In The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh speaks with former directors of Israel’s secret service, the Shin Bet, about Israel’s war on terror, Rabin’s murder, targeted assassinations, and the Jewish Underground. The film has caused a furor because these men, who have devoted their lives to Israel’s security, all believe Israel should end the occupation. They favor a two-state solution.

DT: In 1967, a million Palestinians suddenly came under Israeli rule…In the film, Avraham Shalom said the Israelis responded with no strategy.

DM: No strategy, just tactics.

DT: Do you think that Israel just didn’t know how to handle the situation…that it found itself in completely new territory, so to speak?

DM: If you ask me to analyze what happened in 1967, the intelligent way is to go to the leaders at those times, not seeing it in hindsight now. I think that after many years of Israel being threatened by major forces—the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Jordanians—everybody knew that if Israel lost a war, it would be the last war that she would fight, because basically it would have meant the annihilation of all the Jews in the state of Israel. All of a sudden, in 1967, something miraculously happened: Israel triumphed, unbelievably, against those armies. Against Egypt we conquered all the Sinai. Against the Syrians we conquered the Golan Heights, against the Jordanians we conquered the West Bank and Gaza—there was no Palestinian state, by the way, it was from the Jordanians. Suddenly the leaders of Israel felt, OK. We have a strong army. Nobody can threaten us anymore. I think this was intoxicating in a way, because from a small country that was always threatened—you know, David against the Goliath that was all around him—they said, OK, if the Palestinians and the Arabs want to create peace…and these are the phrases that Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol used…let them come. They can come whenever they want. We’re not in any rush to solve the problem. I think that most Israelis felt the same in that era. You know, we were a country under siege, under attack all the time from both terrorists and the countries surrounding us, and all of a sudden, OK, we won. It’s your problem now. You have to play now. We don’t have to play. And this was what happened then. This was why in 1967 the leadership, especially towards the Palestinians, didn’t think strategically. And the problem is that the more time passes, the more complicated it is to solve it. What was much easier to achieve forty years ago was less easy to achieve thirty, twenty, ten, and now. As time passes it gets much harder, with much more human suffering, to reach the solution. You know, everybody knows what the solution will look like. Only the extreme right doesn’t accept that. It involves a lot of human suffering…especially from the Israelis, by the way. All those settlers were sent by a state—by a criminal, in my point of view, policy of the state—which yielded to those messianic feelings among the settlers. Yielded. Not wanting. Yielded to their messianic “It’s either or.” Either they will be evacuated and it will be a human catastrophe, or they will prevail and it will be a human catastrophe for all of Israel.

DT: Why do you say it will be a catastrophe if they’re evacuated?

DM: It will be a catastrophe for them.

DT: Oh, for them.

DM: For them it will be a catastrophe. I saw what happened in the disengagement plan when Ariel Sharon uprooted those settlements. Look, the governments of Israel sent those people to settle there in a way, sometimes by looking with a blind eye. They didn’t want to look at that. And those people felt ideologically, and they feel up until today, that they continue the Zionist movement, which was basically a settlement movement. Those settlers feel that they’re walking in the footsteps of those who settled in the 1930s, 1940s.

DT: That’s really, really interesting.

DM: Zionism is a settling movement. Herzl was not right: “A country with no people for a people with no country” is not the case. There were people, in Lod, and Ramlah, and Haifa, and Sfad, and Jaffah, where I live. There were Palestinians. I live in an Arabic house, which was a Palestinian house, let’s say seventy, sixty-five years ago. I’m not ashamed of that, but those settlers in the West Bank and Gaza: I think they’re wrong. The fact that Israel didn’t force them not to settle—or forced the law that says they’re not alllowed to settle in those territories—created this big mess, but at the end of the day there are 500,000 people there now.

DT: Right.

DM: This is why I say it’s a catastrophe. Imagine 500,000 people. It’s not what will happen, but let’s say 150,000, which is the smallest number. 100,000 people: You have to uproot them from their houses, from places they feel are homeland, whatever bullshit they’re fed with—the land of the prophet, the land of our ancestors, where our fathers walked, which we cannot give back, all this kind of horrible, stupid, unbelievable religious bullshit—and they have to go back. They have to leave that.

DT: In the film, Avraham Shalom [director of Shin Bet 1980-1986] said, “Luckily for us, terrorism increased, because now we had work. We stopped dealing with the Palestinian state.”

DM: Yes.

DT: To what extent do you think that terrorism has prevented the Palestinians from getting a state of their own?

DM: You’re asking me to speculate here. Basically Avraham Shalom meant that in the beginning there was no real resistance in the Occupied Territories after ’67. There was no Palestinian movement. Nobody knew how to eat this new thing. But the fact that Israel didn’t move very swiftly to say, OK, this is the Occupied Territories, we are going to try to create a Palestinian state—this is what Shalom says, “I thought that it’s a good idea to create a Palestinian state”—they didn’t move then, and then the terrorists started. Because nothing moved on the ground, terrorists started, and then we started to work against terrorism. The terrorism got more complicated and we got more complicated, and all of a sudden we find ourselves working 24/7 forgetting about those ideas of a Palestinian state we had in the beginning. Basically we lost track of what needed to be done because we were chasing after our tail all the time, like a cat who sees his tail and tries to bite it.

DT: Right, but it was a two-way street. I mean, it takes two to tango. If there had been no terrorism—

DM: If there had been no terrorism, Israel would not move an inch. Never. The first time the Israelis acknowledged that there is a Palestinian people was in 1987, the first intifada. Suddenly the Israelis woke up and said, “Wow, there are people there in the West Bank. There are not only the servants that come to clean the restaurants and build our houses. There are people there who don’t want to be ruled by us.” For me it happened, definitely. 1987. All of a sudden, Wow. There are Palestinians there, not those Palestinians who are working in the factories for us or who are doing all the dirty jobs that we don’t want to do. If there was no terror—and it’s hard to say that—Israel would not move an inch. An inch. I will give you an example, also from The Gatekeepers. 2000. Ehud Barak unilaterally withdraws from Lebanon. He withdraws from Lebanon, Hezbollah comes to the international border. Hezbollah fighters are on the border, tearing the flag of Israel and saying, “We pushed you out. By force. You were afriad, this is how we pushed you out.” In the meantime, the Palestinians are saying to Barak—or to the Israelis—“We gave you security in the last two years. We did everything we could in order to fight the Hamas terrorists. We put them in jail, in the prospect of getting a Palestinian state. What did you do? How much did you move? Nothing. You didn’t move towards us. Nothing. Hezbollah killed your soldiers, fired rockets on your northern cities, and what did you do? You moved to the international border.” What is the message that every Palestinian understands from that? What kind of a clear message does Israel send to anybody after that? You want to move forward? Let’s move forward two months ago, three months ago. For three, four years the Palestinian Authority has provided security for the state of Israel completely. Two days ago it was published that this year no Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks from the West Bank.

DT: I saw the article in Haaretz.

DM: First year. Why? Because the Palestinian Authority security forces and the Israeli security forces allowed that state of security to happen. What did Netanyahu do in the last four years? Zip. Nothing he did. Nothing. What did he do with Hamas? He released one thousand terrorists in order to get Gilad Shalit, and he negotiated. Although he likes to portray himself as the strong guy, the strong leader who doesn’t bow to terror, who negotiated with Hamas about the cease fire in Gaza just three, four weeks ago? Who was the one? Was it Barack Obama? Was it the left or the right wings in Israel? No, Bibi Netanyahu, the big fighter against terror, negotiated with Hamas and yielded to Hamas. The consequence of the last conflict in Gaza was that the terrorist leader of Hamas was allowed to come to Gaza and to row in the parade, where he says this is the only way that we will force Israel to submit—only by force. Who allowed that? Who allowed that? The prime minister of Israel.

DT: Well, that answers my question.

DM: The biggest fighter against terror. And what is he doing in the meantime with the people who are saying to him, We are willing to accept the state of Israel, we are willing to fight terror, we will fight terror, we don’t believe in terror, what is he doing to Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad? Humiliating them. Making them not relevant. And showing to the whole world, and definitely to the Palestinian population, that only Hamas, by using force, is making Israel bow, is forcing Israel to do whatever he wants them to do.

DT: For me, one of the most heartbreaking moments came when Ami Ayalon, speaking about Rabin’s assassination, said, “I suddenly saw a different Israel. What do we have in common?” For me, that was heartbreaking, especially as an American Jew. We trotted up with our little quarters to put in the Keren Kayemet box, and all the propaganda that we get here…

DM: It is heartbreaking for me as well. What can I tell you? Do you want me to comment on that?

DT: Yes.

DM: The biggest threat to Israel’s security is those far right wing extremists. This is the biggest threat to Israel’s security. Who is the most renowned American president? I’m asking you now.

DT: Lincoln.

DM: Why?

DT: Because he brought the people together.

DM: And what did he do in order to do that?

DT: Compromise?

DM: Civil war. He made civil war because he felt that at one point in its history, a country cannot yield to something that is so brutally and honestly immoral. There are some things to which you cannot yield. After he assassinated Rabin, Yigal Amir said something at the end of his trial. The judge tells him, “Before I’m going to sentence you, I allow you to speak.” And what Yigal Amir said stayed with me; he said, “Nobody addressed the fact that there is a contradiction in terms between the democratic Israeli state and Jewish law. Unless it will be addressed, it will continue.”

DT: What’s the contradiction?

DM: Jewish law comes before the democracy, before the law of the land. Basically, the rabbis are above the law of the state, and this is the main problem: When there is a group of people inside Israeli society who do not accept the concept of democracy but when it comes to decision making they say the law of the Torah, the law of the Bible, these are the ones that prevail. You saw that in the movie, when this rabbi says, “No leader can oppose the Torah. No one can do that.” When it reaches that point, Israel will have to decide where it goes. Even if it will mean a civil war…

DT: Haaretz just reported that Riad Malki says that the Palestinians will go to the Hague if Israelis don’t stop the E1 plan. How important is international pressure at this point?

DM: Crucial. Essential. Unless Obama will put enormous pressure—on both sides, by the way, not only the Israelis—but mainly on the Israelis and the Palestinians, nothing will happen. They’re two entities that have now reached the pubic period. They’re two entities that are basically like small children who are fighting and nobody understands what they’re fighting about. As far as the leaders of Israel, Netanyahu is dealing with all the wrong reasons not to do anything. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t believe that Netanyahu has it in him; he’s not a leader. He’s a good salesman…for furniture…I’m talking really honestly. This is what I feel. He’s the worst prime minister. He and [Ehud] Barak can compete for who’s the worst prime minister in the history of Israel. I don’t know who will win. Probably Netanyahu although Barak in his year and a half created so much damage that it’s taking many years to mend the damage he did. The kind of leadership that needs to move towards peace you don’t see even in the far horizon of Israeli politics. So though the gatekeepers are always trying to comfort me and tell me, “You are much too bleak, the leadership will arise,” I don’t see that kind of leadership on the horizon of Israeli politics now. And unless an enormous power will be forced on both sides to move ahead… America knows how to do that—Barack Obama, if he wants, knows how to do that—and I think that there are hints by appointing the defense minister…

DT: Chuck Hagel…

DM: And by appointing the foreign minister…

DT: John Kerry…

DM: He indicates very clearly where he wants to go. I hope that he really means that. There’s also concern about the conservative Jews here in America, who have a lot of power, I think. in my point of view, those Jews are making a mistake in what they do. I’m not the only one saying that. Believe me, six heads of the Israeli secret service are saying the same thing: By the way that they act, the way that they accept the wrong policy of the Israeli government, they are damaging the state of Israel. Not helping—damaging the sate of Israel. And unless they understand that, and unless they will help President Obama take this Titanic that is heading head-on towards the iceberg and help him change the wheel…. Basically this is what they are doing: They are helping the captain of the Titanic move head-on towards the iceberg. I don’t want to blame, but this is what I feel AIPAC is doing.

DT: Is there anything you want to add?

DM: I hope those people will come to The Gatekeepers keeping an open mind and heart and watch those six heads of Israeli secret service, the Shin Bet, whom you cannot call unpatriotic. They are the ones who sacrificed the most for the security of Israel. Most of their grown-up life since the day that they served in the army was in the service of the security of Israel. This is what they dedicated their lives to…six of them. All the heads of Shin Bet who are alive, coming and telling…. Listen to them. This is what I ask. Just listen to them. Don’t do anything. Just come with open minds to The Gatekeepers and listen to those people. What you decide after that is up to you. But listen to them. Don’t be racially prejudiced or mesmerized by the propaganda machine that’s working against that. Go to the movie and judge for yourself. You are old enough and capable enough intellectually to do that by yourself. This is what I’m hoping will happen.

But what game? The one James Naismith invented to bridge the football and baseball seasons and help restless adherents of “Muscular Christianity” endure frozen New England winters? The one that philosopher-king Bill Russell called a simple game played by grown men in short pants? The high-wire carnival circus on display at NBA’s All-Star Weekend, played on Michael Jordan’s fiftieth birthday? [1].

II. Changes

Since Russell’s simpler time, there have been tidal waves of extrinsic changes, with salaries escalating astronomically, and players ever-more-quickly achieving iconic status, marketing themselves as both comedic super heroes and arbiters of taste. The pants aren’t short any more either.

A quantum increase in marketing was ushered in by events of the mid-80’s, presided over by – and of course reflecting – a Ronald Reagan ethos: the corrupt – or at least suspect – 1985 lottery in which the faltering Knick franchise was rewarded with Patrick Ewing, ESPN’s meteoric rise, and Nike’s seemingly made-in-heaven marriage to the instantly iconic and insanely popular Michael Jordan. Ewing was introduced nationally as a player who could impact immediately markets. Never mind games! The desire to “Be Like Mike” became universal.

In the new deal, players were rated and judged as much by their salaries as their on-court efforts and achievements. Come 1992, the soil was fertilized for the outsize winning personality of man-child Shaquille O’Neal to ramp up marketing even more. So by the time Lebron James was drafted in 2003 – barely out of high school, yet entering the league with enough fanfare to command nearly an eight figure sneaker contract – he could, credibly, – and before ever stepping on an NBA floor – publically aspire to become the game’s first billionaire.

III. Lebron's Journey

While James was toiling seven years in Cleveland without a championship ring, on an individual level, the real issue became whether, or when, he would supplant Jordan as the game’s recognized greatest player.

Being one of the few that held out for Oscar Robertson’s right to retain that position, I saw James as offering a unique resume in his bid for that distinction. I based my opinion not only upon James’ overall greatness, but also upon his combining attributes of the best all-court players (Robertson, Jordan, Magic Johnson) with the physical strength and overpowering brute force of the most dominant centers: Wilt Chamberlain and Shaq.

Seeming to be ideally positioned to obliterate this time-honored Best Big Man-Best player distinction, James suddently detoured into public censure and virulent hatred with his nationally televised image-suicide gaffe known as “The Decision. ” Before that time, James had managed his image with the utmost care, making it doubly difficult to understand his opacity [2] in commanding a national audience to watch him callously announce that Ohio’s native son was deserting Cleveland for the glitter of Miami.

That was less than two years ago. Now playing his tenth year in the NBA at the age of twenty-eight, James has added an NBA title and an Olympic Gold Medal to his resume, and has come through the firestorm of negative sentiment that he generated with his decision to take his talents – and reputation – South, to the beach – and then worsened with a still- inexplicable confused disappearance in his first Finals with his new Miami team. King James has in effect become the game. He is now basketball’s public face.

We hardly stopped to ask the question that Jordan answered so
disappointingly: how will he spend his social capital?

Then, on All-Star weekend (which interrupted a Miami Heat win streak that was surging toward – and would eventually reach – double figures), after a succession of six unbelievable games in Oscar’s high triple-double mode (scoring over 30 points, and shooting over 60%), a sub-plot emerged that established a continuity between Oscar’s lineage and Lebron’s, as distinct from that of Jordan and Shaq. In a player’s meeting resulting in the firing of NBA players union executive director Billy Hunter (whose business practices are being investigated by several government agencies), James became a key participant. James’ role was reminiscent of Oscar’s before the 1964 All-Star game. Oscar forwarded the players struggle for union recognition and a retirement pension by organizing the game’s newly emergent brightest stars to threaten not to play in the 1964 All-Star game.

Unlike Jordan, who never leveraged his popularity into support for social and political justice issues, James the super-capitalist was doing his righteous duty, if at the same time enhancing his image. He was, it could be said, forging own unique integration of marketing, public relations, textbook high IQ basketball, and overwhelming physical talent. The contrast with Jordan’s post-retirement career could not be more glaring! [4]

IV. All-Star Weekend

All the game’s changes were on showcase review during All-Star Weekend, a meaningless but symbolic pageant, with multiple circus tents for a range of stars to showcase their talents, beginning with the newest iteration of the rookie-sophomore game, re-named the Rising Stars Challenge, which was a chance for me to get a look at the younger players on teams that I rarely watch; it’s a game in which the young bucks get to display the superb athletic skills that – unless coming in hyped as the next Lebron James – they must submerge, as young players, to get playing time. Undisturbed by defense, they ran up a 90-66 half-time score (on its way to 163-135), thereby underlining Weekend’s extreme orchestration – thrown into another gear a decade ago, when Turner TV took over, and rapidly escalated the already steadily increasing corporatization of the festivities.

The cozy bond between media and participant has progressively tightened. Chuck and Shaq themselves constitute the show. They chose up to form teams, changing the format from Rookie-Sophomore. The media completely surrounds, and seamlessly interpenetrates with, the experience of watching games, with announcers shilling “apps,” as if we had inadvertently clicked on a link.

Fully enveloped in a hip-hop sound production enterprise, with music that failed miserably to link the game with its historic past. In glaring contrast was Bill Russell’s interview before the game, in which Russ talked of his meeting with Nelson Mandela. It is a further irony that James forsook wearing #23 in stated deference to Michael Jordan, but, without even a nod, blithely switched to Russell’s #6.

For the occasion, a jovial Karl Malone was brought into the studio to join Shaq, Charles, and Kenny Smith, taking the raucous hip racially-tinged humor swirling around the unflappable Ernie Johnson to yet another level.

V. Then, Now, Always

How different a world the NBA now presents from the one in which I grew up: In 1954, I was at Madison Square Garden for the fourth All-Star Game (5)! A hand ballot in the fourth quarter gave the MVP to Jim Pollard, George Mikan’s Minneapolis Laker team-mate on the seemingly victorious West. But a combination of Bob Cousy’s last quarter heroics put the East ahead, until Mikan’s two free throws put the game into overtime. The East won, and a re-vote was taken, giving Cousy the MVP. Somehow, in the crowd, we (including me, at age ten) knew all this, by quickly-circulating rumor, as it was transpiring.

Perhaps the best way to think of the changes in those fifty-nine years is to look at the contrasting figures of James and Mikan, who was about Ryan Anderson’s size, and considerably less athletic. The 6’10” 240 pound Anderson’s participation in the Weekend was limited to the three-point shooting contest, which he had a real shot at winning. A similarly sized white giant – Kevin Love – won it last year. If only there were a YouTube clip of Mikan trying to launch a three-pointer!

What worlds remain to be conquered for the recognized (by all but Kobe Bryant, from his increased James-directed mano-mano competitiveness toward the game’s end, when he actually blocked one of the King’s shots, after playing him increasingly physically) King? He’s had All-Star game MVPs, and that’s the weekend to chill and be politic. He might try the dunk contest. Just once, Lebron. Please.

But the man is focused on titles, as well he should be. A string of rings is all some people will value, in making ultimate comparisons. He knows he needs to convince them too. Getting into Lebron’s mind, though, is something he will now allow only to those he wants in. Don’t forget the big reason he went South: to play with his friends. And we hated him for that!

Notes

1 As if to underline the marriage of showmanship and content, it was just the following day that the basketball world was saddened by the death of Jerry Buss, the Los Angeles Laker owner whose flamboyantly spent dollars were so closely associated with the Laker ascension to dominance, with its Showtime offense orchestrated by Magic Johnson, under Pat Riley. Buss assembled great teams by both spending money and by hiring the best basketball minds (Phil Jackson, Jerry West, in addition to Riley).

2The ungainly fashion in which Lebron presented himself reminded one of the bumbling presentations of pompous blacks in “Amos n’ Andy.” “The Recission” the Kingfish might have called it.

3 This Big Data generated “streak” was “broken” by an at least equivalently marvelous game in which James tallied 39 points, 12 rebounds, and seven assists, and only dipped under the requisite 60% from the floor by taking and missing a late 28 footer (after the game’s outcome was clearly settled).

4 See Dave Zirin’s “Citizen Mike.”

5 I had already been to an NBA Finals game, a completely unheralded event that took place not in Madison Square, but in the 69th Regiment Amory, a building into which the Knicks were shunted when playoff games turned out to conflict with the Circus, which had booked prime time in March, when the Finals arrived in those days. Getting booking time in the winter in the Garden was a coup of a kind not previously associated with the NBA of the leaner-than-David Stern years.

What if one side is in the right and the other in the wrong? This is a question that a (radical) relativist would simply dismiss as illegitimate (for him or her there is no objective right and wrong), but a believer in the possibility of objective truth must take the existence of right and wrong seriously. Wouldn’t compromise diminish what principled advocacy means to accomplish? The answer depends upon the kind and degree of right and wrong. Racism, slavery and genocide, to name the most blatant examples, are or should be non-negotiable issues. Which is not to say that we cannot negotiate with oppressors if they have the capacity to hold on to power, but such negotiation would be in the interest of reducing oppression. (It is a curious fact that there are those who in the interest of peace and avoiding war urge the government to seek diplomatic solutions with intransigent tyrannical adversaries in order to reduce violence or oppression, while intransigently refusing to engage less menacing opposition at home.) Wasn’t Lincoln a principled compromiser in the matter of slavery? He limited his resistance to the westward expansion of slavery before his election to the presidency to the displeasure of the abolitionists, because he viewed its complete elimination as politically not feasible until the Civil War was won. Lincoln never completely overcame his own racism, though he made considerable progress in moving away from it. Slavery now is universally anathema in civilized nations though it may continue to have an underground as well as an open existence in backward nations. Racism too is anathema though there continue to be differences of opinion about what constitutes racism in particular instances.

The rights and wrongs in our current politics are less momentous than those that produced the civil war, but they are serious enough with potentially grave social and economic consequences. Returning to the matter of the state of our national economy and the question of how our deficit and sovereign debt should be addressed, let us make the reasonable assumption that the Keynesians are right to argue that stimulating the economy and not austerity is the order of the day; should those of Keynesian persuasion compromise with advocates of austerity? (For Keynesians the problem is moral as well as economic, for what is at stake is the fate of millions of unemployed job seekers.) Though of great importance, the differences between the two sides do not have the moral gravity of slavery and racism. They do not constitute a struggle between radical good and radical evil. There is a case for beginning to address the problem of the high national debt in the long term by carefully cutting spending now and making deeper cuts later when the economy is stronger and unemployment is low. In an often dysfunctional, non-parliamentary democracy like our own, legislative action is slow and too often badly done. It may be wise to begin early in planning for the future. Those on the liberal side for the most part embrace such a view in principle, but are resistant in practice, because even small spending cuts may significantly reduce benefits in entitlements (in particular medicare and social security) necessary for those who earn little or are unemployed. If there are cuts to be made, the liberal view is that they should be made mostly in defense and corporate welfare to supplement increased taxes on the wealthy. In the meantime, liberals believe that a stimulus package to improve our infrastructure and education made possible by increasing taxes on the wealthy to be necessary; it would strengthen the economy and reduce unemployment. It is a position unacceptable to the conservative side, which draws the line on tax increases, while seeking spending cuts across the domestic front with little or no cuts in military expenditures. Republicans argue that they have already conceded on the tax front in agreeing to raise the marginal rate on the wealthy. A reasonable compromise would entail sacrifices on both sides: liberals would have to give on entitlements, particularly medicare and conservatives on higher taxes of the wealthy.

In an interview, House Speaker John Boehner rejects the idea of compromise and embraces the idea of common ground. While compromise involves sacrifice on both sides, common ground implies an overlapping of interests and convictions of opposing sides. When you find common ground presumably you have given up nothing. In effect, Boehner is declaring an unwillingness to concede anything to the opposition—at least beyond what he has already conceded. My own view, as I have already said, is that the case for the liberal view is economically and morally the stronger case, but its strength is diminished if it would refuse to consider cuts in entitlements in exchange for agreement from the conservative side to cut, for example, corporate welfare such as subsidies to oil companies. If there is any doubt that compromise is a necessary principle in the life of a nation, we need only contemplate the prospect of the disastrous consequences of “sequestration” (arbitrary draconian cuts in domestic and military spending): the evisceration of essential programs, the strong possibility of close to a million job losses and a return to recession. Those at the extremes are willing to see the sequestration go forward without worrying about the consequences. Their ambition is to successfully fix the blame on the other side. What is distressing is that for opportunistic political reasons the apparent non-extremists on one side (the Republican side) seem to have bought into the extreme of their base.

The extremists are empowered by the conviction that they are in exclusive possession of what is morally right. In their view, compromise is a dilution, a distortion, a diminishment of what is right. Compromise (i.e., being compromised) has as one of its meanings self-betrayal as well as the betrayal of others. But extreme principled views can also have tyrannical resonance as in Barry Goldwater’s affirmation of liberty: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Yes it is a vice when it suppresses the question as to what is meant by liberty, by no means an easy question to answer. Consider Lincoln’s remarks in a speech he gave in which he acknowledged the contentions over the meaning of “liberty”:

The world has never had a good definition of the world liberty. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with the others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor…

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the shepherd and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty, and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures…(Address at a Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, April 1864).

The liberty of an individual with money and power may in effect deprive those without power of their liberty. The fact is that liberty like equality has different meanings and applications, which hyperbolic rhetoric such as Goldwater’s represses.

If the task of government is to preserve liberty, then what is required is negotiation among those who embody its different meanings. Which means that mutual restraints on the liberties of the various parties may be necessary in order for each to party enjoy liberty. The wolf may have to be restrained from attacking the sheep. The human defender of the sheep may be limited in his power to kill wolves in order to preserve the herd. (Lincoln’s fable delivers a powerful message against the slave owners; it scants however the claim of the wolf.) We may think of compromise as the respect that each side has for the views of the other side or sides and the understanding it shows for the need to exercise self-limitation in serving the public good. Consider, for instance, the needs of the poor (the cause of the liberal left) and the aspirations of the entrepreneur (the cause of the libertarian right). To inhabit the imagination of the passionate left is to enter into the lives the poor, the disabled, and the deprived and to live the life of indignation and protest. We need a party that works to alleviate the suffering and improve the lives of the poor, but we also need to value the enterprising and the creative, who enjoy their strength, independence and productivity. The parties will be in conflict with each other, but it should be possible that particularly in times of crisis for them to form a partnership and at other times to coexist in parallel? The party of strength and wealth should also be willing to sacrifice more than the party of the poor, because they possess more and can afford the sacrifice.

“The uncompromising mindset,” as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson point out in The Spirit of Compromise, has a role to play in the story of compromise; it may provide a check on premature compromise, a fault of Obama according to his liberal base. A problem arises when “the uncompromising mindset” becomes inflexible and turns into a simple refusal to compromise. A premature compromise, it should be pointed out, is often difficult to determine, especially for those on the outside of negotiations. Compromise like comedy depends on timing. One needs to be privy to what is going on inside the process to know when it is appropriate to make concessions. And even those inside the process can’t ever be sure that a concession or the failure to deliver one at the time was right or that the right concession was made. History is not a laboratory in which events can be replicated. Gutmann and Thompson distinguish between the mindsets of campaigning and governing. The mindset of the campaigner is uncompromising in setting forth ideas and policies in contrast to those of rivals, while governing necessarily requires compromise. However, when one or the other side proves to be intransigent in enacting legislation, those who govern may have to turn to the public and campaign for compromise, which is what Obama has been doing. The uncompromising mindset is not always a matter of personal or political temperament. It may have deep cultural roots that cannot be easily plucked out. Progressives in their impatient desire for improvement may fail to take into account conservative cultural resistances to the changes that they seek. For instance, laws to regulate guns will not succeed if a substantial portion of society is aggressively opposed to such regulation. The resistance to gun regulation is especially serious and dangerous because the resisters have the weapons to enforce their resistance. To say this is not to say that the effort should not be made to control the purchase and use of guns, but what needs to be respected is the call for discussion and debate. The acknowledgement of the difficulty of achieving such legislation is not a cop out—as some advocates of gun control believe. If advocates of gun control lose the battle on assault weapons but win the battle for background checks for gun purchasers, they will have gained a victory through compromise.

Compromise is a matter of manners as well as morals. Incivility in normal political discourse reflects something deeper than bad manners: an intolerance of views opposed to one’s own. Which is not to say that intolerance has no place even in civil discourse. We have a duty as civilized creatures not to tolerate murderous actions and words, totalitarian governments, racism, slavery etc. Should we then extend our intolerance to what we view as wrongheaded ideas that refuse to die (the economist Paul Krugman calls them zombie ideas), but are not murderous? In a free society, we allow them to be expressed, though we are also free to deride them. One reason to show restraint in attacking opposing views is that we may turn out to be precipitous in our judgments. A disreputable view may deserve a fresh, disinterested look, while a received view may merit a skeptical look. Compromise too often is thought of simply as sacrifice. It may prove to be a learning experience. In the process of negotiation, we may see flaws on our own side as well as virtues on the other side. What is most admirable is a critical openness to the views of others, a willingness and capacity to learn from others—the powerless from the powerful as well as the powerful from the powerless. Most troubling about the intransigent right is that one is forced into a posture of a defensive progressivism. One feels less free to be self-critical, that is, critical of the progressive position, since so much energy is diverted to combating the intransigence. Realizing this, one should make an effort not to be blind or indifferent to faults on one’s own side, despite every temptation presented by the other side.

In the early days of the republic, the party system was the subject of debate between party advocates, who believed that democracy required a space in which different and conflicting views could be expressed and anti-party advocates, who envisaged a politics of unanimity that transcended factional interests. The party advocates fortunately won the debate. We know what that oxymoron, a one party system, looks like. A no party (lack of) system would give us chaos rather than unanimity. But our party system has its liabilities, and they are fully on view at the present time. A minority party with the desire and the means to block necessary action simply refuses to compromise with the majority party. We are in a time when the spirit of compromise that has existed in the past has atrophied. It needs to be restored.

We are going on about how increasing someone’s pitiful dole allowance by 25 pence a week is woefully unfair since wages are going down. We are talking that tired crap of blaming single mothers and immigrants and the European Union for the lack of jobs, decent housing, a living wage, why Johnny can’t read and write.

Ignorant and hell–bound youth hurl abuse at Chinese students, who bring millions of dollars into the UK economy every year. No one stops them. Hoods rule public transport in many places.

Indian students, that other group traditionally counted on to prop up the higher education industry, are beginning to be less enamoured of the UK’s prestigious caps and gowns. Their applications are down by more than 10,000. They know they are not wanted no matter what Cameron said in India last week. Unlike him foreigners have to travel the busses and trains and walk the streets of racist and resentful English neighborhoods. In a globalized world, word spreads.

The official unemployment rate is high at 7.9% and forecast to get even higher. But we are told that there more people are employed than ever before but beneath the headlines its clear that the jobs are part time and temporary. In a population of 63.2 million, 13 million live below the poverty line and there is a growing number of hungry families. There are now 250 food banks in the UK and more coming. There is an unprecedented rise in heating costs, too. Some families are having to choose between heating and eating.

Caroline Flint, from Labour says, “People have to ask themselves what kind of Government can afford a £3 billion pound tax giveaway for the highest earners but chooses to cut support for people in fuel poverty and leave over a million children in the cold."

Much of the growing poverty is due to the cuts in job seekers allowance. In many ways though, it’s even worse if you are working. And if you are working full time – good for you – but your living standards are worse today than they were a decade ago. Just as in the American economy there is an enormous gap between the upper one-third of the country and everyone else. The more we toil, the more we produce, the greater the inequalities. And the ticket to social mobility – a university education – is now an eye-watering £9000 a year at the best universities. So what? In the US, we pay a lot more for college, no? That’s true and it has always been that way in the U.S.

But not long ago, just a decade or so, British students did not pay any tuition at all. But then you didn’t need a degree to get a job either.

Britain’s public sector is not only being drastically reduced but, more importantly, it’s being re–structured. Since so much of the population north of London and the home counties was dependent on public sector jobs and services, the private sector has collapsed as well. But the Right does not want recovery; it wants something different, and the economic crisis is an opportunity to create that something different at a profit.

Councils, local government, are at the mercy of tightwad ideologues. Cuts are to the bone. Thousands of poor people on state benefitS are being uprooted from pricey London boroughs and dumped in some of the poorest, most under–resourced and historically troubled cities in the North, like Liverpool and Bradford. I smell a riot. Up north there are now food–banks where community centres used to be. Whole town centres are boarded up – towns that used to boast of being too political and principled to allow a McDonalds are now too poor to support a McDonalds. Community work, family support, counseling centres, rehabilitation units, youth work, and the crown jewel of the welfare system the National Health Service have all been cut.

We’ve been told that we are in all this together. And we have been told that the cuts have not gone far enough.

Arts funding too has been cut dramatically in most places and as much as 100% in the cities of Newcastle and Somerset. But councils there have money for other things. "Everyone is making difficult decisions" government spokesmen intone. Except of course those who are having these decisions made for them. But do not get the idea that there is no money in Britain. There is plenty of money. The public sector gave £9.3 billion to the Olympics. Private groups put up a little over 2 billion. Lloyd’s bank says the UK taxpayer may benefit from this extraordinary outlay – but not until 2017. So you see there is money for the monied in the UK. Expensive philanthropic projects have glam openings. Millionaires have pavilions named after them. Billionaires buy football teams.

While the rest of us remain unorganised, still at one another’s throats.

If you read Shaw’s first novel carefully, you soon realized that his apparently old-fashioned page-turner was also a quiet but deadly satire: the only schoolbooks with any chance of engaging an intelligent child’s attention were the ones Merton’s school had recently purged from its classrooms and library as hopelessly obsolete, so that Merton encountered them purely by chance, on a rubbish heap in his school’s basement. Similarly, Merton’s social success derives in some part from his family’s occupational status, just as it might have in a school story written a century ago, but in Merton’s case his great chance comes from the fact that his mother’s newest boyfriend is a coke dealer, whose filched product provides the first step on the hazardous road to adolescent celebrity. While Shaw’s subtlety and tact can strategically obscure the fact, The Illumination of Merton Browne is not only a school story and a bildungsroman, but a political novel: it is a teacher who educates Merton. Although this man is paid with tax money to do such a job, in Merton’s case the job is necessarily done informally, irregularly and despite the best efforts of the school Merton attends, which to a grimly plausible degree barely remembers what it means to educate anyone. In our age, which often overtly and almost always tacitly deprecates the potency of governments, what the state does, or fails to do, matters infinitely to someone like Merton Browne.

Shaw has now published a second novel, Ten Weeks in Africa. It feels significantly bleaker and also more intricate than his first, but it is also an often-satirical novel of politics. Ten Weeks In Africa is set in an imagined and renamed version of Kenya with a bit of Uganda added to the mix, and its non-African characters are mostly British or Pakistani, but the kind of pseudo-politics Shaw is satirizing have an unhappy relevance for Americans. Professed and even sincere good intentions mean much less than we hope they do, a point Shaw makes repeatedly in Ten Weeks In Africa: his novel’s most effective hero is a businessman who, among his other enterprises, bribes police officials to allow his employees to steal tourists’ luggage from an international airport. This businessman’s newest employee, a small boy unhappily resolved to help notorious thieves in order to buy medicine for his dying mother, seems on first encounter to have fallen into an African Fagan’s hands, but we slowly realize that the boy is now working for a man who is in effect an unsentimental, wholly modernized and absolutely plausible version of one of the Cheerybles, the benevolent merchants from Nicholas Nickleby.

Shaw recounts the lives of his African characters with almost no comic effects, reserving his satirical energies for his British NGO workers, some of whom are as decent as they are deluded about the nature of logic of the system within which they work, while others recall the Jellybys and for that matter the Pardiggles of Bleak House. None of them are remotely as intelligent, or as sinister, as is an African cabinet minister, a woman who has published now-canonical feminist scholarship on the role of women in Africa while helping loot her country for herself, her tribe and her family, speaking (when she chooses) Western Left academic idiom with a fluency and rhetorical effectiveness that leaves my colleagues in the dust. This suggests that to have learned about contemporary Africa in a Western university may mean having been steeped in either irrelevancies or deadly absurdities about the places one aspires to improve, which is only one of Shaw’s points, but one that informs some brilliant and chilling scenes.

There are also plenty of non-Dickensian characters in Ten Weeks In Africa. At a crucial juncture the truly entrepreneurial businessman/thief/hero is motivated by the lowest of motives, lust provoked by pique over the standoffishness of a beautiful young woman of superior status, while the higher motives of Shaw’s European characters can be masks for the most deadly kind of self-seeking, the sort that disguises itself as selfless virtue to those caught hopelessly in its grasp. So far, so good, indeed so wise, bitterly funny and instructive, but why might Ten Weeks In Africa be peculiarly instructive for Americans, at least ones who work in universities?

In part because of what Shaw demolishes: the notion that the most virtuous among us work for NGOs seeking to salve the wounds of what used to be called the Third World, and that Development Studies is the science of virtue. As it happens, these notions take in a extraordinary number of my otherwise corrosively skeptical students, and for that matter my friends’ children. Something about the education they have received makes them oddly credulous about NGOs, and my guess is that this credulity has something to do with the intellectual trajectory of the generation that has educated them. A lot of American academics fell out of love with the state just around the time I began teaching, and while we still officially urged its expansion—most of us still called ourselves socialists—we didn’t write about it much, and to a remarkable degree we ceased to teach its histories. It bored us, and to our students the state also seems rather boring, in part because it was deemed wicked in an oddly dreary way. I have the impression that nowadays a person deemed “political” may well be someone almost perfectly inattentive to (and deeply bored by) politics as the word was once understood.

This has not improved our ability to comprehend or improve the politics of either our own societies or of any others. As Shaw’s novel dramatizes, while NGOs may be assumed to be free of self-interest, ugly compromises and almost all the amoral realities of power, they are of course steeped in such things. They necessarily have their own institutional and sectional interests, and they often pursue their interests in durable coalitions with those government to which they are so misleadingly (because so heroically) contrasted. This does not mean that NGOs are likely to be worse than governments, but since they are widely taken to be so much better than governments, they are surely fit subjects for satire, or in this case for tragicomedy. One point Mr. Shaw does not bother to make—he may think it too obvious—is that NGOs are in one striking respect very different from the Western governments to which their moral superiority is so persistently assumed: they lack the democratic legitimacy of the governments to which they so often condescend, for no-one has ever voted for an NGO. So Shaw has written a deeply affecting and instructive novel showing just how deranged an assumption my students have been encouraged to make about NGOs. Like the school teacher in The Illumination of Merton Browne, Mr. Shaw is attempting to teach something that is desperately important, and doing it very much against the odds. We should all wish him the best of luck.

Zebra refers to Black/White mix. Relates the colors of a person's parents to the colors of a zebra's stripes.—The Racial Slur Database

I was working for a Rock-n-Roll magazine; bin Laden was on his own and on the lookout for talent to join his gang, Al-Qaeda.

It was a simple meal in a complicated place. Fruit, bread and cheese arrived on an antique silver platter that could have been used, in 1885, to serve the head of the British soldier Charles “Chinese” Gordon to the Muslim leader Mahdi, ‘the Guided One.’ Our host smiled at the suggestion, and said, Maybe.

There were three of us sitting around a table inside the headquarters of the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference located in a low-slung, whitewashed building in Khartoum, Sudan. Secretaries came in and out, whispering messages to their boss Hassan Al-Turabi and, sometimes, to his other guest, Osama bin Laden. Turabi, as always, looked sharp, spotless, his turban crisply creased and perfectly tied; bin Laden, on the other hand, appeared comfortable in wrinkles and unbothered by the tea stain atop his left bosom.

Yes, I’ll take it, Turabi told a factotum and excused himself to field a phone call. Heading to his desk, he added, Please start, you two. I’ll only be a minute.

Good manners advised us to wait. I was prepared to chat; the night before a full moon repaved the town, turning its pot-holed and unswept streets into pearl carpets. But bin Laden turned away from me to stare at a bare white wall. We had met once before, at a crowded reception; we didn’t say much to each other then, and, obviously, he was not interested in making small talk now.

I had arrived in Khartoum weeks earlier, in September, 1994, to research a story about radical Islamists and the march of Islam’s green flag in every which way. Entering the city I was respectful of its magic. The Blue and White Nile rivers meet here, forming what Arab poets call the longest kiss in history. It’s also the traditional gateway connecting black Africa to the Arab North, and its bazaars were famed for offering goods and services that blurred the lines separating the exotic from the forbidden.

Another more pressing reason for a circumspect approach came out of Khartoum’s position as both the wheelhouse and engine room of fundamentalist Islam. As Africa’s only Islamized state, and minus the heavy hand of Mideast monarchies, agents of almost every radical Islamic group were based here. Each of them had their fingers in the honey pot: donations from the faithful, which Western sources say exceeded $200-million a year, along with tens of millions more in weaponry. Meanwhile, military camps originally financed by the Saudis and staffed by Americans to prepare Islamic warriors for battle against Russian designs in Afghanistan were being used to train Islamic terrorists in their battle against just about everybody else. And since this was the encampment of the officer corps, it was where the maps were being drawn for the passage ahead.

By all accounts, Turabi was the reason Khartoum had become the center of thinking and action for Islamic revivalists. He had opened up Sudan to veterans of the Afghan War, as well as raw recruits wanting to become jihadists, and made sure they were housed and fed and trained. Additionally, acting as talent scout, matchmaker and affable host, he ran things like a salon, constantly putting together confabs, lunches and get-togethers, urging the best and the brightest in radical Islam to meet, to network, to co-ordinate thinking and action. Only a unified force, he told me, can hope to establish a new world order, with Islam calling the shots. One, together, hundreds of millions of us, Islam will be unstoppable, he said, tapping his right temple, then his heart.

At the time, Osama bin Laden was considered a rich kid with a mixed reputation as a fighter. His money bought him attention; his unflagging dedication to jihad made him stick out; and his knack for logistics garnered him respect. Earlier, during conversations with various commanders in the Afghan war, bin Laden was described as just the kind of man you want behind the lines to keep an army going. These men thought it funny that bin Laden’s organizational skills were honed early on, as a teenager, by retired CIA officers also working for the family construction company while building the Saudi infrastructure. Not once did anyone remark on bin Laden’s qualities as an orator, thinker or strategist.

Eat. Please. Start. I’m almost done, Turabi encouraged, covering the speaker end of the phone. I reached for a date; bin Laden, however, didn’t move, still intent on the wall. Turabi smiled at me, then nodded and returned to his phone call.

***

Back then, in the early-to-mid-1990s, Turabi was Mister Big Deal, not bin Laden. He was the acknowledged power in Sudan, a Geppetto pulling the strings of a puppet-like president. Turabi both designed and engineered the Islamization of Sudan during his days as Sudan’s Attorney General. He soon exited politics to assume greater prominence as Islam’s eminence grise, directing the flow of global events through his speeches, religious writings and, when necessary, whispered commands to politicians. Without doubt, he was both the leading intellectual of fundamentalist Islam and its star on the world stage, the go-to man for presidents and pope.

Thanks to Turabi, civil law in Sudan was replaced by sharia, which treats crime as an affront to the Koran, and is enforced with a passion absent in the West. Cops from the moral squads prowled the streets, on patrol for bared female legs, heads and midriffs, and kept watch for couples holding hands or, god forbid, kissing in public, rock music and other signifiers of Western pop culture. Being caught with a bottle of beer, for instance, merited a six month prison term; the second offense earned another six months in jail, plus twenty lashes from a whip made out of camel’s tails. Because of Turabi, Sudan had been recast in religious terms, with Allah and his Prophet Mohammed providing context and direction. At last, after waiting more than one thousand years, according to Turabi, the world’s 700 million-plus Sunni Muslims could draw inspiration from fundamentalism in action.

I first met Turabi by chance. It happened the day after I arrived in Khartoum, as I nosed around the back wing of Friendship Hall, the mammoth conference center designed by Russians and built atop sand by the Chinese. An international religious conference was going on in the main hall and some heavy hitters were attending, like Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Nigerian on many short lists to become the next Pope. Mostly though, the conference seemed a scripted event for the Muslim delegates to pat themselves on the back between rounds of applause for Turabi and his cause: Islam’s dominance over corrupt value sets, i.e. Western countries and cultures.

I left the auditorium to prowl the building, not sure where I was headed and hoping for a surprise. Perhaps I’d stumble on a smoke-filled room. It was rumored that Arinze was here as part of a quid pro quo that Turabi brokered in exchange for Muslim support against a feminist agenda at the upcoming Cairo International Conference on Population and Development. Or maybe I’d happen on an interrogation room used by security forces. Sudan had one of the world’s worst records of human rights abuse, and routinely imprisoned citizens in public and private buildings. The dungeonesque quality of some of the rooms I visited (chairs with straps on the arms, chains hanging from the ceiling, empty ashtrays on a table and dozens of butts under a chair) brought torture to mind.

As I turned a corner, entering a darkened hallway, Turabi appeared ghostlike in the distance. He was backlit, his features obscured and shape eerily outlined. I approached with caution. He stood in place, his hands invisible inside the voluminous sleeves of his snow-white robe. My eyes fixed on his turbaned head, which looked preternaturally large for his body. Closing in, I could at last discern his eyeglasses and white patent-leather shoes that blend perfectly with his robe. He squinted and cocked his head. He had thought I was someone he knew.

I introduced myself.

Oh, yes, you must be the American, he said, shaking hands. Please remind me who you are working for.

Spin magazine, I replied.

Spin? What is Spin? he asked, leading me down the hallway.

Rock’n’Roll, sir.

Oh, dear, that’s too bad.

He picked up the pace and I stayed with him until three bodyguards appeared out of nowhere. They positioned themselves between Turabi and me and, as I kept chattering, I could hear them muttering accusations at each other for not intercepting me earlier. Turabi, always polite, kept giving answers over his shoulder, and we set a date to meet.

***

Turabi rejoined us at the table, and we all dug into the food. Our host guided the conversation, talking about model-making and how many pieces had to be glued together before the job could be declared done. Believe me, he said, we’re only at the beginning of Islam’s march. Soon, many nations will become one. And God’s voice will thunder. Sudan, he claimed, was merely the staging area for the worldwide expansion of fundamentalist Islam.

This is true, bin Laden piped, and repeated himself. Soon, soon, God’s army will assemble, he added.

Turabi resumed speed and forecast the future: It won’t be long before Islamic fundamentalism defines a vast geography. Listen, he demanded, pointing at me: we will be bigger than the European Union…We will be more powerful than America…The power that once belonged to Russia will be ours, yes, ours… Try the cheese. It’s delicious.

Is it French? I asked, knowing Turabi refined his taste for fine threads and food as a law student in England and later, during his time studying for a Ph.D in Paris.

I wish, Turabi said wistfully.

Bin Laden, however, insisted Muslim hands make the best of everything and speared a date with a paring knife.

Turabi shrugged but didn’t correct his guest. It’s important, he told me earlier, that Khartoum welcome all types willing to fight for Islam. It’s the only way to insure that revivalists from around the world have somewhere to share information and collaborate on all levels. He’ll offer whatever it takes to come up with an attack plan that banishes modernism and other products of the Enlightenment.

As everyone downed some cheese (delicious) and went quiet while struggling with the bread (zestless and chewy), I recalled an earlier session with Turabi when, bluntly, I asked him, What is fundamentalism?

Hmmm. Fundamentalism. What is fundamentalism? he repeated my question. He toyed with a paperclip and kept at it, until, suddenly, I realized that it would be an interminable wait. He was asking me for the answer. But I only knew fundamentalism in terms of Christianity.

Precisely, Turabi said, suddenly animated, and went on to remind me of fundamentalism’s American roots. I filled in the rest: The word was coined in the early 20th Century, during the great Protestant debate over relevancy: The majority of Protestant Fundamentalists favored coming to grips with Darwin and evolution, science and its systems of proof; the minority wanted no change and felt comfortable in maintaining the old view of biblical language as divinely derived. Out of this contest sprang the Protestant Evangelicals, who have been spearheading the battle against liberalism ever since.

I prefer revivalism to fundamentalism, Turabi said, but wasn’t upset by my decision to employ both words. Americans usually do what they want anyway, he observed.

According to Turabi, the Islamic revivalist movement rises out of two seemingly dissimilar forces: reaction and revolution, as much a voice of conservatism as an undeterred enforcer of Islam’s establishing spirit. In essence, it is opposed to any secular culture that encroaches on a Muslim’s ability to practice his or her faith, which, being a comprehensive religion, permeates all aspects and measures of life. The world is beset by demonic forces, the fundamentalist believes, and it is the duty of Muslims to combat Satan in whatever guise. The Koran offers the believer a full set of plans on which to build a perfect life, and Allah’s Prophet Mohammed provides construction tips through His example. Anything that denigrates the premier role of the Koran or even competes for attention is, by definition, morally corrupt and fair game for attack. If the climate is off one degree or 180-degrees, the revivalist must seek socio-moral change. For the revivalist, Islam is not an alternative, it is an imperative.

To regain Islam’s rightful place as a global superpower, Muslims must be exposed to that original force and reawakened again, Turabi told me, referring to the vitality that spurred the inaugural march of the green flag in the first millennium. In his way of thinking Islamic power ebbed, Allah’s armies sent in retreat and Arab ambitions stymied, when people started drifting away from the truth, letting the memory and example of Mohammed give way to an era of self-satisfaction and monarchy rule. Out of it all, a power elite emerged and closed the doors on the masses, excluding them from the decision-making process shaping Muslim lifestyles and sharia. And as people continued to distance themselves from a stripped down, pure form of Islam, an unfortunate tradition took hold that allowed Western ideas to contaminate Islamic society.

I told him he was hallucinating, merely trying to substantiate an historical mirage. The past is far too messy to explain in one clean sweep, and religious fervor can’t possibly explain 400-years of war and peace, growth and contraction. He said I missed the boat. The Koran and the Prophet’s life guided those glory days; all he is trying to do is construct a model Islamic state that allows history to repeat itself. Islam, he reminded me, means ‘Surrender.’ And the moment the state surrenders all power to Allah, the community will benefit. Sharia will insure this by turning the power pyramid upside down and letting the masses decide what course to steer. This will do away with royals and cronyism and allow all to prosper, just as the Koran dictates…

Western history books, he claimed, were wrong, flat out wrong when discussing both the sudden rise of Islam and its decline. Religious purity, not timing and opportunity, impelled the initial wave of Muslim troops. It didn’t matter to him that both the Byzantine and Persian empires were crumbling and vulnerable to attack. What counts is the religious energy that carried Umar ibn al-Khattab’s army through Damascus, Egypt and Persia in ten short years. Later, the march of Islam stalled, he insisted, not because of banal logistical difficulties attendant to swift expansion, but due to religious corruption. Only Revivalists can rekindle that old time fire. And only revivalists can once again form an unstoppable army. Allah’s troops, he asserted, are free of confusion spawned by doubt or mission, and both its commanders and grunts welcome death as an entry card into heaven. Simply put, in life and death the pure can’t lose.

Back at the table, Turabi, cleared his mouth of the last of the bread, and advised his guests to stick with the fruit and cheese. Bin Laden piped in that he liked it, that all the chewing made him think while he ate. Turabi sighed, but caught himself before chiding his guest; instead, he winked my way and left it at that. Seconds later he pulled bin Laden close by taking aim at the House of Saud and blasting all monarchist and secular governments in the Arab orbit. He considered them prime examples of human frailty clouding the immutable words of Allah and rejected the medieval systems of interpretation that justified Muslim kings. Those regimes must be toppled to free people of their great burden and, at the same time, fuel the spread of revivalist Islam, he said, eliciting a broad smile from bin Laden. Turabi then put those nations on notice and predicted their downfall. Oh, they will be toppled, he explained, because the longer they remain in power, the more corrupt they become, and the greater the need for revolution and rehabilitation. Mothers and fathers and all their children will all take part and attack the wicked beast, he asserted, adding, Islam, the Islam of the Prophet, will guide us to greatness.

Yes. Yes. Right. It will happen. It must, bin Laden cheered, and then went quiet, resuming his nodding in sequence to Turabi’s phrasing.

Suddenly, though, when Turabi changed the subject to reprimand me for being arrested a second time, bin Laden grimaced and ran his eyes up and down my body as if sizing up a lamb carcass. Three strikes and you’re out, I’m warned; certainly, Turabi wouldn’t bail me out again.

A few days before, I was thrown in jail for the second time, arrested inside African International University, the college of choice among radical Muslims looking for a career in terrorism. It offered advanced training in theology and bomb-making, and alumni left Khartoum for neighboring countries endowed with wads of money, missionary zeal and weaponry to preach the gospel of Turabi. Much like John the Baptist, they ventured into the world of the unbeliever and prepared the way for a religious revolution, but instead of crosiers they leaned on AK47s. As I walked by a university building, the pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from a basement shooting range lured me inside with a camera and a notebook.

You stay away from there; no Westerners allowed, bin Laden scolded me. He was aghast that a bald, pasty-white Westerner could walk uninterrupted through school doors. He told Turabi security had to be tightened and then he revved his engine, raising his voice and speaking far too quickly for me to understand. Turabi interpreted before abruptly laughing and saying, Yes, you’re right. To keep bin Laden from going on and on, slamming me, along with American foreign policy, for putting our noses where they didn’t belong, Turabi talked about a sermon he was scheduled to record later that day. As he briefed us about what he was going say, bin Laden leaned into every word.

While Turabi played host to the officer corps, video and audio cassettes of his speeches took him deep into the hearts and minds of the average grunt manning the front lines. Usually poorly educated, sometimes illiterate, the foot soldiers memorized these speeches and, eventually, let their AK-47s and Turabi speak for them. Inevitably, in jail cells from New Jersey to New Caledonia, captured revolutionaries spouted Turabi’s words in answer to almost any kind of question involving identity (Who are you? What army?) and purpose (Why are you shooting at us?).

Orange Fanta was brought in, and the conversation drifted toward Egypt. Turabi lamented the state of the revolution there and went on about his favorite topic: cement-work. There could be no great victory, no genuine advance in the cause, until the various splinter groups in each and every country acted in concert. And, of course, this is why he expected the bonds forged in the Sudan to connect scores of different revolutionary groups around the world. Rising out of it all: a juggernaut able to role over and squash Western ideology.

Bin Laden weighed in. Planning. Planning. Planning, he said. The old, tribal way of fighting is dead. Although bin Laden kept racing along, now speaking very quickly in Arabic, Turabi kept silent and handed me the silver platter of fruit and cheese. When, finally, Bin Laden finished his rant, he clicked his tongue as he glanced at me and let his eyes rest on our host. In return, Turabi offered him a tired look, a professor surveying an eager but not especially bright student and handed him a napkin, along with advice to clear the debris of bread and cheese clinging to his beard.

The fuel for the coming Islamic revolution was being bunkered as we sat and talked, Turabi informed me. From earlier discussions I knew he was referring to sophisticated weaponry, like Stinger missiles, which, more than any other single bit of weaponry sent the Russians out of Afghanistan. What was missing, he added, was the spark that will set events into motion. He wasn’t sure what that spark exactly was, but he knew it would rally millions under one banner and ignite an unstoppable march of Islamic soldiers. He was convinced, like bin Laden, that once things started moving, fundamentalist Islam would recreate those 300-years, from 650-to-950, when Muslim armies established an empire that reached from Spain to Afghanistan.

I lost count of the number of times bin Laden nodded his head and whispered, Yes, yes, God is great.

A few minutes later, a secretary walked in and said something to Turabi that merited his immediate attention. Lunch, my friends, is over. Back to work.

Bin Laden and I walked through the courtyard, into the gatehouse waiting room and matched steps to the street. A Mercedes was waiting for him. Did I need a ride, he asked? I declined and after a short walk around the block, I returned to the waiting room. It was where I sat day after day, waiting for Turabi to call me inside for ten minutes, maybe twenty, perhaps hours. It depended on his mood, his schedule, and how good my questions were during the previous meet.

As usual, the waiting room was packed. Abu Nidal was there, as well as representatives of al-Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Red Hand Commandos and other, smaller organizations. Everyone was candid about his association with one or another extremist group. But no one would talk about his work in public; instead, we chatted about the weather (unrelenting heat) and local soccer action (unexciting club teams).

In private, however, one man I met in the waiting room was happy to blab, in return for a free meal. He had been trained as a doctor, spoke perfect English, and we hooked up several times a week at a fancy café, where he got to order whatever he wanted. His name was Ahmed al-Zawahiri and during one meal, he asked me about bin Laden. Turabi, he confided, thought they would make a good team and suggested they combine attributes: Ahmed’s big brain with Osama’s organizational skills and thick wallet. I reckoned he would jump at the chance to partner up, since he was scrapping bottom, broke and limited in his reach, with more enemies than friends back home in Egypt, while bin Laden was loaded and had big plans.

I bumped into bin Laden a few times later on. We shook hands and left it at that. He didn’t strike me as a particularly interesting character. Money had given him things others had to work for, and their stories were much more revealing. Besides, over the course of my six weeks in Khartoum, I came to understand bin Laden as a small part of a colossal machine that was growing day by day. Indeed, Turabi was the top man in a hierarchy of one. Directly under him were hundreds of dedicated believers, each a fighter, and a select few, like bin Laden, rich enough to finance their own groups within the umbrella organization.

What resonated for me, and I’m sure, for thousands of others in Khartoum at the same time, were Turabi’s words. They empowered the fighter and scared the hell out of me. For instance, on a Sunday, Turabi told me there is a renaissance of Islam coming. We are rising again, with Jews all around us…It’s part of a historical cycle. Islam will be on top again…Dramatic explosions, he predicted, will propel Islam’s army and reconfigure governments along an East-West axis. And throughout his sermons and pamphlets picked up by millions, he issues a call to arms, urging the faithful to usher in a new world order based on that old time religion preached by the Prophet.

From Khartoum, I headed south, into the heart of what was then rebel territory, where armies were locked in war against Turabi and the Government of Sudan. The year before, in 1993, I had spent three months traveling with one army and nothing had changed: South Sudan remained hell on earth, a place where the horrific had twisted itself into the routine. The smell of death was inescapable across an area larger than Texas, the direct consequence of a civil war pitting a southern black population of Christians and animists against the Islamists based in the North. The war had run hot then cold ever since Sudan gained independence from England in the 1950s, and no one I met thought it would end until a new country was born. One rebel leader told me there shouldn’t be any hope for reconciliation. That would be foolish, he said, because the Islamists are Arabs or think like Arabs and Arabs, believe me, are racists.

Those accusatory words brought to mind something Turabi said to me denying the rich cultural heritage of tens of millions of people who happen to be black. Africa, he told me, is virgin land and he was sure it would be easy to conquer. Why? Because it is fertile, he answered, ripe for the Islamic seed. It is land that hasn’t been planted again and again, civilization after civilization. What is there in Africa but tribalism?

At the dawn of a new century, Turabi lost power. The downfall played out like a Greek tragedy, when the puppet president hooked up with disgruntled former protégées of the master and decreed that their time had come. Turabi, they said, was out of touch, old and detached from the vitality of the masses, and in the way of the cause he once espoused: the march of the green flag. After the putsch, he was jailed, then put under house arrest house and picked clean, losing his titles and any snap to his punch. The phone stopped ringing and his repeated attempts to make a comeback failed.
The new regime quickly showed itself to be more strident and less elastic than anything that preceded it, intent, I suppose, to out Turabi Turabi and establish its own brand. Turabi told me that he loved to read Shakespeare, and I never doubted him. He was a debater, easy to engage and always willing to enter a dialogue. But the new gang in charge lived in a world of whites and blacks and were quickly tiresome talkers, always quick to lecture me about two things: me (impertinent American journalist, sinner and spy) or America (the home of Satan and Islam’s enemy).

Most worrisome, I thought, was the fanaticism that the new order wore like badges of honor. Shallow thinkers, they never went deep, the Koran the one and only book they ever referenced. Indeed, the men I met from the officer corps didn’t think beyond the mission at hand: destruction of Western culture, with the rise of Islam in its place. In the process, they ratcheted up terrorism beyond anything the West had ever experienced before.

Moreover, the new leadership, as well as the next generation coming up, proved themselves humorless. Their idea of a joke came out their experiences in training camps built by the US; they laughed at the mention of their training by former Green Berets and SAS troops. I came away believing these men derived warped enjoyment any time they could tear a page out of the bible and rub it in Western faces. In particular, I kept thinking about the gospel of St. Mathew describing a Savior killed for the sins of others. And now, after watching Zero Dark Thirty, I wonder how history will judge us. I fear that we will be found myopic, our focus on revenge, the long view blurred. I fear the process used in killing him will launch bin Laden’s star and lead others on a journey like his.

Dear Thomas Reese:

Your comments on CNN to Piers Morgan (February 25th, 2013) regarding allegations of gay sexual activity in the Vatican are a perfect example of the casuistry I learned to reject – though the lesson wasn't always carefully taught – during my 12 years of Catholic education, fortunately tempered by the winds of reform under John XXIII, even as I at the end of the reign of Pius XII was learning Latin and serving as altar boy in a changing Church. I went on to other worlds from the Peoria into which I was born, baptized by the Rev. Athanathius Ostermeyer at St. Boniface Church and a great hybrid Catholic/secular education at Spalding Institute/Academy of Our Lady where reformist priests and nuns opened the world to curious students. I am forever indebted to the Catholic Church for having challenged me – as my not traditionally Catholic parents also did – to learn well and speak truth to power. I unfortunately know that my Peoria alma mater is now a John Paul II reactionary institution even giving academic credit for students writing anti-gay-marriage appeals to legislators.

As it happens, while in high school I realized I was both atheist and gay, traits well thought out and explored later as an undergraduate at Trinity College/Hartford (not a religious institution, even though while there I intensively studied the history of religious thought and biblical studies).

In the CNN Piers Morgan interview you made the odd case that yes, there are priests who are homosexuals, but that it was somehow anti-gay to accuse such priests of unrestrained homosexual activity (as opposed to straights who might be more capable of self-control). You also discounted the thought that such homosexual clerics have undue influence within the Vatican. That is the casuistic part of your position: you appear to be defending gay people from a charge of profligacy but you're actually trying to deflect attention from a contradiction that amounts to a moral disaster: the gay clergy’s homosexual behavior and influence in an institution which says homosexuality is an “intrinsic disorder.” [Josef Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, 1986.]

Growing up Catholic it was always obvious that the priesthood was for many homosexual men a way out of having to explain why they were not interested sexually in women and heterosexual marriage. Given the increasing social acceptance of gay relationships, this institutionalization of a kind of normalized homosexuality within the Catholic Church hierarchy has finally caught up with the Catholic Church in both its social message and its internal social relations. It's not the “gay pedophile” scandals but rather the out lives of people such as myself (once Catholic) and my Jewish same-sex spouse that have made the issue of homosexualiy a non-issue for all but the most intransigent bigots and casuists dedicated to keeping the Church’s dirty little secret.

Even if out gay people outside the Church are (with good reason) criticizing hypocritical homosexual priests and their ecclesiastical privileges, such criticism also comes now from honest Church members – gay and straight – who object to the hypocrisy of the Church as an institution willing to cast blame on others in same-sex loving relationships while its clergy indulges behind closed doors in behaviors it publicly condemns, seemingly to protect its status as an all-male club hostile even now to the very nuns (witness the investigations here in the United States of women religious orders) who have historically provided the backbone of the Church's work in education and healthcare, and without whom the Catholic Church would have collapsed decades ago, and of which I am a prime, thankful beneficiary.

When I lived in Rome (1972; 1975-79) it was well known that the Vatican was full of gay prelates, priests and seminarians, including many I met at gay clubs/discos such as Easy Going, SuperStar, and St. James. Most of these young guys were confused and in Rome having fled their provincial lives as gay refugees much as conservative Midwestern and southern American members of Congress are in D.C./Georgetown to live the “gay life” (whatever that might mean to them) even as they proclaim their opposition to gay rights to the folks back home.

Casuistry? I hope you get my point.

Dean Scream

I’m wary of having too much fun when I’m on the side that’s won so I cut out from tv festivities on Inauguration Day to attend a Serious Times seminar on Occupy Wall Street. While the timing of that OWS meet seemed to underscore a snarky point made by Thomas Frank in a review of books about Occupiers – “Measured in terms of words published per political results…OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time” – one grad student’s talkback at the conclave lifted me as much as Obama’s oration earlier in the day. It was bracing when this young woman – a former participant in Oakland’s OWS who’s currently committed to Occupy Sandy’s exercises in mutual aid – expressed astonished contempt for the gross cynicism of a political theorist named Jodi Dean.

Professor Dean had used her time at Serious Times to go live with a Call for a new Communist Party. (Got dead if you want it at Amazon which is selling Ms. Dean’s new book, The Communist Horizon [Alternate Title: Blue Skies in the Gulag].) Dean’s song of Leninism (and Ooh-Mao-Mao) had me humming “Springtime for Hitler” under my breath. And sure enough winter roared in once that student had the temerity to tell Dean lying might not be a good way to build a political movement. The prof got icy when the OWS vet recalled how opportunists with only a virtual connection to the local movement in Oakland rankled actual Occupiers there by promoting unsanctioned actions. What really bugged Oakland OWSers were attendant false reports in social media that wildly inflated numbers of souls at side-shows. Professor Dean claimed not to grasp why any OWSer would have issues with shadowy outliers hyping sect (or solo) actions. She accused the OWS vet of pity partying and talked up a politics of “rising expectations.”

Given that Dean is a wannabe Communist Party cadre, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when she copped to her ease with the prospect of outside factions conflating their agendas with that of a consensual local movement. Still, for an American, it’s sort of a stunner to run into an unapologetically undemocratic politico. And I’m glad that OWS innocent’s voice (and face) registered her shock at the Prof’s s'all good trashing of truth.

Dean’s attitude once ruled half the world. Here’s how it twisted dailiness in Eastern Bloc countries according to one Polish witness:

The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people. Mass exterminations are not exceptions in history; cruelty is part of human nature, part of society. But a new third dimension had been added that was more deeply and subtly oppressive: a vast enterprise to deform language…Lying is part of human nature and all governments are hypocritical, but here all the means of disclosure had been permanently confiscated by the police…the viler the deed, the more grandiloquent the name.

Blood-Red rumor-mongers like Dean may be clueless, but anyone sentient during the last century knows what’s beyond the “Communist Horizon”: Big Lies and screams. Per this famous passage in Whittaker Chambers’ Witness where he hears out “the daughter of a German diplomat in Moscow who explains…why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist”:

It was hard for her because as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. “He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”

Confronted with Communist vision in 2013, Serious Times seminarians probably felt closer to Chambers’ “enlightened modern girl” than to her implacable pop, but, thankfully, nobody seemed juiced by Professor Dean's willful beamishness. That Occupier from Oakland preferred Thomas Franks’ doomy riffs on OWS. I pushed back a bit there, suggesting OWS’s 99% rhetoric had more staying power in mainline politics than Frank allows, especially after it was amped up by Mitt’s diss of the 47%.

Though I may have lost Oaktown – and militant haters of Dems – in the Q&A by invoking advice of C.L.R. James who once said American leftists must learn to live with the fact American “workers” had made a home in the Democratic Party.[1] His stance reminds me now of Whittaker Chambers’ flip response to ‘50s Movement Conservatives who dreamt of a purer vehicle for their ideology than Ike’s Republican Party. Chambers told them he’d be voting the straight Republican ticket for the foreseeable. I’d’ve been with James, not Chambers. But even in our Tea Party time, I’d go for the G.O.P. in a heartbeat over an American C.P. made up of Deaniacs.

Black Russian

My subway reading to and from Dean’s horizon happened to be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate – the great Russian World War II novel (based on the structure of War on Peace) that’s probably the definitive protest against 20th Century Fascism and Communism. My life rarely arranges itself into such sequences of point-counterpoint. Though I’m reminded the day I found a torn-up copy of Chambers’ Witness in Riverside Park I saw Victor Navasky coming out of Columbia U.’s gates. Navasky being the last fervent apologist for Chambers’ antithesis Alger Hiss, I figured then I was fated to read Witness. I was already into Grossman's Life and Fate but Professor Dean's mug and mouth steered me to Grossman's last word on Communism, Everything Flows.

Young Grossman had been a True Believer. He was a comer in Soviet letters in the ‘30s. Maxim Gorky praised the first draft of Grossman’s first novel, but, as Robert Chandler notes in his intro to the NYRB classics reprint of Life and Fate, Gorky sensed the new star might prove prickly for commissars.

Gorky suggested that the author should ask himself: “Why am I writing? Which truth am I confirming? Which truth do I wish to triumph?” Even then such a cynical attitude would almost certainly have been anathema to Grossman. It is hard, however, not to be impressed by Gorky’s intuition. It is as if he sensed where Grossman’s love of truth might lead him. In…a story written a few years later, Grossman quoted the maxim “Absolute truth is the most beautiful thing of all.” And in 1961 after the manuscript of Life and Fate had been confiscated, Grossman would write to Khrushchev: “I have written in my book what I believed and continue to believe to be the truth. I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.”

The author of Life and Fate “did not come back from hell empty-handed” (to lift Andre Malraux’s line on Chambers’ Witness). Grossman’s novel was founded on his experience as an ace war reporter who covered the bulk of major battles on the Eastern front up to the fall of Berlin. He published “The Hell of Treblinka” – one of the first eyewitness accounts in any language about a Nazi death camp – in 1944 and after the war helped compile The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War 1941–1945, which was suppressed by the Soviets. Life and Fate reflects Grossman’s clarity about the rise of anti-Semitism in Stalinist Russia. If Stalin hadn’t died in 1952, Grossman himself would probably have been a victim of anti-Jewish purges. He worked throughout the 50s on Life and Fate, a novel of terrible and lyrical realism that speaks “for those who lie in the earth.” It nails Stalinism by portraying “the important and evil” along with dozens of morally complex yet representative Russian characters (as well as a few “good Germans”). Around the time the KGB arrested the text, the politburo’s chief ideologist implicitly confirmed the book was for the Ages when he told Grossman it couldn’t be published for 200 or 300 years. (Life and Fate didn’t come out in Russia until the late 80s.) Grossman was almost broken by the State, but he kept working until his death in 1964 on his other masterpiece, Everything Flows – a hybrid novel/testament that builds toward a passionate polemic against Leninism.

I might not have rushed to read Everything Flows if Dean hadn’t clowned herself at the Serious Times colloquium. Her Millennial Leninism sent me directly to Grossman’s critique of her idol. Though Everything Flows contains much more than that polemic. Grossman’s version of the anti-Kulak campaign and the resulting famine in the Ukraine felt even more urgent to me than Life and Fate’s scenes inside the Lubyanka and the death camps. You can read that section as a standalone set-piece. (And you should do so ASAP.) But on to Grossman’s Lenin. First there’s the Word:

The twenty-eight volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works – speeches, reports, programmes, economic and philosophical studies – did not help Russia to know herself and her fate. The result of confusing Western revolution and Russian ways of life was a chaos greater than that of the Tower of Babel.

Grossman doesn’t pretend the echt Bolshevik was one-dimensional. He knows young Lenin wasn’t a thug like young Stalin. Grossman cites passages in memoirs attesting to Lenin’s softer side: “In his personal relationships…Lenin was always polite, sensitive, and kind. Yet…

Lenin was always rude, harsh, and implacable toward his political opponents. He never admitted the least possibility that they might even be partially right, that he might be partially wrong…Lenin’s concern in an argument was not with truth but with victory…– and to this end he was happy to employ any rhetorical means. He was equally ready to trip his opponent from behind, to give him a metaphorical slap in the face, or to daze him with a metaphorical blow on the head…And when the dispute moved from the pages of a newspaper and magazines to the streets, when it moved to military battlefield or to fields of rye – then too there was nothing that Lenin shrank from, no tactics too vicious for him to employ…Lenin’s intolerance, his unshakeable drive to achieve his purpose, his contempt for freedom, his brutality toward those who did not share his views, his unwavering readiness to wipe off the face of the earth not only fortresses but also whole districts, regions, and provinces that challenged his view of the truth – all this was a part of Lenin long before October.

Grossman keeps trying to get a fix on the mystery of Lenin’s personality: “The ability to trample one’s opponent into the mud without a second thought, to deafen and stun him during an argument, combined with a sweet smile, with a shy sensitivity.” But, in the end, he’s not stuck on Lenin’s character. What matters is how it fit with the “national character of the Russian people and then with the overall thrust of Russian history.” In Grossman’s mind, that history has been marked by an “abyss” separating Russian life from Western life: “The evolution of the West was fertilized by the growth of freedom; Russia’s evolution was fertilized by the growth of slavery.” Grossman looks back to Tsars who laid the foundations for Russian scientific and industrial progress and notes their work “involved an equally remarkable progress in the severity of serfdom.” Then he flashes forward to the 19th Century:

The emancipation of the serfs [in 1861] – as we can see from the history of the following century was more truly revolutionary than the October Revolution. The emancipation of the serfs shook Russia’s thousand year-old foundation, a foundation that neither Peter the Great nor Lenin had so much as touched…In February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin.

And Grossman tells exactly how that choice shook the world: “What the Russian Revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself.” 20th Century Russia no longer looked to the Enlightened West, but offered rulers (and toadies) a new path: “of modernization through non-freedom.”

Post-moderns like Dean and other new Leninists mean to go back to that dead end. Who knows if Everything Flows could turn them around? But Grossman’s rap against non-freedom fighters should have resonance for any American. Especially after our last presidential election in a year that marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grossman’s analysis of Lenin’s Russian way of being should help us all – liberal-minded conservatives in particular! – dig the persona of the beautifully American democrat in the oval office.

Grossman’s lucid formulations translate pretty easily from the Russian context to our own. Try this one: “The only true revolutionaries are those who seek to destroy the very foundation of the Old Russia: her slave soul.” The novelist’s sense of how Great Emancipations play out over generations (and how it feels when the whip comes back down after freer times) makes him a brother under the skin of everyone in African American freedom struggles. Please don’t understand me too quickly (as they say in Russian novels). No American should jump to equate our national experience of slavery with Russia’s. Or blame social deficits of America’s black nation on “post traumatic slave syndrome” rather than a range of government policies implemented since the New Deal that have amounted to affirmative action for white people. Whatever the most proximate causes, though, slavish sides of underclass life still instantiate institutional racism. And, on that score, Obama’s cool persona is countercultural. As a white Southern liberal has noted, “those are not softballs he’s throwing at card-carrying white supremacists.” Obama is an American equivalent of those “true revolutionaries” Grossman envisioned (and Russia’s still waiting on).

Flo Ridas

The radicalism of our current American revolution tends to go right by American radicals. Obama may have linked his Inauguration with progress of liberation movements – “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall…” – but that got him bupkis from Serious Timers. Professor Dean’s first respondent at her S.T. lecture – a poet and essayist named Jasper Bernes – dismissed Obama’s push on gay rights. Bernes had the President pegged as a poll-driven pol who was following trends, not acting on principles. But he forgot Obama hasn’t always played it safe on gays. Back in the 2008 campaign, Obama delivered a sermon from Daddy King’s pulpit in Atlanta where he chastised black church folk for scorning “our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them.” Obama was out in front of much of his base again when he came out for marriage equality and his “evolution” changed public opinion in black communities where gay rights are now favored by a majority due to his intervention.

That’s not to say Obama has always been the boldest leader. But he seems more straightforward now about his own political agenda and easier with his own (and others’) emotions. There was that sequence after the inaugural when he paused and turned to the massive crowd on the National Mall saying (loud enough for the media to pick up): “I want to take a look one more time. I’m not going to see this again.” And there was his choice at the peak of his State of the Union address to go silent; to ride the flow of echoes in the chamber before amping up the crowd’s message: “They deserve a vote.”

Obama’s call and responsiveness then testifies to his experience of African American cultural forms. His rootsy interlude at the SOTU brings to mind Amiri Baraka’s line from Blues People: “Negro music is always radical in the context of formal American culture.”

A line that seems both right on and way out time given Beyonce’s lip-synching at the Inaugural. While Beyonce gives glory to bod, there’s nothing rad behind her music except her behind. When Beyonce covered the late Etta James’ “At Last” at the 2009 Inaugural Ball, it was a devolution from wild and blue Ms. James. And why wasn’t Al Green singing “Let’s Stay Together” at this year’s Ball instead of Jennifer Hudson who’s a much thinner talent?

Those may be relatively trivial questions but thinking about them helped me zero in on a pop song that sound-tracked Inaugural sensations in my house. Florida rapper Flo Rida’s “Good Feeling” – a hit track from his CD Wild Ones – is fluff but it’s all up in this moment: “I could be president one day.” The hook is an Etta James sample: “Sometimes I get a good feeling…A feeling that I never never never never had before.” Flo sings along with her (as he often does with samples in his songs) sounding like he's intent on getting his kicks too. His amateurish voice implicitly welcomes listeners into the mix. Everyone is invited to join the party and sing along too. (They deserve a vote!) In (and out of) tune with authentic traditions of black music – and Obama’s reboot – Flo refuses to let perfect be the enemy of good feeling.

“The Art of Peer Pressure”

Good feeling in Rapper of the Year Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, mA.A.d city is always dicey:

Bitch don't kill my vibe
I can feel your energy from two planets away
I got my drink I got my music I will share it but today I'm yelling
Bitch don't kill my vibe

Why are Lamar and the folks he speaks to/for hunkered down in the Obama era? His concept CD suggests pervasive gun violence lies close to the root of their anxiety. Fear (and rage) shapes everything about everyday life in Lamar's mad scary city.

Ezra Pound once said: “It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.” good kid, mA.A.d city’s stress may be a far cry from The Cantos. (OTOH, it’s not a stretch to homologize Lamar's rapping for “the ones in front of the gun” with Vasily Grossman’s speaking for "those who lie in the ground.”) But per Pound: “here the thing is done.”

…Look at me
I got the blunt in my mouth
Usually I’m drug free
But, shit, I’m wit the homies

Lamar’s steer through “me” to his peers has much in common with the Reflector-in-Chief’s act of self-awareness after his Inaugural speech, which turned the focus back on the massive audience incarnating the party of hope mobilized by his campaigns. Plenty of Kendrick Lamar’s soul brothers were in that crowd, but good kid, mA.A.d city brings home the truth America – and that dreamy bunch on the Mall – is not “just like Compton” where Lamar comes from.

Though there are good and bad points of intersection. Obama noted one when he linked dangers facing city kids with what happened on “quiet lanes in Newtown.” Our exemplary rapper has Obama's back. First time through mA.A.d city I thought Lamar might be alluding to West Coast police departments' use of helicopters to cover far-flung neighborhoods when he cites "choppers" (repeatedly). My bad: “chopper” is Lamar’s street term for an assault rifle – “one chopper – one hundred shots bang…two chopper – two hundred shots bang…”

Shots from choppers in Lamar’s synesthesiatic “Swimming Pool (Drank)” meld with (anesthetic) shots of hard liquor.

Pour up, drank, head shot, drank
Sit down, drank, stand up, drank
Pass out, drank, wake up, drank
Faded, drank, faded, drank

“Swimming Pool (Drank)’s” drunk ends in an episode of “black-on-black” violence that sparks a post-cathartic move to mindfulness. Having witnessed a killing of his homie “Dave,” Lamar realizes his vocation as a truly conscious rapper on “Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst.” He will tell his story (per his mom’s urging) “to these black and brown kids…let em know you was just like them but you rose from a dark place of violence.” And that story won’t be a single one (even if Lamar is a singular talent). It will embrace those who made it out of the ghetto, those stuck on the streets, and “casualties of war” like Dave or Lamar’s own Uncle Tony (who was shot when the rapper was 11 years old and whose picture is on the cover of mA.A.d city).

In “Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst,” Lamar stretches himself, imagining lives on the margin beyond his own fam and crew. He assumes voices of a drylonso Brother and Sister. First he does “Dave’s” living brother and then (daringly) raps as a young street-walker – “you can’t fit the pumps I walk in” – sister of a lost girl whose story he’d told on a previous CD. The thirsty Brother is a gang-banger who celebrates Lamar’s gift and wishes for a similar “passion” that would let him recover “the life I knew as a young’n/in pajamas and Dun-ta-duns.” (A term for kids’ underwear with superhero pics, “dud ta dun dun” being the soundtrack that accompanies a hero's entrance.[2]) The thirsty Sister is not a muse. She objects to Lamar’s past rap about her own late sister – “how could you put her on blast…judging her past” – even as that tale seems to foretell her own sordid future. She’s a fighter – “I’ll never fade away” – but she fades out of the mix, going down slow, like Dave’s brother.

Lamar is careful not to look down on his archetypal Brother and Sister, nor on anybody in the struggle, even as he’s looking past them (pace Jay-Z). Lamar wishes to be with these ghetto vets in spirit: the Black Church offers him an alternative to payback codes and money-mindedness that’s killing his anti-heroes by degree. Humble Bible values inform his hood rap – “I’m a sinner/ I’m probably gonna sin again” – and a Church lady is one of only two adult voices that’s never mocked. But I hear an expansive humanism – not high piety – behind his riff on “Amazing Grace”: “my city found me.”

Lamar has a Race Man’s sense of community and the inwardness of a natural-born outsider. (He calls himself a “black hippie.”) He circles around his own sensitivity (and word-drunk aestheticism). As in the colloquy in this witty skit where a soulful bud encourages him (“K-Dot”) to drink his way back from a beating:

Nigga pass K-Dot the bottle, you ain’t the one that got fucked up, what you holding it for… Niggas always acting un-sensitive and shit.

(Nigga that ain’t no word.)

Nigga shut up. Dot – you good my nigga? Don’t even trip. Just sit back and drink that.

Lamar’s kind friend is anything-but-insensitive though of course he’s cultivating oblivion. Lamar’s mA.A.d city is up to such moral complexities. So maybe he deserves a pass for hanging tight with devilish Dr. Dre. Lamar’s gangsta rap minder snakes in to take credit on the CD’s closer “Compton” (which re-ups on the melody of Dre’s biggest hit, “California Love”). Dre’s characteristically petty boasts mash up eternity with product placement as he looks forward to driving a Lamborghini in heaven with dead rappers and R&B singers. Lamar egos off with Dre – “I’m King Kendrick” – and bows down to him as West Coast hip hop’s chief impresario. He even pulls a Lennon in “Compton,” boasting with Dre their records are “bigger than your religion.” But he also cites a bible passage that speaks to mutual aid and a (extended familial) sense of solidarity. Lamar’s mA.A.d city is grounded in mimesis that beats Dre.’s nihil-triumphalism. Consider Lamar’s mission statement: “Brace yourself/I’ll take you on a trip down memory lane/This is not rap on how I sling crack or move cocaine/This is a cul de sac and plenty cognac and major pain.” The track (and CD) ends not with “King” Kendrick rolling and snorting with pop royalty on cloud nine, but flashed-back to where he began, a poor and horny teen borrowing his mom’s van. It’s a self-check. A reminder Lamar’s hip hop isn’t about bling. He means to stay true to his gift (and his city) by keeping it real.

The Saving Right to Reprove

That last flashback hints Lamar’s narrative sense is movie-made. good kid, mA.A.d city is subtitled “A Short Film” and it’s rife with nods to Hollywood's "black" movies from the 90s like Poetic Justice and Boyz in the Hood. Lamar’s impulse to break time down and flip it suggests Tarrantino is in the picture. When it comes to cinematic influences, though, Lamar could do much better than Q.T. Director Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding – 70s independent films set in the black working class environs of Watts – seem made for Lamar.[3] Burnett is a son of Watts and an empathetic Race Man like Lamar. His art (as one critic wrote of Killer of Sheep) “releases audiences from the abstraction that curses the standard language of compassion (‘black despair,’ ‘absence of values’ and the like); it offers direct access to experience in its wholeness and complication.” Lamar’s mA.A.d city offers similar access to close imaginers and no doubt that’s why sounds of shots in “Swimming Pool (Drank)’s” chorus snapped me back to the maternal slap that punctuates Killer of Sheep’s opening scene…

From darkness a face appears – a scared looking, black male adolescent. A grown-up man is talking threateningly offscreen.

“You let anyone jump on your brother again and you just stand there and watch, boy, I’ll beat you to death.”

The last words come in a stammering jumbled rush; the stammerer has to start over:

“I don’t care who started what, if he was winning or losing, you get a stick or-or-or-or a goddamn brick, and you knock the kid down whoever is fighting and if the son of a bitch is too big for you, you come get me. This off-the-wall bullshit about Harry started it –“

The speaker breaks off again, this time in a coughing fit, and as the shot widens we see a heavy-set man – the father – doubled over with coughing…a pregnant woman, the boy’s mother…The boy’s younger brother presses his face into the mother’s apron and skirt.

The father resumes in a stagey voice – a voice of paternal reasonableness and persuasion.

“If anything was to happen to me or your mother, you ain’t got nobody but your brother, and that goes for your brother and he knows it. You are not a child, son. You’ll be a goddamn man soon. Start learning what life is about.”

Abruptly he pauses the boy’s mother flings forth an arm – strikes her son across the face.

Thus begins Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep…It’s a movie about teaching right conduct to the young – or, rather about trying and failing at that effort, trying again, ultimately giving up. The theme is the loss of that which practically defines the human essence, namely the saving right to reprove.

It’s a theme that would surely resonate with Lamar. good kid, mA.A.d city upholds that saving right right from the start. (Check the title.) Though there are ears who ain’t trying to hear. An educated fool in the LA Times recently traduced Lamar’s message to the grassroots by equating him with Eldridge Cleaver and Tupac: “Kendrick Lamar might intend to keep the music alive but what Lamar shares most of all with Tupac is the understanding that there is no making sense of this nonsense.” But what’s most striking about Lamar’s hip hop is his will to comprehend its moral/social context. (In Re: Lamar v. Tupac, a passage of Grossman’s seems apt: “Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.” Lamar is a good kid. Tupac was a bad…((shut your mouth)).)

Lamar is all clear how high times “wit’ the homies” lead to petty crime and heavy violence. In “Swimming Pool (Drank)” – one of his many raps on "the art of peer pressure" – he busts himself for swimming with another shark who urges him to try a deep dive: “Why you baby-sittin’ only two or three shots?/I’ma show you how to turn it up a notch/First you get a swimming pool of liquor then you dive in it.” Lamar’s conscience talks back, recalling “parental advice.” Actions, though, speak louder. Lamar has come up around “people living their life in bottles.” He remembers his Granddaddy’s “golden flask” and Lamar’s dad sings his own nasty drank song in skits near the top of mA.A.d city. Both of Lamar’s parents become more winning figures as the CD proceeds. But their moral authority – and that of other grown-ups (cops for instance)– is compromised.

It’s never been easy for black folks mired in bottom-caste life to uphold their right to judge. (Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep dramatized the difficulties back in the day. Recall that father in Burnett’s opening scene who:

means to call up a world wherein choices count and elders give helpful guidance. Stand by each other. Respect experience. Life is hard. But there’s static in the message. Mature reasonableness a la Judge Hardy – “You are not a child, son” – clashes in the scene with bravado – “You come get me.” – overdone profanity and threats. The man chokes, seemingly, on the claim that he knows something worth knowing; his stammer and cough and fulminating – like the blow the mother strikes – suggest bodily revulsion at the claim.[5])

But violence in black neighborhoods that metastasized in the 80s has made it even harder for parents to parent. Safety must come first and absent security, moral lessons of adults often seem off point or quaint. Noise from those choppers echoes. It’s rough on parents trying to cut through. Young men like those in Lamar’s mA.A.d city grow up looking to their peers for the down low-down.

Ta-Nehishi Coates has suggested wonks crafting gun legislation should pick up on facts of feeling in mA.A.d city. I hope someone in the White House is listening. Obama’s presidency will matter less and less to African American city kids if they don’t believe the father of their nation is out to protect them. And on that front, the First Lady belonged at the funeral for Hadiya Pendleton, the Chicago teen who was shot after marching in the Inaugural day parade. But. Flush the Oscars. (Unless they give Charles Burnett a Lifetime Achievement award.)

Coda: Meeting a Stranger

The day before the State of the Union address, I listened in on a Serious Times dialogue between a neo-Populist American nationalist, Barry Lynn, and a subtle Marxologist, Moishe Postone. They came at the state of the American (and global) economy from different angles.

Lynn focused on the deep decline in American entrepreneurship. Despite myths about the relative vigor of the country's “free enterprise” system, he pointed out Americans are now creating something like half as many new businesses as they were in 1977. Regulations are often cited as a heavy burden for small businesses but (according to Lynn’s piece last summer in The Washington Monthly):

The single biggest factor driving down entrepreneurship is precisely the radical concentration of power we have seen not only in the banking industry but throughout the U.S. economy over the last thirty years. This revolutionary remaking of almost every economic activity in the nation was set in motion in 1981, when officials in the Reagan administration all but suspended traditional enforcement of America’s antimonopoly laws, a change in policy then adopted by every subsequent administration. Since then, regulators have done almost nothing to stop the great waves of mergers and acquisitions, with the result that control over most major economic activities is now more consolidated than at any time since the Gilded Age.

Serious Times' American populist was more concerned than S.T.'s Marxist internationalist with risks to national sovereignty posed by race-to-the-bottom monopolists. (Butterfly Effects loomed large in Lynn's projections about coming American economic crises.) But both understood globalization as an assault on human autonomy.

Postone’s despair went soul-deep (as well as around the world); he mused about a global continuum where desire and the Self itself are inexorably squeezed into the commodity form.

Lynn was more positive than Postone – and other Marxists in the room – about prospects for remediation. He argued for reviving serious anti-trust actions. The Marxists were skeptical of any "progressive" effort to resist economic concentration. No revo, no hope...

Listening to them (and Lynn) in the back of the seminar room, I felt a defensive urge to sing-song: "B---- don't kill my vibe." I couldn't deny it seemed willful - not to say dim - to see freedom on the march in the Obama era. "It's the economy, stupid," I reproved myself.

But it didn't take for long. I guess I can't keep down with Western Marxists. Not after Obama proposed in the SOTU to bump up the minimum wage to $9.

I wonder what Lynn would make of that. (I assume Serious Times' Marxists would be dismissive.) Perhaps he thinks it's the sort of regulation that would actually hurt small businesses. After all we’re told such employers “cringe at the thought of paying higher salaries.”

The day after the SOTU, though, a Christian Science Monitor story spoke to the uses of the bully pulpit:

“Obama says to raise minimum wage to $9.00/hr. So I did!!!" posted Kelly Wilson, a small business owner in Virginia on her Facebook wall. "If my little company 3D Sports can do it, maybe some of the big rich companies can do it too!!!"

This morning, Wilson texted her employees that their hourly wage would jump to Obama's recommended $9 per hour: "Congratulations on your raise!"

Not everyone believed her at first, she says. When she reiterated her promise, one texted back, "Wait, you were serious about that?"

Wilson says she doesn't expect a host of other employers to follow her lead. But that's not the point, she says. "I'm not trying to set a trend. I'm trying to do what is right."

Perhaps because I’d just been among Marxists, this little story synched up in my head with a famous proclamation of the elder Marx (that may help explain why he once said he was not a Marxist): “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

***

A few years ago, I found myself arguing at a right-wing website with conspiracy-mongers freaked about "who sent Barack Obama.” There were birthers who thought Obama's father was Malcolm X or Farrakhan. More sophisticated rubes locked on Frank Marshall Davis – an African American ex-CP Party member who settled in Hawaii in the 70s. They all needed their clocks cleaned of course. But when I think of Obama’s proposal for (what Fox News terms) "a massive increase” in the minimum wage – it occurs to me maybe they weren’t all gone. It’s not in Obama's genes, but my anti-Leninist black President has a bit of Old Moor in him. (I’m reminded of his forthright response to the Republic Windows factory occupation in 2008.) I’m praying the whole body of the American people – workers in particular – make him show more of his inner Marx this term.

Notes

1 One Serious Timer followed up with me by emailing a pointed question: “what is the best account you've read of why so many Americans don't vote?” I was temptd to respond to him with another question: “Are you aware black turnout in 2012 was higher than 2008 and that it may it may have exceeded white turnout for the first time in history?”

2 Per “Rap Genius.”

3 Available on one disc from Criterion.

4 “The Saving Right to Reprove” by Benjamin DeMott in First of the Year: 2008. Transaction Publishers.

5 DeMott, 2008. Op. cit.

The infernal idiom comes naturally when speaking of Ammons. In the old music reviews and liner notes, he’s forever framed in flames—hot, blazing, turning up the fire, inhabiting a realm where the tenor sax and the musician who plays it merge into a single hybrid creature, a burning birdlike monster who dips and soars, swoops and flutters, and dives to the attack. He’s a powerhouse, a smoker, a cooker; the thing is blistering, bristling, raw, muscular, carrying a torch, punching out phrases; he brings the house down, he takes no prisoners: the Boss is back! Listening to the record, I have to admit the justice of the language. Here’s the first cut, “The Jungle Boss,” Houston Person and Prince James the guest brass section and Ammons’s horn doing exactly what the writers describe: charging, surging, heating up, roaring out, the rest, a series of further glosses irresistibly emerging—shouted party talk, the fight at midnight, a crazy sex boogie waltzing through a mirrored room, Magic Markered asterisks and handwritten notes under the song titles on a battered DJ copy, Mellow Boss; Jugs Down Hard; Kicks Royal Ass.

Yet I hear one thing more. It booms—yes, the horn echoes and booms like its down in a tunnel, some effect of Ammons’s playing or Rudy Van Gelder’s miking. I’ve heard too that the sound was a commercial move, one of those bids for radio play like Sonny Stitt’s Varitone a year or two later. It booms: the verb opens out a street, a Chicago night, the world is big, big (anther Ammons epithet); it’s the sound of a giant heartbeat, the sound of the cannon and the gun, the sound of a fate that hangs over you and one day drops, boom, or a fate that brings you to the top, boom you’re there, sound inside the body a fast-jump pulsing of love or hate, boom I’m yours, you’re mine, or boom you’re dead, a blessing or a curse. It booms because it’s touchy, it’s hair-trigger, it’s explosive, not spoiling for a fight but hauling a weight, a critical mass that’s building toward a chain reaction, that smears across the clouds of a fall Chicago sky some eruption of a tear in the face of a cold wind, some laugh out of a warm loaded belly, some hard rush off the end of a sax or a bottle or a needle. Boom—I don’t hear Ammons from anywhere outside, horn sounds off a stage or drifting from a window, but from inside, inside the tenor itself, a bright blind world of warm slicked brass and a rumbling, vibrating shaking. A twisting phrase. A touching. Man it hurts, it feels so good, rattling hide stops of the pads under invisible fingers and shadows telegraphing inside a hearted chamber where all I hear is you and me. A touching.

In the pressure of that sound’s opening I hear the passional bottom ground of philosophy—primum of love and hate, the foreboding brooding of the Anaximander fragment—things perish into those out of which they have their birth…for they give reparation to one another and pay the penalty of their injustice according to the disposition of time—as the horn gruffly erupts upward and then sweetly swoops back down, within that interval the surge and the gravity and the exposure of a world’s becoming. Jug—Ammons’s best-known nickname, the fifth of Seagram’s at his side during recording sessions, the word titling scores of compositions, those free-blowing or deep-down tunes where the promise is one of everything pouring out. Ammons offering again his all, yet at the same time a sense that the vessel he becomes still holds a reserve, the echoing and the booming, the debt and the payment and the love and the hate going around so there’s never a final settling-up, there’s always more to take and more to give. The Jug: inexhaustible.

The Boss is Back!—in the cover photo, Ammons is disembarking from a small airliner. He stands at the top of the stairs, a bulky figure wearing an overcoat, underneath it a plain black suit with a wide-collared gold shirt. He has his sunglasses on, and one hand is raised in greeting. It’s a confusing gesture, that wave of the hand, sign of a new freedom, a happy sense of finally coming home, yet hinting as well at anger, at violence, the arm raised and the broad palm and fingers poised as if ready to slap something down or to shape into a pounding fist. By art or by accident, the photo’s mise-en-scene underscores the duality. Dissolving into or looming up from the iron stairs, the lower half of Ammons’s body is nearly invisible, like he’s conjuring himself or perhaps struggling to escape from a dropping shaft of darkness. Above it, his upper body is framed by the plane’s heavy-duty airlocks and latches, the free-waving hand seeming fettered, fixed to the door’s white steel border. On the fuselage alongside, a fragment of the airline’s logo appears: the letter A, almost perfectly sliced in half.

1970: “Laughter Echoed Softly”

1962, a Chicago street, Gene Ammons arrested, jailed—to tell the full truth of the events that led up to 1969 and The Boss is Back!, to Ammons’s second career or his resuming a career interrupted, one would track down the newspaper archives, work through the interviews and the comments from musicians and agents and friends and relatives, all the words spoken by those who knew Ammons and knew of him. My account will only be a partial one—the version of the story I heard and have remembered and imagined for many years, the story that called me to attempt to speak of another’s life, the life of a man who was a stranger to me, a distant hero or celebrity but mostly a commanding, disturbing presence, a power in my world.

It’s hardly a story, really, only what I heard from one person, who said he’d heard it from Ammons’s wife when she was in his cab one night. It was round 1970 that Chuck Andrews told it to me. He was a friend, a man in his mid-thirties I’d met a year or so before when I discovered the secondhand bookstore he owned on the Northwest Side. The place was an overloaded small storefront, the books in chaos, Chuck hauling in stock from resale shops and estate sales, opening for business between his shifts driving a Checker taxi. Though I’d been haunting city bookstores for years, he was the only proprietor who’d ever bothered talking to me, a kid obviously without much money, not a real buyer or a serious collector. He asked me questions, spoke about everyday things, mentioined his old lady he was split from, smoked a lot Viceroys with his feet crossed on the desk. Talking with Chuck I forgot the chronic feeling I had at the time of being younger and thus suspect, awkward, and uninformed, a confused hanger-on among the stacks of books thick with words and ideas. I wandered from shelf to shelf with only a vague sense of what I was after. I looked at his face—he had an uneven mustache stained with smoke and already turning gray, large eyes gazing directly at you but without any pressure, eyes that just lightly touched upon yours, a voice that said things in general like it was fine if you didn’t have a reply—and I saw kindness.

Kindness may be the right world for what I felt there in the little bookstore. In the gentlest way, Chuck made me believe I was his friend but there wasn’t any pretense of establishing a point of entry or resemblance between us—after all, he was twenty years older than I was and had lived through a world of things I knew nothing about. The sense was that it didn’t matter; you were whoever you were. Nobody was going to cling to you, pull your sleeve, make you look at something he thought you should care about. That was how I came to the music. Ammons and the rest—it was just there, itself, lightly touching the air through the speakers buried among the piles of books under the desk. Chuck lived in that music, played it all the time he was in the store, varying it occasionally with Bartok or Debussy but soon going back again. It took a good while before I could hear or could attend to what I knew was called jazz—it seemed a strange world: so scrappy-small, so oddly unhooked—and today I can only imperfectly reconstruct when it happened, when what had sounded like a whirling piping, something fast and scratchy, whispering mysteriously through the air, suddenly resolved itself into the nervy jump phrases of Charlie Parker’s “Out of Nowhere,” Chuck with a cigarette looking out the window and listening to the music in an ecstatic silence. He let the silence stay for a long time, long after the record had ended and the traffic sounds were drifting in from Cicero Avenue, my own breath audible along with his sounds—a slight shuffling of his feet, the record sliding into its sleeve, another crack of a wooden match. I understood I didn’t have to say anything. What mattered, what didn’t matter, was so light on the air that it scarcely existed. It was whatever happened to be there without my searching for a word or a theme; it was the stain on the cover of a book, the gray color of the afternoon on the store window, the indifferent murmur of the passing cars and buses on the street. It was Chuck and I looking at each other, the brightening stirring of the music shining for an instant across our eyes and our faces and already passing somewhere else, nothing you could claim or capture. The one word we could speak was the emptiest and the fullest—mere cliche nonsense, dumb affirmation: Yeah.

Though he didn’t know Ammons, Chuck had been around the Chicago scene in the 1950s. He was a young zoot-suiter, baggy slacks pegged down around the ankle, a slouching, tailored member of the original Harrison Gents, a West Side gang. He was close to Ira Sullivan and other bop musicians in the city. Like many of them, Chuck was using heroin, an addict for most of those years. It had damaged his heart: he struggled now going up stairs and got winded lifting the boxes of books. He told me once that he’d seen a man die, shooting up in a bathroom stall. It had been really good shit: too much, an over-dose. The man’s face had turned blue, he was cold as ice. But he wasn’t cool, Chuck told me. He’d been too hungry, too greedy. Cool was another thing entirely. Cool was the whole idea of heroin that people didn’t understand: you were in front of the stage hearing Bird blow at the Club De Lisa and you didn’t move. You didn’t interfere with the spirit in the air, get your hands on things, shouting and clapping like the drunks or snapping your fingers like the so-called beatniks. Cool so you might even look like you were asleep, and it wouldn’t matter if you were because you felt the velvet hand of the music touching you everywhere; it turned you inside and out like you were its soft glove. Chuck wrote poems, words I never saw but there was one phrase of his heard later, a favorite line of his wife’s: “Laughter echoed softly/ through hand held-gifts.” I thought for a long time that the language was merely pretty and not true to the passion of the music it was describing. Now, though, I hear something else in those words—a sense of the music being a subtle kind of contact, a lightness as well as a weight, at its heart not just the love or anger I always thought was there but a passionate generosity, a laughter of giving everything away, a joy of powers spending themselves, hands offering all their gifts.

1962: Heroin Possession

Ammons was in the ear with somebody else; he wasn’t even holding the drugs. The heroin was stashed under the seat, though, and he was the driver so that was all the cops needed. It might have been he was framed, set-up. That was it; all Chuck told me.

1962, Chicago. It might have happened somewhere on the South Side, the Black Belt as they called it, maybe Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove or Forty-seventh and State, one of the neighborhoods torn down by urban renewal by the time Chuck told me the story, a strip where fires raged and windows shattered in 1967 and 1968. What kind of car was Ammons driving that night—a Cadillac Fleetwood, red and heavy with chrome? Or a boxy black Buick Electra 225, a car like a big rolling coffin? Ammons was driving around casually, the Cadillac taking a ride over the dividing line of State or near the Ryan construction zone, the kind of car that almost goes by itself, you can forget you’re driving the thing, things drifting before he knew it into the Back of the Yards or Canaryville or maybe Bridgeport, Mayor Daley’s Irish neighborhood. He’d be seen right away by white people on the streets who were jealous of their territory, some of them resentful of what they saw as smart-assed coloreds coming over to show off what they had, a big fancy car. The telephone at the stationhouse might have started ringing right away after the Fleetwood was sighted, a middle-aged lady watching the street from her steps or a corner grocery owner looking out the window and picturing black gangsters coming through his door with blue-steel pistols under their loose leather coats.

In Bridgeport, the police would respond fast. The mayor lived there, the house on Lowe Street, their neighborhood too and the power base of the Chicago Democratic machine. But the police wouldn’t even need a call. Riding in one of the black Chevy sedans with the red flashers and a swaying ten-foot antenna on the trunk a pair of them could have spotted the car coming into the neighborhood or maybe not in the neighborhood at all but still over on the other side, the east end of the sector. The way Ammons was driving might have pissed them off, a big black man driving easy and fast, the Fleetwood boating around a corner off Southern Parkway. Ammons with good high going that night and grooving on the deep power reserve of the 454 engine, on his home ground, and feeling comfortable, his passenger lighting up a nice matchstick reefer out of the pack as casually as he would a Chesterfield, pure Panama Red. The police car would get right up on the tail of Ammons. They’d put a cramp in Ammons’s styling. Show him who the hell was boss.

Ammons’s passenger—his name was Peter or Ronnie, or a name like Moon or Fast Jack—started swearing, seeing the black cruiser, the white cops. He moved quickly, sliding the package of heroin under the seat. In his hurry he gave it such a push that it came out the other side in the back riding over the transmission hump and landing right behind Ammons. The uniforms in the cruiser kept at the tail—Ammons tried to make a turn, get headed east again, the lines of lush trees along the street all pointing back toward the lake, all the neon signs seeming to read backwards, everything suddenly going in the wrong direction. In the mirror he could see the antenna on the cruiser, a thing quivering with signals, voices, plans for a roundup on the other side of the Belt Line tracks. The flashers weren’t on yet, though, and he hoped it was a tease, a game like other times, at worst their ugly faces and words, a fifty-dollar bill handed over to them with the driver’s license, after that a laughing cop whose voice would remind him of a clogged drain, something choking on itself.

And that might have been all. Harassed a while, worried a while, the money in hand to pay them off—that was what they always wanted, to give it to them. Ammons, stop fucking around. Ronnie said, Stop the goddamn car right now, but Ammons wasn’t in the mood that night, he wanted to make them show their red, he gave them his own, touching the wide pedal on the power brakes and making the high fins glow and the Fleetwood rock, asshole Ronnie going out of his head already because he was afraid, so afraid. Shine your light, Ammons said to the mirror, I’m looking to be harassed in a properly legal manner tonight, and that was the bad magic, there it went, the Mars light flashing like a cold fire over the black hood in the mirror, cold devil faces behind it, and the more nervous Ronnie was getting the more Ammons was bulking his spirit, his body too feeling all its weight. Could be I’ll never tops this car, he said, just have to shoot me through the damn head, and he felt the bullet already, saw his body on the street, the blood pouring out of the wound and straight off from Ronnie the fear ran into him, and he took his foot off the accelerator and let the Fleetwood glide as though it was happening by itself, the car rolling over to a stop, the black doors slamming then and the cops getting out, the money sliding into position in his wallet, the sweat breaking out now across his face and his neck he thought he was saving.

In the instant when he turned over his wallet to the growling policeman, the cecond one’s face hovering behind him with a close thin grin like he was sewing up Ammons’s mouth, tasting all the words that couldn’t be said, all the words that were expected—Yes sir, No sir, to a cop who wasn’t good enough to shine his shoes, to lick the dust off his Cadillac—Ammons felt himself getting right. The cops felt it too, and saw it—the immovable way he sat in the driver’s seat as though the car his kingdom and he was suffering an insult, bearing it, his eyes staying with the cop as he fingered the money, checked the denomination, tucked the bill away like it had never existed. Eugene Ammons? Yes that’s right. They never heard of that name, spoke it like it was nothing, a joke, schoolboy in glasses, Hey you, gene, Eugene and Ammons, what was that, I thought you boys were all named after the presidents, the people who got the money, hey hey.

Hey hey—Get the hell back into the car, boy, but Ammons was out the door, standing on his feet. What was Ronnie doing now? Making sure the package of heroin was as far away as he could get it. Ammons out of the car and the cops distracted so he slid it up under the driver’s side? Or is Ronnie just now getting the package out of his pocket, doing what he had agreed to after his last bust, delivering over a high-profile case the DA imagined would teach certain people in Chicago a lesson: famous Negro jazz musician arrested for heroin on South Side, Gene Ammons in jail and facing ten years in prison, smug stories in the Tribune and regretful ones in the Daily Defender, where Ammons was a hero?

It was going bad—was it the cop or Ammons telling himself to keep his arms where they were?—his hands wanting to jump, it would be a heavy blow he’d land on the cop’s face and then another come raining down, let it fall. You’re under arrest: the words seemed to lose their meaning or they meant too much, everything, now there was crazy pissy welling like tears, Ammons raining inside, and he couldn’t move, it might be his own body that would fall. Up the street, he could see the railroad viaduct, the incline of the pavement going down into it. A train was passing above, even here he felt the vibration rumbling under his feet. Inside the viaduct, traffic shadows jumped across the whitewashed walls, on the vertical supports painted names blossomed with loops and flourishes and snaked themselves into secret languages. On the black-striped center pier a caution light flashed yellow. Walking through, a kid could beat as hard as he wanted to on the iron rails that leaned over the street, shout as loud as he wanted to inside the noise of the traffic. He could write his name up there under the road of the train. Listen to the booming echo of the voice. Small turned big.

Ammons smelled the fear coming off the cops, himself, and Ronnie suddenly still and collected as though the plan all along had been to drop off Ammons here and take over the wheel. Get back into your seat. The partner’s gun was already drawn, dog-head clawed out his own and pushed it at the air like a prod or a stick, but still Ammons didn’t move until the thing touched him, clumsily bumped his face and slid dumb and cold against his left ear. That touch enraged him— better to shoot him up front than to molest his face. And his ear—he had beautiful ears as his mother always said, women loved their small delicate shapes, nibbling and biting and making up stories about what they could tell. Ear that could catch anything, Captain Dyett had said: key from the first bar of a song, melody off a passing fragment. Perfect pitch. Like a hunter’s ear, too, tuned to the vast sounding world, hearing the littlest things down inside the house, rustlings and creaks of ghosted frames, hearing along the wind the heavy life of the leaning trees in the park, hearing the floating life of music rising from the body and making a system in the air, fragile bridges stretching out and elevating their spans and at their edges asking to be crossed and re-crossed, spun and pulled and tensed.

With his face set hard, Ammons suffered the touch of the gun. He was waiting for it to happen, the thing to go off before he did. But he was listening so intently for the stir, the scrape, the click that would be impossible to hear because he would be dead before he could hear it, thirty-six years old and corpse with his brains blown-out from behind his temple, that he scarcely noticed the drop of the first cuff on his wrist, his other arm being pulled around behind him for the second.

All right, all right, he said then, but keep my friend out of it, nodding at Ronnie who didn’t care and didn’t need any help, maybe thinking Ammons was a joke, his ass down the river; or maybe he was saving Ronnie, whose life would be a waste from that moment on anyway, everybody accusing him of selling out Ammons when he didn’t. But why did they let him off? Ronnic could never explain to them that for one minute the cops had been afraid of Ammons and so they obliged him and let Ronnie take off down the street with whatever he had or hadn’t been holding. He wasn’t the one they wanted anyway.

After that, the world changed the way it sounded. Ammons wasn’t listening to its motions and shifts and voices but instead to an inside of things, nearly imperceptible whirling or subtly grinding sounds that accompanied a falling, a spinning, a being jerked into place like starting hard and panicky from a quiet drifting into steep. There was nothing but air around him—the same air he had lived by, the stack of wind, the column and the pipe, buzzing breathing staff of all his powers—but it was impossible for him to touch anything, for anything to touch him. Somebody else was writing his name, writing his life, and he hung inside an icy void like one of Dante’s condemned, all reaching hands and dear faces and unbelievable walls around him draining off into some devising of a type or exemplum, the law freezing him inside his skin.

Stateville, those first days, that week, that month, he dreamed out his hunger for the syringe, the pricking needle—the bars of the cell, the perforations in the metal bed, the chug of the stinking commode and the hot voices calling Jug, Jug, you with us too, brother, all that cold hell pumped out like water, not a particle reaching him. Ammons sat there hard and impervious as a rock, but a thing like a hand coiled inside him, felt on its pulse a dipping plunge of his blood that made him so weak and so limp a baby could have slapped him aside. Nothing but air: November winds blowing hard across the flat Illinois cornfields outside the walls, the winded heave of his chest he sometimes caught himself waiting for or found himself trying to catch up with, the bodiless suctioning blank where the clang of the steel doors died out after a minute, an hour, seven years.

In that stilled cloud he imagined the touch of the junk, his heartbeat becoming a far-off thunder, his fingers gloved again in warm velvet, the touch like a prickling bud on the skin of the world, a slow oil distilling down into a swelling, a throaty voice. Touch that made the Boss boss, let the Jug fill itself and pour itself out.

Levered boom of the doors, uneasy fall of the dark, a murmuring then of love and hate, everything owed from the day that would get paid off in the night.

Ammons sat there untouched. Listening to the echo of an echo.

1975: Jug Eyes

A night at the Jazz Showcase on Rush Street, a bill with Frank Foster, Jodie Christian, Rufus Reid, and Wilbur Campbell. Foster was the second tenor, about the same age as Ammons but seeming so much stronger and younger, though not making a point of it. I sat there drinking my Beck’s and like thousands of others in clubs and concerts over the years, watched at my leisure Ammons’s every move—the pulse of his fingers, the cut of his grizzled chin as he again took the reed into his mouth, the way he signaled to Christian as he approached the microphone for the solo. Even as he started, his tired face was showing the labor of it, his dark-ringed eyes hopefully going wide and then gradually closing themselves down, Foster’s solo hanging still in the air over him, his own maybe an impossible thing he had to do anyway, all the room waiting on him to deliver the goods.

Working through the standard phrases, the signature lines, the hollowed booming echoing of his sound, slash of his own mark on the art, he made it happen again—it shined enough, it caught some fire, faltering only here and there, the hard applause afterward recognizing that if Foster hadn’t been on the stage it would’ve sounded better. In the middle of it all, though, there was a small floating terror, watching the heave of his shoulders and the push of his chest, the terror that this next minute, this next phrase, this next note, we might see Ammons fail for good, we would lose him.

I had watched him avidly for years, though my own eyes closed sometimes in the wash of his power, the music’s demand calling out an answering labor in the heart, the soul, the hard rollicking edge of it finally driving the feelings into something as sober as a prayer. I could watch him at my ease because he had nothing to do with me, he operated in the near yet ideal world of the music, the instrument, the intimidating superiority of his name and his art. That night, however, I felt myself drawing uncomfortably close, his gaze catching now and then on mine as though he felt its pressure, maybe resented the way I was sitting there gobbling him up, unseemly in the controlled swoon of a cognoscenti’s delight. As he broke off into another solo, I felt the way I hovered, my mouth, my breath, my body leaning slightly forward in the chair, strangely blended with or strangely parasitic upon his, an unconscious sympathy or identification suddenly brought to awareness by the answering look he’d directed at me. The sensation was disturbing, a sort of vertigo in it that was like an approach of death, mine or his. I couldn’t tell which as I followed the strain of his work, his labor, all that Ammons was again giving, delivering, pouring out. Perhaps it was no more than a touching between us that was made by the hours and years of my watching and listening, unmade too by that swift moment when his gaze returned mine, an intermittent and uncertain link that was of no more substance or consequence than a drifting curl of smoke across the stage lights or the rattling of ice in someone’s drink at the table beside me.

For the rest of the might I found it impossible to look again, to countenance the returning gaze of Ammons’s charged tired face. I was caught out, abashed, mortified. I had been making him into my theme, my thing. Listening to the music I only stared down at my hands or closed my eyes, his face appearing anyway before me as though I were awakening from a dream. The image was at times wavering and distorted, at others suddenly as clear as a photograph. A face possessed of a rocklike solidity, a gravity of power in it like a spirit mask, eyes in their deep sockets vaulting an unrecoverable mystery. A face I saw in painful, near-hallucinatory detail, every minute line and incision and pocking of the skin, each singular marking on it of a time, a world, a life, and a death. His eyes—they were brown, dark dark brown—appeared immensely fragile, immensely strong; they lidded over, they closed in some ecstasy of making a line, a sound; they opened again in the middle of what was being offered, what was already moving off and away, time-tunnel of that great stalking booming, that delicate running echoing.

1999: Echoes

Echoes, echoes of echoes—why do I return to this almost meaningless phrase, perhaps too vacuous and too trite to say anything true? It’s just the emptiness and lightness that I like, its sense of a touching that doesn’t linger, that reverberates indefinitely. Each thing pays the penalty of its injustice according to the disposition of time—the echo of an echo forgets any origin or source, can’t claim any patrimony or descent; there’s a motion, a rhythm, a syncopation in between that only offers itself there, that doesn’t settle down into being but exposes a becoming, again, again.

“Jug jug”—in Coleridge’s poem, it’s what the nightingales sing, alone in the wood in the dark, echoing one another’s calls, somebody nearby leaning to hear. Jug, jug: sound of a joy attended by the ear, a whorled opening to the world. I with my eyes closing in the listening, Ammons stomping off like some thundering cloud. Ammons fluttering off like some stirring of evening birds, taking it all away, giving it all back once more.

Excerpted from The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz (2005) Columbia University Press.

I'm in heaven
I'm halfway drifted away
only a fool would understand
how I feel today

only an idiot
could feel this joy
only a moron or a
girl they tried to turn into a boy

only an imbecile
could've taken me this far
only a shattered adolescent
could be wishing on a stupid star

I'm no e.e. cummings
I'm wordier with much less to say
but like his "he-man's solid bliss"
only a fool could understand how I feel today

I'm no mentalist
ask any clown
the less I have up there
the less there is to dumb-down

I'm in rapture
almost blown away
only a shit-for-brains could understand
how I feel today

Beat It

you got the honey
I got the feet
you got the money
but baby I've got the beat

you got the pistols
I got the duels
you got all the fencing equipment
I got indoor pools
(installed by fools)

you got the wherewithal
I got the nerve
you got the straight line
I got the curve

you got the authorities
I got the unknown
you got stuck in portfolios
I got sold alone

you got the commodities
I got the edge
you're heavily invested in
me going off the edge

but I got the boombox
and a couple of moves
you got the building blocks
whose existence I had to proove

you got the meetings
I got the sheet
you may've got the fancy shoes
but baby I got the beat

New Directions

I'm more like the beatles
she's more like the stones
never understood the beach boys
now we're almost grown

I'm more like lips
she the mic/mike
I'm more Tina Turner
she's more Ike

she's just a little bit Yoko
I'm just a little bit Paul
I say my prayers each night to George Harrison
she doesn't pray at all

she's a little Rod Stewart
I'm more Marvin Gaye
she dances to a different beat
from the one my drummers play

I'm no Ringo
she's no John
I'm a circle that won't be unbroken
until one of us is gone

she's a little more Elvis
I'm a little more Cher
she only gets to steal seconds with me
when Sonny Bono's not there

I'm a little more Hollywood
she's more Liverpool
I was on my way to Nashville
even before she started playing me for a fool

Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. A prose masterwork that begins with the story of Duncan’s initiation as a poet, over the course of its 646 pages it morphs into a visionary meditation in which H.D., the American poet born Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), remains the thematic touchstone. In The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004), Duncan writes to Levertov as he undertakes the book that he needs to guard against letting his distress over dismissive reviews of H.D.’s work by Randall Jarrell and others deflect him from his deeper purpose. Exploring the generative resources and implications of H.D.’s work, he was surely aware too that he was also setting the course and realizing perhaps the fullest expression of his major phase as a poet. The irony is that half a century later one must guard against allowing the analogous treatment of this book to deflect attention from what is here at last.

Robert Duncan (1919-1988), whose mother had died giving birth to him, was raised by caring, attentive foster parents in a Theosophist household in Bakersfield. A city at the southern end of California’s agricultural Central Valley that might seem an unlikely setting for a young poet’s coming of age, in fact the city has nurtured such diverse talents as Merle Haggard, William Everson, and Frank Bidart. As a high school student Duncan encountered a teacher there, Edna Keough, who brought to class one of H.D.’s early Imagist poems, a teacher who lovingly recognized in Duncan a special student, and shared books with him outside the classroom, becoming with H.D. the initiating figure of his vocation as a poet.

In 1944, after his poem “Toward an African Elegy” had been accepted by John Crowe Ransom for publication in the Kenyon Review, Duncan’s pioneering essay “The Homosexual in Society”—in which he came out at the age of 25—appeared in Dwight MacDonald’s magazine politics, and Ransom withdrew the acceptance. By the mid-fifties, after a peripatetic decade in Europe and on both coasts of America, Duncan had settled with his partner, the painter and collagist Jess Collins, in the Bay Area, now a central figure of the post-war American poetry heralded in Donald M. Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, which also included the work of Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara, among others.

Along with Olson an elder in this wildly talented, somewhat raucous cohort, Duncan sustained a more measured, ruminative “stance” than others more quickly celebrated and emerged as a venerable elder statesman, an aesthetic and moral resource for several generations of poets. While the three poetry collections of his major phase, The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964) and Bending the Bow (1968), were published in timely succession by mainstream New York houses, The H.D. Book was rejected by Scribners, which had published the latter two poetry books; and an arrangement with John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1972, which would have brought Book One (the first 200 pages here) into print, was cancelled over a disagreement with Martin.

As the sixties advanced, so did the darker shadows portended in much of the text, and late in the decade, with the war in Vietnam a point of deepening dissension in the otherwise mutually sustaining correspondence with Levertov, Duncan made the decision not to publish a full-length book of poems for fifteen years.

What was this about? “Responsibility,” he wrote, “was to maintain the ability to respond,” and in a seeming paradox he’d taken issue specifically with Levertov’s public persona as an anti-war activist. Having seen a clip on the news of her making a speech, he wrote her that her “soul is sacrificed to the demotic persona.” In effect her position in the national debate eclipsed what he perceived to be her deeper responsibility as a poet. In its way, this echoes his misgivings at the beginning of the decade about taking on Randall Jarrell at the expense of the rewards of staying on message in tracking H.D.’s journey. (When he does get around to Jarrell on page 518, he seems even-handed and even empathic.) “The poet’s role is not to oppose evil,” he wrote Levertov, “but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov. And we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light.”

Was there an element of jealousy in Duncan’s imperative to a contemporary whose fame now exceeded his? Perhaps, just as there might have been hauteur in turning his back on the powers that be in deciding not to publish. He wasn’t exactly being pursued. But at the same time there is also the clear sense that he was heeding his own admonitions in not seeking a spotlight on this issue (while opposing the war) because it meant forsaking “all the vital weaknesses of the living identity,” which, he wrote to Levertov, she was sweeping away in her “demotic persona.”

More specifically, the loss Duncan perceives here seems to be the “place for the syllable to occur” which he alludes to early on; the place, that is, where the vowels and consonants occur that, ideally, make a music, and for which the poet is the ground station and receptor: syllable by syllable, phrase by phrase, without any predetermined agenda, that “damnation of systematic rime or systematic thought” that would “be careless of the variety of what was actually going on.” In the turmoil of the moment, as he saw H.D. do in her own tumultuous history, he was at pains to keep his literary garden, “the opening of the field,” intact, albeit just then out of public sight. Speaking publicly against the war, as he saw it, couldn’t be his first responsibility in life or in poetry since it would stifle the deeper possibilities of his vocation.

The H.D. Book, in the end, is an extraordinary meditation on vocation and its power to subsume and reflect intricately the universe at large. Has the affirming power of tragedy, both in Oedipus and in Christ’s passion, ever been so lucidly explicated? Has Ezra Pound’s odyssey?

In the Greek myth, if Theseus looks directly at the Gorgon Medusa, he will turn to salt. The way he defeats her, in the end, is to keep track of her in the mirror of his shield. Vocation, Duncan seems to say, is both mirror and shield. And if its rules are honored, even in the face of tragedy, it provides a way of moving meaningfully through the world, “a rite de passage, a way of survival for the poet in the personal life.”

After the first 200 pages in which Duncan writes of his adolescence and young adulthood and the discovery of his vocation, I kept a pencil nearby to mark benchmark passage after passage:

The mythos, the telling of it, how it is made up is part of our text; the dromenon, how it is enacted in the poet’s life is part, what she went thru in the time of the poem. What they tell and what they do, the text and the action, form in turn a rite de passage, a way of survival for the poet in the personal life. [p. 242]

We made in a poem a place for the syllable to occur as it did not occur in the careless rush of speech. The damnation of systematic rime was like the damnation of systematic thought for it was careless of the variety of what was actually going on, the lead one sensed in incident, in factors so immediate they seemed chance or accident to all but the formal eye. [p. 272]

There is a threatened chastity of mind in Pound that would put away, not face, the thought of hellish things, here in considering the Divine World, as later in considering fascism, where also he cannot allow that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure with the obscene—what goes on backstage. Spirit in The Cantos will move as a crystal, clean and clear of the muddle, even the filth, of the world and its tasks thru which Psyche works in suffering toward Eros. [pp. 306-307]

The avoidance of Christ in The Cantos. A poem that is after all primarily an epic of the gods and of the divine reality, is complex; but even with those gods who do appear in The Cantos, Pound avoids all knowledge of their aspects of embodying our carnal experience of suffering and mortality as a value in life. [p. 307]

After the excitement in the authenticity of masterpieces, having resistant individuality and a demanding skill, I have come to see such works not as the achievement of the inventors or masters or diluters or starters of crazes, as Pound would have us classify writers in his ABC of Reading, not as objects of a culture, embodying original sensibilities, but as events in another dimension, a field of meanings in which consciousness was in process; where I saw psyche and spirit, as I had come thru Darwin to see the animal organism, arising in an evolution of possible forms, surviving, perishing, derived always from an inheritance in which the formal had to live the last of a species, the first of a species, and yet having only its own terms, its own life, in which to make it. [p. 309]

Like the exile of Odysseus, Pound’s exile can be read as the initiation of the heroic soul (the hero of a Poetry) descending deep into hubris, offending and disobeying orders of the imagination, and returning at last after trials “home.” [p. 323]

Freud, and later the theurgist Robert Ambelain, come to lead H.D., as Mussolini and Major Douglas lead Pound. [p. 323]

Later in Helen in Egypt, H.D. will refer to the tradition…of the poet’s restoring to Poetry the truth about Helen, but in The War Trilogy she strikes out, alone of the Imagists, to restore the truth of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to Poetry. Not a conversion to Christianity, but a conversion of Christianity to Poetry. [p. 324]

There is an evolution of life-forms, experiences, yet they exist one in another:

There is a spell, for instance

in every sea-shell

p. 324

The “free verse” of high poetry was not abstractly free, but free, specifically, from the concept of a poem’s form as a paradigm, an imposed plan to which the poet conformed. The form was germinal, the germ being the cadence that began in language (“a new cadence means a new idea,” H.D. and [Richard] Aldington had argued in their 1916 Preface), arousing a life of its own, a poem. [p. 326]

It is not in their exemplary character-structure but in their passion, in their ripeness, the fullness in process of what they are, that I am moved by H.D., Pound, and Williams. They move in their work thru phases of growth towards a poetry that spreads in scope as an aged tree spreads its roots and branches, as a man’s experience spreads; their art in language conveying scars and informations of age without armor as a man may gather in his face and his form acknowledged accumulations of what he is in his life, in his cooperation with the world around him. [p. 329]

The germinal form of Man in which we individuate and out of which we are each the immediate occasion of our species is such a figure, “of the whole race.” Here [H.D.] draws upon the biologic identity, as in The Flowering of the Rod, ix, she affirms:

No poetic fantasy but a biologic reality,

a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plant

or sea-plant cell…

…It is not only the figure of Man then out of which and to which the individual thread has its weaving of intention, but, beyond Man, in the larger field of Life itself, so that the poet strives for organic form as Life form. This is not a humanist art. The “whole race” is ultimately not the species Man but the race of the living. [pp. 331-332]

The full roster of Mr. Eliot’s accusations against Pound, carefully loaded to excite the prejudices of right-thinking critics, was to be applied against [H.D.] by her critics. Mysticism without the sanction of any church, daemonic and ghostly personae, biological and sexual coordinations, and in H.D.’s case, Freudian in place of Confucian rationalism. [p. 361]

Where a democracy is composed of a people in which the individual conscience and nature is not liberated, so that a common standard or consensus of the majority rules and not the union of each in free volition, the state is already totalitarian. [p. 362]

H.D. in her work with Freud followed, she tells us: “my own intense, dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or the subconscious pattern.” The unfolding pattern of the psyche is not primary for her, but the unfolding pattern of a poem the psyche enacts. The poet, like the scientist, works to feel or know the inner order of things, but for the poet the order is poetic, measures that renew his own feelings of measure in his art. The form in process of the poem, the form in process of the psyche, correspond in turn to the form in process of What Is. “The world ever was, and is, and shall be,” Heraklitus says: “a Fire, kindled in measure, quenched in measure.” [p. 379]

[F]or Freud led the consciousness into territories the mind had forbidden itself. One of the determinants of an art, of our existence as artists, is where the permission is given. It was not only sexual and erotic knowledge that had been prohibited. For sentiment, association, like repetition and ornament, were distasteful—fearful then, in Freudian terms—to the mind of the twenties. “The impact of a language,” H. D. writes “as well as the impact of an impression may become ‘correct,’ become ‘stylized,’ lose its living qualities.” It was, in this sense, away from style itself toward the act of writing itself that Freud helped H.D. [pp. 384-385]

“What you gave me, was not praise,” Freud wrote to H.D.: “was affection and I need not be ashamed of my satisfaction.”

“Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” To admit affection, sentiment and association, and to need not be ashamed would strike at the repression of sincerity in the modern as his admission of the very fact of sexuality hit at the repressions of the nineteenth century. [p. 388]

Words can become correct, stylized, she tells us. She had been the perfect stylist—the Imagist…The thrust of the soul’s life, of energetic imperfections, was keen against the resistance of her perfectionist style. The writing of H.D. gives way first in the prose of the late 1920s…a prose that strives to carry in the stream of consciousness mode the burden of tangling experience. [p. 391]

For the next epoch, announced by the works of Darwin early in the century, and then by Frazer, Freud, and [William] James, it is the comparison of all things or the Mixing of the Waters—but this is the thicket. Bushman, shaman of the Lapland wastes, the child at his watercolors, and Michelangelo are brought into one complex concept of Art. In the new Jungian religious psychology, Attis mixes with Christ; Christ mixes with the dream figures of school-teachers in Iowa; the Serpent in the apple tree mixes with Attis and the beneficent Damballah of the Gold Coast. [p. 392]

The very elements that Williams, Pound, H.D., and Wallace Stevens find most questionable in each other’s work become in turn generative terms of my generation in poetry. Our admission in consciousness of what must be included in our humanity, in our poetic art, in our history is not only vastly extended and complicated but intensified. The experience of men today is one of overwhelming increase, expansion, and density, of over-population in consciousness as well as in social space, of pollution in culture as well as in industrial production—it is the dramatic force of the creative identity, charged and over-charged in the abundance of resources, exploitative, glutted, driven on to lay waste or to conserve but to work with the terms of a world mind which has succeeded the nation mind or the city mind or the tribal mind, driven by the command that no…impression be suffered to die or to be lost. [p. 393-394]

“Posing,” the unkind were likely to judge it, but for her kind H.D.’s tone presented a key in which to live. This ideal is what in my generation Charles Olson has called a stance. [p. 421]

H. D. will all her life be concerned in her work with conveying to our sympathy the fact that agony seems to be in the very nature of deep experience, that in every instant there is a painful—painful in its intensity—revelation. [p. 422]

Shakespeare’s actors reminding us that it is but a stage seems finally to be saying that our actual life is only a stage from which we may be recalled at death. [p. 423]

High mind must labor—Williams in Paterson calls up the figure of Madame Curie working the pitchblende—in obscure matter. But just where the mind disavows its sexual motivation or where the genital organ disavows its mental imagination, a contention begins in man’s nature. What a dark filthy fabric of lies and richness the political figures of our day seem to weave towards their precipitation of “tragedy, disharmony, disruption, disintegration”—as if driven by necessity—the old Judeo-Christian dream of a War to end the trials of Creation in a holocaust of fire. What does it mean? In 1935 and 1936, as Jung began to first publish his studies of Alchemy, that matter of the Second World War was gathering in men’s minds everywhere. These falsifications of memory were tendentious. Possessed by the thought of the enemy, in fear and anger, men turned their high minds to the invention of the nuclear explosion in matter, to the cultivation of last diseases, to research in gasses that would cripple the minds of whole populations. [p. 455]

Then, after the trauma of the Second World War experience, when in the debacle of the Fascist last days [Pound] was forced almost to admit the disorder, the Hell, of Mussolini’s reign which he had held as a model of order, the later Cantos pour forth the contradictions of the mind no longer removed from its underworld. “Tho my errors and wrecks lie about me,” he will sing in Canto CXVI: “I cannot make it cohere.” “But the beauty is not the madness,” he confirms. [pp. 508-509]

In The Pisan Cantos, as the voice of Pound ransacking his broken consciousness begins, like Lear, his testimony of what the heart knows, outrage as well as tenderness comes. God Himself, Boehme argued in the sixteenth century, was the fire of Hell as well as the light of Heaven, wrath as well as love. Ugly flarings up of the Turba—the unrest of all creation—must be there if a man bear witness to what he is and feels, even though he is aware his thought and feeling are dis-eased. For the business of the artist is to bring things to light…Marx, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the oppressed, and Freud, who would compel the mind to take up the cause of the repressed, appear as enemies of the high mind. [p. 509]

In a conventional art, the sense of Beauty is a sense of what other men will find beautiful, pleasurable, enhancing, and exemplary in their social terms. Poetry would present models of feeling, and reviewers of this order commend or chastise the poet’s being to their taste or exciting their distaste. But there is a higher or larger order of poetry where Beauty is a sense of universal relations, of being brought into intensities of even painful feeling. Here, the virus is life, the hatred is emotion, the breaks in consciousness—that in conventional thought seem inroads of natural chaos or damaged passages that need surgery or correction—are surfs or sun-spots of the deep element. [p. 511]

[Randall] Jarrell’s great forte was that he successfully impersonated and then genuinely represented the needs and attitudes of the new educated literary class that was making its way in the English Departments of American colleges and universities, an increasingly important and established group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official culture. His appeal in rejecting even the “felt” and “sincere” where it was “queer” and “more than a little silly” was an appeal to some right proper and respectable range of thought and feeling that any member of a university faculty must keep in order to maintain his position. It is not at all clear in Jarrell’s reviews what H. D.’s work is, but it is most clear, if we accept unquestionably all that comes from his authority, that whatever it is is “silly,” “level debris,” “anachronism”—not to be countenanced by reasonable men. [p. 518]

The light of Dante or of Plato, the spiritual light whereby men saw in dreams or in thought, but also the matter of the ancient world, the mothering Life or Great Mother, the dark mysteries of the underworld, offended the Protestant ethos. Seely which had meant “spiritually blessed,” “pious, holy, good” was shortened to silly as the interests of the mercantile and capitalist class took over the direction of society and profitable works won out against grace as a measure of value. [p. 523]

The man who would present himself without the dimension of dream and fantasy, much less the experience of illusion and error, who would render the true from the false by voiding the fictional and the doubtful, diminishes the human experience. [p. 527]

We have left from the waxing twenties, fat after the holocaust of moneymaking in the war, records of what life was like for those who had lost the goods of the intellect for the commodities of a cultured sensibility: the deracinated drift of Scott Fitzgerald or the inhabitants of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Capitalist society, as Marx had rightly pointed out, exploited materials and men’s labor towards a profit that was empty of meaning. The whole speculative possibility of the market grew up around panics of inflation and depression, sales-manias, war-manias, and time-wasting. [p. 553]

[I]n searching out what we suffer or enjoy not as happening to us or belonging to us but as belonging to a design or creation, taking our strength there, we discover a new person who does not suffer but who creates in our suffering, coming into an increase of meaning. [p. 557]

The volition of the artist is to fulfill the form or will that he feels or discovers in the thing he is making. [p. 559]

Oedipus, with the blood streaming down from his eyes, having come into the fullness of the knowledge of his play, is like Christ with the blood streaming down from his hands—eyes that looked with love upon his mother; hands that touched with love his fellow men.

The difference between the neurotic nursing his guilt or sin and the hero is the dramatic gesture, the formal imperative. [p. 567]

What Burckhardt calls the Art’s “high and independent selfhood” is not only the poet’s form, but the underlying relation and meaning in the story of things. It is the selfhood of Poetry that makes of the writer’s self no more and no other than a persona of the cast. [p. 567]

The fact of the risk of inspiration is recognized in the common sense of “touched.” Where men have vision and courage for the experience of life itself, even where it exceeds the uses of understanding, beyond the preservation of the species, silly could mean blissful, and it was deserving of compassion, for it meant to go in peril of the soul. [p. 578]

The design now is of such an order all loci seem to contribute to their own loss of identity in the larger figure: the poet takes over as a higher person from the immediate social personality of the man who sits down to write. [p. 634]

A final note: University of California Press has recently published a meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of Duncan by Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, which I commend to any interested reader.

It might have been Lorca who said that literature is dangerous. In Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino, who incidentally was a great admirer of Lorca, apothegmatizes that homosexuality is not revolutionary, is rather "sexual reformism to rescue one from terror." Nevertheless, Lorca died, in part, because he was a homosexual as well as a great poet of the last or penultimate revolution*, while Sorrentino's anti-hero Lou Henry is a bad poet, a bad translator of Lorca, and a bad (failed) heterosexual. But Sorrentino, following Joyce following Marx following Vico, wants us to understand that farce is tragic for the farcical.** Lou Henry is as much a victim, in his own way, of the Moloch of literature as Lorca was.*** His mistake was to read William Carlos Williams to autoerotic excess, to incorporate an invasive genius to the point of iconodulism, botanical fetishism, self-amnesia (Sorrentino's mutinous insight, although one could also think here of Julio Cortázar, is to invert the hackneyed Romantic metaphor of demotic parasitism and the Artist in favor of a situationist cris de coeur, which is to say that we are all giants encumbered by a million strabismic and neurotic dwarves, if only we knew it, which we never will, because what would we know it with?) Literature is dangerous. If Lou Henry hadn't become a bad poet, he could have become any number of better things. For instance? Sorrentino, one of literature's great listmakers, suggests: "An editor at a publishing house anxious to keep up with 'what's happening': A Tarot adept: An unlocker of the mysteries of astrology...An admirer of Nabokov...A Jewish liberal...A copywriter for an ad agency [too late, Leopold Bloom beat him to it]: A movie star 'with ideas.': A composer of folk-rock songs: An experimental novelist: A Communist: A Communist dupe: An anarchist: A revolutionary: A devotee of Paul O'Dwyer's toughness and incorruptibility: a good poet." But this list, like all enumerations of reveries of possible or imaginary selves, lands us back in the cloacum of fatalism, the Ouroborus of pessimism, the comedy of squirming conatus, the worm of the ego condemned to be itself by escaping itself, the futility of ejaculation****. Of course, Sorrentino, who has a touch of the Kafka about him, offers his characters the possibility of salvation, provided salvation remains a sterile syllogism (like Simone Weil's God): "If I avoid the demons that maraud through my intelligence, I'll write poems that are acceptable. I'll always know that when the time comes I'll confront these demons and out of the confrontation will come great poetry. The next step however is more difficult and can lead to total destruction. That is: the confrontation with the demons does not necessarily lead to the creation of great art (or any art at all). You can writhe in the darkest pit and filth of yourself and come up with some dull fragment of vers libre, indistinguishable from that of a hundred contemporaries. Thus pain does not guarantee anything. Art, you see, is not interested in your suffering. It is not a muse." The Sorrentinian paradox can be formulated as such: Salvation lies in confronting the terror that dominates our lives (the old Socrates palaver). In order to confront the terror of being ourselves, we have to undertake the great and primeval exploits of the spirit (art, love, war/revolution). But the great and primeval exploits of the spirit are great and primeval because they transcend and mock our finitude. They are like the rose of Paracelsus, the immutable rose (the rose that emerges as a rose after being thrown in the fire). Paracelsus, who we are told is nothing under his mask, will not perform his miracle before any witnesses. It is only when he is alone that he scoops up the ashes and brings the rose back to life. Art--the glory of art, the essence of art, which could be our salvation--is always somewhere else. The characters in IQOAT are stranded in an obscure world of appearances, of images that swarm beneath the eyes, of imaginative qualities. As for the actual thing, the agalma we ceaselessly strive to know, we can only arrive at it apophatically, in the malaise and schizophrenic desire and hypocrisy and absolute epigonism of life itself.

Sheila Henry, Lou's wife (also a bad poet, having apprenticed herself in the uniquely squalid school of radical chic bourgeois marriage), is chronically unfaithful because she loves her husband (she loves him almost as much as she hates him and works methodically towards his ruin). She fucks***** other men, it seems, both to torment her husband but also to delineate his absence, to consecrate her love for him by incarnating the opposite of love. Actual lovemaking with her husband is disappointing. The only time she appears to be satisfied is when Lou uses her mascara to make himself look like Che Guevara and sodomizes her with a candle. Sorrentino is not the only acerbic, left-melancholic writer fascinated and dismayed by the obscene, counter-revolutionary appropriation of Che's imago by the bourgeois sexual imagination. Eric Hobsbawm truculently observes, in his essay on "The Revolution and Sex," that a New York theatrical performance of a homosexual orgy invoking Che's name would have nauseated the puritanical revolutionary (he adduces this blasphemy, as well as the pot smoke hovering over the barricades in Paris 1968, as indisputable evidence of the inanity of the New Left: then again, Hobsbawm probably didn't think much of Che in the first place). In Roberto Bolaño's Amulet, the virginal Uruguayan heroine chastises a woman who claims to have slept with Che but won't elaborate on what he was like in bed (these kids, she says, by which she means the ill-fated generation of 1970s Latin American youth, so similar to Sorrentino's characters in their delusional faiths and preordained failures, and yet ennobled by a genuine confrontation with danger, have a right to know what Che was like in bed). But no one will ever really know how Che fucked, or how any world-historical individuals fucked******. It's a mystery: even Hegel neglected the subject. Sorrentino would have wanted to know. Not out of prurience, or not just out of prurience, but because it's relevant to the question of what is left of the spiritus mundi after the death of the gods. What is being travestied, what is debased, when a writer manqué orgasms just as his partner quotes William Blake? Sex, or the Ideal, or both? The shabbiness and puniness of the present against the perfection of the past, or the spurious majesty of the past itself? Is it a revolutionary or despairing transgression to have sex miscegenate with art and revolution? Or is miscegenation beside the point, is it not simply a question of eternal eros collecting its debt wherever it can find it? In a world of total debasement, I think Sorrentino is telling us (telling me), the final and irrevocable debasement is to continue to believe in the inviolability of our past ideals: poetry after Auschwitz, etc.

Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke's gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can't remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn't get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot. 4. When I lived in Oakland, I was briefly friends with an anti-Semitic poet from Tennessee, a Black Mountain zombie, who approached me at a coffee shop while I was reading The Cantos. One night he brought me along to a party where the guests were expected to take molly and dress up as their favorite German theologian. Like Borges, I have an abnormal fear of masks and costumes, and I don't like drugs or saturnalian unseriousness vis-a-vis the so-called life of the mind, so I was fairly out of place. My poet friend, who was in all likelihood a bad poet, went as Karl Barth and ended up sleeping with a girl dressed as Meister Eckhart. A few weeks later he tried to kill me.

It occurs to me that Sorrentino's principal theme is the failure of mourning, culturally and individually. Mourning for what? For the fact that we are ourselves and not someone else, not William Carlos Williams, for instance. His characters introject, cannibalize, the myth of the great artist, forgetting that the great artist is a myth, an effigy. What would the real, the noumenal, thing look like, shorn of its imaginative qualities? I suppose that in Sorrentino's epoch, which was a decadent epoch, one could still hope to glimpse it. Doc Williams strolling amiably among the shrubs and wildflowers of Patterson New Jersey: Ezra Pound in his Tyrolean castle with his quarrelsome wife and concubine, a fascist's stately retirement, perturbed only by the occasional bout of depression: Lorca in his Andalusian mass grave. And who are our masters, our myths, the ones who have spawned "the aberrant desires of a minority of the populace?"******* Don't even talk to me about the reactionary utopian socialism of David Foster Wallace, or the philistine birdwatching, the Augustinian pretensions, of Jonathan Franzen. The New York Times says George Saunders is "the writer for our time." I wouldn't know because I've never read him.********

*All we can say for sure is that revolution is mausolean in Sorrentino's '50s/'60s New York

**This is the root of Sorrentino's comedic pathos, a pathos that Marx, in his rarified and teleological misanthropy, would have found alien. But Marx was also a failed poet.

***I reject, as I believe Sorrentino would, the empirico-humanist scruple that would protest against the conflation of literature and fascism: Lorca was murdered by fascists, true, as Mandelstam was murdered by Stalinists, but both were martyred to poetry. Art, Sorrentino tells us, is implicated in the labyrinth or system of signs that constitutes our fate and our unfreedom. Art is a labyrinth of freedom (with both the subjective and objective genitive in operation): art is the paradox of freedom.

****Impossible to resist the mimetic bug if one wants to love or review. Something I learned from Proust, not Sorrentino, who might have also learned it from Proust.

*****The agonies of the erotic lexicon. Sorrentino cannot describe an act of fellatio without encountering a linguistic aporia. He cannot say "sucked off" without speculating that Guinevere "sucked off" Lancelot, and Cleopatra Antony, and Hero Leander, etc.

******Sorrentino on a rapacious Willhelm-Reichian cum "revolutionary": "A deep interest in politics, radical of course. Which is not to say that his old age will not bring him a kind of reasoned conservatism...He's going to buy a house up in the mountains with the money, so that he can get away from the Repression that's coming. But--and this is good news--he'll be coming into the city about two or three days a month, for sex. I recollect Lenin doing that, popping into Moscow once in a while for a little gash. He was always cunt-crazy, old Lenin."

*******I have heard that Sorrentino taught Jeffrey Eugenides at Stanford. But as Sorrentino incessantly reminds us, the echt artist has a right to be a frivolous and philoprogenitive fornicator.

********I'd like to absolve myself of the charge of tyro's envy, of literary rancor, of Underground Man paranoia, of bogeyman manufacturing, on the grounds that these things are endemic to the writer's craft. Sorrentino: "As a matter of fact, Pound's entire career, the tragedy of his career, might be said to consist of an obsessive need to create bogeymen in order to be able to dispel them, a need to create straw men so that he can knock them over. In other words, he's very strange and literary."

When it first appeared, it was terrifying. Like a medieval plague…It was like everything we thought we had triumphed over came roaring back…It was like a death figure just slammed a hammer down on everybody. Like, Oh yeah, you thought I wasn't here? I'm not saying that's what I really think, but it had that feeling to it. There was a period of ten to twenty years where you could have sex with impunity, with basically anyone you wanted, without feeling horribly ostracized — in New York anyway — without feeling like you were risking your life. That was very different than the rest of history, and suddenly everything was changed. We thought we were living in a world that was totally remade, and it wasn't.

No one called Gaitskill out on her implication that, for her peers, AIDS represented repressed history reasserting itself with a vengeance. Yet her interview statements aren’t far from “Back in New Fire”’s Generation-X p.o.v., in which AIDS becomes a millennial update of the dragon of antique myth, which must be slain before the knight can enjoy his desired damsel’s carnal favors.

Wallace and Gaitskill are very different writers whose discrete artistic missions overlap in some pretty remarkable ways, as is evident throughout Both Flesh and Not. And because Wallace frets about the future (of fiction, professional tennis, cinema, etc.) in nearly every essay here, it seems apropos to point out that Gaitskill, in her own good time, is finishing what Wallace couldn’t.

Biggest difference between Wallace and Gaitskill, at least in the way these two writers are perceived: Wallace’s writing isn’t thought of as particularly sexy, whereas Gaitskill still can’t quite shake her ‘80s media profile as a sort of taboo-busting beatnik for the MTV age. But Gaitskill’s work has always been less “sexy” than infused with a powerful sense of physicality, of what it is like to live as a body. If it weren’t steeped in the rhythms and details of American city life, her prose would be downright earthy.

You can find on YouTube a video of Gaitskill delivering a lecture called “Why We Read,” where she says great writing “comes from the individual, idiosyncratic bo-dy…It has intimate understanding, including sub-thought, sub-emotional understanding.”

This echoes the upshot of “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” the essay on the Swiss tennis champ that leads off the new collection. Wallace writes that the beauty Federer brings to the sport “has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it has to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” Which means, of course – though Wallace doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to say it – our reconciliation with mortality.

And this is why that so-easily-misunderstood aspect of Wallace’s work – his cliché-embracing, irony-decrying, ostensibly soppy side – really needs to be re-examined, like, now. Wallace wrote a lot about the “profundity” of clichés, especially in his non-fiction, not out of love of banality but because he recognized the cliché marks a sort of sacred place where language has the potential to exist without the suffocating self-aggrandizement of its speakers. Cliches are words worn smooth by centuries of crushing struggles with the Infinite, and it was those struggles, not the clichés themselves, that fascinated and inspired Wallace.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s recent Wallace biography, ends by summarizing what’s known about how the celebrated author killed himself. Perhaps to dispel the morbidity a bit, Max intersperses a line from Infinite Jest – actually, from a scene in the very center of the book where a mute innocent is brutally murdered by terrorists seeking a weapon (of sorts) they think will unmake America: “[A]s he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home…at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

As befits his largely context-averse bio, Max doesn’t explain how the excerpt relates to the account of Wallace’s suicide beyond the fact that it too describes a death. But his instinct to include the passage was right-on. The Pentecostal image of a polyglot call-to-arms perfectly encapsulates what Wallace was all about. He waged war against cliché (pace Martin Amis) by activating the conflict within cliché: the human being grappling with the enormity of his/her own passions. And thus may we be reconciled.

Mary Gaitskill, for her part, has been working for some time to perfect a literary style that dips below the surface of cliché to capture the essence of soul-warping earthly experience. Her brilliant short story “Mirror Ball” (from the 2009 collection Don’t Cry) used the purity of the fairytale form to dramatize – unforgettably – the momentous consequences of what would seem from a distance to be a frivolous one-night-stand. Earlier this year, “The Devil’s Treasure,” an extract from the novel Gaitskill is currently writing, appeared at the Electric Literature site (http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/27477039156/mary-gaitskill-devils-treasure). Building upon “Mirror Ball”’s fairytale allegorization of adult experience, the new story narrates a seven-year-old girl’s dreaming descent into Hell. It’s just a taste, but it lingers, catching you up in its ever-morphing series of vivid tableaux depicting, it seems, the destiny of all human desire.

If Gaitskill can sustain the tone and quality of “The Devil’s Treasure,” she may well achieve a new myth. And in doing so, render (even more) prophetic the closing lines of Wallace’s first published essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” from 1988, the same year Gaitskill’s debut short-story collection Bad Behavior hit shelves:

It’s quite possible that none of the best [“Voices of a Generation”] are yet among the Conspicuous. A couple might even be…autodidacts. But, especially now, none of them need worry. If fashion, flux, and the academy make for thin milk, at least that means the good stuff can’t help but rise. I’d get ready.

Once upon a time, in fact more recently, there was a young boy who was brought to us malnourished and sick. His name was Jean Tony.

Sadly, we see so many sick and malnourished children, that it was not his condition that made him stand out to me; rather it was because he would just sit and stare and never say hello when someone passed by him.

At the end of very long days, as I plodded to my room exhausted, he would not say a word as I went by.

Finally one night I said, “Why don’t you ever say hello?”

He said, “to who?”

I said, “to me, and to whoever goes by!”

Jean Tony said, “I didn’t see you go by. I am blind”

I learned that Jean Tony is recently blind from degeneration of his eyes because of lack of vitamins, and he has not yet learned the many other ways to “see” that people who cannot see develop over time.

So I sat down next to him, on a chair three times too small for me, and we started to chat.

I could see right away Jean Tony was a cheerful boy, curious and playful. When I asked a number of questions about his blindness so I could understand its onset and his chances of seeing again, he said to me: “Why are you asking so many things about my eyes? Everything else I have works!”

I was astounded. What a beautiful focus. What a phenomenal spirit.

Our continued chats were always marked by curiosity, wonder, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm.

We soon became fast friends, he with me because I brought him a harmonica and a trumpet and other small treasures. Me with him because I wanted, and needed, the energy of his beautiful spirit.

His spirit is a gift to him and a gift to me, A gift of grace.

Today, the feast of St Nicholas, is a good time to think about gifts. Christmas is rapidly approaching.

Ancient spiritual writers tell us that the full Christmas story has three parts. The first and the third are seen with the eyes. The middle part we will never see if we are spiritually blind.

The first visible part is the birth of Christ among us, as the one who saves us from the sin, ignorance, darkness, and evil that is around us and can be in us. He is Savior. He is also Redeemer. He pays the price, first for us and then with us, so that we can live as children of light.

The third part of the story, which according to the scriptures will also be visible to the human eye, will be the deliverance of all Creation to God, the last days of universal salvation,

What is the second part, which is invisible and cannot be directly seen?

The second part is us, the second part is now.

We can be governed by light, or we can be governed by darkness. It is our choice. No angelic choirs in the sky, no triumphant return upon the clouds. Just us, and our choices - if we place our lives in the hands of Emmanuel, “God with us”, God invisible.

We are the middle days of Christmas. We are the “miracle in the middle,” the time in between Incarnation and Last Fulfillment.

The trouble is that we can be quite blind to the middle days of Christmas. The physically blind Jean Tony is not. But we can be.

Just as Jean Tony was made blind by lack of nutrients, we can be made blind by so many things: by anger and hatred, by jealousy and prejudice, by greed and power-lust, by arrogance and non-forgiveness. We can be swallowed up by care and concern only for ourselves, which leads to apathy.

Apathy is the biggest blinder of all. Apathy is a very simple stance: “I don’t care.”

“I don’t care” about someone else’s problems. I have my own. I don’t care about the poor unless they are the poor of my neighborhood. I don’t care to hear the silly chatter of a small blind boy.

Conversely, we can be people who see completely, and care fully.

What do you want for Christmas?

I wish for the spirit of Jean Tony. I wish the cures to hatred, pride and all the destructive blinders that keep us from being children of light. I wish wisdom, peace, love, friendship, faith, and hope. I wish for peace on earth and good will in all people.

And I wish for your deep wellbeing, health, peace, and a life fully alive to the miracle in the middle!

Thank you for your making our miracles possible, in our wide world of children, the mission of Fr. Bill Wasson and Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos!

Merry Christmas!