Notes on two political books from 1974

As noted, I'm reading Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, by James and Grace Lee Boggs, published in 1974. Last week, I read An Autobiography, by Angela Davis, also published in 1974. Why am I reading these books?

In a sense, they both came to my attention as part of my effort to read more feminism, and in particular more by black women and other women of color, though neither book is explicitly feminist. Angela Davis is very well known, of course, but it never really occurred to me to read her (or read much about her) before encountering references to her work in my recent reading of bell hooks. So I'd added her to my list of writers to check out. Seeing the interview with her in The Black Power Mixtape clinched it and pushed her to the top (you should absolutely watch that interview, by the way; and here also is a recent short interview with Davis about that film: really good stuff). Grace Lee Boggs first came to my attention last Fall, when I attended a panel discussion on race, here in Baltimore. She was not in attendance, but Scott Kurashige was. He is co-author (it's billed as Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige) of her most recent book, The Next Revolution in America: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, which was available for purchase at the event. The discussion was excellent, and in another, more flush time, I would have walked out with a pile of books. As it was, I only bought David Roediger's classic, The Wages of Whiteness, though even so I was sorely tempted by The Next Revolution in America. In any event, reading Roediger's book re-awakened my need to deepen my understanding of racism in America, to read black history, and works by black writers, especially black women writers. Which is one reason I was going back to bell hooks in the first place: both for hooks herself, and for the other writers and books she references. And in her Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she quotes several times from Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. So then I spent some time looking into Grace Lee Boggs, and by extension, her husband and partner, James Boggs.

Once I began looking up Grace Lee Boggs, it appeared that she was everywhere and that everyone else was already familiar with her. She is Chinese-American, born in Providence, Rhode Island, now aged 94, who has been a fixture in Detroit activism for decades. James Boggs was African-American, an auto-worker when they met. He died in 1993. They worked closely with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, among others. (Those details are essentially cribbed from Grace's Wikipedia entry, which is rather skimpy, as is James Boggs'. See also the Boggs Center, which appears to serve as a kind of blog and document repository and community organizing site.) They split with C.L.R. James in the early 1960s, and the many works they appear to be best known for come after this time. If they are anything like as good as Revolution and Evolution, then they are very important indeed. Among these works are (which I list here in part as a reminder to myself):

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (1963; James Boggs)
Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook (1970; James Boggs)
Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998; Grace Lee Boggs)

And just last year, Wayne State University published Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, which I imagine includes at least a few pieces from the first two books listed above (both of which, incidentally, like Revolution and Evolution, were also published by Monthly Review Press, which is always a good sign in my book).

Anyway, reading these two books—Angela Davis' autobiography and Revolution and Evolution—at this time is a strange experience. I find them fascinating, inspiring, yet also dispiriting, a little depressing. These last two effects have very little to do with what the authors have written, but with what has transpired since they wrote. As I mentioned, both books appeared in 1974. Reading Davis there is a palpable excitement, of evil being confronted, of victories, however limited, being won, victories that you get the sense can be built on. But those victories didn't last; far from it. For one example, I'd completely forgotten, before reading her book, that the death penalty had ever been outlawed in the United States. It seems ages ago. And far from solving the problems of prison and policing, and its disproportionate impact on African-Americans, we have been subjected to the ever intensifying logic of the prison-industrial complex. (I say "we", as if I'm not as shielded from its evils as it's possible for a non-wealthy person to be.) And we know it was part of an explicit counter-offensive intended to contain black people, who have always been more dangerous to the system than white people.

On this last point—the intentional containment of politicized and dangerous African-Americans—allow me to briefly revisit a point I made in passing in my post on The Black Power Mixtape. This is what I said:

In the later years, we see the ways drugs flooded American cities, and politics, focus, power, recedes. In light of the scenes that came before, it is difficult to believe anything other than that this was absolutely intentional. (I've always wondered: as if there's any chance huge quantities of illegal drugs could make into the United States without some powerful governmental entity making it happen.) There'd been a clip earlier in the film, in which someone, I forget who, says something like "they can't jail all of us". Then you see the drugs, and the dissipation, and it comes to you with an astonishing clarity, though you already knew it, that this is in fact what they intended. They will jail you, or they will fuck you up. Whatever the case, you will not win. 

Now, I wasn't sure how to word this paragraph. I was angry, but trying not to sputter. And I was somewhat wary of being taken for a kook. After all, those of us who were raised as good little white liberals, especially of a certain age (I am closing in on 42), don't we fundamentally have a hard time believing that the system is not basically good? Even when we finally believe that it's not (and it's not, not at all), when we finally come around to the idea in its fullness, do we not feel a tug? (Do we not, still, after all this time, get sucked into utterly debased debates about "humanitarian intervention", as if there was any validity to the terminology or idea at all?) In the event, it was nevertheless still suggested that what I'd written there amounted to an unnecessary "conspiracy" theory. I admit I wasn't really sure what to say in response, or even which part was supposed to be the conspiracy (the jailing? the drugs?). It wasn't as if I was suggesting that Federal agents literally forced heroin into a person's arms. But don't we know that drugs were allowed into the cities intentionally? Is it really that controversial? And, really, how do so many drugs make it into this heavily fortified country if they aren't somehow let in?

Well anyway, I let it go, not wanting to get into it. But then as I was reading Revolution and Evolution, in the riveting chapter on the Vietnamese Revolution, "People's War in Vietnam", I noticed this passage, covering the history of French imperialism in Vietnam, around the time of Ho Chi Minh's birth:

From Vietnam the French chiefly wanted rice and rubber for export. The establishment of rubber plantations necessitated removal of the peasants from large tracts of land. The peasants thus displaced were transformed into a labor force working to produce rubber and rice and to construct the roads and railroads to take these commodities to the ports. The sale of opium and alcohol was encouraged to help the police force control this labor force. To finance the new apparatus of transportation and control, taxes had to be collected, etc., etc. (p.99)

The sale of opium and alcohol was encouraged to help the police force control this labor force. Well, of course. It's after all not a new technique, is it? In this case, in the U.S., the traffic of drugs is encouraged to dull the edges of rebellion, and/or possible revolutionary fervor, and just so happens to fit in quite nicely with the nascent expansion of what came to be known as the prison-industrial complex.

But in Revolution and Evolution, though James and Grace Lee Boggs are highly critical of various aspects of American leftism, Marxism, Black Power, and so on, they nevertheless are writing under the assumption that they are in the middle of a "revolutionary period", and they spend a lot of time discussing what a revolution is, what sorts of questions and problems it needs to address, how these problems are peculiar to the United States (you cannot import revolution from elsewhere without understanding what you're doing or the place you're in), how it's distinct from a rebellion, how it requires so much of would be revolutionary leaders, and so on. Presumably they do this because they thought it was worth their time. And yet, all the myriad problems they diagnose have only deepened over the last 40 years. Nearly everything they talk about is considerably worse now than it was then. That thought is more than a little dispiriting.

It occurred to me, while reading both of these books, that they appeared right as the ruling class was itself responding to various questions of its own. This is exactly the period of the so-called oil crisis of 1973-1974, the manufactured crisis that the U.S. Government and the oil companies and conservative think-tanks used as the opportunity to completely change the game, bringing into being what we now call neoliberalism. Timothy Mitchell describes the true nature of this crisis very well in his recent book Carbon Democracy, which I have blogged about a couple of times (here and here). There is quite a lot to say about his argument in that book, but I bring it up here to point out that this neoliberal turn was happening at the precise moment when people on the left might have had reason to believe that something like victory was, if not imminent, then possible. And it essentially took place without anyone noticing—it took years for the left to notice and analyze what had happened. Sympathetic liberals still haven't noticed. The question, I suppose, is how to take the proper kinds of lessons from of all this. That, after all, is what James and Grace Lee Boggs say repeatedly: without the correct understanding of the problems needing to be solved, along with the willingness to take the responsibility to formulate solutions to those problems, true revolutionary change is not possible. Though they seem a lot smarter about technology than a lot of Marxists, yet they say nothing about the problem of energy, which is and has been an international problem, where their analysis repeatedly emphasizes, correctly it seems to me, the ways in which revolution must be addressed to the problems and contradictions specific to each individual country. How to resolve that contradiction?

I'm not sure how to finish up, whether I have a specific point to make, other than to be struck anew by the enormousness of it all. I imagine that'll have to do for now.

"We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not"

Audre Lorde, the Black feminist essayist and poet, visited the Soviet Union in 1976, at the invitation of the Union of Soviet Writers. Her clear-eyed "Notes from a Trip to Russia" is the first piece in her excellent collection of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider. I'd thought I'd share a few passages from it.

In Samarkand, she encountered a man who was very interested in talking with her about Black Americans. He was surprised to learn that Black Americans were allowed to go to school, and to college, and to teach, since he was under the impression that they had no jobs. Lorde explains that it was simply "more difficult for Black people to find work and make any kind of living, and that the percentage of unemployment" was much higher for Black Americans than for white Americans.

He pondered that a little and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned.

There's much that I think Russian people now take for granted. I think they take for granted free hospitalization and medical care. I think they take for granted free universities and free schooling as well as the presumption of universal bread, even with a rose or two, although no meat. We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

It's remarkable how we've taken for granted the idea that one should pay for medical care. The apparently level-headed, superficially reasonable debates about the extent to which the government should "interfere" in the healthcare "market": we've all seen them, read them, participated in them. They're insane. Anyway, again, Lorde was writing in 1976; she died in 1992, so she didn't live to see how much worse it's gotten here in the U.S., nor would she have seen much of the post-Soviet destruction, "Shock Doctrine" style, of all of those basic features that she notes were (rightly) taken for granted by the Russian people.

And here she is, at the end of the piece:

It will take a while and a lot of dreams to metabolize all I've seen and felt in these hectic two weeks. [...] I have no reason to believe Russia is a free society. I have no reason to believe Russia is a classless society. Russia does not even appear to be a strictly egalitarian society. But bread does cost a few kopecs a loaf and everybody I saw seemed to have enough of it. Of course, I did not see Siberia, nor a prison camp, nor a mental hospital. But that fact, in a world where most people—certainly most Black people—are on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot. If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.

Earlier she'd written "when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different". Of course, in the latter case, the solutions that are found are in fact not intended to "solve" the problems that we are likely to identify. That is, they are not intended to solve "the bread problem", to alleviate "breadconcern". They are intended to solve altogether different problems, usually something more along the lines of "how can we exacerbate the bread problem?" or "how can we increase breadconcern so that more people are compelled to give up potential power and work for less?" In which case, the existing solutions work rather well indeed.

Notes on Black Power Mixtape

I watched Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 this week. These are just a few passing notes. This is a documentary assembled from recently discovered footage that had been taken in the United States by Swedish film crews, with commentary in 2010 from such figures as musicians Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, John Forté, and Questlove, poet Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale and Harry Belafonte, and professor Robin Kelley.

I found the film fascinating, and ultimately, inevitably, sad. The focus is, first, on the activities of the Black Panthers, and such famous figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis (Davis also provides some present-day commentary). I'm rather abashed to have to admit that I previously had almost zero knowledge of either Carmichael or Davis, though the latter I had only recently decided to begin reading. I mean, I knew a little about them, of course, but not as much as I should have. The movie overall is riveting, but the footage of Carmichael and Davis especially so. An interview with Davis, from prison, is simply stunning in its force and clarity (the topic: violence). They were so beautiful.

We also see some footage of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the period before his assassination; the uprisings after it. Brief appearances by Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. The Attica uprising and the subsequent attack on the prisoners (with a very interesting interview with William Kunstler, the radical lawyer: "Well, I guess I'm a white, middle class citizen of this country, and I had all of the stereotypes about prisoners that any person in my capacity has. I had to learn the hard way that they were decent, honorable men. Much more decent and much more honorable than that went in there to shoot them."). Forté's remarks here, and especially later, after the interview with Davis, on her short 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, are particularly compelling (Forté spent some time in prison on a drug charge, and has since been active in the prison reform movement).

In the later years, we see the ways drugs flooded American cities, and politics, focus, power, recedes. In light of the scenes that came before, it is difficult to believe anything other than that this was absolutely intentional. (I've always wondered: as if there's any chance huge quantities of illegal drugs could make into the United States without some powerful governmental entity making it happen.) There'd been a clip earlier in the film, in which someone, I forget who, says something like "they can't jail all of us". Then you see the drugs, and the dissipation, and it comes to you with an astonishing clarity, though you already knew it, that this is in fact what they intended. They will jail you, or they will fuck you up. Whatever the case, you will not win.

Given this, it's weird and off-putting that the film presents us with an odd note towards the end of the film. It comes after all of the explanations for and justifications of violence, after Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, and after the more militant words from Talib Kweli and Questlove, after the assassinations and drugs and hints of the dawn of the prison industrial complex, after the clarity gives way to fogginess, after Black Power gives way to Louis Farrakhan. We hear a voice-over from the record producer, Kenny Gamble, who's not previously been heard from, but who talks of the tremendous ride of the black man (sic) in American history, and contrary to everything we've seen in the film up to that point, seems to extol the virtues of non-violence, and the constitution, and law, and black people using these to become part of "one of the greatest countries that's ever been, the United States of America". Astonishing.

On Flannery O'Connor and politics and literature

Dan Green wrote this recently in a post on Flannery O'Connor:

[David E.] Anderson identifies as a flaw in O'Connor's fiction "the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement." It has always seemed bizarre to me that an "absence of attention" to this or that condition or phenomenon in a writer's work could be considered a "shortcoming," as if every writer is under the necessary burden to address every fact of life that confronted the writer in his/her time and place. O'Connor had no obligation to portray race relations or to confront issues of civil rights. Her subject lay elsewhere, in the lives of white Southerners and the effects of class and religion. If it is true that O'Connor's work is anchored in the belief that the world around her was "mired in nihilism," that view could not plausibly be embodied in stories centered on the lives of Southern blacks. They were themselves neither nihilists nor the victims of nihilism in the theological/philosophical terms with which O'Connor was concerned. They were the victims of bigotry, and this is a more mundane human evil that doesn't really get to the spiritual corruptions O'Connor was at pains to disclose. A writer should be judged by what her work does attempt, not by what it doesn't.

This leads in fairly well to some thoughts I've been having about Flannery O'Conner's fiction. I read O'Connor for the first time several months ago, in the famous story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. O'Connor had always been on my mental well-I-guess-I-should-read-it list, but I admit I'd had little enthusiasm for the idea. My interest was actually piqued by Andrew Seal's somewhat ambivalent post on the collection from April, and Shelley Ettinger's extremely negative post on O'Connor from March. I also thought it would be interesting to read these stories after having just read Evelyn Scott's marvelous Migrations—both writers being Southern women, with Scott largely forgotten and O'Connor widely hailed as a literary genius, the master of the short story. It turns out there's finally not much similarity between them as writers, other than the casual racism of their characters. Scott appears to have been more ambitious. O'Connor has an easier-to-read surface prose style and possibly the most negative view of human nature this side of William Golding.

Shelley was writing on the occasion of a review in The New York Times Book Review of a new biography of O'Connor. She highlighted these choice quotes from Joy Williams' review:

"She was a connoisseur of racial jokes." And: "The civil rights movement interested her not at all." And in response to "a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, 'The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.'"

Shelley goes on to explain why she couldn't stomach O'Connor's stories and to re-articulate her views on art and politics, and on form and content. Shelley is at all times clear that she is a communist and that she views literature through the lens of class struggle (in fact, I've merely re-worded her blog's tagline in saying so). I am deeply sympathetic to her perspective, but I disagree on some important points. I've made no bones about my leftism here, nor have I felt the need to isolate my political writing from my blogging about literary matters. I have in the past, however, struggled with the questions of politics and art, politics and literature in particular. In early posts (for example, this one), I claimed to hold aesthetics above all else, to oppose the didactically political, and so on. Since then I've realized that I don't really buy the separation of so-called aesthetic values from whatever else fiction (which is what really concerns me here) has to offer; that, in fact, I'm not entirely sure I know what aesthetics even could be, when so isolated. As I observed last Fall, literature is not innocent: it has definite effects in the world, many of which are broadly speaking political. I've intended to discuss these matters further, in part in response to certain calls for an explicitly leftwing, or liberatory, literature, and, with respect, I hope to use Shelley's ideas as a way to begin doing so. Though this post is not the place for a detailed investigation of her ideas, I will nonetheless need to address some of them here.

I happen to think that she's missing something on O'Connor, though I am by no means an immediate convert to that particular church. Rather I think that there's a misreading of O'Connor that may help me address some of Shelley's more general points. These are, as she puts it, "the old questions of (1) form and content, (2) the writer and the writing, (3) social responsibility and literary neutrality". The standard bourgeois critical positions on these matters being, respectively, (1) form--or aesthetics--trumps content, (2) the writer's politics are irrelevant to his or her work, and (3) literary art is properly politically neutral. I stand with Shelley in opposition to these bourgeois shibboleths but for, I think, somewhat different reasons. Or rather, our positions do not always coincide.

With respect to the first point, Shelley calls bullshit, and says that "content matters", period. I'm not going to spend much time in this post on this point, except to say that in my view form and content are not easily separable. That is, yes, content matters, but if a book can be easily reduced to a statement or message, then it's probably not worth reading. Form is a problem for the writer, it is not merely something lying about awaiting use—it is not a container for whatever "content" the writer wishes to use it to convey. I'm going to leave it at that, if only because this blog is in many respects basically about this question, when it's about writing. I've been working up to, or around, a more detailed articulation of what I mean, but that is for a different post. I will say, however, that the general view that the novel is a container for story and character is actually itself a major reason to take issue with calls for a more liberatory novel. Because what happens is the novel contains the politics within. Not only does it necessarily reach very few potential readers, as do the vast majority of books not written by Dan Brown or Stephen King, but its very containment within the standard novel mutes the politics. This is not to say that people can't and don't learn things from novels having bearing on political matters, but that the very private nature of reading, on balance, makes it difficult to translate what we glean from a good work of fiction into effective political action. They end up being political entertainments. People read the book and then move on, the messy politics kept safely between the covers.

With respect to the third point, Shelley says "there is no such thing as literary neutrality on the great social questions. There is faux neutrality, which amounts to alignment with the status quo." I agree without hesitation that there's no such thing as plain neutrality—that there's no such thing as being "apolitical", practically speaking. You might be apolitical in the sense that you do not follow politics, or vote, or any number of other things. But this is an effectively conservative position, and by conservative I here mean only "reinforcing the status quo" (and I am closer and closer to believing that voting, at least, is, in this sense, itself an inherently conservative act). But what does it mean to speak of literary neutrality? Shelley says, earlier in the post, that the question is "whose truth is being told, and what is it being told in service of? The status quo or change?" I don't think this question is irrelevant, but I think it's not quite as clear cut as she implies.

Let me return, then, to Flannery O'Connor. When she read her work, Shelley says she encountered "sympathetic portrayals of racist characters and varied but by my read mostly insensitive, one-dimensional portrayals of African Americans" and numerous uses of "the N word". She figured there must have been some sort of anti-racist point coming, but there wasn't. O'Connor's work, she suggests, "with skill and art, subverts fiction's promise, fiction's potential, fiction's hope, and delivers instead a portfolio for the power of words as bulwark against progress." Something like "the thinking person's Margaret Mitchell." Well, I admit that sounds pretty horrible! However, I think it unfortunate that Shelley did not continue to read; it would have been interesting to know what she thought of she'd read further. One observation: every use of the word "nigger" is by a character, not by the narrator, who always uses "Negro". Another: the characters in most of the stories are poor whites, though some are not. They are unquestionably bigoted in the most casual, unthinking way. But, though these people are indeed sketched with some sympathy, it's also true that most of them are fools or even idiots, not to mention often doomed. (Andrew is much less charitable on this score; he says "no character is ever smarter than they need to be".)

The difference between O'Connor and Margaret Mitchell is vast, and not just in the area of literary ability. Gone With the Wind is an actual fictional apologia for the Old South; it effectively mourns for a lost way of life (I am admittedly basing this mostly on the movie, which, unaccountably, I have seen several times—I enjoy the melodrama, what can I say; for what it's worth, as I learned from this piece by Carolyn Porter on Mitchell and Faulkner, which appears in A New Literary History of America, apparently Mitchell thought she was being critical of the South and expected attacks from the South for her depictions, which is quite the opposite of what happened). It is deeply reactionary. O'Connor's stories are nothing like this. For one thing, they take place in what was for O'Connor the present day, that is, the mid-20th century. For another, there is no editorializing by the narrator in favor of, say, Jim Crow, or racial bigotry. O'Connor may personally not have been interested in the Civil Rights Movement, but her fiction does not overtly argue against the aims of that movement. One may then argue that this is not enough, and one may further argue, as Shelley does in the explication of her second point, that the writer's politics will come through in the text, whether the work is overtly political or not. Possibly. In fact, I think to some extent Shelley is correct on this point. However, I would suggest that literature is more ambiguous than that. To shamelessly recycle a sentence from a comment I made to Dan's post: I think a great writer, however unpleasant in real life, will see things in his or her art that they might not cotton to outside of it. I think this was often true of Flannery O'Connor. And, I would argue further that by realistically depicting the lives and views of Southern whites during the Jim Crow period O'Connor at least enables us to learn something of value about such people.

I would like finish up by briefly considering one story in particular, "The Artificial Nigger". Right off, of course, the title seems unfortunate. In this story, Mr. Head and his young grandson Nelson take a trip into the city of Atlanta, where Nelson had been born but never revisited. Mr. Head wants to cure Nelson of any desire to ever go into the city again. He tries to scare Nelson ahead of time by telling him that the city is "full of niggers". Nelson shrugs. He's never seen a black person, and he's not worried. On the train they encounter three black people, a man and two women. Mr. Head gawks at them and asks Nelson if he saw who he saw. Nelson reports that he saw a man, a fat man, what else does his grandfather want? He doesn't know enough to recognize these people as "niggers" ("you said they were black", he complains; "How do you expect me to know anything when you don't tell me right?"). Mr. Head feels he's scored a point. When they get to the city, Mr. Head tries to avoid actually showing Nelson anything of interest; he walks them in circles. When Nelson picks up on it, they change course and promptly get very lost. Before long they find themselves in a black part of town. After much blaming and bickering back and forth, Nelson finally asks a black woman for help (he "was afraid of the colored men and didn't want to be laughed at by the colored children"):

Nelson stopped. He felt his breath drawn up by the woman's dark eyes. "How do you get back to town?" he said in a voice that did not sound like his own.

After a minute she said, "You in town now," in a rich low tone that made Nelson feel as if a cool spray had been turned on him.

"How do you get back to the train?" he said in the same reed-like voice.

"You can catch you a car," she said.

He understood she was making fun of him but he was too paralyzed even to scowl. He stood drinking in every detail of her. His eyes traveled up from her great knees to her forehead and then made a triangular path from the glistening sweat on her neck down and across her tremendous bosom and over her bare arm back to where her fingers lay hidden in her hair. He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel.

"You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie," she said.

Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. "You act like you don't have any sense!" the old man growled.

They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame. The sneering ghost he had seen in the train window and all the foreboding feelings he had on the way returned to him and he remembered that his ticket from the scale had said to beware of dark women and that his grandfather's had said he was upright and brave. He took hold of the old man's hand, a sign of dependence that he seldom showed.

After a bit, following the tracks and finally, to their relief, back in a white part of town, Nelson decides to rest and falls asleep. To teach him a lesson about "impudence", Mr. Head hides so the boy will wake up alone. When he feels Nelson's slept too long, he bangs a trash can lid, causing Nelson to jump up and, not seeing his grandfather, run. Mr. Head runs after him; when he finally catches up, he sees that Nelson has run into a women, who is screaming that she has a broken ankle. At first, Mr. Head hides himself before finally coming forward; Nelson throws himself around his grandfather and clings to him. By now a crowd has assembled, and, with a police officer approaching, the woman accuses and shouts "Your boy has broken my ankle!":

"This is not my boy," he said. "I never seen him before."

He felt Nelson's fingers fall out of his flesh.

As they continue walking, Nelson keeps well behind his grandfather, refusing to have anything to do with him, refusing water, "his mind had frozen around his grandfather's treachery as if he were trying to preserve it intact to present at the final judgment." Mr. Head is appalled at the depth of his sin: "He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation." He is saved when he spies a lawn ornament in the form of a black person, the "artificial nigger" of the title, which phrase he says, and the boy repeats. They both stare at the thing. Mr. Head looks at Nelson and sees "a hungry need for [...] assurance", a need for "him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence." He says: "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one." And Nelson is, pathetically, back in the fold.

I've quoted excessively from this story in a desire to give a flavor of the flow, to allow for some small appreciation for the reading experience, also because I'm uncharacteristically focusing here on what the story might be seen to be saying about racism. Because it seems to me that if one wanted to read this story only for a reductive message, the message would have to be that bigotry is fear-based and irrational and frankly stupid. And consider that, for all his obvious flaws, and for all their incessant bickering, Mr. Head is all Nelson has in the world. When he is betrayed, he can't help but feel lost. He needs to forgive his grandfather. In finally doing so, he necessarily, though his own brief encounter with the woman who gave him directions seems to conflict with what he'd always been told about black people, re-enemizes them. Though it's possible he'll remember his experience as a counterweight to his grandfather's ignorance, it seems more likely that that ignorance will instead continue to be passed on through him. In such ways, the story could be saying, is the racism of poor whites reinforced and maintained.

Not so focused thoughts on politics and government. . .

lenin is typically great on health care and the evil totalitarianism of the National Health Service in England. . . speaking of fears of such horrors, Dennis Perrin observes that "Over the last quarter, the number of clueless white Americans rose by thirty-seven percent." White people. What can you do with 'em? (Among the heartening take home messages of the public discourse surrounding the Gates Affair is how eagerly white people embrace the logic of the police state. Remind me again why I read comment threads?) In innocent moments, one is tempted to wonder where such widespread ignorance and stupidity comes from. It's not that there aren't legitimate criticisms of Obama's "plan" (Black Agenda Report offers a few here), but people are just bonkers. Socialism? Really? No, not really. As Tim Wise points out, the cry of "socialism!" is invariably coded racial language and always was. Not that we haven't seen plenty of non-coded racial language.

Racially coded or not, though, there is a weird fear or distrust of government. Many white people have been conditioned to believe that government is this evil thing, as well as necessarily incompetent, bumbling, bureaucratic, and so on. Bitch Phd writes yesterday about the things government provides for us and the ways in which we personally benefit from all the government does. It's a useful reminder, or should be, for all those who so often forget. She includes a photo which identifies and labels various government-provided items or services shown; also, the picture is of an anti-taxes rally, and one woman is holding a sign that reads "Cut Taxes Not Defense". It's not clear where such people think the funds for "defense" comes from if not taxes. But that point leads into a couple of things about Bitch's post that struck me (aside from the very good point she is making with it). First, the list of items gives the impression that "government", in its benevolent wisdom, has simply provided these things, from on high. As if every one of the positive functions of government, outside of basic infrastructure, wasn't the result of pressure from below.

This leads me to the next thing: how deeply militarized even her short list is. The very jumping off point for it is her observation that the Internet is not only a governmental creation, but that it came out of DARPA. She mentions her husband's various DoD-related jobs over the years and their VA-financed mortgages. I don't mean by highlighting these points to sound critical of her at all. My own job depends on there being a continual supply of disabled veterans, and I spent most of the first eight years of my life living on Naval bases. The point is that so many of us, regardless of our political outlook, work in situations that directly depend on massive spending on "defense". Our lives are intertwined with the military-industrial complex to an enormous extent, an extent to which most of us are generally unaware. Much of the technology we drool over came out of military research. Countless regional and local economies would all but collapse without the presence of the military. This is the process that has happened without the public's consent, which has warped the very fabric of society for decades without anyone seeming to notice. The ongoing threat to democracy, and obstacle to necessary change, should be obvious. Instead people are afraid of some mild liberal reforms of health care and, still, always it seems, black people.

Scattered thoughts on the election

I've spent months deferring writing anything about Barack Obama and the presidential campaigns. I've been short of time, yes, but the truth is that it would be all too easy to write a long post detailing all the problems with Barack Obama and why I'm wary of the excitement others have for him and why I don't think he offers what this country needs at this time (which, frankly, is drastic change, decades late, in the form of some kind of bottom-up non-capitalist socialism or communism; see, incidentally, this mostly excellent video lecture explaining the economic crisis, from Professor Richard Wolff of Amherst, in which he proposes just that. Link via the new blog Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008 (thanks to Infinite Thought for pointing to this blog), video first seen at Lenin's Tomb).

But, sadly, it's pretty clear that Obama is just about the best that the two-party system can plausibly come up with for a Presidential nomination. He's a vastly better candidate than either Gore or Kerry were (which is not to say that he is substantially different from them). And people are genuinely excited about him, which is something. Excitement is not something to be dismissed lightly, though, again, I'm wary that people expect things of him that he's not prepared to even attempt to deliver. (I remember being excited about Bill Clinton, it saddens me to admit.) Regardless, it remains mind-boggling that, for example, anyone could view any of the debates between Obama and McCain and conclude that McCain is worth supporting or voting for.

(By the way, the morning after the final debate, I was making just this observation to one of my bus-riding companions--that I have numerous problems with Obama, but find McCain repellent in every way, utterly and always devoid of integrity, incoherent, and so on, and inconceivable that anyone could have watched the debate and decided that McCain was their man--when another rider interrupted and wanted to know what I didn't like about Obama. I started off with his odious foreign policy, that he's a serious hawk whose version of "leaving Iraq" doesn't look much like leaving, etc . . .I didn't get very far, because he interrupted again and asked if I thought the United States should just pull its troops out of Iraq. Yes, in fact, I said. No, he countered, and said further that the United States must stay in Iraq because the major conflict in the world today is between the Christian world and the Muslim world and the U.S. is needed to stop terrorism and has been spreading democracy in the region, witness this or that election, etc. etc., blah blah blah . . . I didn't know what to say. I could have had a conversation with someone arguing that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq, as wrong as they'd be, but I wasn't expecting this kind of argument--I didn't know that normal people spouted reductive versions of Samuel Huntington's stupid, racist, discredited "clash of civilizations" thesis. What can you say to that? I can talk to people with whom I disagree, but some positions are so wrong that I often simply don't know where to begin and I either say nothing or try to say too much in too short a period of time, which only contributes to the trivialization of discourse. Is it my job, on a ten-minute bus-ride, to hold court on recent geo-political history? It is not. I held my own as best I could, but have to admit that I did indeed sputter incoherence at least once.)

(Regarding that last debate, I will say that I learned one good thing from McCain. It was news to me that Joe Biden had voted against the first Gulf War. Good for him! For McCain this was just one time among many when Biden was wrong about foreign policy, it being naturally one of the few times he was actually right.)

Anyway, though Obama is the best the two parties can come up with, he remains a center-right figure of limited vision. But he nevertheless pays lip service to worthy values, and it is these values that matter to his supporters. And it is this, along with the ongoing lunacy of the Republican Party, that makes his candidacy worth supporting. Steven Shaviro made an excellent argument along these lines in two posts from September. In the first one, he writes:

no matter how hypocritical the Democrats are [...] — nonetheless, the fact that they pay lip service to human rights, human dignity, and freedom from unnecessary suffering makes them morally superior to the Republicans, who are so crassly cynical that they overtly and positively revel in the prospects of torture, bigotry, destroying the environment for quick corporate profits, and enriching the already-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons [...]. As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression.

In the present circumstances, this means that Obama’s rhetoric of hope, no matter how vapid and empty it may actually be, still matters. Anyone who thinks that Obama will actually change things is in for severe disappointment if he wins. It’s pretty clear that Obama will do no more than restore Clintonian neoliberalism, in place of the revanchist militarism and rampant looting and pillaging that characterizes the current Bush-Cheney regime (and that McCain, for all his promises of “change”, will do nothing to alter). In other words, Obama may well rescue us somewhat from the nightmare of the last eight years, but only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante, with its foreign bombings and domestic “rationalizations” of the economy, that we rightly objected to in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that Obama, Biden, and company pay lip service to humane values that they will not actually uphold is in itself a cause for hope, for maintaining a “hope we can believe in,” or (to quote a past Presidential candidate whom it is now taboo to mention) for “keep[ing] hope alive.”

We should vote for Obama because

we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes.

Shaviro's second post is a discussion of the idea of evil, in the wake of the discussions that took place in the comments at his blog, and also in response to two posts by Jodi Dean and subsequent discussions at her blog.

(For the record, I voted for Ralph Nader in each of the last two presidential elections. I have no trouble with either vote, nor do I have a problem with people voting for Nader again this time, or for that matter for Cynthia McKinney. I've considered writing a lengthy defense of both those votes and of Nader himself and his candidacies, in part because it keeps coming up: Liberals keep dragging Nader and Nader-voters through the mud; each time something awful happens, be it a terrible Supreme Court decision or a certain military action, you can still see blog comments blaming Nader for it. An argument that Nader and those who voted for him are somehow responsible for the Bush presidency is not one that can be fruitfully defended if one is interested in the facts. I intended to explain why, at interminable length, and also why I still believe the 2000 vote in particular was the right thing to do at the time, but I don't have the heart for such an endeavor anymore--or possibly I'm just tired of being accused of "not getting it", or worse, of being a racist by tiresome, over-indulged commenters at other people's blogs.)

(Before concluding, let me offer yet another parenthetical and say that there have been some things I've liked about Obama. I was very impressed by this speech about religion, for example. I was less impressed by the much-ballyhooed speech on race, though he did say many important things worth saying in it, dragged down as it was by the awful boilterplate about Israel and fact-challenged distancing from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On the latter, I'd meant to point to a few analyses I found of value way back in March, but I got bogged down and distracted. Here are two: Tim Wise, in CounterPunch, typically excellent on Obama, Wright, and "the Unacceptability of Truth" to white America; and I Hear a New World's brilliant post linking Wright's oratory to African American popular music, including linking the now-infamous "God damn America" phrase to Nina Simone's classic "Mississippi Goddamn".)

On Saturday, we attended another Iraq Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier event, at 2640, followed by a not well-attended anti-war march. One of the panel members at the event was Michael Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who's written articles appearing at TomDispatch, Z, Asia Times, and others, and has written a book titled War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (which I'm currently reading; it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good). Towards the end of the Q&A session, the panel was asked whether there was any glimmer of hope with the upcoming election; that is, would there be any substantive change in policy, in terms of the continuation of the war and occupation? Schwartz replied that the only glimmer of hope he could discern was that the economic crisis would get so bad that the United States could literally not afford to keep troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, whether combat or occupation, and be forced to withdraw. I think it's fairly clear that he's correct. Now, Obama is invested in the American imperial project--he merely believes he can manage it better--and he is a proponent of neo-liberalism (with figures like Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker as close advisers, why would we think anything different?), and so on. But the truth is that, with Obama, under such circumstances one can at least imagine him being able to modify his policies and move toward more genuinely populist positions, however difficult they might be to implement. One can imagine no such thing with John McCain.