I Never Cried Over Slavery

A while back I was having a conversation with one of our JD’s for intellectual property. We somehow got talking about oppression, I think in terms of the documentary work I’m doing on art historians who perished in the Holocaust. I frequently have found myself in despair that a country could motivate its citizens to kill other of its citizens, to create national machinery for hatred, subjugation and death for no other reason that their birth genetics. Our conversation naturally continued the topic of this country’s history of slavery. She’s a black woman and as we talked about the enslaved, tears welled up in her eyes.

That has haunted me. It’s been a while since that moment happened. George Floyd and BLM came. Yet that moment in her office will not leave me. Why did I never cry about my own country’s treating people like animals for hundreds of years? About determining that African-origin people were less than human–not primarily for ethnic reasons but for economic reasons. Justifying cheap labor through capitalism and slimy religious determinism? They watched their children sold to other buyers. Their women were sexual toys for their owners. Their masters thought, as Michael Gorra recently noted, that “education ruins blacks.”

Until you have wept at injustice–the injustice of one hundred fifty years ago as well as now–you will never take the kind of action needed to change economic, racial, and social oppression. Not injustice in general, but the disaster of suffering in specific lives. Lives you can imagine if not know personally. I’m so grateful for that unguarded moment in her office. It was a line drawn which I had to cross, pushed actually, at the price of someone’s tears. About suffering, they were never wrong (Auden).

Bonhoeffer, again

Anyone who’s not locked into Republican zombie ideology realizes Trump has taken Adolf Hitler’s playbook.  This is not hyperbole.  Hitler could never win outright election in Germany, he had to be given power by von Hindenberg, the elected official with whom he shared power.  Donald Trump curried fewer votes than his opponent.  Sound familiar?   Once in control, Hitler began dismantling the Weimar Republic, not by changing the laws so much issuing counter orders to them which gradually allowed them to collapse when these laws had become meaningless.  Jews were only attacked verbally at first.  Their places of business could still operate;  but the new Reich government would do nothing when thugs from the party open harassed the stores “Achtung Deutsche, kauft nicht bei dem Juden!”  Sound familiar?  (“There are some very fine people there.”)  As the tenets  of the [Weimar] Republic and its enforcement body no longer protected those at odds with the leader, it was open season to flagrantly flout autocracy over former democracy.  And of course, the leader (der Fuehrer) could not be challenged or countered–regardless of how off his facts were or how extreme his views were.  Those in his own party who might try were banished forever.  Those outside his party criticizing him were met with government retribution.

Regardless of where you stand politically, the above facts cannot be disputed (except, of course by minions of the leader who present fear and emotional arguments to counter factual discourse).

Apocalypse: Abolitionists meet the NRA

photo: revjdevans (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/revjdevans/36704587234/in/album-72157688969949196/

I’ve been reading a lot recently about abolitionism in the 19th century–obliquely–through the Laura Walls’ biography on Thoreau and Michael Gorra’s book on the writing of James’ Portrait of the Lady.  I’m not a Civil War buff but it’s been fascinating to learn about how pro-slavers behaved, how they marshaled their forces and funds resulting in the tragedy of the Civil War.  Those supporting slavery in the US were never more than a well-funded minority, largely from the agrarian south.  They bought their elected officials so effectively that slave-holding was non-negotiable issue in congress.  The United States could never pass anti-slavery legislation;  it had to come by presidential proclamation and then a civil war.  Sound familiar?

Advocates of assault-weapon ownership in the US are an overwhelmingly small group, but as we know (and as they admit) they destroy politicians who might represent moderate, majority views.  Consider the sides.  The typical gun-law supporter is an informed married-or-attached person with children and usually a positive worldview.  The average assault-weapon advocate is a rustic, fearful, one-issue white man who spends his (often meager) income amassing weapons, buying hunting kitsch and sending donations to the National Rifle Association (and declaring the South should have won the war).  Today, it’s again clear that democracy is once more helpless on this issue.  When it comes to sensible gun ownership assault-weapons owners will bring (and are bringing) the country down at any cost in order keep their personal ownership of their weapons of mass destruction.

I hope this issue won’t come to another internal war.  However, if conservatives were once willing to fight a war in order to keep human beings enslaved, they sure as hell will be willing to fight a war to keep their guns.  And it’s the same people who desperately tried to keep slavery alive who now want the right to own multiple automatic weapons.  Their beliefs are already killing people.  And, as with the first Civil War, they’ll perpetrate a lie to distract from the real issue (“the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights”) (“it’s not about guns, it’s about liberty”).

More die for peace than for war.

Apocalypse Now (not the movie)

As I think most rational people will agree, it’s the apocalypse.  It’s the end of the world.  You don’t have to be religious to believe this is the end–in fact, it’s the non-religious people who are most convinced.  Climate change is now irreversible, fires and storms and flooding all at unprecedented levels.  As the heat at the middle of the globe makes it uninhabitable, the inhabitants are going to flee to the north and south continents.  And no god-damn wall is going to keep out people fleeing for their lives.  Those who can’t flee the immense heat between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn will die, likely through famine.  And famine is the single best way to start disease epidemics.  Luckily, the destruction of the Amazon rain forest will drastically limit the breathable air so many will be saved the misery of panic fleeing.

Need more reasons?  Trump.

I regret I had children.  When my wife and I had them, it looked like positive change would be possible.  Now what is left to them (and my grandchildren) is misery.  I would like to say I’m sorry.  The conservatives have committed suicide for us.  I didn’t see it coming.

Rereading Rilke Regularly

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Rilke, I think, has nothing to say to the modern age, and that’s why he’s so wonderful to read.  Such a balm for the mindless of the world of GitHub.  A profound pacifist, he switched his poetry language from German to French after World War I, a protest of his native tongue, which he considered too closely tied to militarism.  (Interestingly enough, military terms are predominantly French, as “lieutenant,” “general,” “corporal,” “ensign,” “colonel,”).  Regardless, Rilke the man was in touch with interiority and exteriority.  This extoriority (which David Need in his new translation of late Rilke poetry, translates as “gesture”)

Rose o reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter so vielen Lidern.

Which, as much as I like German, as a gorgeous lilt in Italian,

Rosa, o pura contraddizione,
voglia di essere il sonno di nessuno sotto
cosě tante palpebre.

The Italians were on the better side in World War I.

Who Told You That You Were Naked?

One of the treats of this year’s Advent lectionary is hearing familiar Bible passages in new contexts.  The fall-of-man story in Genesis is read at Christmas to remind Christians that humans are sinful and that Christ’s coming resets the “sin chart”.

In my old age I’ve come to love the Bible for its zingers, its mots justes that say so much more as stand-alone passages than the elaborated stories around them.  For example, Pilot’s asking “What is Truth?” (Nietzsche’s favorite Biblical quotation for obvious reasons), etc.  When the Genesis story was read this season, Adam, now conscious of the difference between good and evil has affixed fig leaves over his genitals, the parts that have just given him unimaginable pleasures with Eve.  Adam realizes this kind of feeling is way too good for mortals and he covers himself for shame of possessing what God has alluded to, what he not be in possession of.  God discovers Adam newly clothed and asks in the most parental way (and every parent knows the gist of this phrase),

“Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11).

As much as I’d like this blog to be about sex, it’s not going to be.  To me, this story is about coming to terms with our shame of undeserved pleasures and what we do about it.  I think this passage is one of the core ones to Christianity and Judaism.  Adam and Eve are in possession of way more than they’re supposed to have.  You only get that much by sinning, a sinning that doesn’t seem like sinning.  The cute Bible story talks about a talking snake, eating an apple and discovering sexual love.  If you’re like most of us in America, you’re overwhelmed with possessions and at Christmas time you’re teased with more.  You have clothes made in countries by people paid 35 cents an hour.  You eat fruits with a carbon footprint the size of Utah.  You drive a sporty SUV which the EPA classifies as a truck so that it doesn’t have to conform to passenger-auto pollution standards.  Your retirement investments make money through risky and shady instruments. So go ahead, don’t buy clothes or eat fruit in the winter or drive anywhere or save for retirement.   No, we’re all Adam.  We don’t have the option not to eat the apple.

But if we’re by definition the bad Adam and Eve, we’re also the good Adam and Eve.  They’re ashamed.  They’ve done bad not because they wanted to get ahead at work, or see their daughter get into med school through phony resume-enhancing activities, or bought luxury cars–they just went against the boss’ word.  They just wanted to test out the power they’d heard they didn’t deserve.  We, however, know well what the apple costs.  The diminishing of God’s polar bears, the waste of humanity in ebola-stricken countries, the 20% of the United States who work and yet still cannot earn a living wage–these are all the consequences of owning more clothes in our closets than we can fit.  But we’re blessed with the first couple’s shame and the godhead’s question:  “Who told you that you were naked?”  Answer, “the beggar on the street.”

Honey: Haight Spelled a Different Way

I collect pushback buttons.  Collectors refer to these as “pushbacks” because of the way the metal stick-pin part hooks into the back of the button.  I find them at flea markets, street booths, on the ground or in someone’s junk drawers.  The metal ones are the most collectable:  the modern celo clamp designs are too easily reproducible.  Apart from a few rarities, nearly all mine are junk.  My collection–a denim wall of full of pins  advertising American Girl, Esso, Eastern Airlines, or sporting slogans such as “Labor for Carter,” “Drugs Saved My Life,” or “Third War Bond Drive”–have value more as a collection than as individual pieces.

I wear them, too.  It makes me a living museum.  Most of my selections are so nonsensical in a current context that people stare in bewilderment–and occasionally shock.  I wear McGovern buttons in irony that much of what that presidential candidate stood for has subsequently been enacted but he himself seemed to be unelectable.  I wear millennial buttons: “Mr. Wrong,” “I Don’t Care About Apathy,” or a black button displaying in white letters the word “blue.”  Other times it’s Bible-school booster buttons, Betty Crocker homemaker, Elvis or 1951 chauffeur badges.  I wear them as Dada, a nod to the famous-for-fifteen-minutes social amnesia of the American middle class.

This week I’m wearing a red-white-and-blue political button with the word “Haight.”  Of all the crazy push-backs I’ve put on at the last moment, this means the most to me.  I’ve no idea who it stood for.  My best guess is that it was produced for Raymond  L. Haight (1897–1947) a moderate California Republican whose main claim to fame was that as an independent candidate for governor of the Golden State he spoiled the bid of the famous democratic candidate, the writer Upton Sinclair.  It’s not, however, any particular politician I’m memorializing.  It’s democracy itself.  Our political system has degenerated into hate campaigns.  People are manipulated to vote against other candidates more than for one they support.  “Fear,” Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager observed, “is a better motivator than conviction.”  Conservatives in particular position themselves as “for” some vague ideal (like freedom or small government) when in fact they run hate campaigns against the poor and disenfranchised who benefit from human services and government.  That’s what intrigues me about “Haight.”  It’s “hate” spelled another way.  Just like the the way to get elected today, candidates packaging their “anti-” sentiments less antagonistic words.

So I wear Haight as a kind of performance piece, a reminder of the collapse of the compromise way of doing things, a.k.a., democracy.  Why, then, is this a ‘Honey’ value?  It’s the manner in which I show my protest.  I’m not brandishing one more aggressive political slogan to divide groups (“Marriage = Man + Woman”–why? on what basis?); not one more aphorism to gloss over the complexity of an issue (“Children need Parents, not Programs”–well, duh, but when parents fall short or are absent, what then?).  The honey of wearing “Haight” is that I play with the concept.  The honey is that I don’t play their game.  Hate spelled a different way is still hate.  I get that.

Steel workers union buttons of WWII and slightly after.  “Remember Batan.”

Honey: Errant Vine Comes to Beauty

I more or less resent the bushes in the front of the house.  They need trimming–which they don’t get enough of–and, frankly, should be replaced altogether.  Weeds grow underneath these monstrosities and have to be pulled.  So, by the end of the summer when I saw a wild vine climbing though the bramble to the top, I meant to pull it, but I didn’t.  Perhaps because the vine grew up the back, or was only visible at the top, or, I don’t know, but I let the spindly vines be.

This weekend morning, November 7th to be exact, I stared out the window of my reading room and saw beautiful, yellow flowers at the vine, flowers at a time of year when everything else floral is dead.  I’m grateful for flowers–the only ones I got as a present for my recent birthday as a matter of fact–and these without the carbon footprint of most of the others.  So unexpected.  I’m grateful for the surprise.  I’m thankful I don’t get to everything in my yard.  I taste the honey.

Apocalypse: Disabled License plates

Are disabled license plates the biggest scam going right now?

I ask this because I know a number of walking-impaired people.  I’m pleased this country reserves parking spots close to doors and access ramps so that they can enjoy full citizenship.  Recently,  however, I’ve become aware of disabled-plates on bizarre vehicles.  Mazda Miatas, Ford F-15os, Jeeps . . .   Here’s a simple question.  If you can climb into or out of one of these vehicles, do you really need special access so you don’t have to walk so far to a door?  This isn’t a rant so much as an honest question.

I posed this question on my FB site a while back and got into a debate with a friend who started out by saying, “My Dad drove a pickup with disabled plates and  . . . “.  Memorandum:  anytime a rebuttal begins with “My Dad did . . . ” don’t hope for a discussion based solely on facts.  I kept trying to parse facts and he kept asserting how needy his dad was.  Enter apocalypse, stage left.

My puzzlement in all this is why the genuinely mobility-impaired aren’t more upset about this.  I get that some physical challenges aren’t obvious to the observer.  People with some afflictions can have good days/bad days.  But on your “bad days” are you still able to swing your legs out of your Camero?  Why aren’t the genuinely needy incensed by the abuse?  Me, I park at the other end of the lot because I like to match bumper stickers with car makes.  Stickers that say “God bless America” on some enormously polluting SUV.  That, and not disabled license plates abusers, are my cause.

Honey: Eliot and Marginalia Love

A piece in the NYT‘s “Weekly Review” by James Collins on not outliving one’s office supplies began by quoting Eliot’s “Little Giddings,” one of the Four Quartets, the last and posthumously published poems by T. S.  I was not familiar with the poems and so, it being (then) Primavera, I went to the Library to check it out.  The sole copy available was an exceedingly worn first edition (1943), spine repaired with book tape and its pages some of the most heavily annotated, defaced, tortured, marginalia’ed I’d ever seen.  Here is the Angst of at least seven discernible hands (if my paleography is correct), crazed graduate students, bleary-eyed undergraduates, and perhaps a dutiful girlfriend helping her harried boyfriend, all trying to pull meaning from this verse the past seventy years.

Much has been written about the phenomenon of marginalia, that study of reader’s commentary in the blank portions of (mostly medieval) texts.  It’s a form of public feed-back, crowd-sourcing-before-crowdsourcing.  When I was a graduate student, library book marginalia annoyed me.  I didn’t care if a reader ten years earlier thought the paragraph at hand was Scheisse. Dutiful English translations of the foreign quotations were always handy–though I always pedantically quibbled with the German.  Today I take a tenderer view.  Those poor English majors, today abandoned of their dreams working in the family business or poor literature Ph.D.’s–now equally forgotten in their current roles as high school principals, never having had their say on Eliot in any public forum, except in this sole copy of the Four Quartets.

The more I looked at these comments the more the pages appeared as art. Circles and arrows resembling Tom Landry’s diagram for an end around.  Fragmentary thoughts on the page:  “different emotional tone,”  “epic simile,”  “See BN III [and then circled] The way down.”  The ‘way down’, indeed.  It seems to me if Julian Schnabel’s mish-mosh canvases of junk can be considered art, these pages must qualify, too.  So much of Eliot was devoted to recalling old texts (“can these dry bones speak?”).  How rich the layers upon layers of phrases–and what else is poetry but perhaps that very thing, forming a new text, a nearly different one from the original, without the palimpsest erasures?

Assuming some of this annotation is contemporary to the publication date, the earliest responders are likely dead.  All are gone from this place.  What I once saw as book defacement, I find now as monument.  Like the graffito left by Goths during the sack of Rome.

I’m going to go out and deface some other library books for the good of society.  I think.  The Dry Salvages.