Nation

Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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And now for something a bit lighter: The great Garfinkel’s caper

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If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 18-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway.  I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.

It was the early winter of 1964 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. when I and three friends, who were all long on energy and short on some essential brain cells, decided it would be a fantastic idea to pull off the greatest shoplifting caper in our young lives.

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Amen Corner

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I want to thank C. Liegh McInnis for commending The Burial — the new movie streaming now that’s based on true events in the 90s. The film tells how Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) — a white Mississippian with a legal team led by a black lawyer, Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) — sued Loewen funeral company, a Northern corporation looking to establish monopoly control over the death-industry in parts of the American South. Along the way, one of O’Keefe’s lawyers, Halbert Dockins Jr. (Mamadou Athie), amped up his client’s case by zeroing in on the full ugly of Loewen’s deals with clergy who sold overpriced funeral packages to black churchgoers.

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The mainstream media completely missed the story when reporting on Trump’s visit to the South Carolina gun store

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Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August.

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Breakdown

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The rich take a plane or hire a car,
but our power is only waiting hour
after hour at the cancelled
bus station, waiting for the backup bus
to heave its way down from Tampa,
while the driver in cigarette-
stained undershirts waits with us,
repeating over and over, he “didn’t
f-up.”

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Honey

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My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law “honey.” One afternoon in the early 1930’s, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren’t fighting about Paul’s love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one’s life. I don’t say a good life.
I say a life.

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“Little Women,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and America’s Progress

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The absolute favorite books of my childhood were strictly for boys, written by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers and its numerous sequels, which I devoured, or by James Fenimore Cooper, the author of The Last of the Mohicans and its own sequels, which likewise I devoured. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, was, by contrast, strictly for girls. I knew this because, unlike the works of Dumas and Cooper, which sat on my own shelves, Little Women sat on my sister’s shelves, together with other works by Alcott. But there was no bar to my taking a peak, and the illustrations enticed me, and the pages turned, and somehow I devoured Little Women, too.

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Mugs’ Game

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Trump calling into Newsmax to say “I’d never heard the words ‘mugshot’ — they didn’t teach me that at the Wharton School of Finance” is one of his greatest lines.

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Mountains Beyond Mountains

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In the New Republic‘s August 10th issue Katherine Stewart published a long and learned account of the now openly anti-democratic polemicizing at the Claremont Institute, titled “The Claremont Institute: The Anti-Democracy Think Tank” (https://newrepublic.com/article/174656/claremont-institute-think-tank-trump) pointing out that what was once a sort-of normal conservative think tank has since 2015 become something much uglier: “In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism…Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.”

With a couple of trivial caveats, this seems right.

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Brother Minds: Kafka and Obama

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The nausea produced by Trump’s “alternative facts”—which are neither facts nor viable alternatives to facts, being merely lies–has led to a good deal of finger-pointing. Is the seeming legitimacy of such lies owed to advanced (post-modern, “post-truth”) literary theory? For, here, it’s said, readings for the truth of complex texts result in nothing more than a vertigo of indetermination. We have no decisive outcomes but only different hypotheses, having unfathomable degrees of validity, that vie for primacy with no end in sight. It’s not my remit to do a history of the concept of truth-skepticism, but we did not need Foucault and Derrida to introduce us to this great negation. There are paramount exemplars of such concerns in German thought, from at least the 18th century on: Doubts about the accessibility of truth abound, but they are not given equivalent status with lies. The polymath G. E. Lessing acknowledged “the diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process.”[1] We have a kind of modern radicalization in Kafka’s skepticism: “A certain [kind of] truth might be found only in the chorus … or choir (im Chor) (emphasis added).[2] Bottom line: we did not need to be vexed by literary theory to declare that “alternative facts” may not be turned into a chorus of part-truth viewpoints and opinions.

As we return finally to another anthropological order, we find the suggestion that criticizing Trump “for not being consistent, reliable, or rational is to misunderstand his leadership philosophy.” Is that true? I’d aver that he has no detectable “philosophy,” unless it’s to have none. By contrast, it’s tempting to invoke, as possibly redeeming, the mind of another ex-President: Barack Hussein Obama.

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Fanboy James & The Utilitarian Nature of the Blues

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Last week on What Did Prince Do This Week?, someone mentioned the documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. That caused me to remember when B. B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland were on Soul Train in 1975 to promote their joint album, B.B. King and Bobby Bland: Together for the First Time, which is my favorite blues record of all time (here). It doesn’t hurt that King and Bland open the album with King’s seminal song, “Three O’clock Blues.” The first time that I got my hands on the album, it took me a month to listen to the entire thing because I just kept playing “Three O’clock Blues” over, and over, and over, and over until my mother finally yelled from the back of the house, “Boy, if you don’t let the rest of that album play, I’mma come up there and knock you into Three A.M.!” Even though I had the studio version (45”) of “Three O’clock Blues,” this live version was the most amazing thing that I had ever heard. Interestingly, this appearance by King and Bland on Soul Train is also a bonus scene on the Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown DVD. More than just the music, it’s wonderful to watch James Brown, at the height of his popularity, become a fanboy over King and Bland. When I first saw this performance years ago, it was something to see a man the stature of Brown become almost childlike in the presence of King and Bland.

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R.I.P. to a Man’s Man

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On Cunningham Street in the Upper Brickyard of Clarksdale, Mississippi, Clement Edmond was a man’s man—respected and beloved by all as a bedrock of his community. He reminded me of my pops in his ability to express every aspect of what it means to be a leader and fully human. He was a traditional husband who worked while his wonderful wife, Louise, kept a safe and loving home for their thirteen children.

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Use Him

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In February 2023, music producer Ian Brennan traveled to Mississippi to record with the prisoners of the notorious Parchman Prison, which has a rich musical history. (Former inmates include Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison and Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon Presley.) The bureaucratic process behind Brennan’s visit took over three years: “Granted approval a little more than a week before, Brennan caught a red eye flight to be there on a Sunday morning for the few hours he was allowed to record.” Parchment Prison Prayer belongs to the honorable tradition of song-catchers searching for unchained melodies in penitentiaries.  This time around, Brennan may have caught at least one song for the ages…

“I give myself away,” sings the vocalist to his personal Jesus (as he makes the piano chime), “so you can use me.” That’s the gospel truth.  The singer/pianist is the only Parchman prisoner/performer recorded by Brennan who chose to remain anonymous.

A True Pro-Life Movement Has Never Been Tried

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In Ohio, this Tuesday, voters in a special election will decide on a scammy state constitutional amendment. “Are you sick of constitutional amendments? Vote yes on Issue 1 and you won’t have to put up with them anymore!” Issue 1 makes the process of amending our state constitution significantly harder. Since 1851, proposed amendments to our constitution needed a simple majority to pass. Issue 1 would up the required majority to 60%. If you take supporters’ word for it, shadowy interest groups from outside the state have set their eyes on Ohio and our big, beautiful constitution. “They” seek to shred it so as to turn us into another Democratic shithole like Chicago or California. We need a special instance of living constitutionalism to protect the original intent of the constitution (or something).

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Yard Politics

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Four days a week, I wake at 4:50 a.m. and start my exercise routine. Thursday is the only day that I don’t exercise. I still wake at 4:50 a.m., but I mow the yard and wash both cars. I’ve been doing that since I was in my twenties, when I was renting a house before I purchased my own home. The Thursday routine was instilled in me by my pops who always cut his yard on Thursday, mostly because his work as a juvenile youth counselor and a member of the Mississippi Democrat Executive Committee meant that his weekends were too busy for yard work. However, the notion that mowing one’s yard and maintaining one’s home is a primary responsibility of a citizen was instilled in me from the womb by my pops, grandpops, and just about every person in my Clarksdale and Jackson communities.

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Benificence

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A couple of comments on Florida’s new history standards. I use the word “standards” loosely, of course.

But first a tweet that I give my highest compliment. I wish I had written it.

Larry Sabato: “So far Ron DeSantis has run a failing campaign. But here’s the good news: DeSantis has developed skills which, in some instances, can be applied for his personal benefit.”

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