More seriously he invites attacks from people who think his notion that
Palin is "the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with
the big dogs" is fairly ridiculous. Indisputable to who? The underlying
argument holds that anyone whom the author doesn't deem attractive, is
somehow disputably fertile.
...is an erroneous reading of Purdum. I stand by the broader conclusion, but that particular claim, on reflection, doesn't hold up. More likely, Purdum was (as many commenters have pointed out) simply alluding to Trig's recent birth.
If You Think You're About To Say Something Sexist...
Then you're probably right. Here's Todd Purdum on Sarah Palin:
Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the
mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the
best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics,
the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big
dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has
captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin's
record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has
made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks
like a beauty queen.
I think some more thinking could have helped this graph. A lot. It is, in my estimation, certainly arguable that Sarah Palin's appearance has played into her reception. My sense is that it's helped.
Purdum thinks the mere mention of this notion invites attacks from people who spend their days waiting to accuse people of sexism. He is wrong. They invite attacks from people who wonder why he's speaking as though there have been a parade of women who have scaled the national political heights. In the literal sense, there has only been one other--Geraldine Ferraro. Thus Purdum is basically arguing that Palin is better looking than Ferraro. A more charitable interpretation throws Hillary Clinton into the mix.
More seriously he invites attacks from people who think his notion that Palin is "the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs" is fairly ridiculous. Indisputable to who? The underlying argument holds that anyone whom the author doesn't deem attractive, is somehow disputably fertile.
What we are talking about is who is fuckable, and who isn't. Frankly, speaking as a man, I'm always skeptical of the "fuckability" concept. I've seen to many men step to with women carnal intent, and then deny it later. Usually after rejection and dismissal, but sometimes after success.This game of fuckability, or "indisputable fertility," is exactly that. It allows men to assert control over a situation, in which, most frighteningly, they often have very little
Hillary Clinton haunts the dreams of no less than half the men who rag on her appearance. And should she ever step to any of them, there'd be very little dispute of any kind. Indeed, it would offend the senses of a polite society were we ever to honestly contemplate exactly how large a portion of womankind men regard as "indisputably fertile." Some of them are scientifically infertile. But brothers don't really care. Let's not act like we do.
I met my wife in a bookstore and read her my poetry before our first conversation was over. So, of course I loved poetry Friday's. Here's Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It." This is - nah, I won't explain it. Just enjoy.
All respect to everything Ta-Nehisi is saying about Obama and gay rights, and how credit for speaking out should be apportioned. But I have to say, I'd be much more interested to hear what Bill Clinton has to say on the ways his views on equal marriage rights have evolved right now than I am to hear Obama talk about what he's going to do, at some point, in the next three years. Someone who is reflecting, and who can acknowledge his beliefs and how they've changed and why, free of political responsibility, might do a lot more good than a reluctant advocate.
Update: Lots of thoughts on this in comments. I said this because I don't believe that Obama, while in office, will
ever a) talk about his honest feelings about and personal experiences
with gay people, or b) endorse full marriage equality. And
I believe that a) knowing gay people personally is the single
experience most likely to change people's minds about equal rights, and b) that, now that Lawrence has
decriminalized sodomy, that marriage is THE issue around which
difficult discussions are going to be had, because it is the policy
that gets at the difference between gay people and straight people. If
Bill Clinton were willing to talk about how his attitudes on equal
marriage rights changed, he'd be addressing both of those issues. I'd love to be
surprised on this. But for now, I'm a cynic.
Some Clarification--Religous vs. Secular Marriage
Commenter exitr makes a fair point:
Hold on a sec - just going by what you've quoted here, Obama is definitely not saying that gays should not have the right
to wed. He's left himself a huge (frustratingly huge, actually) amount
of wiggle room; when he says "my religious beliefs say that marriage is
something sanctified between a man and a woman," that is a far cry from
saying that the law in an at least technically secular society
should not permit same-sex marriage. Especially when he frames it with
"I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my
political views on this issue." Basically I think his words here can be
interpreted to support almost any position on this issue - and he can
certainly be criticized for that.
Here is Obama's original quote:
I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious
beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do
believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is
something sanctified between a man and a woman.
My understanding has always been that Obama was opposed to gay marriage--as a legal matter. Perhaps that opposition has nothing to do with opposition to gay marriage as a religious matter. Indeed, I could be wrong about his opposition to gay marriage. In this clip he says he is not someone "who promotes same-sex marriage. But he believes in civil unions." You can make of that what you will. A charitable interpretion argues that he's against it religiously, but doesn't have a problem with civil gay marriage. My interpretation is that he's a politiician and that he believes, perhaps correctly, that this issue could be fatal.
Honestly, I don't know. I'm just sick of playing the pathological problem child. I'm sick of black folks being America's sin-eater. It's a maddening--if neccessary thing--to extend good faith to people you deeply suspect are not in the same business.
Vibe Magazine No More
[Neil Drumming]
According to Gawker, it looks like Vibe magazine has officially folded. I can't say I'm surprised, considering the state of the publishing industry in general and the fact that the book had long ago lost its clear dominion over the culture so often referred to as "urban."
Having worked for Vibe as an editor for a short time and done some freelance for the magazine in recent years, I wish I could say I was more distraught. But as Ta-Nehisi was fond of telling me back in our earlier days in the magazine business: "Some things aren't meant to last forever."
Somebody tell that to the guys at RollingStone.
Sex and Harry Potter
[Alyssa Rosenberg]
Enough with the seriousness. I've been meaning for a while to complain about James Parker's piece in the July/August Atlantic about the problem of keeping the Harry Potter movies fresh as filmmakers tackle the later books and deal with their characters' development into sexually mature adults (Caveat: I really like Parker's work in general. The piece about Spongebob is delightful and insane.). And now that early reviews are calling the new movie "sexy," I've got my excuse. Parker's piece, titled "Sex and the Single Wizard," spends about only half its words talking about adolescence and relationships, and fails to mention the actual source of the problem: that J.K. Rowling, for all that she's created a compelling universe, is really awful at writing about adult sexual and romantic relationships.
I suppose I should warn that thar be spoilers ahead, if you care, so let's go after the jump:
For
if we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that there are good
and decent people in this country who don't yet fully embrace their gay
brothers and sisters -- not yet.
That's why I've spoken about
these issues not just in front of you, but in front of unlikely
audiences -- in front of African American church members, in front of
other audiences that have traditionally resisted these changes.
I think anyone who regularly reads this blog knows how much I admire Barack Obama as a president and a politician. I am not an unbias party. I also find a lot of the public criticism that he's gotten on race to be baffling and empty. And I have said as much. Moreover, it needs to be said that I believe homophobia is ultimately bad for black people, and wreaks havoc on all of us, regardless of our sexual orientation. More than that, I believe that an informed reading of the history of the Civil Rights movement reveals instructive moral parallels. As my friend Jelani Cobb has said gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our time.
With that in mind, it's worth remembering where Barack Obama is on the civil rights issue of our time:
I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious
beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do
believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is
something sanctified between a man and a woman.
It's very interesting to see a man who opposes gays should not have the right to wed, claim credit for talking to "African American church members" about homophobia. It's even more interesting to see a man who lives in a majority black city, poised to go further than he, himself, ever would, claim that credit. I've heard it said, many times, on this board that Obama is actually pro-gay marriage, but that he can't come out all the way. If that's the case, then we must conclude that he is lying about his stance. Moreover, he's invoking his relationship with religion, and his God, in that lie. Perhaps worse, he isn't being fully honest with the very audiences he wants credit for addressing--the very audiences, that by his logic, would most benefit from that honesty.
I was reading Dwayne's post on Juvenile Life Without Parole this morning, and the last paragraph really stood out me:
"I don't think our justice system has evolved to something more
productive and effective than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. In
most other industrialized nations, life is something conceivable like
30 years or 50 years, and parole is an option. These nations have lower
incarceration rates than the US - they have less crime. Somewhere our
justice system got off track - we replaced medieval guillotines and
rope for jail cells that don't aim to rehabilitate."
As I mentioned yesterday, I did some volunteer work in the Massachusetts prison system a while back, and in my day job at Government Executive, I occasionally write stories about staffing and the challenges prison guards face in the federal prison system. So I'm interested in the question of how we can create strong, sustainable rehabilitative programs for people who are incarcerated, and how we keep prison guards feeling secure enough to do their jobs and create disincentives for prisoners to use violence against guards and vice versa.
Clearly, it's possible to create good rehabilitative programs. The one I worked in required the women involved to go through alcohol and narcotics treatment, and intensive job training and parenting classes. The incentives were pretty good: if they completed their classes, they got to see their daughters twice a month, through a program that was handling all the hassles of getting their daughters to the prison and also checking in on how they were doing in school, with foster families, etc. The one mother who got out of prison while I was involved with the program did find work when she was released. But as sections of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family (and of course many other sources) point out, who gets into those programs can be haphazard, and they're not necessarily widely available, given the stark cuts in funding for educational programs in prisons. I think it's good to have volunteer-run programs, but unless they operate on a very wide scale, volunteer programs can erode fairly easily, and if they rely on bringing people in from the outside, risk getting snarled in swiftly-shifting bureaucracies.
Ya'll can't get mad at me, because I haven't done a Michael Jackson post yet. This will be my only one, barring unforseen developments.
On the bus yesterday, I was reading Newsweek and found this article from David Gates on Michael Jackson:
Why did he feel so deeply uncomfortable with himself? The hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching yourself into a simulacrum of a white man suggests a profound loathing of blackness. If Michael Jackson couldn't be denounced as a race traitor, who could? Somehow, though, black America overlooked it, and continued to buy his records, perhaps because some African-Americans, with their hair relaxers and skin-lightening creams, understood why Jackson was remaking him-self, even if they couldn't condone it.
I think this misunderstands what Jackson was going through. I can only speak for myself, but I didn't see Jackson as rebuking or hating black folks by mutilating himself. I didn't see him as someone who was deliberately reinforcing the notion that white is inherently beautiful, I saw him as an example of how a number of factors, like racism and a really fucked up family life, can make a person go so crazy that they'll cut up their own face.
Contrary to conclusions of late-night comedians and even some journalists, I don't think Jackson wanted to be white. It's not like he started signing like Frank Sinatra or dancing like Fred Astaire. You don't get down with Al Sharpton or pick your bodyguards from the Fruit of Islam if you want to be white or you hate black people or "blackness". I think Jackson was after something far more elusive.
It's been an education to watch the insidious efforts to blame this country's trenchant homophobia on roughly 13 percent of its population run up against a wall of facts--and plow right through them:
In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard
several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and
foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA
and Don't Ask Don't Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was
following a deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals
through long-term game plans. After all, he's only five months into his
term and must first juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care
and Iran. Some speculated that the president is fearful of crossing
preachers, especially black preachers, who are adamantly opposed to
same-sex marriage. Still others said that the president was tone-deaf
on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks any known gay
people.
Frank Rich, I guess, is just reporting what he's heard, not advancing the theory. Furthermore, I can't separate my own emotional reaction to this from my ego. Writers want their work to have impact. The idea that it isn't is troubling. It's a vane impulse of course, and one I hope to check by laying it out there for you.
Beyond that, it's just enormously depressing to see writers who you respect, writers who you, in many ways, model yourself after, repeatedly invoke this lie. Maybe it's time to stop modeling. I am, at least in my own limited estimation, a hard-eyed skeptic. I work to not assume bad faith in disagreements. But at some point, as someone in it, you start to conclude that this race shit is real.
There are black people all over the net laughing at me right now. I take that.
I just want to say that watching, on the one hand, a black city move toward gay marriage, and on the other hand, people blame Obama's inaction on black people is deeply disappointing. On gay rights, Obama hails from one of the most progressive black churches in the country. Moreover, there's been this ongoing narrative that Obama isn't afraid to tell black people hard truths. And yet when he comes up short, somehow it's because he's caving to the horrid blacks. In everything else, Obama is postracial. In the matter of gay rights, he is truly black.
With respect due, I am so heartily tired of reading certain white writers talk about what's wrong with us. It's like watching a terminal cancer patient with, a few months to live, talk shit about another patient, with mere weeks.
The Language Police
This post has to me made every few months. I guess now is as a good a time as any. We've gotten quite a few new commenters, in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. We've also got some new people responding to our guest bloggers. I welcome the new contributors, as well as the continued input of older ones. I've enjoyed the spirited debate--especially over Ricci.
That said, I'd like to remind people that this is a social space and one that tries to take its cues from the virtual and the real. I've said before that it helps to think of this blog as a dinner party. I'm your host. This week, I have a few cohosts. I'd ask you to speak to your fellow guests with same respect that you'd give to a fellow guest at an actual dinner party.
That may seem unusual or weird given the conventions of the internet and most blogs. But that's kind of the point. If you're feeling pissed off about something, if you want to call people names, if you want to revel in snark, than this probably isn't the place for you. And that's fine--the web is awash in spaces tailor-made for blowing off steam. But this minor stop, on the sprawling, infinite internet isn't one of them.
It's worth thinking before you hit that publish key. It's worth talking to people like they're people. It's worth avoiding straw-men. It's worth assuming the good faith of your adversaries. It's worth considering what they have to say. Do that and you'll be ahead of most people who argue for a living.
Truthfully, I forget those lessons all the time. But I hold them as values. I ask the same of my commenters. Again, I know that sounds weird. But I see my commenters not as mere after-thoughts or appendages, but as a valuable resource. With that in mind, it's kind of hard to ask any less.
Thanks in advance for bearing with me.
June 29, 2009
Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP)
[Dwayne Betts]
Since the Ricci opinion came out, it seems only right to talk about two cases that will be before the court soon. The issue of JLWOP will come before the Supreme Court soon - law firms all over the country are preparing amicus briefs in the effort to sway the courts one way or the other. The two cases in question are both Florida cases, chosen because they are both instances of JLWOP for crimes that didn't result in murder. In one, Joe Sullivan was sentenced to JLWOP for raping at 72 year old woman. He was 13 at the time and it was 1989. In the other, Terrance Graham got life for committing a home invasion while on probation for robbery. He was 17. I think these cases were taken because they aren't murders. It's hard to argue for any kind of leniency (if you call life with the possibility of parole leniency) when someone has been killed. The backdrop of this case is the Court's decision that the giving a juvenile a death the death penalty violates the 8th amendment.
My fear is that in settling the JLWOP issue - there will be other issues around sentencing that don't get resolved. In a state like Virginia, for all substantive purposes there is no difference between sentencing a juvenile to 55 years or life - because there is no parole. In the juvenile death penalty case Judge Kennedy said that even the most heinous crime isn't evidence of a child that cannot be rehabilitated. He said the heinous crimes are not "evidence of irretrievably depraved character." That's why the United States leads all industrial countries in incarceration by a nice margin - and why we are the only industrialized country to sentence juveniles to life without parole.
The Rockets team physician is saying that the injury to Yao's left foot could end his season and possibly his career. It's early now, too early to say definitively what happen. Yao could have the surgery that Cleveland's big Z had - but right now little is known except an injury that was expected to get better is now worse.
What does this mean for the league? We know it means little for the Rockets, they weren't winning anyway - but Yao was to China what the US beating Brazil in soccer the other day would have been. More than that, Yao is the most offensively skilled big man in a decade.
I'll never forget watching Yao throw a one-handed touch bounce pass through the lane his first season. He and Stevie Franchise never did it like I wanted them to - but they had some good runs. Personally, I think Tracy McGrady brought the injury bug to Houston with him.
To New Haven and Back Again
[Alyssa Rosenberg]
Today, Adam and Ta-Nehisi have things to say about Ricci, and I'm happy to let them talk about the decision. But because we'll get a pile of legal analysis today, I want to step back a little bit and talk about New Haven as a town, and what it meant to me. New Haven is to me what fatherhood is to Ta-Nehisi, I think, and because it's in the news today, even in a tangential way, I'd like to talk about the town a little.
Why am I qualified to talk about New Haven? I spent four years going to school there, including the time that Frank Ricci filed his lawsuit. Attending college in New Haven is not, admittedly, a guarantee of deep-seated involvement in the Elm City. But I was lucky enough to get swept into the roiling waters of New Haven politics, an experience that was critical in shaping my understanding of race, politics, and ultimately, myself. And I want to write a little bit about that process today. (Quick disclaimer: I work as a non-partisan reporter now, and as a result, don't participate in party politics, make political contributions, lend my support to candidates, or causes,etc. The events I'm going to describe here happened in the past.)
I liked to believe I was not a naive little white girl before I moved to New Haven: I'd helped lead a troop of Girl Scouts whose mothers were in prison in high school and spent a lot of weekends going through security at MCI Framingham for jailhouse visitors' room meetings. But when I got to New Haven, I was naive enough to believe that a town with an overwhelming Democratic majority on its Board of Aldermen would have no problem passing a law creating a local domestic partner registry for gay couples. I was wrong. A coalition of black and Latino pastors and their congregations, plus some Orthodox Jews, convinced the board to vote against the registry by a one-vote margin. But even though that loss was tough, it was the thing that got me into conversations with New Haven's political figures, union leaders, and pastors, and for that, I'll be grateful for it for the rest of my life.
I've posted a number of immediate reflections on the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in favor of the white firefighters in the Ricci case over at TAPPED, which you can read here, here, and here.
The conservatives on the court decided that the city decided to throw out the test results "All the evidence demonstrates that the City rejected the test results because the higher scoring candidates were white." That's not what happened. There were a number of issues with the test the city failed to address before giving it that were brought to light afterwards, and the racial disparities in results made the city concerned that they would be liable for discrimination, so they threw it out.
Justice Kennedy argues that jurisdictions only have reason to fear liability in cases where there is a "strong basis in evidence" necessitating such concern. As Justice Ginsberg points out, this requirement is somewhat redundant, Title VII already requires the city to show problems with a practice beyond mere disparate impact.
What I find remarkable is that the above assumption of bad faith on the part of the city New Haven violates their own standard--there is nothing in this case, the composition of the test, nothing in the composition of New Haven's fire department ( blacks and Latinos comprise 30 percent and 16 percent of the City's firefighters, respectively, in a city that is 60% black and Latino) or even in the history of race in this country to justify the opinion that the city just doesn't like white people and doesn't think they should be firefighters. But if you believe, as Pat Buchanan does, that white men are the most discriminated against people in America, then the city's intent is clear. There just isn't a "strong basis in evidence" to support that view.
Next Monday, July 6, I'll be at the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street, reading from my memoir. Actually, I'll be playing wing-man to my dear friend David Carr. He'll be reading from his New York Times best-selling memoir, The Night Of The Gun.
It's fair to say that were it not for Carr, you guys wouldn't be reading this blog. I met him thirteen years ago, when I thought I was on my way to either getting a PhD in history, or an MFA in poetry--2.3 GPA be damned. Carr was then the editor of Washington City Paper, and I had some vague affinity for writing. So I applied for internship there, sending some clips from my college paper and a chapbook full of truly awful poetry. Carr taught me to love the long-form--too much, so. Against his advice, and my parents advice, I dropped out of Howard and went full hog. My calculus was simple if immature--I'd rather get paid to write, than pay someone else to write.
Anyway, here we are all these years later. Come out, if you can. You'll get to see how this insane experiment turned out.
Madoff Gets 150 Years
{Dwayne Betts}
I'm not want to be sympathetic to someone who stole 13 billion dollars by low estimates and 50 billion dollars by high estimates. But it's insane the staggering sentences the court system in most states in the United States mete out. I'm talking about people on a regular basis walking around with 30, 40 and 50 year sentences in states that don't have parole, as if 85% of 30 isn't life in most circumstances.
The insanity of such high sentences is really brought to bear in the case of Madoff, who in most states would already be eligible for geriatric parole. I just wonder if we have long passed the point where the sentences given begin to have diminishing returns. And I honestly can't begin to fathom a punishment that fits his crime - but I know the number 150 exists in a fairy tale world that can have no real deterrence factor on the current ponzi scheme being developed in someone's head.
And now for something completely different...
[Neil Drumming]
(I think that's the second time today John Cleese has been quoted within this particular blogosphere. Anyhoo...)
Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and Nikki Finke have all raised a nice-sized stink over TransformersII's downright belligerent box office smackdown -- despite the fact that everyone in the film or film-related business seemed to have suspected it was going to go like this from the get-go. I believe the hyphenate I've most heard bandied about regarding Michael Bay's latest op(tim)us is "critic-proof."
Me, I like that phrase. Certainly in this circumstance, the understanding that Bay does not give a single, glowing energon-turd what the average Scorcese or Soderberg-loving writer thinks about his movies, seems to have unleashed a delicious fury in most critics. If nothing else, it has freed many a movie reviewer up to have a little nasty fun at Bay's expense. Hence, we've gotten great quotes like this one from the Washington Post's John Anderson:
"In its chattering, noisy, malnutritious excess, Trans 2 is the studio version of a genetically modified, growth-hormone-enhanced chicken."
Or this swipe from the Portland Oregonian's Mike Russell regarding the movie's script:
"that screenplay is pretty much straight-up nonsense -- a barely strung-together collection of visual ideas and set pieces, with some of the most hilariously stupid and generic dialogue ever financed by hundreds of millions of dollars."
And, of course, there's Roger Ebert's critique which is far too delightfully venomous to quote partially. Rogerebert.com'll do ya.
As for me, I saw the movie -- shelled out $20 bucks for an IMAX screening, no less. But I don't wish to get into a discussion here about how good (or completely atrocious) it is. (Most of what you will read is probably more than a little bit true -- including the accusations of robotic racism.) I'm just happy that if I didn't enjoy myself viewing the metallic mess that was Revenge of the Fallen, at least a few other writers had an awesome time dismantling it.
To me, this is the heart of the issue. The city threw out the test
not because they thought it was biased, but because they were afraid to
get sued. That's not only their practical justification, but their
legal justification. That's weak. For me, the case doesn't have any
kind of moral heft unless you establish whether the test is actually
biased or not. The state didn't even bother to try to find out. They
just screamed OH NOES and invalidated the results. In what way is that
useful to anyone? I believe the SCOTUS issued new rules today about
when it's approproate to take action because of a fear of lawsuits and
when it's not. Perhaps that will be useful.
I know the case is tied in to much larger issues, but the more I
read about it, the narrow and esoteric the thing seems. I can't get
worked up about it one way or the other because all the decisions have
been so narrow and the deep moral/philosophical questions seem quite
far from what folks are mulling over on the bench. That said,
Ginsburg's dissent is a tour-du-force. Taking it as a policy statement,
I could not agree more.
She should get her of fucking blog, and stop outshining me in the comment section. Seriously, though "the moral heft" point mirrors a lot of my own thinking.
Wimmen's Work And The Midlife Crisis
It's interesting watching the media's reaction to Jenny Sanford. I think a lot of us are tired of seeing politicians, like Sanford, embarrass their families, and yet seemingly not lose them. (Don't take that the wrong way--it's an emotional impulse, not a judgment of fact.) Hence Jenny Sanford's invocation of respect is being hailed as a breath of fresh air. There's also the fact the she was very talented in her own right, but put much of her energy into her husband's career and her family. Here's Willa Paskin over at Double X:
Now, it's not that this set of characteristics doesn't have a certain
appeal (and, not to cast too many partisan stones, a particularly
Republican one at that), but in light of last week's events, they also
have a stark downside. Because she did the thinking and the
babies, now she's a very tough, very smart woman with a killer oatmeal
chocolate chip cookie recipe who is best known, personally and
professionally, for having a husband who likes to "spark"
on women other than her. Turns out doing it all amounted to doing
everything for everyone but herself. And that may be admirable, but, in
light of her husband's behavior and Mrs. Sanford's seemingly real and
impressive talents, it's some seriously misdirected energy.
I wonder about this. I think to buy into the idea that Jenny Sanford's energy was "misdirected," you have to believe she'd spent her years selflessly slaving on behalf of her family. I guess that would be an apt description, but people are complicated--and altruism almost always is. I'm a nice guy. But I've never done anything kind, for anyone, that I didn't get anything out of. Usually, it's just piece of mind, but it's still something.
My question is why would a woman so willingly throw herself into her husband's life work? There must have been some sort of light there, something that she got out of it. I don't say that to be caustic, or mean. But the narrative of put-upon housewife always leaves me unsatisfied, because while it says a lot about the husband, his proclivities, and his selfishness, it really says nothing about the wife. Who is she? Why would she enter into such an arrangement? What is the trade-off? Where is her agency in it all?
SCOTUS Rules For Ricci
We knew this was coming. I've read up on this case quite a bit, and the fascinating thing is that it looked like the law was on the city's side. From Ramesh Ponnuru, last week:
To conclude that New Haven acted unconstitutionally is to assume
that the Constitution's 14th Amendment mandated a policy of strict
colorblindness by state and local governments. Maybe it should have.
But the historical evidence that it did is weak. Certainly the
conservatives on the Supreme Court have not tried to argue that it did:
originalist analysis has been notably absent from their opinions in
affirmative-action cases.
Judicial restraint has also been
absent. That virtue is best understood as a finger on the scales,
tipping judges in close cases against invalidating the actions of
Congress or state or local governments. To invalidate laws without a
strong argument that the Constitution requires doing so is precisely
what conservatives usually mean by "judicial activism."
In their
outrage over the Ricci verdict, I suspect, conservatives have gotten
carried away by their laudable fervor against race-conscious policies.
But we on the right, of all people, should know that not every wrong
has a judicial solution. Conservatives are moved, as well, by their
empathy for the Frank Riccis of the world. When President Obama has
talked about empathy on the bench, conservatives have responded that,
given free rein, it can lead judicial reasoning astray. On race,
unfortunately, we are illustrating our own point.
That said, I never liked this case on the basis of fairness. The dyslexia doesn't move me. It's one thing to argue over criteria--say, should race play a role in college admissions? It's another thing to argue that after we've agreed upon a criteria, we should scrap the results because we don't like how they look. This is just me talking. Some legal scholars, and likely some of my guest bloggers, may feel different.
My abbreviation was young when I caught the cases
{Dwayne Betts}
A few days ago, the Jena 6 ordeal was settled with a plea of "no-contest" in District Court. But I'm not interested in re-hashing the drama the case caused. See I was asking myself in my head how many folks have heard the term juvenile certification, and realized that many people are likely like my family - having no idea what juvenile certification means until someone you know who's under eighteen find themselves calling a jail cell home.
The boys from Jena 6 were all initially certified. In the end they were all tried in juvenile court, but what I didn't see, that I would have liked to see, is a larger conversation on the consequences of sending juveniles to prison.
Background: When I was sixteen years old I was certified as an adult. After that, I did 8 years and three months in some of the craziest prisons in VA. I had no idea what certification was before I caught my case - my first case. And learning what it meant was one of the lessons that have become a part of whatever it is I do in this world. For the past few years I've been speaking at juvenile justice conferences around the country on the issue, I've written a few articles about the issue and my memoir, A Question of Freedom, chronicles my years in prison.
Dana Milbank debates Nico Pitney on Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. Milbank can barely bring himself to respect Pitney as a person, let alone a journalist: according to Pitney, Milbank called him a "dick" while Kurtz was promoting another segment.
I've already written about what I think of this whole matter--the White House notifying Pitney they intended to call on him in advance would have been offensive if it had been, as Milbank put it, "colluding with the administration" in order to advance their agenda. But that didn't happen, because president dodged Pitney's question of under what conditions it would recognize and Ahmadinejad victory in Iran. The point of "colluding" would have been to make the President look good--and that was neither Pitney's goal nor the ultimate outcome.
What strikes me though, is that Milbank is actually probably the least likely champion of traditional print journalism. His columns are all tone and humor, they offer very little original or significant information. Milbank is not document diving or sneaking into veterans hospitals to find mold on the walls and cockroaches taking over the building--not that he necessarily has to be, we can't all be Dana Priest. But by nature, Milbank's columns are meant more to be entertaining than informative, they draw on reporting from his colleagues at the Washington Post, and they're 90% snark. The only thing that really separates Milbank from the stereotypical blogger is that he writes for the Washington Post and he wears a suit. I think that's actually what bothers him the most about Pitney in particular and bloggers in general. I'm not of the opinion that bloggers make old school shoe-leather reporters obsolete. Not by a long shot. But someone like Milbank? He's a rotary phone. And I think he knows it.
June 28, 2009
Because It's the End of the Weekend, and Going Into This Week, We Need to Laugh
[Alyssa Rosenberg]
I'm having trouble embedding it, but seriously, go watch Steve Martin parodying the Billie Jean video. If Michael's gift was his grace, Martin's is his awkwardness, and his utter lack of fear in exploiting it for our pleasure. The video makes Michael's talent clear by showing how awkward and gawky those moves would have been if they were performed by anyone else.
Parenthetically, things like that video make me wonder what's going on in Martin's head as he's made his recent career choices. In the last ten years, he's made two very different good movies, Shopgirl, which broke my heart, and is based on the tiny gem of a book that Martin also wrote, and Bowfinger, his savagely funny takedown of Hollywood. And his memoir, Born Standing Up, is sharply observed, and one of the best explanations of how comedic sensibility grows that I've ever read (Martin, like Jackson, was also abused by his father, though only once physically, the rest was emotional. He writes in Born Standing Up: "I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian," a sentiment both self-aware and deeply painful.) But there's been a lot of trash in between. It's hard to know how the guy who made stuff like The Jerk and Roxanne and All of Me ended up making Cheaper By the Dozen and the horrendous Pink Panther remakes. I don't know why it is that few great stars, in any genre, seems to survive into late adulthood with their artistic sensibilities intact. There are exceptions, of course, people like Clint Eastwood, Neil Young, whoever. But there are a lot of dramatic, puzzling falls to observe.
The BET Awards and Why Hip Hop is Not Motown
{Dwayne Betts}
The show came on at 8pm and Jamie Fox needed to be bleeped out four times in the first ten minutes.
Then, he performed Blame It On The Alcohol while climbing out of a giant bottle of alcohol.
T Pain had on a chain that said "Big Ass Chain."
And then, if you watched more than thirty minutes of the show you recognized a few things. The juxtaposition of the O'Jays, New Edition, BVD with Kerie Hilton, Lil Wayne and Drake made it clear that there is a reason the camera wasn't panning the entire audience as word after word from Wayne's mouth was bleeped out.
But you know, none of that is too important. The real problem I have is that I can't get my moms to listen to the lil Wayne album. No, scratch that - I can't bring myself to play the album when I'm in the car with me. And while I think the new Wale joint is dope - when I went to recommended it to one of my mentors, in the back of my head I knew he wouldn't listen to it because there was too much profanity, and there were moments of disrespect.
But more than that, my favorite artist's thank the haters way too much.
Hey ya'll, this is Adam. You guys might know me from such blogs as TAPPED and Jack and Jill Politics. I'm honored to be guest-blogging for TNC, and I'll try my best, along with the others, to help keep this blog interesting in his absence.
I don't usually write about sports. I don't even really watch sports like that--with the exception of soccer, which is the only game I really and truly love. I spent a number of my formative years in Italy or Brazil being mocked for being from a country that spent millions of dollars mastering every sport except the one that mattered. So the past few years--the past few weeks in particular, as the U.S. soccer team came within a hair's breadth of winning the Confederations Cup, have been sweet. I actually let myself hope that the U.S. might come away winning its first major tournament against Brazil, until Luis Fabiano crushed those dreams during the second half of today's game.
I should be really upset--but I'm not. Because I don't think we deserved to win.
Let me clarify that--I'm not talking about the individual members of the U.S. team who played their hearts out today. I'm talking about "us" as a nation just opening its sleepy eyes to a game the rest of the world has always been in love with. Before there was Michael Jordan, there was Pelé. Much of the time, when it comes to international sports, we wipe the floor with the rest of the world. Soccer is where the rest of the world wipes the floor with us. And there's a certain kind of karma to that--we don't love the game as much as they do. Not yet.
It would have been like a relationship peaking too early, when two people get excited about one another only to realize a month later that they're bored. if we had won, most Americans would have shrugged their shoulders--"of course we won." But losing--that gives us something to care about. If we had won, as a country, we would have been bored. I honestly think that in losing, we give ourselves room to start loving the game the way that everyone else does. We'll know we're there when the places we play pickup games have names as recognizable as Rucker Park, when little kids wanna be like well--Luis Fabiano, and not just Kobe Bryant. Maybe that'll never happen. But I'd love to see it.
Technically, we beat the best team in the world when we beat Spain last week. But beating Brazil would have been different. Brazil is legendary, what they are defies the mere science of temporary rankings. Beating Brazil would have been like beating the game. We're not there yet. We don't love the game enough. But someday.
Now maybe this is just a fanboy trying to make sense out of a loss that's relatively simple to explain: we lost because we played a better team. I still can't help feeling like maybe, in the long run, that's not such a bad thing for the future of American soccer.
June 27, 2009
A Funeral For Funerals
At some point I'll read the Times Magazine's profile chronicling "The Fall Of The Black Middle Class." But it's hard to escape the sense that, by the lights of most mainstream media coverage, there really isn't much of a Black Middle Class. It all feels anticlimactic.
I thought Detroit, like most places where black people congregate, was the site of everything wrong with this country. The notion that it actually had produced something approaching normalcy, and that that normalcy is now imperiled would be much more interesting--had the normalcy been regularly explored in as much depth as its erosion.
Kinda hard to mourn what you never had...
Don't Shoot
{Dwayne Betts}
I didn't introduce myself before my first post. I'm R Dwayne Betts. The R is for Reginald - I was named after my daddy. I write poetry mostly - but I wrote a memoir too (shameless plug - it comes out August 6th. Okay, I won't mention it again.) My thing here will probably be sports, some juvenile justice issues, and some random stuff from the news. I'll try to keep it interesting. I love that folks challenge each other's ideas here. Challenge mine, please.
Every once in a while you read an article in a magazine about someone approaching an old topic with a fresh eye. In the June 22nd issue of the New Yorker, Seabrook tells the story of an interesting approach to curbing gang violence. "Gang violence." Before I could really say what I want to say about Seabrook's article, I can't help but to mention the way phrases like "gang violence" and "at risk youth" get at me in the wrong kind of way. I can't help but to read the phrases as society's euphemism for young black folks. But, even approaching the article feeling that way - feeling like no matter what it would be, it would be a thinly veiled finger pointing party where young black males get to be card board cut out villains with less depth Wesley Snipes in the I'm Bad video (you remember that?). Every once in a while though I get taken aback.
In this article, Seabrook gives it up on a program that, on the surface, sounds outright revolutionary in its simplicity.
"Music Is the Freight Train In Which God Travels..."
[Alyssa Rosenberg]
Many thanks to Ta-Nehisi for letting me hang out here this week and represent the ladies. In my day job, I'm a staff correspondent at Government Executive, The Atlantic's sister publication about government management, and on the side, I write about pop culture for The Atlantic's website and do some other freelancing. I like science fiction, comics, British television dramas, unusual women singers, fast rhymes, baking, and bourbon. I'll get to those in a minute.
But first I wanted to say how glad I was that Neil brought up The Wiz. The show isn't an exceptional favorite of mine, but these sentences stuck out at me: "there was something about that hateful, little blurb running once or twice a year alongside glowing reviews of Mary Poppins orChitty Chitty Bang Bang that rubbed me very much the wrong way. It was one of my earliest brushes with what I eventually decided was -- say it with me, folks -- racism!" Neil's talking about the movies, but The Wiz began life as a musical. And it's worth remembering how undeniably white Broadway is, and how hard it is for a show like The Wiz to break through to occupy a Broadway stage, much less to become a massive hit there.
Broadway is so calcified in certain ways, that it was somewhat unusual last year when two musicals by non-white composers and writers, and rooted in African-American and Latino experiences, were playing in Broadway theaters, Passing Strange at the Belasco and In the Heights at Richard Rodgers. The latter won praise (and a bunch of Tonys) for its theoretically unusual voice, embodied in the choppy flow of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator and star (which I found almost unbearably irritating). But I suspect the show did so well in part because it was so familiar to critics and traditional Broadway audiences--West Side Story without the stabbing, an extended rendition of "America" without the anger. If I never see another love song delivered from a fire escape, it will be far too soon for me.
Passing Strange, in contrast, had a deep skepticism about the musical theater format in its very structure. Stew and Heidi Rodewald, co-creators of the show and partners in the collectives STEW and The Negro Problem, used a stage that raised and lowered the band in and out of the action. Stew frequently broke the fourth wall in his role as a narrator. And the show, which traces the Youth's (a younger version of Stew) attempts to forge an identity for himself as an African-American man in middle-class black Los Angeles churches, Amsterdam coffeehouses, and Berlin art collectives, begins in gospel music and travels through punk, pop balads, electroclash and rock, but eschews hip-hop. The show was stubbornly anti-typical, and gorgeous. And it closed last summer, despite fantastic reviews, Tonys of its own, and the fact that Spike Lee was filming it for a television adaptation, while In The Heights plays to sold-out audiences.
Passing Strange's lesson is depressing, not just because the ultimate message is that it's hard to get black characters, much less all-black casts on Broadway, but because it's so difficult to do anything that breaks with Broadway's staging and story-telling conventions, no matter the color of your skin. Fortunately, Passing Strange will play in a limited theatrical release this fall, and on PBS in 2010. But it was incredible live, and it's a loss that audiences won't get to see it that way.
And Let Me Lubricate My Mind...
[Neil Drumming]
By way of introduction, I'm a screenwriter and an Aquarius. My interests include drinking, eavesdropping, browsing Blockbuster for films that I will then order OnDemand, streaming Netflix movies through my XBoxLive account, and telling people that I jog.
I feel at a loss seeing as how I have little to say about the topic of the day (week, month). MJ died. I was shocked. I'm a little sad. Yada, yada. I guess my great hope is that his death will somehow result in more people seeing The Wiz and giving that film the credit it deserves.
My shoulder-chip goes like this: When I was a kid, my dad wasn't falling for that whole cable TV fad, so my family watched, you know, regular channels with numbers. My brother and sisters and I would get all excited whenever The Wiz would air on 11 or pre-UPN 9, or whatever, because that movie was about as joyfully black as anything we could imagine at the time. Not only did it have kick-ass Quincy Jones songs, grimy New York locations dressed up to look surreal, Richard Pryor, and the mom from What's Happening? sitting on the toilet, it also boasted Michael Jackson rocking the kinkiest afro possible, executing a spin on the YBR for what seemed like twenty full minutes. (And the yellow cabs wouldn't even stop for Diana Ross, an image which resonated with my parents and older siblings, if not with my school bus-riding ass.)
So, as happy as this Sydney Lumet-directed adaptation of the hit musical made the Drummings, I could never understand why the local newspaper's TV guide couldn't announce the flick's much-anticipated run without crapping all over it. I forget how the few-star review went exactly, but I know the word "overproduced" was in there somewhere and that the general tone was gleefully dismissive.
Now, as a preteen, I was not one to look for trouble -- certainly not in the area of race. (My older brother's Public Enemy cassettes scared the pants off me.) But there was something about that hateful, little blurb running once or twice a year alongside glowing reviews of Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that rubbed me very much the wrong way. It was one of my earliest brushes with what I eventually decided was -- say it with me, folks -- racism!
Now, of course, I realize, having been an ornery pop-culture critic myself for a time, that the guy who wrote that review may have just been pissed at himself for having never written a slamming musical -- overproduced or otherwise.
June 26, 2009
And With The 7th Pick, They Made The Knicks Sick
[Dwayne Betts]
Beware: Guest blogger. I'm Dwayne Betts - and it's my privilege to speak to this community - having been reading the posts and adding my nickel in for a while. And at some point, I'll have to say who I am. But right now I figured we were in need of a sports post.
We needed somebody to say that a crowd full of Knicks were devastated when Curry took his jumper to Golden State. But was there a better team for him? With a coach that doesn't care about size, defense or how deep you shoot it? Still, the Curry drama being basically the highlight of the draft tells me something about the league and its problems.
It's not just that this year's draft was weak. It was indicative of the NBA's drafts future. The highlight was Shaq, Vince Carter and Jefferson getting traded.
The future? A kid named Rubio who has a 6 million dollar price tag to get him to the league and was born in the 90s. I heard someone make a joke about the new Tyson/Ali game a little while ago. They said the game signifies what's wrong with this generation (I guess this generation is "my generation"). Ali beat Frazier, Liston, Foreman - he beat punished Patterson - and Tyson knocked out who? And to take that a bit further, it was exhausting hearing the commentators compare Rubio to Pistol Pete "I averaged 44 a game in college one year" Maravich. Is that insane? The kid was born in the 90s.
What's left? The Clippers picking Griffin? The Clippers haven't made a good decision in 1,000 years, so I'm afraid Griffin will either get traded and be a star elsewhere - or he won't get played.
My question really is how bad does the drafting of high school kids make the draft and subsequently the league? Or does it not matter, is the NBA draft becoming akin to Baseball's draft?
Change Clothes And Go
So next week, I'll be in Aspen with the fam for the Ideas Festival. (Prepping my "Don't embarrass me in front of 'dem white folks" lecture for Samori and his cousin as we speak.) I'm going take that opportunity to bring in a few guest-posters. The roster will include Alyssa Rosenberg, Adam Serwer, Neil Drumming, Eyal Press and Dwayne Betts.
Lotta geeks. Lotta blacks. Lotta Jews. And...lotta dudes. Sorry folks. I'll do better next time. Still, it should be fun. UPDATE: I hasten to add, that I'll still be posting. Not quite as much, but I won't forsake you.
If You Want To Talk About The Ricci Case...
...then you really should read this piece by Emily Bazelon and Nicole Allen. It's a work of actual reporting, and informed legal analysis. I still maintain my "twice as good" attitude. But that isn't so much a matter of law, as it is my own competitive hang-ups.
When Gay Marriage Turns Black
Here's Adam Serwer's latest on gay marriage in D.C. He makes the important point that anti-gay marriage campaigns in the black community, have at once exploited homophobia and racial prejudice. But the gay activists in the District have been able to fight back, not because they've done outreach to the black community,but because they are the black community:
In Washington, D.C., the anti-gay-rights movement attempted to put
recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states to a
citywide referendum (it was rejected by the Board of Elections and
Ethics) hoping that the city's mostly black population would come out
against it. This dynamic may explain why Bishop Harry Jackson, an
African American religious leader, has been put forth as the face of
the anti-gay-marriage movement.
There's only one problem: The face of LGBT leadership in D.C. is
often black. Nationally, anti-gay-rights activists have had a great
deal of success in encouraging black voters to oppose gay rights,
partially because LGBT rights are seen -- incorrectly -- as a "white
issue." But in Washington, D.C., the diverse composition of the
marriage-equality movement means that marriage-equality activists don't
have to "reach out" to the black community, because they're already
part of it. That doesn't mean marriage-equality activists don't face
serious obstacles in garnering support among African Americans, but it
makes racial divisions harder to exploit. The lesson is clear -- when
the marriage-equality movement is integrated, outreach becomes less of
an issue.
It must be said that the District is a special case--it's a majority black municipality, that happens to have a long history of social liberalism. This does not mean that it is absent homophobia, as much as it means that you have people there (many of them black) who've been fighting for gay rights for decades. Given D.C.'s makeup, it's very hard to wage that fight and not engage, on some level, with black people.
Regrettably, I can't think of anywhere else like D.C. Atlanta, perhaps? But I don't see gay marriage coming to Georgia for another decade, at least.
Bible Study
Here is a really, really well argued comment on religious conservatives by Nuada. Read it.
Blessings For Child Molesters
Commenter Thefoulness hits on what will likely become a common refrain:
I gotta object to all this...love
for the man. I dig the music as much as anybody, and long live the
music, but as for the man, good riddance. T
Am I wrong to say you're all weeping over a child molester? I mean, I'm
no expert on the case, but I don't see too many people defending him on
those charges. And that's not a small thing. It should be the first
line in any obituary, and is every bit as heinous as what OJ or Bernie
Madoff did. Worse, really. We're talking about children here.
I say all this as a big fan of the music, I grew up with it, too.
And still listen to it, and found the discussion of his place in music
history very interesting last week.
But the man's flaws are not the kind you overlook. If anything, they are the kind of thing you hope he burns in hell for.
I don't want to relitigate Mike's case, but I will say a couple things. I'm sure there will be plenty of MJ condemnation, and people are welcome to do it. My own perspective is formed by two factors.
1.) I've, at times, heard of the death of awful people and thought "Good riddance." But upon reflection, that feeling rarely keeps. When Jeffrey Dahmer died, I initially thought it served him right. And then I got to thinking about the internal torture that must have made him who he was, and I lost my righteousness. When the mountain falls on people who've spent their lives inflicting pain on others, I am rarely comforted for long.
This is a point of religion, for me. I don't expect everyone to see it my way. Death is fucked up. I don't wish it on anyone. I don't have much use for evaluating who deserves the sword, and when they should get it.
2.) Ray Lewis may well be an accessory to a man's murder. But when I watch him run up and down field on Sunday, it sparks something in me. Woody Allen wooed his wife's adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on...
I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop seperating art from men. Regrettably, I think, I wouldn't be left with much art worth admiring. Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things. One doesn't cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.
People who don't feel that way are welcome to their opinions. I'm not sure why they insist that others share them.
UPDATE: Lots of comments on whether Mike actually was a child molester. I left that argument alone because it's not going to be settled in any way here. Some of us will, quite fairly, point to the courts. Others, quite fairly, will point to the behavior he admitted to. (Sleeping with young children, who aren't his own.)
Before you comment, consider whether your likely to get anywhere with the argument. At some point, we end up with He said/She said.
UPDATE#2: Closing comments on both MJ posts. I don't think this is going anywhere interesting. Moreover, we're mostly hearing from people who just registered today, or yesterday. I think that says something.
June 25, 2009
Remembering The Time
Reposting two pieces I wrote mere days ago. I'd love to say I was prescient. I was not. I've just been banging the hell out of Thriller.
My mother hated Billie Jean. I was seven when this joint came out, and
whenever it came on the radio she'd look at me really hard and say, "If
you did it with her boy, it is your son." One of the reasons
I'm so blunt and open here is because that's really how I came up. Moms
did not play. Plus Mike had a nose-job and a curl.
But this
joint was hot. I've been banging this album a lot lately, and have
concluded that it is, arguably, the greatest pop culture achievement in
history. Just my humble opinion. The album is so great that joints that
would be highlights on other albums, are just seen as filler on
Thriller. "Baby Be Mine" is incredible.
I remember when this
came out, and all the kids who'd been lucky enough to stay up and see
Friday Night Videos came to school bragging about it. You couldn't get
cable in Baltimore back then. Fools were like, "Yo, every time he took
a step the stones would glow! And then when he went invisible the
stones kept glowing!!" We thought Mike could save us all. We hadn't
heard BDP yet.
I chose this instead of the old joint because it
makes me sad. Mike used to be beautiful. My sister Kelly just knew she
was marrying him. And he danced so smooth and easy. I hate to think
that what gave him that ability, was the same thing that ruined him. I
remember watching this a few years back and thinking, "Goddamn, he's
still got it. Amazing." Watch the end where he murders them b-boy style.
UPDATE #2: Somehow appropriate. Long live the king.
Acting Like It Can't Happen
Rod Dreher looks through Mark Sanford's love letters and concludes:
This man is not worthy of his wife or his three boys.
In fairness he offers this update:
Of course there can be forgiveness and reconciliation, and this
marriage and family can be saved. One has to hope and pray for that.
But healing begins with this adulterous husband and unfaithful father
recognizing in his marrow the depth of his betrayal. There can be no
healing without repentance, and no true repentance without authentic
contrition.
Still, I don't understand the certainty with which some of us approach the personal lives of people we have never met. Whatever happened to the failings of others triggering some self-reflection, some assessment of our own works? When I see them foreclosing on the house next door, I don't talk. I check my credit.
What good is marriage if it doesn't humble men? What good is a creed that does not leave you self-aware and conscious of the evil that lay in the marrow of us all? What, precisely, is the point?
UPDATE: This...
I have often found it confusing how readily social conservatives pounce
on any evidence of sins of the flesh, while remaining blithely unaware
of their own pride, which (at least from a biblical perspective) is
just as dangerous a sin.
...highlights something I may be missing. I didn't come up Christian. I'd like to hear some analysis of this from the devout.
I Should Not Talk So Much About Myself...
... if there were anybody else whom
I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the
narrowness
of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer,
first
or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely
what
he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send
to
his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must
have been in a distant land to me.
That's Thoreau killing them with an under-appreciated truth. It occurs to me that this blog has become something of a continuation of my memoir. I didn't expect this. But always I go back to that Fred Douglass quote--A man is worked on by what he works on. I labored at the book for some time, and it changed me. I can't go back.
And so it also occurs to me that newcomers to this blog, like a passerby entering a conversation midstream, may miss some things. In that vein, I highlight this, this and this, so that you may glimpse the precise nature of this distant land presently under your feet.
Fatheralong
From Juba, but low in the thread:
Id also like to add what I once
heard from the late great Ossie Davis--a refocus on how economic issues
can sustain fracture a Black family; frankly, many men shy away from
any commitment if they dont think their pockets are right and they're
struggling to support their own selves. To me personally thats no
excuse, but I understand how frustrating and demoralizing it can be and
I do sympathize.
One of the best things Obama can do, and what I hope he does at some
point, is use his campaign discussions of "incentivizing" positive
social and economic behavior among Americans via tax
breaks--specifically offering some form of tax break for child support,
if not support + regular visitation as well.
At the very least, the long-term effects of a documented pattern of
consistent financial support from father to child will ensure that
fathers with "skin in the game" so to speak get some direct economic
benefit, and that both having "skin in the game" and a benefit will
promote visitation and custody as well.
As it stands now, a non-custodial parent cannot claim their child if
the custodial parent does; they get no credit either for any of the
expenses they might incur that fall outside of child support but fall
within being a good parent (traveling to see the child or with the
child, buying educational tools like books or a computer, school
clothes, etc.). The family laws are archaic and often constraining even
when you have good faith all across the board---mom, dad, judge,
lawyers, etc. and its time to take another look at them.
I am hopeful given Obama's work with Evan Bayh on this front, and
given that its a bipartisan win-win (plenty of single dads in the D, R
and I camps) votewise, that this could get a look in the next four
years. I really hope it does, it would improve lives across the nation.
This is a good point. Also, I'd like to see some sort of dialogue in which fathers come to understand that time is as important as money--in fact, in my humble experience, as a Dad and as son, it's actually more important.
There needs to be some understanding of how men process the inability to provide for their families. I spent a solid eight years like that. I can't imagine how I would have felt had we been truly broke down and unable to provide for Samori.
When I was working on the book, I talked to my Dad about his own father, who he last saw alive when he was nine. Now, my Dad has seven kids by four women. I've said that many times. (To people who are new here, can read about that here and here.) Anyway, when I was interviewing him for my memoir, we talked a lot about the moment when he decided to leave the Panthers. He had five kids, by three women at the time. The oldest was five, and the youngest wasn't even one. I wasn't born yet, and had my Mom not urged my Dad on (it's all in the book) neither me or my younger brother Menelik would be here.
He talked about leaving the Party, basically, to go fulfill his obligations as a father. And how, at that moment, he gained some insight into my grandfather, and how a man could be so overwhelmed by the prospect of providing, that he just walks away. There is deep-seated depression, a kind of emasculation in not being able to do, what feels like, your most elemental job--protect your family. My Dad didn't walk obviously, but always helps to understand the other side--even as you offer a rebuke. Condemnation has its place. Condemnation, with no deep sense of what its condemning, is vanity.
I think men take the financial troubles of a family differently than women--rather men have the luxury to take them differently. But some understanding, followed by some redefinition, would help. If we're going to do away with the notion of man as the hunter, as the dude's whose job it is to go out and kill things, (and I'm fine with that) then there has to be some emphasis on man and woman as protectors of the home, and some expansion of what, precisely, protection entails.
I keep wondering whether the GOP will recalibrate its relationship with the religious right. Cutting them off would be suicide. It also would be passing the buck. The problem is conservative sanctimony, and it's true that you see it in New Gingrich carrying the mantle for traditional family. But you also see it Lindsey Graham's pleas to the wages of whiteness. And you see it in a foreign policy that talks more than it listens. Now sanctimony is ideological--just look at the history of dialogue between black and white liberals over race. But there has been dialogue, and we've come a long way since RFK and Jimmy Baldwin.
Dialouge drives you to humility, and the GOP's general absence of that trait isn't a matter of religion, but philosiphy. There's a resonance between the certainty with which the right approaches religion, and the insistence that the absolute, unquestionably correct thing for Obama to do is to jump in, with both feets, on Iran. Think about this statement which Steve Benen flagged from Liz Cheney:
We've now seen several different occasions when he's been on the
international trips, where he's not willing to say, flat out, 'I
believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally,
unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in
history, and clearly that exists today.' Instead we've seen him do what
we saw him do in the speech in Cairo, which is sort of, 'on one hand
this, on the other hand that,' and then attempt to put himself sort of
above it all. I think that troubles people.
The best nation that ever existed in history. No conservative skepticism. No Niebuhrian humility. Now consider the resonance between that statement and this one from George Wallace which I flagged a few weeks ago:
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,
I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of
tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation
forever.
Now, per the bold type, the equation isn't with the racism, but with the unbridled nationalism. The worst part of Wallace's statement isn't the segregation part, it's the myth, the candy that he's feeding his audience--the greatest people that have ever trod this earth. (One could wrap the arrogance of the Lost Cause in here too, if you were so inclined.)
What you have, in both cases, is a hustle, a bait and switch, in which one claims to be hawking patriotism, but in fact, is selling jingoism. If patriotism is love of country, then much of the unquestioning GOP rhetoric fails on the rudiments. Is love of kin, love of siblings, love of spouse, telling your beloved, that they are the best person that's ever existed in history? Or is that sycophancy, fast talk proffered by loose friends, who in your darkest hours, appeal to your worst self.
The religious right isn't what's wrong with the GOP. It's the pervasive, unthinking, unreflective nationalism. It's the arrogance of thrice-divorced adulterers reaching for the banner of traditional families, and it's the arrogance of men who prosecuted a poorly planned war, on weak intelligence, presuming to lecture us on national security.
Who Are These People?
OK, time for my "You kids get off my lawn!" moment. I mean seriously, who the eff are Spencer and Heidi? I now know, thanks to my readers, who Jon and Kate are. (They're getting divorced and apparently Jon is moving to New York! Holla at a playa when you see me in them streets!! Sorry, it just sucks you in...) But these guys...
It's amazing. These days we have two levels of famous--regular famous. And fast-food famous. We probably always did. It's just that McFamous is experiencing record growth.
Kai Wright is annoyed at Obama's rhetoric around fatherhood:
...the problem with Obama's effort to turn Father's Day into an annual conversation
about the tragedy of failed fathers is that it's rooted in one of the
greatest--and most consequential--lies the Christian right has sold the
country: That "traditional" family structures are best equipped to
produce healthy kids. The notion that biological fathers are essential
to childhood development wasn't true when Dan Quayle asserted it in
1992, and it won't become true no matter how eloquently Barack Obama
restates it.
"The hole a man leaves when he abandons his
responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill,"
Obama wrote in a beautifully crafted Parade magazine essay
last week. "We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good
schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to
fully make up the difference."
This is a terribly moving refrain that echoes
through all of the president's rhetoric on fathers--and it's entirely
beside the point. Nobody sane would argue that government can give a
child love. That truism, however, does not mean only a gendered dyad of
parents are adequately equipped to do so.
Later:
Quayle's infamous tirade against Murphy Brown's
proud moment as a single mom was first mocked. But over the next couple
of years, a small, vocal chorus of conservative sociologists repeated
the notion that kids suffer outside of nuclear families often enough
that it sounded true. Warren's group and others began using their
studies to advocate against poverty programs. And by 1996, Bill Clinton
had co-opted their rhetoric to support welfare "reform" that stripped
away all manner of support for poor families.
On Friday, Obama restated as facts the terrible
fates to which fatherless children are purportedly damned: prison, drug
abuse, dropping out. But while the absence of a father may correlate with these tragedies, so do a whole lot of other bad things.
I think Kai is conflating two things that may seem similar, but are in fact quite different. One is the Quayle-ism which asserts that a household with a married mother and a father is always superior to every other kind of household. The second is the idea that, given that most people in this country (for the foreseeable future) will have fathers, it's best that those fathers be involved.
It helps to clarify Dan Quayle's attack on Murphy Brown. The problem with Quayle wasn't that he attacked absentee fatherhood (as Obama does) but that he attacked career women willingly entering into single-motherhood. One can easily slip into the other--but they aren't the same.
I've yet to see Obama delivering an attack on women who either choose to be single mothers, or end up as single mothers. Indeed the words Kai quotes contain the specific phrase "When a man leaves his child" as opposed, to say, "When a woman decides to have a baby by herself" or "When two women decide to have a baby."
Allow me to lay my cards on the table. This thing is in my blood, more than I actually have the freedom to say, publicly. But let me offer this: I'm the son of two people who were raised by single mothers, after the fathers essentially walked. It's something to attend the funeral of a grandfather who wanted nothing to do with you or your mother. I have a very close relative, who at this very moment, is raising a son whose father has, essentially, walked. I would say that the majority of the kids in my old neighborhood in Baltimore had extremely limited contact with their fathers. I was the only one, out of my crew, with a Dad in the house.
There may be great stats out there that show that a father walking out on his blood, has zero impact on a kids life. But with my history, it's very hard for me to come down on a guy whose own father walked out on him, for saying something as imminently sane as, Be a father to your child.
Here's something else--I've heard a chorus of complaints about Obama's rhetoric on fathers from black male writers. But I've yet to hear from one complaint from any single mothers. I've yet to hear a peep from a woman who was raised in that situation. I think that that's telling.
Open Thread At Noon
Speak your clout...
Homecoming
Published in Harper's Weekly, May 19, 1866.
The mailman just arrived with a copy of Noah Andre's Trudeau's Like Men Of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865. I'm trying to knock this Drew Faust joint out in the next couple weeks, so I can move on. Probably shouldn't talk about books like that--I'm taking time to absorb this Drew Faust joint. Sound better.
Anyway, dig this engraving from Harper's Weekly. It was made in 1865 after the artist watched black troops "mustering out in Little Rock." Here's the artist as quoted by Trudeau:
Just in from Duvall's Bluff, where they had been stationed, their landing created a furor among the resident colored families...[Some] rushed into the arms of their husbands with an outburst of uncontrollable affection...Children ran about with bundles of blankets or knapsacks for their papas, or begged the privilege of carrying a gun for some sable warrior.
Damn. Obviously I'm taken by the soldier in the middle kissing his wife. I don't know how to explain this, and not sound melodramatic. When you're black you feel yourself discussed in this singular, grinding, tragic way. Again, that may not be objectively true--but it's how it feels. And truthfully, on some level, you start to buy it. How many times have we heard some riff off the refrain that black folks can't stick together? You find yourself saying things like, "Niggers and flies I do despise\The more I see niggers, the more I like flies."
Even if it isn't the explicit, you can't help but buy into the narrative. A buddy of mine once said that living in a black New York means getting off the train every evening in your neighborhood, surveying the terrain, and going, "Damn."
"You can imagine the speculation running rampant about 'Why would
you do this?,' 'Why would you be gone on Father's Day?' " said one
longtime GOP strategist who has not always seen eye to eye with the
governor. "Everyone's entitled to vacations. Generally, they know where
you are, your cell phone's on, you take your security with you."
Even
a close Sanford ally, a major figure in Palmetto politics, privately
questioned the governor's explanation. Several sources cited the
multiple and contradictory explanations that came from both the
governor's office and Sanford's own wife.
One thing I've realized, from watching the campaign last year, is the difficulty of presidential politics. There are a lot of pretenders out there who don't understand that this really is the big leagues. This just strikes me as the sort of thing that pro can't do. This isn't the college game anymore.
Leaving The Lost Cause To Others
Even, as I read over that post, I keep trying to get into the head of the other side. It's a sick impulse in me. The picture from yesterday's post is cropped from a larger portrait of USCT soldiers. I've made it the wallpaper on my PC here at home.
Anyway, I was looking at the picture wondering what it must have been to be a white supremacists, to truly believe the mythology, and see these guys charging at you with guns. What was that like? Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie? Did they never really believe blacks were inhuman, that they would not fight?
American history, to its credit, instance after instance of watching white supremacy defeated. At those moments, I wonder how it felt. To see Jack Johnson take out White Hope after White Hope, to watch King and bunch of students destroy segregation, to see Obama now...
Nothing in my experience, or my reading, says that black people ever fully bought into the notions of subhumanity. But for people who truly believe, what does it feel like? Or do they never believe at all? Any recovering white supremacists out there who wanna talk?
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster
"permissiveness," and said that "it breaks the family." But he also saw
a need for abortion in some cases -- like interracial pregnancies, he
said.
"There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white," he told an aide, before adding, "Or a rape."
Meh, why distinguish. It's the same thing. Is there anything else to say?
June 23, 2009
Oh, By The Way
Open thread. It's on you...
A Rising Tide...
It won't do. That answer on black unemployment was awful. I'm out of my realm here, and I'm not sure what should be done. Economics isn't my area. But Obama's basic position seems to be that government really has no active role in rectifying racial disparities. If that's his position, then he should say it. If his position is that it's better to target by other demographic categories, besides race, he should say that. But he ducked that one. And then ducked the follow-up. Weak, weak, weak.
I'm hoping someone with a better grasp of the numbers will challenge him on this. Not in that weak "You didn't say Martin Luther King's whole name" way, but in a serious policy-driven way.
UPDATE: I've got two editors breathing down my neck for stories, and this blog, and my own reading. But the answer really pissed me off--so much so, that I am really going to try to expend some shoe leather this week and get underneath of it.
I think what really got me was, as much as I appreciate what Obama has done with respect to black media, I don't think he took the question seriously. I don't think his answer was particularly thoughtful, or illuminating. Which says to me he hasn't been thinking about it. I could be wrong, but it's what I feel.
Courtesy of
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-B8171-7890 DL
When I was young, those tee-shirts of Malcolm looking out the window with a rifle were everywhere. They were, for black ghetto kids, what Che became for the urbanistas--replete with all the same problems. I had all kinds of Conscious tee-shirts back then decked out with all kinds of slogans--Black By Popular Demand, Black By Nature Proud By Choice, How Long Shall They Kill Our Prophets, While We Stand Aside And Look. My favorite was actually pink, and had the cover art from Bob Marley's Uprising. My Dad's response was to just hurl more Carter G. Woodson and copies of the Wall Street Journal at me. He didn't believe in announcing who you were. And while he suffered my tee-shirt collection, he specifically barred me from buying the Malcolm and the Rifle number.
You must understand that my Dad, in his time, actually carried guns, and from the time I fully knew what it meant to serve in Vietnam, to come home and become a Panther, to point a rifle at a cop, I was fascinated. I still am. I think part of it is knowing that while you may one day write for the Atlantic, you will never knuckle up on the streets of West Philly, fly off to Vietnam and take a lover, come home toting guns, talking Fanon, and then say, "Meh, I've got kids. Time to work at a library." Allow me my dumb, childish romance. We all have it, if we're lucky.
But the other part, and the reason I think those Malcolm shirts struck such a chord, was because so many of us were raised with this solemn, sepia-tinged, gospel-drenched, noble suffering view of black history. It's like our story is basically
massacre, after defeat, after massacre, after more defeat, after massacre, after defeat and then white folks deciding they're tired of kicking the shit out of us. It's like our whole story is marching into billy-clubs, amazing facts about the peanut, and a few Old Negro Spirituals.
I stake no claim on an objective reality--this is how it feels to me. Knowing that, maybe my view of history says more about me and my time in West Baltimore, and the premium
the neighborhood put on righteous violence, then it does about actual facts. Moreover, I'm not sure my perspective is any better--I come to my history prejudiced,and baggaged, halfway looking for the truth, but more so looking for heroes.
This weekend I started in on Drew Faust's This Republic Of Suffering and Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard. I was reading Faust's meditation on how soldiers prepared themselves to kill, and I came across this incredible passage about the reaction of black soldiers to the Fort Pillow massacre perpetrated by Nathan Forrest. It's written by one Cordellia Harvey, sent South from Wisconsin to help with the Union wounded:
Since the Fort Pillow tragedy, our colored troops and their officers are awaiting in breathless anxiety the action of the government...Our officers of Negro regiments declare they will take no more prisoners, and there is death to the rebel in every black man's eyes. They are still but terrible. They will fight...The Negroes know what they are doing.
There's another passage in which an enslaved black woman comes upon her mistress weeping uncontrollably over the latest news--she's lost her only son. "Missus," says the slave woman. "We is even now." The "Missus" had, over the years, sold every one of this woman's children into slavery in the deep south--all ten of them.
I read those passages and got that old, stupid thrill again--Negroes with guns, Negroes fighting back. But more legitimately, I was, as I have been throughout all of this reading, simply stunned by the preservation of humanity--no, by the repeated assertions of humanity made by people who lived under a system specifically structured to destroy it.
There's a temptation to accuse John McCain of playing politics on Iran. I think this gives John McCain too much credit. What McCain knows is that Democrats--especially Democrats like
Obama--are always weak on defense. I don't think there's much more to
it.
Watching McCain go after Obama over Iran, is like watching Vinny Testaverde repeatedly throw deep into double coverage. McCain isn't reading the defense. He isn't looking anybody off. He's staring his reciever down. It's all he knows.
He'd do well to remember that the last time he did this, Barry took it back for six. But I wouldn't count on that.
Not That We're Into Props Or Anything
But this buds for you. Without the commenters here, I have, at best, half a blog.
It needs to be said that I think Martin Luther King--flaws and all--is a hero. I right write with the thought that most people reading this are following the conversation, and are familiar with the blog. That isn't obviously the case. The problem with thinking out loud, is that people hear you. And they may not have heard what you were thinking yesterday. I meant no disrespect to MLK. I wanted to point out the limits of idolizing. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Layers Upon Layers Of Fail
Buchanan attacks Sonia Sotomayor for trying to perfect her English. He does this while attending an "English only"conference. Where the banner misspelled "conference." Unbelievable.
More believable--Buchanan's copanelist urged the GOP to appeal to "young whites" and "yellow people." I'm sure all the "yellow people" are feeling the love. I know I am. And I'm only a little red.
There's More Beauty In You Than Anyone
I know there's this notion that you're supposed to hate your parents music. No real hip-hop head could follow that model. Our music is built off the world around us--we sample the cartoons we loved as kids, random conversations about Sweet Pea Whitaker, and of course our parents music. My folks had amazing taste--Ko Ko Taylor, BB King, Gil Scott, The Drifters. I forgive my Moms for hating Sade and swearing she can't sing.
When I think of being in the car with my Dad, I think of NPR and Bob Edwards, but that's not really fair. My Dad was a music-head too, and really still is. In my book, I talk about him going into the service, hopped up on soul, (the Otis Redding and Stax stuff) and how the white boys used to tease him about his music. So once, when he was back on leave, he picked up a Bob Dylan record, because he thought it was typical "hillbilly music." His plan was to play the record and get back at that white boys by mocking them with some old, "Well here's what your people listen to." Well they were offended alright--but not in the way Dad planned. The response was basically, "Get that hippie shit out of here!"
You gotta remember where my Dad was coming from--he really didn't know who or what Dylan was. But here's the kicker: He started playing this Dylan record that he'd bought as a joke, and he started to dig it. ("Masters Of War" I think) Not only did he dig it, but Dylan (along with a lot of his reading) started to radicalize him. There's this long tradition of soldiers coming home radicalized (veterans of the French and Indian War fighting in the Revolution) and my Dad fit right into that pattern. Basically, a few years after he discovered Dylan, he was in the Panther Party.
When I was kid, We used to take these long car-trips--to Atlanta, Chicago, New York,
Philly, whatever. If there was something going on with books and black
people we would find our way there. We used to wear Joan Armatrading out on those trips. I mentioned this last week in that thread about Mike, and got some e-mail about it. Well here she is in all her glory. I think this is a great song for young girls. Young boys too, I guess.
Moreover--Please Stop The MLK Worship
I love Martin Luther King. He is a personal hero to me. But we need to get real when we talk about him. Fools need to confront the fact that here was a dude, with the future on his shoulder, who was careless enough to be taped--repeatedly--having extramarital sex.
Want to know what could undo all the good you did getting arrested in a suit? By being taped by J Edgar Hoover, in the throes of sex with a white woman who isn't your wife, yelling "I'm not a Negro tonight!"
On Jan. 6, 1964, FBI men installed microphones in King's Washington,
D.C., hotel room and turned on the tape recorder. According to
officials who heard the tapes, King that night betrayed his wife,
Coretta--not for the first or the last time--shouting, amid his most
private activities, "I'm fucking for God!" and "I'm not a Negro
tonight!" Later that year, agents anonymously shipped King "a
'highlight' recording of bugged sex groans and party jokes" along with
a letter warning him: "You are done. There is but one way out for you.
You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is
bared to the nation." They called it the "suicide package."
I think, on the scale of things you can do to potentially doom a movement, this beats walking down a street and telling the world, "I'm proud of who I am." Negroes need to get serious.
A Gay Pride Parade For Bigots
Cord Jefferson, writing for The Root, compares gay pride parades to the marches of the Civil Rights Movement:
Looking at King, however, you'd be forgiven for
thinking he'd been picked up in the winter. As natty as a movie star in
a gray wool suit and pressed white shirt, his eyes remain calm beneath
the shade of a wide-brimmed fedora. It's a gentleman's outfit, similar
to others he often wore to appear in public, and it must have been a
horribly uncomfortable get-up on such a muggy day, not to mention in a
dank prison cell.
Fast forward five decades to the civil rights
movement currently at the forefront of American politics and minds:
that of the LGBT community, which has been on a roller-coaster ride in
recent weeks. There have been notable successes (marriage rights
affirmed in six states) and surprising failures (the endurance of the
military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy). This month, hundreds of
thousands of men and women around the world will take to the streets to
march for visibility and solidarity in gay pride parades. Much like Dr.
King before them, the LGBT marchers ask simply for the basic rights
granted other Americans--the right to work, the right to safety, the
right to equality.
Unlike Dr. King, few of them will appear in suits.
...at the risk of sounding like a staid homophobe, I'm often left wondering where the pride part comes in.
Jefferson does not sound so much like a staid homophobe, as a condescending concern troll. There are several problems with this logic of respectability. In the main, it's premised on the notion that a "protest march" is an adequate synonym for a "pride parade." It is not. There are certainly elements of protest in a "gay pride parade." But, if I may be so bold as to speak for the other side, the primary goal isn't to affect policy change.
This leads to the second problem of asking people in a Gay Pride parades to play by a set of rules (wearing a suit) that you wouldn't ask of anyone else. But that's because the job of parade participants is, evidently, to make homophobes more comfortable:
The annual marches ultimately accomplish two things: They entertain
those of us--gay and straight--who already wholeheartedly support the
cause of equal rights for the LGBT community, and they feed into the
rotten stereotypes of bigots, the same people who fear gay Boy Scout
leaders and consider same-sex marriage "deviant."
And then this:
I wish I could say that no bigots are going to use pictures of a few
men in thongs in San Francisco to write off millions of gay, lesbian
and transgender people, but I can't. There's a lot at stake right now.
The community is on the verge, perhaps, of a tipping point for rights
and acceptance.
There is a deeply insidious logic at work here. It is of a piece with the racist who claims to not hate black people, but holds them responsible for the 15-year old with his pants hanging off his ass. Or the misogynist who claims to love women, but holds them all responsible for the gold-digger around the corner. Jefferson isn't arguing for this logic--he's just lending it credence.
The final insult to oppressed people, is always to make them responsible for the venal stupidity of their oppressors. The bigots core refrain is never "I hate you," but "Why are you making me hate you?" Left unsaid in all this is why, precisely, some guy in San Fran wearing a thong is so offensive. Instead it asks gay people everywhere to adjust. It's not enough to be hated by the homophobe, now you must wash his laundry too.
I don't much like gay pride parades. I don't much like any parade. Hordes of people marching in the same direction always make me feel like I should be going the other way. Especially when they're yelling. But that's my problem--it isn't the job of a gay pride parade to make me comfortable. Or any parade.
Open Thread At Noon
The floor is yours...
The Felon Electorate
Nice piece by colleague Patrick Appel on a rule I've never quite understood:
citizens should be denied basic rights only when a clear threat is
posed to the public good -- not simply for reasons of political
calculus. In recognition of that, even some Republican governors have
relaxed disenfranchisement laws in their states, as Bobby Jindal and
Charlie Crist have done in Louisiana and Florida, and as George W. Bush
did in the 1990s in Texas.
Crime costs this country an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. Unless disenfranchisement helps reduce that number -- and the evidence
suggests that it does the opposite -- then denying prisoners the vote
in order to minutely heighten the virtue of the voting pool is a bad
trade.
I actually understand private enterprise looking into criminal records, before they hire--the primary motive their is profit. It's not a logic I like. But it's a kind of logic. But for the public, disenfranchisimg felons really makes little sense. Either we want these people to be functioning parts of society, or we don't. Setting them free, and then barring them from the basic responsibilities of citizen life seems at odds.
Mos Def On Letterman
When I'm taking my hints on hip-hop from Obsidian Wings, you know I'm out of it. That's a joke guys. I love ObWi. Anyway, haven't heard the album. Any thoughts?
...the gay rights movement, which is about to enter its fifth decade,
has never had a such a leader despite making remarkable strides in a
relatively short period of time.
Gay people have no national standard-bearer, no go-to sound-byte machine for the media. So when President Obama
last week extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees,
there was no alpha gay leader to respond with the movement's official
voice, though some activists criticized the president for not going far
enough.
And for that, I think my gay brethren should be thankful. There's nothing like media anointing someone as your spokesperson. Don't let them Jesse Jackson you. No disrespect to Jesse. But the notion that one person, in these individualized times, should speak for whole populations is crazy. I think, ultimately, this will be for the best.
June 19, 2009
Senate Apologizes For Slavery
I should have something to say about this. I have no idea why I don't. I guess it's good. Maybe I need to think on it more.
Not quite at noon. Was having trouble with the flux-capacitor.
The Legacy Of Sparkling Glove
First, in reference to yesterday's story, Pops sends along this correction:
enjoyed the michael jackson piece. only thing is i remember your mom as
loving that album. shortly after it came out we drove to atlanta. we
wore that tape out. and knew most of the lyrics by the time we got
there. i haven't spoke to her but that's my clear memory.
dad
Heh, I remember that trip. We drove from Baltimore to Atlanta, for some book conference. When you're young, your sense of time is all screwy. I remember feeling like the trip was taking forever. I don't remember Thriller, so much as Joan Armatrading. But I trust Dad's memory more than my memory on that one.
Anyway, I wanted to pick up on a debate that we started in on yesterday, and that being where Michael Jackson stands in terms of the old schoolers like Jackie Wilson, Aretha, Etta, Big O, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye etc.
Now, I realize that all these cats had different styles, and were working in different subgenres. Peter Guralnick would say Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, were more classic soul. He would throw James Brown in there too. But others would see James Brown as the beginning of Funk. I don't want to get bogged down in that debate, because I don't think there's a real answer, nor do I think it much matters. I'm more interested in the celestial place that these singers occupy, and whether there's any sense that Mike belongs up there with them.
Thriller came out at an interesting time. Bands were really losing out, as folks figured out they could do replace a horn section with a keyboard. There's this sense now that anything that came out of the disco era, and the post-disco era is essentially awful. As a kid, I had some of that. We nominally hated R&B and thought of hip-hop as the harder, "truer" form. Later we came to see hip-hop as the child of funk and soul, and 80s R&B as a corrupted, corporate, step-child.This is obviously simplistic, and not only do I not subscribe to it now. (Marvin's "Give It Up" is classic.) I don't know how much I subscribed to it then. (Dig the Lisa-Lisa clip below.) But the question is where does Mike fit into all of that? It's easy to dismiss him, just on the basis of his success, and the qualitative decline of his later work. That second part is true of almost any musician, though.
From my perspective, Mike has earned an honored place in the black music canon. Quincey Jones obviously deserves credit, but citing him to discredit Mike is like citing Steve Cropper (or Issac Hayes) to discredit Otis Redding. It's wierd to think of Mike in that tradition, given his mega-success. But I don't know how you cut him out.
Then again, maybe I'm not the best person to ask. I love Smooth Criminal, after all. I remember coming to school and fools being like, "Yo, did you see Mike hit that lean!" My whole childhood revolves around Mike's--Jackson, Tyson, Jordan...
Rambling About The Language Of Slaves
Or ex-slaves. My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?
A lot of the most vivid language, I find, often comes from the street. I mean that in the broadest sense--that language that's alive comes from places where people (black, white, brown, yellow, whatever) are living close to the ground. Perhaps I've just spent too much time around those sorts of people. But I swear, I've heard some of the most evocative language come from the most formally unlettered people.
I thought about this yesterday, while I was listening to another David Blight lecture. He started quoting from Bailey Wyatt, a freedman at an early Union League meeting, and I was just spellbound. Blight has a cool voice, but it was the words that got me:
We now as a people desires to be elevated, and we desires to do all we
can to be educated, and we hope our friends will aid us all they can. I
may state to all our friends and to all our enemies that we has a right
to the land where we are located. Why? I'll tell you. Our wives, our
children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase
the lands we now locates upon. For that reason we have a divine right
to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of
corn and of cotton and of tobacco and of rice and of sugar and of
everything? And then didn't them large cities in the North grow up on
the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes, I appeal to
the South and to the North, if I hasn't spoken the words of the truth.
I say they have grown rich, and my people are poor.
There are all sorts of things wrong with that passage. But there is something beautiful about the extra "s" on desire, especially placed in a sentence like "and we desires to do all we can to be educated." And then this phrase, "the lands we now locates upon." Again, all sorts of things wrong with that sentence, but something about it's immediacy, its understatement, and maybe it's very wrongness.
I used to be a djimbe drummer. I thought it was going to be my life, at one point. The best lead drummers would play in such a way that they sometimes almost sounded off-beat--not off-beat like a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, but off-beat like a guy who can hear pockets in the rhythm that you can't. It's the same for great dancers. The same for hip-hop. Great MCs hear more.
Not saying that old Bailey was Rakim. But he heard a little more....Or maybe I'm just making excuses for my own grammatical failings.
My suspicion is that despite his campaign promise, Obama is genuinely conflicted about DOMA. In California, the fight against gay marriage was led by black
churches, and Obama must have been exposed to that sentiment over the
years. This is why this feels like the first instance of Obama behaving
in a disingenuous way..
I have a lot of respect for Hanna's reporting chops, and she may well have access to some info that I haven't seen. But I think given the relatively minuscule population of blacks in California (7 percent), given the organization and money that the Mormons lent to the effort, given the correctives we've seen on polling for Prop 8, the notion that black churches led the fight against gay marriage strikes me as wrong.
But not as wrong as the notion that Obama picked up some homophobic sentiment from the black church. Leaving aside the notion that the black church is somehow responsible for Obama's failings, it's a bad idea to draw conclusions from what black churches in Compton are alleged to have done, to what black churches in Chicago actually do.
I can't speak on the whole city, but in terms of Obama's most recent church, he likely belonged to one of the most progressive churches in the city on this issue. Look, Jeremiah Wright's Trinity may have been a lot of things--but anti- gay really isn't among them. On the contrary:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's controversial
ex-pastor in Chicago has largely supported gay rights and has welcomed
gays into his 8,000-member congregation at Trinity United Church of
Christ, according to activists who know him...
With Obama competing with rival presidential contender Hillary Clinton
for gay votes in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary, revelations of
Wright's controversial sermons have raised questions among some
activists about whether Obama's longtime pastor was among the preachers
who delivered fire-and-brimstone sermons attacking homosexuality.
"Absolutely not," said Rick Garcia, political director of Equality Illinois, the Chicago-based state gay rights group.
"Trinity has been among the strongest supporters of LGBT rights,"
Garcia said. "I have the highest regard and admiration for Rev. Wright."
Gay Chicago resident Ronald Wadley, a member of Trinity United Church
of Christ, said Wright enthusiastically backed suggestions by gay
church members to create a gay and lesbian singles ministry as part of
the church's existing ministry to heterosexual singles.
"We call it the same-gender loving family ministry," Wadley said. "It's
a ministry that was formed to allow people to have an outlet to
reconcile their sexuality with their spirituality," he said.
Of course this evidence hasn't stopped news orgs from simply assuming that Trinity must be, in fact, anti-gay.
I don't like how Obama's moving on gay rights, and I've said as much. But that really is on him--not the black church.
Echoes Of The Bubblegum Age
My mother hated Billie Jean. I was seven when this joint came out, and whenever it came on the radio she'd look at me really hard and say, "If you did it with her boy, it is your son." One of the reasons I'm so blunt and open here is because that's really how I came up. Moms did not play. Plus Mike had a nose-job and a curl.
But this joint was hot. I've been banging this album a lot lately, and have concluded that it is, arguably, the greatest pop culture achievement in history. Just my humble opinion. The album is so great that joints that would be highlights on other albums, are just seen as filler on Thriller. "Baby Be Mine" is incredible.
I remember when this came out, and all the kids who'd been lucky enough to stay up and see Friday Night Videos came to school bragging about it. You couldn't get cable in Baltimore back then. Fools were like, "Yo, every time he took a step the stones would glow! And then when he went invisible the stones kept glowing!!" We thought Mike could save us all. We hadn't heard BDP yet.
I chose this instead of the old joint because it makes me sad. Mike used to be beautiful. My sister Kelly just knew she was marrying him. And he danced so smooth and easy. I hate to think that what gave him that ability, was the same thing that ruined him. I remember watching this a few years back and thinking, "Goddamn, he's still got it. Amazing." Watch the end when he murders em b-boy style.
Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance -- No. 1 in
high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review -- her
academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a
testament to Ivy League corruption.
Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that, to get up to speed on
her English skills at Princeton, Sotomayor was advised to read
children's classics and study basic grammar books during her summers.
How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer
reading consists of "Chicken Little" and "The Troll Under the Bridge"?...
Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was
whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review --
all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League
institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a
lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This
is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past
societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this
time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.
One
prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham
Lincoln observed, adulterated "with the base alloy of hypocrisy."
His column is entitled "Miss Affirmative Action 2009."
Anyway this notion that two Ivy League schools nefariously plotted to make Sonia Sotomayor number one in her class and then editor of the Yale Law Review, is not simply unserious, but paranoid. Really fucking paranoid.
Open Thread At Noon
It's all you...
Gay Marriage Moves Forward In D.C.
I meant to post this a few days ago, but gay marriage took another step forward in the District this week. Adam does some crack reporting to show us how Marion Barry made it all possible. UPDATE: James Dobson joins the fight. Where's your states' right now...
The Apology Tour Begins
Rusty Depass, the dude who claimed Michelle Obama forced him to make a racist joke, is now making an actual apology. The piece goes on to note that Republicans in South Carolina actually do worst than the national party with blacks. I guess as the seat of secession and then Redemption it makes sense. I wouldn't expect much change, though. The GOP in South Carolina doesn't think any of this is a problem.
I'm pretty convinced that the Anderson letter is real. We know that Anderson existed. We know that the letter was, in fact, printed at the time. If someone is going to charge fraud they need to have something besides, "No slave could have written this."
That said, I'm interested in a discussion of the exact message of the letter. Better put, I'm interested in a discussion of interpretations. Most people read the letter as a sarcastic dis of Anderson's former master. There is that, but I wonder whether folks think his words of affection were more sarcasm, or sincere? I think it's reasonable to say that the part about the wages was sincere, especially given how he follows it up with hints of divine judgment and also his worrying about the safety of his daughters.
But I've found, in my reading, that the relationships between slaves and masters is often uncomfortably complicated. In numerous cases I've read about whites presuming the loyalty of their slaves, in much the way a parent would presume the loyalty of a child. In most cases, the loyalty is unfounded. But even in those cases, there is sometimes affection for the master, and in truly rare cases a kind of, almost, paternalism exhibited by the slave toward the master.
Throughout my reading, I've been thumbing through Remembering Slavery, a collection of oral histories taken by the WPA of freed slaves. The complexity of their lives and, for our purposes, their relationships with their owners is stunning. There are tales of master's giving slaves guns to go hunting. (I read that and thought, that's a hell of a chance this guy is taking) There are tales of masters and slaves celebrating Christmas together. (I think I read about that one in A Nation Under Our Feet. Forgive me, this stuff is starting to blur together. In a good way.)
The most interesting story I've seen involved a slaveowner who heads off to the Confederate front. The owner hands one of his slave a rifle, and says "Protect my wife, my daughters and my land" or some such. And the dude does it. He doesn't cut and run, he watches over his master's place. There's a way of reading this with the old house/field slave dichotomy. I love Malcolm. And I love that riff. By I don't think it says much about actual people.
Perhaps Old Jourdan is running game again. I don't know. But I would not put it beyond the realm of disbelief that he had some affection, if not for the old Colonel, then for the Colonel's family.
June 17, 2009
Echoes Of The Bubblegum Age
Goddamn, I thought Lisa Lisa was so fine. Everyone loved Janet and Paula. Whatever. Lisa Lisa came to murder dem.
Black and Tan for the win. Of course I was so unschooled then, that I didn't realize she was Latin. Just thought she was another high yaller black chick.
One Last Civil War Thought For The Day
If you do nothing else, read this letter from one Jourdan Anderson, to his former master in Tennessee. Anderson has escaped and is living in Ohio with his family. Anderson's ex-master is hoping he'll return to work for him. The irony and understatement in this piece is so well done, that when I read it, I actually thought it was fraudulent. But Historian David Blight cites it in his letters.
A quick excerpt:
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to
find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back
and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody
else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees
would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at
your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col.
Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in
their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did
not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.
It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss
mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to
them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not
in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in
the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended
to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
Read the rest. It's incredible. So much blackness there, and then something of that sense of Southern understatement there also, that whole playing dumb act while driving home a dead serious point. And maintaining a veneer of politness also, even while discussing truly grave matters.
You wrote: "It is one thing to be
judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same
time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a
loser, is deeply painful."
This reminded me of the following quote from Trainspotting, spoken
by Obiwan Kenobi, I mean, Ewen MacGregor, (who plays, and is, a Scot)
"Some people hate the English, I don't. They're just wankers. We, on
the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even find a decent
culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes."
Yes, that gets at a lot of the pain of it. One thing I've neglected to mention is this: I've learned, during my time writing, that where there is pain there is juice. And where this juice, there's deep truth, a chance for growth, and ultimately kick-ass writing.
Jay's quote gets at something else I wanted, but forgot, to mention--the initial twang of cheapness that takes you over, once you fully begin to grapple with being amongst the conquered. Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" is one of the best meditations on slavery that I've ever read. The most poignant part, for me, is when uses the voice of a slave-trading sailor to mock the small-minded African chieftains:
Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories, Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar; have watched the artful mongos baiting traps of war wherein the victor and the vanquished
Were caught as prizes for our barracoons. Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah, Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.
And there was one--King Anthracite we named him-- fetish face beneath French parasols of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:
He'd honor us with drum and feast and conjo and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love, and for tin crowns that shone with paste, red calico and German-silver trinkets
Would have the drums talk war and send his warriors to burn the sleeping villages and kill the sick and old and lead the young in coffles to our factories.
I didn't want to bold any of this, less I ruin the beauty--but the part that always gets me is the image of "nigger Kings" who traded slaves for "tin crowns that shown with paste, red calico and German-silver trinkets."
It's like, "Damn, that's what I'm worth. Broken crowns, fabric, toys and parasols. Not even gold. It's like they gave us away for nothing."
I need to clarify that I am writing about how it feels, not how it is. It's the subjective emotions, perhaps native only to me, of coming into consciousness. It's about Neo waving off the blue pill, and reveling in the red.
The NFL Today
Some folks feel like Donte Stallworth got off easy. I don't think there's a racial angle here, but I do think that the notion that there is universal justice system that works the same for everyone, everywhere is something that a lot of us (I won't even say black folks) can ill-afford.
In other news, it looks like Brett Favre is on his way back.
Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes
Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.
I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.
I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.
A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.
This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not
noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made
me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.
As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.
I've actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.
It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground.
The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.
I literally just finished Battle Cry Of Freedom. Incredible book. Perhaps the best I've ever read. The story of the escaped slave, who joins the Union Army, encounters
his master and says, "Howdy Massa. Bottom rail on top, this time" is
such a lovely end. More coming. I'm working now.
June 16, 2009
Some Clarification On Cap
A reader writes:
Your comment "It always amazes me that writers don't get the power of dead characters" kinda bothers me.
You're assuming that what drives this storyline, and by extension most storylines in which dead characters come back to life, is the writer.
At Marvel and DC this is often not the case. Big event storylines are often the product of decisions at the editorial level, with writers told what the final result will be and given leeway as to how that will make it happen. Blaming the writers for the meaningless of character death in the comics is like blaming the assembly line workers for a badly designed car.
I'd argue that a "written by" credit makes you responsible--Grant Morrison gets the credit for his run on X-Men. That said, given the influence of editors, I'd say this is fair.
Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating
a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on
their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of
those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign,
John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journalpublished a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.
Imagine
how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of
these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded
around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating
the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at
least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran
is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a
so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering
huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran
inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces,
destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their
society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling
the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's
some abstract decision in a video game.
We talk too much these days. Sometimes it's good to just play the back and listen.
Captain America is rising from the grave. The Marvel Comics superhero returns for the five-part series "Captain America Reborn," beginning July 1.
But Marvel won't disclose how he rises from the dead. Executive Editor Tom Brevoort
teases that the character has been "on a Vonnegut-esque metaphysical
journey," including some soul-searching about his place in the world.
It always amazes me that writers don't get the power of dead characters. Gwen Stacy may have exerted more influence over Spiderman from the grave, than she did alive. She certainly exerted more influence dead, then she did as a clone. I get the Cap is flagship character--then don't kill him in the first place. I also get that it's commercial move to drive sales. But at some point brand degradation kicks in. If you're going to kill main characters, only to resurrect them later, why should we care in the first place?
Go Further, Young Man
George Packer would like to see Obama, and his team, saying something more about Iran:
With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported
cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran's cities,
for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases
serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism
is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality--that you know the
difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for
the whole world to see. A stronger American stand--taken, as much as
possible, in concert with European countries and through multilateral
organizations--would do more to improve America's negotiating position
than weaken it. Acknowledging the compelling voices of the desperate
young Iranians who, after all, only want their votes counted, would not
deep-six the possibility of American-Iranian talks. Ahmadinejad and his
partners in the clerical-military establishment will talk to us exactly
when and if they think it's in their interest. Right now, they don't
appear to. And the tens of millions of Iranians who voted for change
and are the long-term future of that country will always remember what
America said and did when they put their lives on the line for their
values.
One of the things I like about Packer is that, unlike a lot of opinionaters, he's still in the business of gathering first-hand information about the world he deigns to judge. I should add that he has, at his side, a better half who's done the math on this crisis.
So it's with some trepidation, that I disagree. I think we'd be wise to consider our own image problems abroad. What you want is the Iranian opposition with their feet rooted in native soil. What you don't want is any credible intimations of American puppet-mastery. Again, I know Obama's popular--but I'm not sure he's popularity immunizes us against demagoguery.
Moreover, I remain suspicious of bluster. It seems to me that part of realism, perhaps the most important part, is understanding your own limits. In the overt sense, if we can't help, let's do our best not to hurt.
Slower Than Your Average
Family commitments are bearing down. Blogging will commence by early afternoon. Talk amongst yourselves for a bit.
June 15, 2009
The Problem Of Apology (Part 2)
I'm not so much sorry that I'm a racist fuck, as I'm sorry I made the mistake of informing you that I'm a racist fuck:
Newscoma posted details of a racist email sent from Sherri Goforth, legislative aid for Sen. Diane Black
(R-Gallatin). The email depicts the Presidents of the United States
with President Barack Obama as a pair of eyes in a black background.
I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this
email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a
letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the
job.
When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the
photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally
sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to
address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that
she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.
"I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong
button," Goforth told NIT. "I'm very sick about it, and it's one of
those things I can't change or take back."
On another note, I just got a good letter from a cat in South Carolina, who noted that a lot of Southern whites are so sick and embarrassed by this sort of thing. He added that the guilt from their image as a racist backwater affects a kind of paralysis. He wanted to assure me that these fools don't represent the South.
Seems fair to me. I know white Southerners, and the GOP gets tired of being tarred with the racist tag. That said, it's worth considering that black people get tired of being the targets of people who are tired of being tarred with the racist tag.
Seriously folks. In terms of diplomacy between white and black, the South Sides, the Harlems and the West Baltimores of the world can't do much better than the Obamas. Whenever I see this sort of thing I just wonder what they'd say we'd sent them Sharpton.
While demonstrators gather in the streets
to contest Iran's rigged election, online backers of the so-called
"Green Revolution" are looking to strike back at the Tehran regime -- by
attacking the government's websites.
Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime's propaganda sites with junk traffic. "NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir
- pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,"
Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service
(DDOS) attacks isn't clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. "There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep,
which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating
bogus requests for serving images," notes Open Society Institute fellow
Evgeny Morozov.
The Problem Of Apology
I'd love to see some scientific studies on why people find it so hard to say, "My bad." Here we have a GOP activist doing what certain sector of GOP activist do:
Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at
a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass
wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably
harmless."
Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."
Then
he added, "The comment was hers, not mine," claiming Michelle Obama
made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News
could find no such comment.
Now, I normally wouldn't highlight this--it seems pretty clear that there is, at least, a section of the GOP that can't unstrap itself from the wit and wisdom of white supremacy. You can't build court racists and then expect them to stop talking about Obama waffles and watermelon because it's inconvenient. It's who they are.
But it's really the apology that boggles me. The "if I offended anyone" is par for the course for the passive-agressive non-apology. But DePass goes further than that--he actually blames Michelle Obama, falsely apparently, for the whole thing!
This is probably the worst non-apology I've ever seen--but it's of a piece with this particular thing about us, this aversion to admitting error, even when caught red-handed. Perhaps I'm extrapolating too much. Politics is a particular business that attracts a particular kind of person. Maybe if you're in pitched battle with the other side, and in the business of making sure you're side wins, this sort of fake humility becomes your stock and trade.
Also, as a side-note, it's always amazing to see dude's who look like DePass cracking jokes about some woman's appearance. The last to be talking, are the first to flap the lip.
And even after all my logic and my theory I add and open thread, so you ig'nant bloggers hear me...
You Can Not Win
From my inbox, some concern over my classification of racist Jews as racist whites:
I was reading your comments in the story 'Feel the
hate'. According to the article you said "For what it's worth, on a very visceral level,
what I see is a bunch of drunk racist white kids, doing what I'd expect a bunch
of drunk racist white kids to do."
I take offense at your comment. Jews are not
White. Why are you blaming "white kids" for this racial hatred when no white
kids were involved? When Jews do good things they're Jews, and when they do bad
things they're white?
I guess. For what it's worth Michael Schewner and Andrew Goodman were always as white to me as, say, John Brown. But somehow, in this instance, I don't think that helps.
That said, I know there are plenty of Jewish people who don't believe they are white. I have no idea what percentage of Jews hold that opinion, though I suspect it's a minority. I don't really know what to do with that information, besides acknowledging it, and offering deference when I'm made aware of such a case. UPDATE: Sorry guys I botched that "plenty of Jewish people who believe they are white." There should have been a don't in there. Fixt now.
A Dose Of Palinism
I don't have much to say about this Palin-Letterman silliness. That said, it's striking to see someone who would have been a step away from being leader of the free world, feuding with a talk-show host. Sarah Palin is in tenacious possession of a small mind. Whatever you think of John McCain, remember that he was willing to countenance her as leader of the free world. I don't think we have to worry about that now. I can't see her getting out of a GOP primary.
American Power
Andrew responds to Stephen Hayes' suggestion that Obama give a speech in support of the people of Iran:
No! That is the last thing he should do. He should stay out of this as
much as possible. This is not about us. It's about them. And any
interference would only backfire to the regime's advantage.
Obviously, he's going to have to say something. But I basically agree with Andrew, mostly because I'm not convinced that any kind of American endorsement of anything can help. I know Obama's more popular than Bush in Iran, but whatever he says needs to be nuanced. Frankly, I'd expect nothing less.
On another note, I was watching Meet The Press yesterday and saw David Gregory ask Joe Biden if the Obama administration would go down as allowing Iran to go nuclear. Then I saw Mitt Romney blame Obama for the apparent fraud in Iran.
I think this theory of infinite American reach is a little silly. If we could use some temperamental conservatism anywhere, its in our sense of ourselves. Here are your dangerous words for the day--America can do anything. It's a strange logic that says you can't cure poverty, but you can direct the fates of whole nation-states thousands of miles away.
I was surprised when so many people I respect told me not to appear on "The O'Reilly Factor." I'd attacked Bill O'Reilly
for his jihad against Dr. George Tiller, and he asked me on to discuss
my "accusations." I thought that was fair. I could explain my point of
view to his face; to say no felt like being a punk. But smart and
supportive friends, family, co-workers, Twitterers and media stars all over the country reached out and suggested I skip it.
I
thought about it, but not for long. I like doing TV. I'm not terrible
at it. I criticized him, I should have the guts to repeat it to his face
I think the logic of "I ain't no punk" has to be very selectively applied, when your over 25. This is coming from someone who lived by that logic in his younger years. But as you age, the instances where "I ain't no punk" becomes useful are few and far between.
Writers are particularly prone to "I ain't no punk"-ism. In the extreme, you see Norman Mailer and Stanley Crouch. But, in the main, we want to prove to people that we're not effete bespectacled eggheads, hiding behind our reports. We don't want people thinking we're afraid of a fight.
I don't know. Having been a few actual fights in my early years (and ran from a lot more), having knuckled up with some fools who weren't gonna talk you to death (and ran from a lot more), I find the notion of a shout-fest with O'Reilly (or anyone who talks for a living) as a mark of courage to be dubious.
When I was 14, I threatened a teacher, and got arrested, trying to prove I wasn't no punk. When I was 16, I got smacked in the head with a trash can, by a kid who, himself, was trying to show that he wasn't no punk. I've got nothing left to prove. And I know how it all ends. Stupidly.
June 12, 2009
On The Run
Sorry to leave you guys like this after such an emotional week--scroll down if you missed it. I'm on the move today in search of bigger and better stories. Mind the store while I'm out. Consider this your open thread. Guard it with your life. Or at least your virtual life.
June 11, 2009
Wright Clarifies
I don't know if it helps. The idea that "Zionists" are keeping Obama from talking to Wright strikes me as, well, false. I'm willing to bet Valarie Jarrett doesn't want them talking either. I'm willing to bet more that Michelle Obama doesn't want them talking. And, for what it's worth, Obama's a man. If he hasn't called, that's on him. Not on Axelrod.
I don't want to pile on here. And I don't want to be opportunistic. But I've never understood the impulse to defend yourself when you make a blatant mistake. I didn't understand it in Bush, and I don't understand it here. Some of you will argue that it wasn't a "mistake." Fair enough.
But the question I'm asking is, assuming that folks are sincere, what really is so hard about saying, "I am sorry. I didn't mean to say it. It's not what's in my heart. But it was wrong and I am sorry." Why the invocation of Hillary? Why does her (presumed) lack of candidness give you the right to be equally obtuse? Why the dodging? Why the inability to just man up and admit the error?
Again, I wonder if it's the result of having been hardened. I wonder if its about feeling like you're constantly besieged, and to apologize is to surrender something. So, instead, you become more aggressive. The crazy thing is that the aggression only feeds the cycle. It only makes it for more controversy, and more headlines. Why not just kill it? Say "I was wrong" and then stop talking to reporters. Just stop.
This makes me think about Obama's response to Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment. When he came out and said, "Well, I think she'd agree that was poor phrasing," people were wondering if his admission gave ammo to his adversaries. In fact, it just stole their oxygen. He recognized that it wasn't a point worth defending. Why fight it? What do you gain?
Same thing here. What is Jeremiah Wright trying to achieve?
Echoes Of The Crack Age
Oh man, classic...
Don't Marry A Writer
Last night me and Kenyatta went out for dinner with some of our closest friends. At the end I realized something--it was the first time, in two weeks, that I'd gone more than a couple waking hours without making some note about the Civil War.
I've been listening to these David W. Blight lectures, courtesy of Yale, like nonstop. Kenyatta says that every time she comes in the room all she hears is "Blahblahblah KANSAS blahblahblah JOHN BROWN blahblahblah KNOW-NOTHINGS blahblahblah WILMOT PROVISO." Hilarious. I'm in one of those moments--totally overcome by this period of history.
And now for today's random Civil War/Reconstruction observation: U.S. Grant was kind of a bad-ass. Yesterday I was reading McPherson's appraisal of the dude and he talked about how Grant, having failed so much in his earlier life, was a fearless, offensive general. McClellan, on the other hand, who'd experienced so much success, lived in permanent fear of another Bull Run. So much of that resonated with me.
He quotes Grant, in his first major command, leading the 21st Illinois to attack a rebel camp in Missouri. Grant talks about how scared he was. But when he arrived at the battle-field the enemy had fled, and he realized that the opposing general held just as much fear in his heart as Grant.
There's something almost bluesy, and anti-heroic about his whole style, something deep, very human, and of course, ultimately tragic. But it's beautiful. Especially given that generals charged in with the troops and tended to die at astonishing rates.
This whole business is in my skin. I think about it all the time.
For those who haven't followed the debate going on here and over at Andrew's, it's worth checking out this summary. Even if you have, it's still worth checking out. One thing that I didn't realize, until it was all down on paper, was how many voices you have at work--there's Andrew, me, Adam Serwer, Shelby Steele, and the commenters on this blog. There's something very cool about that. And about this line from Andrew's summary:
I didn't actually enjoy reading these TNC commenter posts but they sure got me thinking.
I have more to say about this, but frankly I'm afraid. I don't want to write a long mash note dripping in sentimentalism. I just need you guys to know how much of a privilege it is to be here to set the table for you everyday, to live next door to Andrew, Jeff, James and Megan.
I can remember being a young man, angry about the world, failing out of school, but bursting with words, and frustrated that I had nowhere to lay them down. And now the discipline is to not say too much. What a shift. In my heart, I think I'll always be that kid who flunked out of high school--twice. It is shocking--truly shocking--to be a daily participant here at this site.
Look at this. What a mess. I ended up with a mash note anyway. Damn my dumb, weak heart.
Open Thread At Noon
You know what this is...
"This Is Personal"
Read Mark Blumenthal's recollection of his last visit to the Holocaust Museum with his father. Read the update too. It's all bracing. I haven't said much more about this, because I haven't quite figured out where to go.
It is far too early to make such assessments of President Obama,
but there is a disturbing parallel. He has carefully outlined support
for civil unions and his opposition to a Constitutional amendment
banning same-sex marriage.
But as a former law professor,
Obama certainly knows -- and the language of the recent California
ruling makes frighteningly clear -- the logic of civil unions is
essentially the logic of "separate but equal." (Try reading the
California decision and the Plessy v. Ferguson opinion consecutively.)...
The president would do well to define this moment by taking
immediate action to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" or ensure adoption
rights for homosexual, bisexual and transgender families. Kennedy
believed that promoting civil rights would jeopardize other aspects of
his domestic agenda during a national crisis. Barack Obama has a
broader set of crises to resolve than any president in modern history,
but that is not a rationale for inaction on this issue.
Ultimately, the gay rights movement will have to learn something that
the civil rights movement learned again and again during the 20th
century -- it is often necessary to force the hand of even your allies
to achieve your goals.
A Good Time For That Pally Twink
WoW drops the level requirements for mounts. I think this is just more recognition that the end game, is the game. I'm not sure how much I ultimately like that design model--it'd be nice if leveling meant something. Or if it meant something sooner than at level 80. But I can't complain. I've got a twinked-out lock making her way through Ghostlands.
Jeremiah Wright
I'm just going to be honest and say I didn't expect this:
Asked if he had spoken to the president, Wright said: "Them Jews aren't
going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk
to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's
out of office..."
Feel free to pillory me, but I just didn't see that sort of crude conspiratorial antisemitism coming. I guess it's of a piece with his press club performance, last year. I'm amazed that he's still talking to reporters.
Not to excuse anything, but I wonder if the blitz, from last year, hardened him. I say that because the worse stuff I've heard from Wright, actually aren't in his initial sermons. With the exception of the government creating AIDS bit, I never found his sermons to be particularly egregious.
But in between this and the press club, it's like he's doubling down on the caricature--like he's becoming exactly what they said he was. Maybe "they" were right. I also wonder whether you're just seeing ego--a guy who had the megaphone for much of his life, eclipsed, and doing whatever he can to get it back.
June 10, 2009
Shep Smith On Extremist Violence
Worth watching...
UPDATE: Goldberg, being the crack reporter that he is, has all the latest. Perhaps this means nothing but I feel that I should acknowledge that a black man was killed on guard duty at the Holocaust museum. That may mean nothing. But I think it should be said.
In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve
Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was
tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury,
Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew
judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served
6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn's "Federal Reserve
Caper" HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's
Eastern Shore.
The Eastern Shore of Maryland. Where my people (as in my relatives) were slaves. I don't mean to be paranoid. But folks need to not brush this stuff off.
The Zen Of Chris Matthews
He has an almost accidental genius. He is blustery, loud and seemingly the font of everything wrong with cable news. And yet I've seen him, time and again, expose people, even if they don't know they're being exposed. I think this interview with Joe Scarborough is the latest example of why I enjoy him more than Maddow, and Olbermann.
Scarborough's inability to go all out, and say where he stands on gay marriage and abortion is telling. Or rather, it's selling. I don't know if it's about selling his book, or his brand of conservatism. But it says something that he doesn't want to talk about either issue in much depth. Either he doesn't feel that strongly either way or the issues, and is afraid of losing a constituency. Or he feels strongly, and doesn't feel like he can defend it.
All that said, it is amazing to watch nation figures becoming uncomfortable talking about gay marriage. I mean that in a good way. Like it's losing some potency. Just some thoughts.
Now here's a funky introduction to how nice I am...
Still More...
I briefly alluded to this yesterday, but it's worth emphasizing that a large measure of my power and privilege critique of conservatives, comes from my identity. It's worth rereading King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail which was addressed to those who called his actions "unwise and untimely":
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just
as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried
their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns,
and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the
gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so
am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.
Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities
and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about
what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied
in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects
all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial
"outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can
never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your
statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the
conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none
of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social
analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying
causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham,
but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure
left the Negro community with no alternative.
I think that passage says a lot about black people's relationship to conservatism. I'd be out of my area, but I'd guess that if we looked at other arenas, where activists attempted to open up the Constitution--suffrage for instance--I wouldn't be shocked to see conservatism lagging there too. This is history, of course, and a record on suffrage doesn't constitute a record on all things. But it explains a lot about the chasm. If you come up paying the price for going slow, you tend to be sensitive to others having to go through the same.
I want to be clear about something: I'm not raising this to score points or beat up on conservatives. When I wrote, yesterday, that we should not dismiss the cautions of conservatism, I wasn't being polite. I believe it. I think it was Connecticut that, instead of emancipating all its slaves, simply said everyone born after a certain date was free. Was that a smarter approach? Would a steadier, gradualist approach to Reconstruction made Redemption untenable? Would a more gradualist approach to Civil Rights ultimately left us somewhere better, today? I don't think so. But I don't dismiss it out of hand. Lincoln's conservative hand ultimately served him well, no?
Maybe I'm going here because some of this is ultimately in me. I find Pat Buchanan's bluster to be disgusting--but not because I'm undisturbed by the Ricci Case. This, for instance, I basically agree with:
My worry about identity politics is that we should indeed take into
account our different experiences, but we should always also try to
transcend them. Wallowing in them seems less of an overcoming than an
undergoing. It's why I'm leery of hate crime laws and affirmative
action, and all legal structures that put us all into separate ethnic
or emotional or racial camps for ever. The argument that this comes too
easily for a white guy like me is certainly valid. But I refuse to see
the rule of law and judicial modesty as somehow white or male. The
principles of classical liberalism have no color and gender, and are,
to my mind, indispensable to getting past both.
Our points of emphasis may be different, but this comes perilously close to my own world-view.
Brooks point is hilariously historically naive, and it must be
intentional. If only Sotomayor had had the good fortune to attend
Princeton in the decades that Princeton DID NOT ADMIT ANY WOMEN AT ALL,
she would have certainly found it welcoming of all races and genders.
The bad faith is palpable; in the fifties and sixties, Princeton was
not sure that admitting wealthy east-coast Jews, who were the new
category let in the door in the 20s and 30s, was such a good idea.
While both Andrew and David Brooks' quotes are preposterous,
intelligent people can find a way to abhor evil and also aggressively
critique the response to evil if that response happens to be deeply
flawed. Lots of conservatives are much more disturbed by victimology
than they are by actual discrimination, because they are self-centered
and culturally ignorant. Then again, lots of straight white males are
uncomfortable with liberal identity politics because it seems to
implicitly disinvite them from the party. I'm more concerned about the
latter group's reaction than I am about the former.
When you say that "Institutions, traditions and the past belong to
those with power" I have to disagree. The past does not belong to those
with power any more than the air is the property of the birds that fly
in it. The past, together with its institutions and traditions is the
common property of all men and women. At various points in time those
traditions have privileged the powerful over the weak, but those same
traditions and institutions have also stood for social justice, for the
rights of humankind, and for the freedom of the weak and powerless to
stand up to authority when that authority is seen to be overbearing.
This is true with respect to long-standing traditions, but with
respect to powerful institutions versus the powerless, you're
presenting something of a false dichotomy between conservatives and
liberals. Liberals often side with teachers unions, for example, over
inner-city parents who seek vouchers for school choice. Liberals often
also privilege Wall Street firms and big business over entrepreneurs.
They also privilege alumni of elite schools over smart folks from less
well-connected backgrounds.
Consider this: there's a banker in Texas who didn't lose a dime
during the financial crisis, because he saw the nonsense for what it
was and kept his powder dry. His bank has profited while others have
sought government welfare. He's a self-made billionaire. But he happens
to be a Michigan State dropout. His name is Andy Beal. Don't you think
this is the sort of guy the President ought to be tapping for economic
advice, instead of the Ivy League grads who lost billions on Wall
Street? Beal may have money, but he doesn't have any pull, since our
current liberal President adheres to the status quo of privileging
established Wall Street institutions such as Goldman Sachs despite
their failures.
These are all obviously pulled from comments on yesterday's post on conservatism, Sullivan and Brooks. It's also worth adding one other critique--the conservative position on war. I got into a conversation with a historian via e-mail over this, and then thought some on it. I think there is a credible argument to be made that there was nothing conservative about the Iraq War. I don't mean conservative in opposition to liberal, as much as I mean conservative in opposition to radical. I see similar thinking in Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican-American war, a fight pushed by people who called themselves conservatives, much like Bill Kristol calls himself a conservative. This is obviously a major area where the power/privilege critique comes up short.
I've been thinking a lot lately about why I'm not a
conservative, mostly because I've been thinking so much about slavery
and Reconstruction. It seems, to my mind, to be an authentic conservative in the
1850s is to perhaps recognize slavery as evil, but oppose doing
anything about it that might upset the planters. It seems, to my mind,
to be an authentic conservative in the 1960s would be to recognize that
segregation was also evil, but resolve to nothing about it which might
upset its supporters.
This is not a view to be dismissed out of hand--more people died at Antietam that on any other day in American military history. I think about the terror that fell upon black communities in the South, after the Civil War, and I wonder whether it could have all been averted by a more a gradualist approach. Sadly, I don't think so. And yet you see Lincoln (a conservative at heart, no?), a reluctant reformer, doing whatever he can to avoid war, to avoid making the war about slavery (initially), trying to save the Union at all cost.
He isn't wrong. But if you are the slave, that essentially conservative approach will always privilege your master over you. Conservatism, with its belief in institutions, traditions, and the past, will seemingly always privilege (perhaps inadvertently) the powerful over the powerless. Institutions, traditions and the past belong to those with power. Privileging them, privileges their agents.
Two quotes made me think about this today. Here's David Brooks:
Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she'd entered college in the
late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos
that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she'd entered
Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have
been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly
possess.
But she happened to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School in the
1970s. These were the days when what we now call multiculturalism was
just coming into its own. These were the days when the whole race,
class and gender academic-industrial complex seemed fresh, exciting and
just.
It isn't the judicial rulings that trouble me so much as her
non-judicial opinions and mindset. The constant, oppressive
consciousness of her identity - racial and gender - and the harping on
it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of
victimology deeply entrenched in her generation. I don't think it's
disqualifying and I don't see any crude racialism in her rulings, but I
do think it shows that for Obama, this kind of racial/ethnic view of
the world is so endemic it's invisible to him. And it's off-message for
his candidacy and life.
Both of these quotes extend a tremendous amount of charity to the agents of power. Brooks assumes that these agents at Princeton and Yale, in the 50s and 60s, would have welcomed the Puerto-Rican Sotomayor with open arms. He presumes that they would have wanted her to be one of them. Andrew presumes that that identity politics, what he calls "a classic mode of victimology," with its "racial/ethnic view" of the world, and its focus on gender, is particular only to Sotomayor and her ilk.
A critique of liberal identity politics is not wrong on its face, but it almost always is unconcerned with the identity politics of power. Thus Sotomayor's focus on her identity as a "wise Latina" pose is seen as the disturbing result of multiculturalism run amok, not having been raised in a country where the tangible mechanisms of white supremacy were in full effect.
It isn't, for instance, the fact that Sotomayor was raised in an era where government-backed redlining was still legal, it's the fact that some students at Yale demanded a Chicano history course that's the issue. Likewise, it isn't the oppressive identity politics practiced by conservatives for the past 30 years that's disturbing, but Sotomayor's response to it. To be a true conservative is to be more disturbed by victimology, than actual victimizing. It is to claim to abhor evil--but to abhor the response to evil even more. It's like in the NFL--it's the second who throws the punch who draws the flag.
Still thinking this through. More later.
Open Thread At Noon
Cooling on the scene, like a horse in a stable, A brother got ill and tried to snatch the fat cable...
For The Slavery\Civil War\Reconstruction Buff In You
One of my readers was kind enough to recommend this free series of lectures by historian David Blight at Yale. Pretty fascinating stuff, and great listening material for those hours when you're, like me, leveling up a Warlock alt.
This one on Southern antebellum culture and slavery gets really good about halfway through when it shifts to the economics of slavery, especially in the cotton states. It culminates in this bracing quote:
By 1860 there were approximately four million slaves in the united states, the second largest slave society/slave population in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom...But in 1860, American slaves a s a financial asset were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars...in today's dollars that would be approximately 75 billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of American manufacturing, all of the railroads all of the productive capacity of the United States, put together. slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset in the American economy.
I think, for me, that quote really puts exposes the whole "The Civil War wasn't about slavery" notion. You think about what men--any man--would do to protect that kind of investment. It was not a small group--Blight estimates that one third of all Southern white families had their hands in the business of slavery. You think about not just those who have a direct investment in that kind of resource, but those who have an indirect investment--whites, who we talked about yesterday, who didn't own any slaves, but derived social capitol from the class of black serfs. You think about the price of cotton doubling and tripling at shocking rates.
I don't say this to be provocative, but there is no way to get around this--Slavery was big business. The antebellum Southern economy didn't have slavery as an unfortunate appendage--it was it's trunk, not a branch. We're not even talking about the damage done to the slaves themselves.
We have never grappled with this. We tend to think about America as a country, like all other countries of that era, where slavery was legal. This is a vast understatement, it would seem. More accurately, we were a country in which half the society, the antebellum South, was a slave society.
We have never publicly grappled with that. And I don't think we ever will. The damage is done, and we don't have the will--or maybe even the ability--to repair it. My greatest fear is that Obama isn't the end of something, but that he's just a small respite before a horrible reckoning.
Especially The Blacks And The Jews...
One last thought on this "Jews Gone Wild tape." This sentiment from Jeff...
Max Blumenthal goes to downtown Jerusalem and prompts drunk American
Jewish kids to say horrible things about Obama. On the one hand,
Blumenthal is an exploiter who doesn't seem to like Israel very much;
on the other hand, the things these pathetic kids say are repulsive and
the yeshivas that sent them to Israel are due for a serious soul-search
this Yom Kippur. Their children are an embarrassment to Judaism.
...has an oddly familiar ring to it. It's like that moment when you hear about a horrible crime, and they're about to flash the perp's flick across the screen and you think, "Don'tbeblackDon'tbeblackDon'tbeblackPLEASE!Don'tbeblack!!"
That's not quite right. I think it's more like finding out the D.C. sniper was a brother. Blacks aren't supposed to be serial killers, in much the way Jews aren't supposed to be racist. At any rate, the whole ritual got me to thinking about this riff by Steve Harvey on Rae Carruth. "I know good and well this motherfucker ain't in this trunk..."
I don't want to relitigate Mike's case, but I will say a couple things. I'm sure there will be plenty of MJ condemnation, and people are welcome to do it. My own perspective is formed by two factors.
1.) I've, at times, heard of the death of awful people and thought "Good riddance." But upon reflection, that feeling rarely keeps. When Jeffrey Dahmer died, I initially thought it served him right. And then I got to thinking about the internal torture that must have made him who he was, and I lost my righteousness. When the mountain falls on people who've spent their lives inflicting pain on others, I am rarely comforted for long.
This is a point of religion, for me. I don't expect everyone to see it my way. Death is fucked up. I don't wish it on anyone. I don't have much use for evaluating who deserves the sword, and when they should get it.
2.) Ray Lewis may well be an accessory to a man's murder. But when I watch him run up and down field on Sunday, it sparks something in me. Woody Allen wooed his wife's adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on...
I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop seperating art from men. Regrettably, I think, I wouldn't be left with much art worth admiring. Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things. One doesn't cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.
People who don't feel that way are welcome to their opinions. I'm not sure why they insist that others share them.
UPDATE: Lots of comments on whether Mike actually was a child molester. I left that argument alone because it's not going to be settled in any way here. Some of us will, quite fairly, point to the courts. Others, quite fairly, will point to the behavior he admitted to. (Sleeping with young children, who aren't his own.)
Before you comment, consider whether your likely to get anywhere with the argument. At some point, we end up with He said/She said.
UPDATE#2: Closing comments on both MJ posts. I don't think this is going anywhere interesting. Moreover, we're mostly hearing from people who just registered today, or yesterday. I think that says something.