WHAT IS THE WORK OF THAT PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATRIC COALITION THAT ELECTED OBAMA? That is the central question, the key link in the work of Revolutionaries, Progressives, Marxists today. I proposed this panel to a "Left Forum" revving up. But this is a question that must be debated across the widest spectrum of progressive opinion. Even these people do not seem to know what has happened. The titles of three of my eight or so essays on Obama (which I guess I will publish in Feb-March) carry the load of what needs to be understood. "We Are Already In The Future!" written right after the election; "Obama & The Tragic Errors of Weimar," refers to the early twentieth century debate in the German Weimar Republic between the Communists, Social Democrats, Unions &c, after electing a social democratic government, about whether they had socialism or not, while Hitler and his fascists prepared to swoop down and destroy the last democratic government before Fascism and "Our Victories Give Our Enemies Weapons They Did Not Have Before!" about the Right Backlash and the so called Tea Party Movement.

It would be great if we could collectively get hold of some large venue and pull together Progressives across the spectrum to set such an agenda, list the key proposals, and then create task forces to go about acomplishing these. Rather than sit back and criticize and nit pick Obama rather than fighting the forces that are fighting him and making it impossible to do the things that we need and that we should be demanding of him. But we must begin to Fight the Right!

1/29/10 Newark NJ

We gather here, on a Sabbath, during a time of profound difficulty for our nation and for our world. In such a time, it soothes the soul to seek out the Divine in a spirit of prayer; to seek solace among a community of believers. But we are not here just to ask the Lord for His blessing. We aren't here just to interpret His Scripture. We're also here to call on the memory of one of His noble servants, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, it's fitting that we do so here, within the four walls of Vermont Avenue Baptist Church -- here, in a church that rose like the phoenix from the ashes of the civil war; here in a church formed by freed slaves, whose founding pastor had worn the union blue; here in a church from whose pews congregants set out for marches and from whom choir anthems of freedom were heard; from whose sanctuary King himself would sermonize from time to time.

One of those times was Thursday, December 6, 1956. Pastor, you said you were a little older than me, so were you around at that point? (Laughter.) You were three years old -- okay. (Laughter.) I wasn't born yet. (Laughter.)

On Thursday, December 6, 1956. And before Dr. King had pointed us to the mountaintop, before he told us about his dream in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King came here, as a 27-year-old preacher, to speak on what he called "The Challenge of a New Age." "The Challenge of a New Age." It was a period of triumph, but also uncertainty, for Dr. King and his followers -- because just weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, a hard-wrought, hard-fought victory that would put an end to the 381-day historic boycott down in Montgomery, Alabama.

And yet, as Dr. King rose to take that pulpit, the future still seemed daunting. It wasn't clear what would come next for the movement that Dr. King led. It wasn't clear how we were going to reach the Promised Land. Because segregation was still rife; lynchings still a fact. Yes, the Supreme Court had ruled not only on the Montgomery buses, but also on Brown v. Board of Education. And yet that ruling was defied throughout the South -- by schools and by states; they ignored it with impunity. And here in the nation's capital, the federal government had yet to fully align itself with the laws on its books and the ideals of its founding.

So it's not hard for us, then, to imagine that moment. We can imagine folks coming to this church, happy about the boycott being over. We can also imagine them, though, coming here concerned about their future, sometimes second-guessing strategy, maybe fighting off some creeping doubts, perhaps despairing about whether the movement in which they had placed so many of their hopes -- a movement in which they believed so deeply -- could actually deliver on its promise.

So here we are, more than half a century later, once again facing the challenges of a new age. Here we are, once more marching toward an unknown future, what I call the Joshua generation to their Moses generation -- the great inheritors of progress paid for with sweat and blood, and sometimes life itself.

We've inherited the progress of unjust laws that are now overturned. We take for granted the progress of a ballot being available to anybody who wants to take the time to actually vote. We enjoy the fruits of prejudice and bigotry being lifted -- slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but irrevocably -- from human hearts. It's that progress that made it possible for me to be here today; for the good people of this country to elect an African American the 44th President of the United States of America.

Reverend Wheeler mentioned the inauguration, last year's election. You know, on the heels of that victory over a year ago, there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post-racial America, all those problems would be solved. There were those who argued that because I had spoke of a need for unity in this country that our nation was somehow entering into a period of post-partisanship. That didn't work out so well. There was a hope shared by many that life would be better from the moment that I swore that oath.

Of course, as we meet here today, one year later, we know the promise of that moment has not yet been fully fulfilled. Because of an era of greed and irresponsibility that sowed the seeds of its own demise, because of persistent economic troubles unaddressed through the generations, because of a banking crisis that brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe, we are being tested -- in our own lives and as a nation -- as few have been tested before.

Unemployment is at its highest level in more than a quarter of a century. Nowhere is it higher than the African American community. Poverty is on the rise. Home ownership is slipping. Beyond our shores, our sons and daughters are fighting two wars. Closer to home, our Haitian brothers and sisters are in desperate need. Bruised, battered, many people are legitimately feeling doubt, even despair, about the future. Like those who came to this church on that Thursday in 1956, folks are wondering, where do we go from here?

I understand those feelings. I understand the frustration and sometimes anger that so many folks feel as they struggle to stay afloat. I get letters from folks around the country every day; I read 10 a night out of the 40,000 that we receive. And there are stories of hardship and desperation, in some cases, pleading for help: I need a job. I'm about to lose my home. I don't have health care -- it's about to cause my family to be bankrupt. Sometimes you get letters from children: My mama or my daddy have lost their jobs, is there something you can do to help? Ten letters like that a day we read.

So, yes, we're passing through a hard winter. It's the hardest in some time. But let's always remember that, as a people, the American people, we've weathered some hard winters before. This country was founded during some harsh winters. The fishermen, the laborers, the craftsmen who made camp at Valley Forge -- they weathered a hard winter. The slaves and the freedmen who rode an underground railroad, seeking the light of justice under the cover of night -- they weathered a hard winter. The seamstress whose feet were tired, the pastor whose voice echoes through the ages -- they weathered some hard winters. It was for them, as it is for us, difficult, in the dead of winter, to sometimes see spring coming. They, too, sometimes felt their hopes deflate. And yet, each season, the frost melts, the cold recedes, the sun reappears. So it was for earlier generations and so it will be for us.

What we need to do is to just ask what lessons we can learn from those earlier generations about how they sustained themselves during those hard winters, how they persevered and prevailed. Let us in this Joshua generation learn how that Moses generation overcame.

Let me offer a few thoughts on this. First and foremost, they did so by remaining firm in their resolve. Despite being threatened by sniper fire or planted bombs, by shoving and punching and spitting and angry stares, they adhered to that sweet spirit of resistance, the principles of nonviolence that had accounted for their success.

Second, they understood that as much as our government and our political parties had betrayed them in the past -- as much as our nation itself had betrayed its own ideals -- government, if aligned with the interests of its people, can be -- and must be -- a force for good. So they stayed on the Justice Department. They went into the courts. They pressured Congress, they pressured their President. They didn't give up on this country. They didn't give up on government. They didn't somehow say government was the problem; they said, we're going to change government, we're going to make it better. Imperfect as it was, they continued to believe in the promise of democracy; in America's constant ability to remake itself, to perfect this union.

Third, our predecessors were never so consumed with theoretical debates that they couldn't see progress when it came. Sometimes I get a little frustrated when folks just don't want to see that even if we don't get everything, we're getting something. (Applause.) King understood that the desegregation of the Armed Forces didn't end the civil rights movement, because black and white soldiers still couldn't sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home. But he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the Armed Forces. That was a good first step -- even as he called for more. He didn't suggest that somehow by the signing of the Civil Rights that somehow all discrimination would end. But he also didn't think that we shouldn't sign the Civil Rights Act because it hasn't solved every problem. Let's take a victory, he said, and then keep on marching. Forward steps, large and small, were recognized for what they were -- which was progress.

Fourth, at the core of King's success was an appeal to conscience that touched hearts and opened minds, a commitment to universal ideals -- of freedom, of justice, of equality -- that spoke to all people, not just some people. For King understood that without broad support, any movement for civil rights could not be sustained. That's why he marched with the white auto worker in Detroit. That's why he linked arms with the Mexican farm worker in California, and united people of all colors in the noble quest for freedom.

Of course, King overcame in other ways as well. He remained strategically focused on gaining ground -- his eyes on the prize constantly -- understanding that change would not be easy, understand that change wouldn't come overnight, understanding that there would be setbacks and false starts along the way, but understanding, as he said in 1956, that "we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice."

And it's because the Moses generation overcame that the trials we face today are very different from the ones that tested us in previous generations. Even after the worst recession in generations, life in America is not even close to being as brutal as it was back then for so many. That's the legacy of Dr. King and his movement. That's our inheritance. Having said that, let there be no doubt the challenges of our new age are serious in their own right, and we must face them as squarely as they faced the challenges they saw.

I know it's been a hard road we've traveled this year to rescue the economy, but the economy is growing again. The job losses have finally slowed, and around the country, there's signs that businesses and families are beginning to rebound. We are making progress.

I know it's been a hard road that we've traveled to reach this point on health reform. I promise you I know. (Laughter.) But under the legislation I will sign into law, insurance companies won't be able to drop you when you get sick, and more than 30 million people -- (applause) -- our fellow Americans will finally have insurance. More than 30 million men and women and children, mothers and fathers, won't be worried about what might happen to them if they get sick. This will be a victory not for Democrats; this will be a victory for dignity and decency, for our common humanity. This will be a victory for the United States of America.

Let's work to change the political system, as imperfect as it is. I know people can feel down about the way things are going sometimes here in Washington. I know it's tempting to give up on the political process. But we've put in place tougher rules on lobbying and ethics and transparency -- tougher rules than any administration in history. It's not enough, but it's progress. Progress is possible. Don't give up on voting. Don't give up on advocacy. Don't give up on activism. There are too many needs to be met, too much work to be done. Like Dr. King said, "We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."

Let us broaden our coalition, building a confederation not of liberals or conservatives, not of red states or blue states, but of all Americans who are hurting today, and searching for a better tomorrow. The urgency of the hour demands that we make common cause with all of America's workers -- white, black, brown -- all of whom are being hammered by this recession, all of whom are yearning for that spring to come. It demands that we reach out to those who've been left out in the cold even when the economy is good, even when we're not in recession -- the youth in the inner cities, the youth here in Washington, D.C., people in rural communities who haven't seen prosperity reach them for a very long time. It demands that we fight discrimination, whatever form it may come. That means we fight discrimination against gays and lesbians, and we make common cause to reform our immigration system.

And finally, we have to recognize, as Dr. King did, that progress can't just come from without -- it also has to come from within. And over the past year, for example, we've made meaningful improvements in the field of education. I've got a terrific Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He's been working hard with states and working hard with the D.C. school district, and we've insisted on reform, and we've insisted on accountability. We we're putting in more money and we've provided more Pell Grants and more tuition tax credits and simpler financial aid forms. We've done all that, but parents still need to parent. (Applause.) Kids still need to own up to their responsibilities. We still have to set high expectations for our young people. Folks can't simply look to government for all the answers without also looking inside themselves, inside their own homes, for some of the answers.

Progress will only come if we're willing to promote that ethic of hard work, a sense of responsibility, in our own lives. I'm not talking, by the way, just to the African American community. Sometimes when I say these things people assme, well, he's just talking to black people about working hard. No, no, no, no. I'm talking to the American community. Because somewhere along the way, we, as a nation, began to lose touch with some of our core values. You know what I'm talking about. We became enraptured with the false prophets who prophesized an easy path to success, paved with credit cards and home equity loans and get-rich-quick schemes, and the most important thing was to be a celebrity; it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you get on TV. That's everybody.

We forgot what made the bus boycott a success; what made the civil rights movement a success; what made the United States of America a success -- that, in this country, there's no substitute for hard work, no substitute for a job well done, no substitute for being responsible stewards of God's blessings.

What we're called to do, then, is rebuild America from its foundation on up. To reinvest in the essentials that we've neglected for too long -- like health care, like education, like a better energy policy, like basic infrastructure, like scientific research. Our generation is called to buckle down and get back to basics.

We must do so not only for ourselves, but also for our children, and their children. For Jordan and for Austin. That's a sacrifice that falls on us to make. It's a much smaller sacrifice than the Moses generation had to make, but it's still a sacrifice.

Yes, it's hard to transition to a clean energy economy. Sometimes it may be inconvenient, but it's a sacrifice that we have to make. It's hard to be fiscally responsible when we have all these human needs, and we're inheriting enormous deficits and debt, but that's a sacrifice that we're going to have to make. You know, it's easy, after a hard day's work, to just put your kid in front of the TV set -- you're tired, don't want to fuss with them -- instead of reading to them, but that's a sacrifice we must joyfully accept.

Sometimes it's hard to be a good father and good mother. Sometimes it's hard to be a good neighbor, or a good citizen, to give up time in service of others, to give something of ourselves to a cause that's greater than ourselves -- as Michelle and I are urging folks to do tomorrow to honor and celebrate Dr. King. But these are sacrifices that we are called to make. These are sacrifices that our faith calls us to make. Our faith in the future. Our faith in America. Our faith in God.

And in his sermon all those years ago, Dr. King quoted a poet's verse:

Truth forever on the scaffold
Wrong forever on the throne…
And behind the dim unknown stands God
Within the shadows keeping watch above his own.

Even as Dr. King stood in this church, a victory in the past and uncertainty in the future, he trusted God. He trusted that God would make a way. A way for prayers to be answered. A way for our union to be perfected. A way for the arc of the moral universe, no matter how long, to slowly bend towards truth and bend towards freedom, to bend towards justice. He had faith that God would make a way out of no way.

You know, folks ask me sometimes why I look so calm. (Laughter.) They say, all this stuff coming at you, how come you just seem calm? And I have a confession to make here. There are times where I'm not so calm. (Laughter.) Reggie Love knows. My wife knows. There are times when progress seems too slow. There are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt. There are times when the barbs sting. There are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught, and change is so painfully slow in coming, and I have to confront my own doubts.

But let me tell you -- during those times it's faith that keeps me calm. (Applause.) It's faith that gives me peace. The same faith that leads a single mother to work two jobs to put a roof over her head when she has doubts. The same faith that keeps an unemployed father to keep on submitting job applications even after he's been rejected a hundred times. The same faith that says to a teacher even if the first nine children she's teaching she can't reach, that that 10th one she's going to be able to reach. The same faith that breaks the silence of an earthquake's wake with the sound of prayers and hymns sung by a Haitian community. A faith in things not seen, in better days ahead, in Him who holds the future in the hollow of His hand. A faith that lets us mount up on wings like eagles; lets us run and not be weary; lets us walk and not faint.

So let us hold fast to that faith, as Joshua held fast to the faith of his fathers, and together, we shall overcome the challenges of a new age. (Applause.) Together, we shall seize the promise of this moment. Together, we shall make a way through winter, and we're going to welcome the spring. Through God all things are possible. (Applause.)

May the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King continue to inspire us and ennoble our world and all who inhabit it. And may God bless the United States of America. Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you.

I picked up my copy while trolling for course books during my freshman or sophomore year in college. It had a great impact on me and continues to shape my sense of the past. Lynd’s chief lesson was that a dissenting tradition informed the American Revolution – a tradition that survived the capture of the Revolution by conservative nationalists – not least because it was older, broader, and more idealistic than the discourse upheld by conventional minders of the Revolution’s legacy.

Intellectual Origins came out a year after Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and, as the title implies, issued a potent and intentional challenge to that book’s interpretation of Revolutionary politics. Radicalism, bourgeois or otherwise, cannot be understood as merely a “contagion of liberty” resulting from the Revolution. Nor can it be grasped in terms of anti-conspiratorial ideology derived from early-eighteenth-century “real whig” opposition writings. There was an earlier radical tradition, religious but no less radical for being so, that trusted in ordinary people’s consciences. It was not so much American as Anglo (but not only that), in some iterations explicitly internationalist, and dissenting with respect to both church and state depending on the time and place. We see echoes of it in many different sorts of attacks on wealth and power throughout U.S. history. This tradition included Garrisonian abolitionism, native socialisms, aspects of Jefferson and Lincoln as well as Tom Paine. Radicals could claim a true and thoughtful, not merely rhetorical or mythical, connection to the American past—as some of them have done ever since.

That this view was ever controversial, or that it raised some hackles in 1968, may now need explaining. Between 1961 and 1968 Staughton Lynd published a body of work—articles and anthologies as well as the two works of history republished in 2009 by Cambridge University Press—that was remarkable for its breadth and vision. Indeed, the rapid publication of his essay collection Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (1967) and Intellectual Origins by trade presses reflected the demand for his research and teaching, as well as the recognition he had already achieved among historians during the same years and, to a significant extent, before he became famous as an antiwar activist. He certainly had every reason, while working on Intellectual Origins, to believe that he’d earned the right, and perhaps even had the responsibility, to creatively combine his political work and his historical writing—and that there would be a ready crossover audience for such an effort. He had been hired by Yale because of his standing, in the public eye and in the profession, as perhaps the best “New Left” historian yet to emerge. His writings on the possible confluences of history and activism were also widely admired and anthologized. Being at Yale, in turn, made it even more likely that he would be turned to as a leader and speaker by the movement, whether at demonstrations against the war or at meetings of the American Historical Association.

Lynd emphasized, in the conclusion of Intellectual Origins, that the book was for “radicals.” While writing it, he described himself in one of the many new magazines of politics and culture springing up at the time as “more and more committed to the thesis that the professor of history should also be a historical protagonist.” He was also trying to “save the Movement of the Sixties” as he put it recently, from bad ideas and their effects (particularly “pop Marxism,” violent as opposed to peaceful revolutionism, and an avant-gardism that distrusted popular traditions). If there was a usable, vital radical tradition, a historian could play an extremely important role as “the custodian of such memories and dreams.”

Lynd’s own sense of American memories and dreams had been decisively shaped, as he describes in his new memoir with Alice Lynd, Stepping Stones, by his initial decision, in 1964, to turn down ivy-league offers and teach at historically black Spelman College in Atlanta. His dialogue with students and faculty there (he mentions Alice Walker and Howard Zinn), and his experience as a leader in the 1964 Mississippi Freeedom School project, undoubtedly helped him seek a synthesis. “I did better scholarship on the Constitution while I was teaching five courses at Spelman, and traveling across town to borrow books from the Emory University library, than when I came to Yale,” he writes in his recent book with Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. (A Staughton Lynd Reader is also forthcoming in April 2010 from PM Press.)

His 1967 and 1968 books were in fact well received in the mainstream press and by well-respected historians. Given their subject matter and broad ambitions, it is hard to imagine much better reviews. Yet it’s now an established fact that the Yale history department, with the assent of the liberal historians who had hired him, had decided to get rid of Lynd for political reasons and chose to construe Intellectual Origins as an excuse, with an assist from Eugene D. Genovese, a historian and critic from the left whose objections had little to do with the merits of Lynd’s account of ideas in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Wittingly or not, Genovese seems to have functioned as something of a hired gun. C. Vann Woodward was showing his review around the history department before it appeared it print, and Genovese was invited to teach at Yale for a year soon afterward. Lynd’s neo-Marxism contended with Genovese’s more orthodox variety; his emphasis on abolitionists and founding fathers challenged Genovese’s exclusive interest in the old South. Genovese had also publicly attacked Lynd’s politics before he reviewed Lynd’s two books in the New York Review of Books. The review deliberately conflated the issues, calling Lynd a “demagogue” and wielding its title, “Abolitionist,” as a slur. For Genovese, Lynd’s insistence on slavery as an issue during the Revolutionary era, and on the abolitionists as carrying on a broader tradition, was simply ahistorical. Real abolitionism meant support for slavery’s antithesis, wage labor, which was unthinkable in the pre-capitalist, revolutionary era (or among slaveholders who were not capitalists)—an a priori assumption that, it subsequently became clearer, undergirded Genovese’s own work. Genovese went further in denouncing Lynd’s elaboration and celebration of rights, natural law doctrines, and conscience as politically irresponsible. In a subsequent exchange of letters in NYRB (which scholar Gary B. Nash remembers as deeply influential even as he recalls his wonder at Genovese’s vitriol), Lynd insisted “the Founding Fathers morally condemned slavery.” Other countries abolished slavery between the Revolution and the 1820s: “it is not in the least anachronistic to ask why the United States failed to do likewise.”

There’s still much at stake in this debate. If one ignores the part about capitalism and antislavery, Genovese’s argument that all talk about slavery’s relationship to the Revolution and the founding of the republic is anachronism or presentism is basically the same one now associated with Bernard Bailyn’s most famous student Gordon S. Wood (who also used the term “anachronistic” with respect to Lynd in 1969). But even Genovese has admitted, recently, that slavery “loomed over the Constitutional Convention.” To preserve his “honorable” planter class who “defended principles,” Genovese, however, has amplified their apologies for “slavery in the abstract,” ignoring the rise of racial defenses of slavery designed to deflect natural rights doctrines. (Wood, for his part, complains publicly about books on slavery pouring from the presses, while carefully segregating the subject from his irony-laced narratives about founding fathers and “democratic” capitalism.)

More or less blacklisted from the history business, Lynd has raised tough questions about the academic life and its limits, urging radical historians to cast their net wider. He also asks why historians have stopped doing “structural analysis” or proposing “big ideas that could be tested” (nor, I’d add, doing so while writing as clearly and accessibly as Lynd). Lynd has commented that the academic profession now grants legitimacy to “stories of cancer-stricken chimney sweeps and unwed mothers so long as their authors still cede the main story to their more conservative colleagues.” This is a point of tremendous importance. Even Gary Nash’s 2005 The Unknown American Revolution rests content to treat its story and characters as “alternative” – and to avoid a clash of interpretations over the Constitution, though that text has long been a battleground, and is bound to spark conflicts going forward.

What is striking in retrospect about Intellectual Origins is that Lynd did not claim more for the traditions he investigated than he could plausibly demonstrate. For the variety of intellectual history-cum-radical memory Lynd practiced, it wasn’t necessary to trace strains of thought that flowed with the mainstream or became ideology. What mattered were ideas that endured and came to inspire radical players in American life.

Ideas of this kind were implicit in the revolutionary mindset limned by Bailyn. But he soon lashed out at historians like Lynd who focused on figures who called for fundamental social change. Lynd, in turn, objected that Bailyn’s revolutionary consensus marginalized both John Locke and Thomas Paine, even while citing them, and neglected natural rights as a source of radicalism. Bailyn’s “real whig” opposition sources of republican ideology also dismissed the radical side of the English Civil War and its legacies. More recent historians like Jonathan Scott see the late seventeenth century as a time of “troubles” that sparked an “extraordinary intellectual fertility” which was international in scope and productive of precisely the radicalizing questions of conscience that Lynd highlights. Writers on the left of the American Revolution, including especially Paine and Jefferson, began following the footsteps of the originary English rebels by questioning the inalienability of private property—the bedrock of government for Locke, but also the source of a potent critique of slavery (as a violation of inalienable property in one’s own person).

In the United States, the property question could never be divorced from the slavery question. In Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, Lynd explained how and why the Revolutionaries crafted a “compromise of 1787”: northern capitalists and the plantocracy securing each others’ interests, in the process keeping the antislavery and levelling radicals at bay. Just as persuasively, Lynd showed how Jefferson and his political heirs conceived of American history as driven by embattled farmers against conspiring urban elites. The roots of such orthodox progressive history lie in the so-called great compromises of the early republic. (Though abolitionists tried to undo that orthodoxy by forcing the nation to confront what they called its original sin.) Just as importantly, Lynd excavated the roots of contemporary American historical imagination in the abolitionists’ own debate about whether the constitution was proslavery (William Lloyd Garrison) or in the last instance antislavery (Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln).

Intellectual Origins tells the sunnier side of the story: an important strain of radical and cosmopolitan thinking survived the compromises that secured northern (mercantile) private property by solidifying southern (slave) property. Given that certain figures in the founders’ generation “demythologized” private property, the Revolutionary mind-set could still be a resource for those who argued against slavery, despite the Constitution’s turn toward the safeguarding of property as a greater good. And, indeed, the struggle against racial slavery could be about more than that: more even than a defense of a free labor system construed as the opposite of chattel slavery. It might become, like the ideology of the Revolution itself, a site of internationalism in a nationalist age and of a critique of
capitalism insofar as contemporary capitalism relied on slave labor.

While the mainstreaming of antislavery in the north may have had much to do with its compatibility with wage labor, there were other aspects of abolitionism, especially in its more uncompromising versions, that existed in tension with the status quo antebellum and pointed toward democratic expansions of the political landscape. It was the radical democratic imperatives of abolitionism, including advocacy of the right to free speech, perhaps as much as the insistence on free labor in the territories, that upset the political consensus over slavery. On this score, recent appreciations of the abolitionists can be read as an extended footnote to Lynd. What’s news here is the recognition now given to the role played by African American activists and thinkers. The irreverent populists, influential Quakers, working-class William Lloyd Garrison, and anti-capitalist Henry David Thoreau we meet in Intellectual Origins, all of whom thought long and hard before acting to change history, are now familiar figures who live in your local Barnes and Noble.

Lynd was unusual, however, in underscoring the connection of abolitionism to the Revolutionary generation. But that wasn’t a sign of willful nativism. He refused to choose between a Revolutionary American and a cosmopolitan internationalist tradition, finding the influences twinned in radical and antislavery figures like Thomas Paine and Wendell Phillips. His double-truth telling here anticipated a major theme in recent work on nineteenth and twentieth century America which promote a “post-nationalist” and post-imperial approach, focusing on black and white internationalists like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, who riffed on both the Revolution and its limits. This new body of scholarship, though, tends not to go back to the roots of the story in the seventeenth century. The few writers who do get back, like Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh in The Many-Headed Hydra and Linebaugh in his mind-blowing Magna Charta Manifesto, get attacked as romanticists and nit-picked for factual errors that are somehow excusable in works that celebrate radicals and runaways without raising issues of class, like Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution.

A look back at Lynd suggests that contemporary radicals may be all too invested in the myth of American consensus (in other words, they’ve read too much Bailyn and Wood, and not enough Lynd). Lynd gives us a glimpse of a lost synthesis of American history that has rich implications for our own time. In Lynd’s vision, wars—and, in America, the unavoidable turmoil that war provokes in the politics of race and class—generate crises that spur creative reassessments of social relations. Lynd’s work reminds us that in times of national crisis people have often entered or re-entered politics to “cast their whole vote,” regardless of the previous rules of the political game. Lynd’s account of the sources of radicalism in America before and after 1776 seems right on time now as well as being more in tune with recent scholarship than with mainstream work published circa 1968.

Even forty years later, Intellectual Origins and Class Conflict, Slavery and the U.S. Constitution seem remarkably fresh –in part because the bulk of the historical profession refused Lynd’s implicit challenge to develop a new synthesis encompassing both the Revolution and the Civil War. His books and more recent reflections bear close scrutiny because he provides moral clarity –“The American Revolution had the possibility of abolishing slavery [but] the revolutionary leadership failed to act” – missing from the work of other historians, even those who lean left. There’s nothing namby-pamby about the sense of possibility that’s alive in Lynd’s version of the past. (He sees the Civil War as the first American revolution because “millions of dollars of slave property was confiscated without compensation.”) Lynd’s return – or rather, our return to Lynd – can remind us that radicals are always down for the count, and always getting up.

The Winter that Zebulon set his traps along the Gila River had been colder and longer than any he had experienced, leaving him with two frostbitten toes, an arrow wound in his shoulder from a Crow war party, and, to top it all off, the unexpected arrival of two frozen figues stumbling more dead than alive into his cabin in the middle of a spring blizzard.

Rather than waking him, the cold blast of wind from the open door became part of a recurrent dream: a long endless fall through an empty sky towards a storm-tossed sea...Come closer, the towering waves howled....

He opened his eyes, not sure for a moment if the man and woman staring back at him weren't hungry ghosts. Frost clung to their eyebrows and nostrils, and their swollen faces were raw and crimson from the tree-cracking cold. The man wore a hard-brimmed top hat tied under his bearded chin with a long red scarf, along with a buffalo robe coated with slivers of ice. The woman appeared to be a Shoshoni half-breed. She was wrapped inside a huge army overcoat distinguished by sergeant stripes at the shoulders and, at the chest, two bullet holes, one over the other.

The man sank to his knees, swearing and choking from the smoke pouring out of the cabin's leaky fireplace and the overpowering stench of a nearby slop bucket. He spoke in a rasping whisper, as if his larynx had been smashed.

"I figure we be dead meat until the breed told me you was camped on the Gila. She knows things that ain't available to other mortals."

The man was Lobo Bill, an old trapper and horse thief, known for his wide range of windy tales and maniacal rages, that Zebulon had run into and away from in various saloons and hideouts from Tularosa to Cheyenne. When he removed his top hat, he exposed a face sliced on one side from cheek to jawbone, as if neatly quartered by a butcher's knife.

Lobo Bill nodded towards the breed, who was standing with her back to the wall, staring at Zebulon with huge, empty eyes. "She ain't one for words, but when she does open her flap, she packs a punch you don't want to know about. Even so, I owe her. She saved my bacon when a wolverine took after me. Axed it into quarters and sliced me up as well. I won her in Alamosa from a horse trader. A straight flush to his full house. A hand for the ages. She's half Shoshoni, half Irish. 'Not Here Not There' is what I call her, and I'm favored to have her, things bein' what they is these days, or ain't, depending on which way the wind blow, and even if it don't.

Lobo Bill and Not Here Not There took off their clothes. After their bodies thawed out, they collapsed on a pile of bearskins near the fireplace.

Zebulon spent the rest of the night stoking the fire and drinking from one of his last bottles of Taos White Lightning, pondering memories of Lobo Bill and all the other mountain lunatics he had known, and what he and they used to be, or not, and what he was meant to do, or be, depending on his view from the valley or mountaintop. It wasn't so much that the old mountain ways were played out, although that day was surely coming. There was something that Lobo Bill and his breed had brought in with them, a mysterious presence or shadow that he was unable to define. Or maybe it was just the sight of two stange and lost figures snoring on his bed.

It was dawn when the wind died, along with most of his premonitions, enough anyway, to let him pass out next to his guests.

II

When he woke, a hard brittle light was splattering against the cabin wall. There was no sign of Lobo Bill. When he questioned Not Here Not There, she shook her head and rolled her eyes back and forth, which made him think that Lobo Bill had either gone off to find his mules and traps, or he had decided to skip out all altogether. Around him the cabin had been swept clean. The slop bucket had been emptied, his stock of flour, tobacco, whiskey, coffee, and dried jerky were stacked neatly in one corner, and split logs were piled up on either side of the fireplace.

The extreme tidiness of the cabin, together with Not Here Not There's sullen silence, made him uneasy, as if she were harboring secret thoughts or maybe, god help him, some ill-intentioned plan. Never mind, he thought. Whatever was meant to come would come, ready or not.

While they both waited for Lobo Bill to appear. Zebulon hunted for small game and prepared for the annual spring rendezvous by taking down and sorting the hundreds of muskrat and beaver pelts he had stashed in the crooks of several trees.

After three days Lobo Bill still hadn't returned. Most of the time Not Here Not There sat on the bench outside the cabin, staring at the river and the dark blue ice that had begun to splinter into large moving cracks. In the evening she avoided looking at him as she cooked one of the rabbits he had shot.

After they ate dinner, instead of retreating in the corner she had chosen to sleep in, she joined him near the fire. Looking at him with a sly grin, she took his bottle of Taos White Lightning from him and drained the rest of it, then swayed back to her place across the room.

That night he was woken by her long nails scratching lines of blood down his stomach and across his groin, a violent gesture which she repeated even as she pulled him inside her, locking her legs around his waist as if she wanted to break him in two.

For the rest of the night she dictated their furious passion in her own insatiable terms. in the morning she left the cabin without looking at him or saying a word.

Two days later she returned in the middle of a thunderstorm. Standing before him, she looked into his eyes as he removed her clothes and positioned her over the table, pinning her arms abover her head.

When the door opened, he was plunging on inside her as if they had never been apart. When he became aware that Lobo Bill was standing above them with a raised hatchet, he decided he might as well go out in the same way that he had been conceived. Part of him enjoyed the prospect, and he was dammed if he was going to give Lobo Bill the satisfaction of an apology. He continued to thrust himself inside her with even more abandon, letting out a long mountain yell: "Waaaaaaaaaagh!"

His fury broke the table, sending them both to the floor. Lobo Bill's hatchet missed Zebulon's skull by an inch and sliced a large hole in the middle of Not Here Not There's stomach.

Before Lobo Bill could react, Zebulon reached for a pistol inside Lobo Bill's belt and shot him between the eyes.

Unable to move or speak, he sat on the floor, watching Not Here Not There stagger through the door.

When he finally went after her, she was standing naked on a slab of ice halfway into the river, her hands trying to hold back the blood oozing from her stomach.

"You killed the only man that ever cared for me," she aaid. "And now you've killed me."

They were the first words that he had heard her speak.

As the ice sank lower, carrying her downstream, and the black freezing water rose over her legs and hips, she called out to him again. "From now on, you wil drift like a blind man btween the worlds, not knowing if you're dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you're dreaming. Three times you will disappear to yourself and all that you know, and three times you will - "

She said something more, but he was unable to hear the words as she slowly sank beneath the ice.

It has become commonplace to place the responsibility for literature’s retreat on a populace too distracted or too shoddily educated or simply too tired to do the heavy intellectual lifting a decent novel requires. But what if the cause of the novel’s current difficulties is not the shrinking of its audience? What if what is most deleterious to the novel’s future is the refusal of those entrusted with its furtherance and renewal to continue their work in the medium? In other words, what if the novel were to one day die not because it had run out of readers, but because it had run out of writers?

Which brings me to a Seattle-based English professor and writer named David Shields, who is releasing a compendium of provocative remarks with the somewhat tin-eared title, Reality Hunger, a self-described “manifesto” that applies Shields’s considerable, contentious vigor to the proposition that what readers crave, and what he, as a writer, feels most drawn to, is reality, a famously slippery term which Shields, in his weaker moments, attempts to link to Personal Expression. For Shields the frisson of reality occurs when the artifice of the novel is jettisoned and the novelist forgets about characters and plot, and his or her opinions and thought processes show through without anything between them and the reader, when the writer is speaking to us face to face, as if over a couple of beers.

To Shields, the best thing Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote is the introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, and, in a similar spirit, Shields's cites Geoffrey O’Brien’s intro to a new edition of Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick with these words of praise: “As is so often the case, I like the book but I like the Introduction as much or more: concision.”

He not only likes intros more than what they are introducing, he is interested in so-called reality TV, and he gets a kick out of stand-up comedy. Lest the reader start to wonder if Shields’s standards might be softening, and that culturally he is taking the path more travelled and less effortful, he occasionally reminds us that he a devoted reader of Proust. Nevertheless, his impatience with the written word is, in fact, one of Reality Hunger’s animating forces; his nervously drumming fingertips supply the rhythm to the entire performance.

“I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels,” Shields says.

At least I think it’s Shields saying this. One can’t be totally sure since the work of at least one hundred other authors are incorporated into his argument, and they are used without quotation marks or attribution in paragraphs numbered from 1 to 617. (This numbering of the paragraphs is what poker players might spot as a “tell,” a device that exposes the basic unsustainability and insubstantiality of the argument. And it is also part of Shields’s Contract with ADD, a promise to the reader that nothing will last very long.)

Yet for all its bluster and palpable hostility to writers who can still practice their craft – e.g. “The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge. Have I read it? No. Will I? No.” – Shields's book comes to market wearing a kingly robe knit from the names of fourteen well-known writers, all of them presumably willing to join Shields’s assault on traditional narrative. (I am told by someone in the book business that Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, the biggest of the fish caught in Shields’s and Knopf’s publicity net, has asked for his blurb to be removed from the mix, reducing the amen-corner to a possibly unlucky thirteen, possibly making my advance copy with Coetzee’s name on it a valuable commodity, like a misprinted stamp!) Charles Baxter, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, are just a few of the accomplished authors conjured by the pre-publication roll-out for Reality Hunger, and, if the blurbs are to be believed, all of them are almost as hungry for reality as Shields himself. Lethem claims to be astonished, intoxicated, and overwhelmed, Hempel vows to put the book on her syllabus, and Wayne Koestenbaum likens the experience of reading it to being socked in the jaw or receiving an electric shock in his solar plexus.

Here is a book not so much written as curated, a chorus of snippets that Shields has ordered just so, with each paragraph numbered, and each chapter adorned with a letter of the alphabet. The numbering of the paragraphs – reminiscent of an executive’s Power Point presentation – makes a certain sense, since the numbers conform to loose attributions in the back of the book. (The purpose of lettering the chapters, however, remains mysterious to me.) On the first page of the text, paragraph number 1, chapter heading A, Shields, after placing his work in the same boat as Chekhov’s diaries, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up, and John Cheever’s journals, puts on his game face (snarl, wink) right away: “My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.”

But what do Shields and his admirers mean by reality? On the basis of this “manifesto,” reality includes diaries, memoirs, reality TV, advertising, virtually everything that our media drenched moment presents us with, perhaps even blooper reels. And artists who are attempting to express the zeitgeist are encouraged to use what used to be called second-hand images, or that which goes by the name of sampling, appropriation, or, frankly, plagiarism. (Oh, those impressionable students, who one imagines absorbing Shields’s rap!) If you have written a poem and Shields takes a few lines from it and tries to blend it into, say, an essay about himself, he may argue that he has allowed the “reality” of your poem into his work, even though you may feel disrespected and annoyed. If you are one of the writers whose work Shields has woven into the argument put forward in Reality Hunger you may give him a blurb, a sort of thank-you card for inviting you to the rave, as several of the writers cited in Shields’s manifesto have, or you may wish your work had never crossed his desk.

Reminiscent of a performance ably pulled off by Jonathan Lethem a year or so ago, in which he wrote an essay using only the words of other writers, Reality Hunger is a book full of previously published work, a kind of gallery of remarks, a new kind of authorship in which the man taking credit for the book appears and disappears like the Cheshire cat. It is late in the game to continue arguing whether appropriation is appropriate or if it is an act of theft. (In David Shield’s own website, however, there is a prominent warning: “All material on this blog is the property of its owner. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.”) Sampling is everywhere, and though much of it is arch and soulless, lacking the intimacy, energy, and, I would venture, the durability of true creation (which, like good bread, is tastier and more nutritious when made from scratch), it has nevertheless become a staple of our diet.

Yet Shields argues that this incorporation of previously existing work is the best way to capture “reality.” Why? Because “reality” is simply too swift and various to be captured in any other way. In Power Point #319, he says: “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fashionable whole that concludes in a neatly wrapped up revelation. Life though – standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night – flies at us in bright splinters.”

But is this necessarily true? It’s certainly not true that good novels insist that “life” (or anything else) is coherent or neat, and the assertion raises serious concerns about Shields’s reading list – especially since he is meant to be educating young students at the University of Washington. And it isn’t even true that experience for the conscious writer is a series of overwhelming, mind-blowing events. Standing on a street corner if you are actually paying attention to what’s happening around you, or if you are there on the look-out for a missing cousin can be a highly focused endeavor, and if you are experiencing the faltering of a relationship as a somehow random explosion of bright splinters you have not only failed to pay attention to your relationship but you have also missed out on an event that has been the progenitor of many fine novels and stories. I will, however, concede the validity of his observation about channel surfing – it is bewildering and I would recommend he stop doing it.

After 200 pages of Shields’s sly obituary for narrative fiction, I began to wonder if the doom of the novel in the eyes of the beholder? It might be that some writers, growing older, find it difficult to continue the frankly labor-intensive carpentry needed to build a piece of narrative fiction, to do the intense and sustained work that goes into making something that is original, nor do they care to risk the self-exposure that comes with presenting a work of art that is not an ironicized grab-bag of things they have read, seen, and overheard. Proclaiming the death of narrative is not for young writers – it is for the aging, who might be tempted to confuse their own waning powers with literature itself coming to an end. Some stalled novelists might go so far as to posit that their very inability to sustain even the reading of a novel is proof that they are on the leading edge of an evolutionary trend, like those lucky people who don’t have wisdom teeth. Collage, aphorism, confession, rants, riffs, jottings, false-starts, quotes and thefts – all of these things strike some struggling writers (i.e. writers who are struggling with their own writing) as more conducive to life in the 21st century than the creation of characters and the accumulation of incidents and all of the other traditional accoutrements of the novel, which in a couple of decades will be celebrating its 400th birthday. (Everyone’s invited! Dress optional.) And still, as politicians like to say: the work continues. The novel changes with its readers and writers, as it must – and as all living things do. And while exhausted writers may seek rejuvenation in attacks on the form, on the very idea, the very possibility of the novel, this year (as in every year) good novels will be written and read –and once in a while a truly great one will appear. As the novelist Richard Price once put it: no more talk about the death of the novel; the novel will be at your funeral.

When last (& first) they met, it was billed “The Grand Collaboration.” The production was the brainchild of the great Max Roach, one of the most formidable musicians to emerge in the 40’s with music media named “Bebop.” He is one of the original Boperators of that innovative upsurge of American Classical musical rejuvenation - the soul of which was carried by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, JJ Johnson, Kenney Clarke, Charlie Mingus to begin a list.

In 1970 Max had put together a startlingly innovative percussion ensemble called M’Boom with marimbas, xylophones, timpani, vibraphones, gongs, timbales, chimes, bongos, steel drums, glockenspiels and the drum kit. At times its personnel reached ten players. Not limited to what people think the role of Percussion instruments, viz., rhythm, the group also emphasized and focused on harmony and even melody, moving from one genre of music to the other seamlessly, with sticks, mallets, hands, to make a truly thrilling musical presentation. Certainly M’Boom was one of the most inventive groups anyone had heard. The personnel on this original appearance was Fred King, Joe Chambers, Warren Smith, Freddie Waits, Roy Brooks, Omar Clay, Ray Mantilla, Francisco Mora, and Eli Fountain. And though the personnel varied through the years, today Joe Chambers, Warren Smith, Ray Mantilla and Eli Fountain remain. Steve Berrios has been a delightful addition.

David Murray arrived in New York from California in 1975 and began to effloresce in the mix of the then transitioning New York music scene. Trane had left 1967, Ayler in 1970, so that when David arrived and as I said in an essay in my book Digging) "Some years ago I wrote, ‘Albert Ayler is the dynamite sound of our time.' Now I think, that can be said about David Murray.” And so a few ticks after re-establishing his base in the city, and meeting some of the wonderful young musicians who were also blossoming, by 1976 David pulled together the original World Saxophone Quartet. They were Murray, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluiett.

Hemphill died in 1995 and a stream of fine saxophonists have sat in that chair, Arthur Blythe, Eric Person, James Spaulding, John Purcell, Bruce Williams, Jaleel Shaw, Jorge Sylvester, Steve Potts, Tony Kofi, James Carter and occasionally they have added other instruments. It is James Carter that stepped into that spot in their most recent gig at Birdland. What the WSQ has done since their inception was fashion a newer and more engaging face for the so called "avant garde.” In taking four of the most daring and innovative saxophonists from a new emerging avant, i.e. emerging after Trane, Pharoah, Dolphy, Ornette, Albert, and utilizing a welding unison baked harmony as their identifying brand sound, it raised the level of what individual players styling themselves “out” had to do to at least qualify themselves as digging musical innovation “at the top of their time” (Richard Wright’s dictum). The Sax Quartet by its very approach to a new music seemed to structurally dismiss mere anarchy, as some would-be Newists insist is all that makes a music not just ”new” but “newer.”

The recent gig at Birdland (Jan 19-23 2010) brought us back to Max Roach’s historic call and 1981 production of “The Grand Encounter” which brought together two of the most important groups in contemporary music, M’Boom and The World Saxophone Quartet, at St John The Divine, to an audience of 2000. Max Roach remained an innovator and daring scientist of sound until the end of his days. No matter that he had been in the music over 60 years (Max debuted with Duke Ellington, sitting in for Sonny Greer at the Paramount, when he was 18!) he has always felt at home with the new, playing with each wave of avant that arrives, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp. Not to mention that in the 60’s Max had to suffer repercussions from the liberal crabs of backwardness that still control so much of the music, (recording, venues, tours, festivals, &c) for his revolutionary work with Abbey Lincoln involving himself with the struggle for equal rights and self determination for the Afro American people.

So that the call in 1981 for that “Grand Collaboration” should not have been a surprise to people knowing Max Roach’s constant identification with innovation and daring and knowledge of where the newest new was heading. The call in 2010 by David Murray’s 3-D family organization in conjunction with Birdland was very very welcome, especially since somebody let the dogs out with constant cries that “jazz is dead” which is just another advertisement for the mediocrity of the commercial vulgarity the corporations (or corpses) have tried to replace the serious and often revolutionary art which accompanied the political upsurges of 30 years ago.

The Birdland gig was a marvelous restating of what’s called “high art," the emotional, intellectual and political epiphany of witnessing artists at the top of their skills working outside the jailhouse of moneyed shallowness. Both WSQ, now with Murray, Lake, Bluiett and the amazing James Carter and the latest M’Boom, Chambers, Mantilla, Fontaine, Smith and Berrios blew the top off Birdland. I was there three out of the five nights. And it seemed that the engagement drew a lot of the people I knew from the days when you could walk around New York and see Ayler, Dolphy, Ornette, Pharoah, Trane, Monk, Miles, Sassy, Abbey and Billie the same night.

The music involved compositions by most of the players. Bluiett’s Saxophone opened the sets I was at with its pummeling revox of all the R&B sax vamps we’ve ever heard with all the instruments entering and splitting wrapped in the huff huff puff puff of its rumbling, reaching a church howling stomping of the highest order. Among the phalanx of percussion instruments the interplay between say, Ray Mantilla’s wondrous congas, sometimes playing congas with bongos between his legs and the great Warren Smith vocalizing with the tympani and Eli Fontaine on the set or the bells or xylophone, Steve Berrios with timbales or the huge double sided congas and Joe Chambers like a Vibing melodic enforcement of calm direction in the eye of the M’Boom-icaine. Like Father Divine folks used to say, “…it was truly wonderful.”

Putting the WSQ and M’Boom together through all the music I thought made it even stronger. The saxophonists took turns turning the place out with their solos as well. Murray’s ferocious assault on silence I have long chronicled. David has now not only the musical menace of his approach but he has developed an ear for subtle lyricism to balance the immediately awesome. The duet he played with Bluiett on Bass saxophone with Bluiett surprisingly on clarinet was stunning.

But they are all more than able. Oliver Lake is certainly one of the most intelligent players extant, whose wiry sinewy alto makes his controlled emotional statements seem almost literary among the raging that goes on around him. The newest of the Sax Quartet, James Carter, as I have stated is himself an amazing player. He is always on the high wire of almost over the top performance values sounded against an incredible technical facility made valuable by a deeply felt old time, new time gut bucket blues feeling that allows him to speak, sing, grunt and holler through alto and especially soprano.

Two compositions I want to comment on, lst Warren Smith’s imaginative piece, "Couchette," whose name, he explained to my hearing aid, means a suspended set of cots let down on long French train rides. It uses rapidly contrasting unison parts for percussion and then the four horns in unison back and forth. And this might be self-aggrandizement, a David Murray voicing of a poem of mine we did in Paris, “Imagine Obama Talking To A Fool” (Of course, now, we would say Fools!)

1/29/10

Fr. Frechette allows problems caused by the earthquake are "overwhelming" and that it "will have severe ramifications well into the future." But his past writings remind us that Haitians has repeatedly been in states of emergency. His reflections in the wake of previous natural (and unnatural) disasters in Haiti have a resonance that won't quit. Here are excerpts (from FIRST's back pages):

Thursday, June 18th 2004

During this past week we made two trips to the impoverished flood areas. The truth is, all these towns and indeed most of Haiti would be considered a disaster even if there had not been a flood. They are terribly poor, and lack the most basic services including schools and clinics. It is impossible not to be deeply struck by the depth of poverty and hunger in this country, once you stray away from Petionville where there is an illusion of development. Many of the people who come to these various towns hoping to get a little bag of beans and rice are not from the flood areas. Hunger drives them to seek help wherever they can.

As a doctor it is easy to diagnose illnesses as you offer a little bag of food and talk for a few minutes to the people. Many are so very polite and want to show their gratitude and they stay close by to talk a little bit. I am thinking of a woman who has the bulging eyes and enlarging neck from thyroid disease. I notice she had a chain tightly around her neck, surely the attempt of the local voudou doctor to stop the growth of her thyroid gland. I see a very old thin man, groaning with belly ache, his legs discolored and ulcerated. I am sure he is diabetic. And I see a very pathetic ten year old albino boy. He is doing his best to keep up with all the other children, as curious as they are about us and what we are doing. He has his tee shirt pulled above his head to keep the sun off his pained eyes, since the sunlight hurts his tender retinas. His legs are red from sunburn, and dry and flakey. I can see he already has a patch of melanoma on the skin over his collarbone. How much could have been done for this boy in another setting: simple sunglasses, ultraviolet protective sun lotions, proper education and proper clothing regarding sun exposure. Instead of this, he is a small, fried boy with a deadly cancer...but he is ALL BOY. I gave him two bags of rice, and he squealed with delight and ran off. This child haunts my sleep now.

I will go find him again and see if that melanoma can be removed and hope it hasn’t spread. I will give him a big hat and sunglasses and ask the next person coming over from Miami to bring lots of 15 or higher sunblock. There is so much to do it is hard to know where to start.

The bishop has a good idea. To build a little chapel on high ground, and a little school next to the chapel, and a little clinic next to the school, and a little market next to the clinic will bring EVERYONE to high ground. It sure is worth a try.

July 12, 2004

The little albino boy I mentioned in a previous report is with us now in our hospital. His name is Ronald. His grandmother wanted to just GIVE him to me, for life. It is amazing how often people offer you their children for keeps. We have Ronald outfitted now for the tropical sun...glasses and creams for UV protection, and a big floppy hat. He will be with us for a few weeks while being evaluated by a dermatologist for removal of cancerous and precancerous skin lesions. He is a delight.

Jesula, who lost her leg in a big market accident a few weeks ago, is suffering a number of setbacks. She is often in tears now. Poor healing and recurrent falls when she tries to negotiate a walker have her very discouraged. To cheer her up, I offered her my own right leg, with the caveat that it might not look good on her since it is white, hairy, and defective (since my surgery last November)! She chuckled alright, and then ACCEPTED! She still has her sparkle. Prayers are appreciated for her! We will send her to the Dominican Republic for an artificial leg when healing is complete.

Unfortunately the gang violence has returned, as well as the kidnapping of children of wealthy people. The gangs are often in the slums where we work. Not long ago when we were in Wharf Jeremy, we heard an unbelievably wild lament. Many children were crying inconsolably. You knew immediately it was not the cry of someone who was just punished or who had fallen down. It was a chorus of deep, soulful screaming and crying. We walked until we found the shack where it was coming from. In all my life I have never seen a more pitiful sight. Five little children whose father was shot dead, left alone by the mother who had gone to find the body on the street, were out of their minds with grief. They were rolling on the dirt floor, covering themselves with mud, ripping their clothes and wailing and screaming a sound that would shake your bones. One was clutching a dead kitten. I did my best to console them, to hold them, the talk with them but there was nothing I could do to penetrate their frenzied grief. Finally we went out to find the fathers body, and there it was, baking on the street in the tropical sun, with the wife wailing at its side. We put the body in our truck and took the wife with the body to the morgue and gave her some money to do the official paper work at the city morgue and to buy something for the children, and some money for the funeral. You can imagine we go through money like water, facing these situation one after the next, and I dread the day when finances will not allow us to take an active role in helping with these problems. That day will be a huge challenge to faith, because we will be present but helpless...as helpless as the poor people themselves.

I didn’t sleep all night. I could not get the pathetic scene out of my mind, or the pathetic lament out of my bones. The next day, after mass at the orphanage, we went back to Wharf Jeremy with 7 chicken dinners. We sat in the little sweltering shack and talked with the children as they and their mom feasted in chicken. I made it a point to learn their names. This time they came to me, and sat with me, and we were able to express our sorrow to them and to try to give them an experience of goodness, of friendship, of love to counterbalance and offset the horror. It was deliberate on my part to offer a humane and spiritual medicine as close as possible to the moment of horrific suffering. It must have worked. The mother offered all the children to me, and the children begged me to take them. But such solutions are far from ideal.

Since then we have completely relocated the family out of Wharf Jeremy, and thanks to good friends in Scranton, Pennsylvania, they are in a safe and simple house with their mom, and we will get all the children in school.

St. Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounds even more. Thank you for the prayers and help that make St Paul as right as anyone can be.

September 17, 2004

When I heard from the Sisters in Port-au-Prince what happened in Gonnaives, we headed there at once. We would go in solidarity, and to show our friendship and care, and to see what help we could offer. We would go with our friend and colleague Phadoul, to help him search for his mother and brothers and sisters who lived in Gonnaives.

Five hours of terrible roads. We arrived after sunset. To get into the city we had to drive through a lake that had once been rice fields. Our headlights completely underwater, only darkness and dark waters were before us, waters which rose to our doors. Two guides stood on our sideboards, guiding us along so we would not fall off the underwater road, as had many overturned trucks and public buses which lay at our right and our left, like toppled buoys marking the 2 kilometer crossing. Gonnaives itself was dark and desolate and in ruins. There were no signs of people, at least not at night. We plowed through the waters, the garbage, they broken city until we arrived at the Sisters. They came out to greet us…muddy but happy to see friends, recounting in detail their ordeal. It was late….everything covered with mud, we had no choice but to sleep in the truck on the only clear patch of land we could find.

In the morning we had mass together, very early. A mass of thanksgiving, a mass for the victims, a mass begging for help. After mass, the Sisters gave us canned breakfast from army rations which they had, and eggs and bread. We made lists of what would be needed from Port-au-Prince, and we went off to the city again to find Phadoul’s family.

Wandering through the streets in water to our waist, as dead puppies floated by, and people washed muddy clothes in the even muddier water that engulfed us, it would be impossible to describe the extent of the disaster. Everything was destroyed to a height of 15 feet. Electric lines dipped in the waters around us. People greeted us from the roofs on which they were huddled together with whatever belongings they could salvage, on roofs which had saved their lives, and called down to us “be careful the white man doesn’t fall into the canals. He doesn’t know where they are on the side of the road. He is wet enough.”

Thank you! Ki gen nou ye? How are you?”

“Nou pa pi mal….we are not bad. When you still have your life you have everything.”

While the roads were filled with underwater garbage, furniture and rocks, the courtyards were filled with underwater mud. As we entered the courtyard of the house of Phadoul’s mother, our sandals were sucked off by the deep mud with every step. The body of an old woman was immediately apparent, buried face down in the mud. We uncovered enough mud from her enough to know it was not Phadoul’s mom, and we stopped to pray for her. We could not raise her body simply because if we did there was absolutely no place to put her. And we would never have been able to carry her back through the waters, two miles back to the truck. We had news that Phadoul’s mother had been taken to a friend’s house at high ground, and that she was alright. We trudged further into the city until we found the home of Phadoul’s brothers and their families. Belongings pile high on the roof that had saved them, drying in the sun, the family began the arduous task of digging 6 feet of mud out of their house.

With gratitude to God for the safety of the Sisters and Phadoul’s family, moved by the concern for us shown by many strangers from their rooftops, inspired by the great spirit shown by those grateful for life and already starting to reshape their lives, we headed back to Port-au-Prince so that we could start organizing serious help. The same help we continue to offer in Thiote since the terrible floods of last May. Everything is needed. Clothes, drinking water, cots for sleeping, food, medicine, seeds for replanting, cement for rebuilding, shovels for digging through the mud. Everything is needed, but the day is young…and when you still have your life you have everything.

The little fire-storm set off by my post of a couple of days ago on TPM Cafe produced a great many angry rebuttals, some of them curiously personal; but most were written with seriousness and, like my post, occasion diagnosis, not catharsis. They deserve a response. For starters, some cruel facts of life.

One. The US Senate, as Rick Hertzberg tirelessly reminds us, currently puts an effective veto in the hands of 41 elected officials representing perhaps a sixth of the population.

Two. The top 10% of the population own about 80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate; the top 1% about 42% of financial wealth, that is, money for new investment. Quite apart from their direct influence over legislators who believe in the amazing grace of the invisible hand, their attitudes toward the economy more generally are a big part of what macro-economists mean by "confidence."

Three. The private sector is about 10 times bigger than the public, so that getting the economy "moving" in a crisis like the one we just experienced means, if you have digested One, first reassuring and inspiring this 10% of the population, regardless of how fairly a subset of them made their money in the first place.

Four. The approximately 40% of people with higher education map more or less perfectly onto the 40% at the top of the wealth distribution. In a knowledge economy, haves and have-nots map roughly to knows and know-nots. The gap will only widen in the years ahead. This means phrases like "taking on the elites" can mean anything from making taxation progressive to teaching Creationism; making heroes of Michael Moore or of Sarah Palin.

Five. On the whole, the people feeling the most financial stress also tend to be people who are least educated, most "religious," most isolationist, most flagwaving, most NRAish, most cable newsish--you get the idea. This is not to demean or caricature anyone; I live in New Hampshire part of the year and have friends who voted McCain. But to unleash their anger against the "elites" and hope for Sweden is to ignore much of what made the fascism of the 20th century so memorable.

Six. Changing One through Five means working for a generation - changing political structures and commercial standards, establishing a strong social safety net and educational infrastructure. But change requires growth, or budgets get busted, inflation takes over, and private sector investors go back into a panic.

NOW TO HEALTH care, the Massachusetts vote, and so forth. The draft reform that took shape since last May, like the law currently working (and covering my son, his wife, and their daughter) in, of all places, Massachusetts, would cover virtually everybody. It would force insurers, HMOs, community coops, etc., to compete on service, not on cherry picking. And it would do so by regulating the industry and subsidizing the poor, gaining revenue for extending coverage by raising about $200 billion in progressive taxation of various kinds. This is what we stand to lose, and it is not a little thing. How did we get here?

Some say blame the White House. Perhaps the most trenchant argument along these lines comes from my old friend Bob Kuttner. Basically, Bob says that the bill itself is manifestly not what it could be because it accommodates Blue Dogs, who in turn were accommodating insurers and big pharma, all the while insisting that this was not a "government-run" plan--that is, the White House plan was not only inadequate, but its defenders seemed to be attacking government action while asking all to depend on it.

Bob is not against the plan, since there was never any question that most of health insurance would remain private and employer-based. But the politics of the plan's framing was wrong, he insists. And it had to be. Because the White House's critical mistake was dealing with health care before the economy turned around. Presumably, so long as there is high unemployment, health care must seem a secondary matter. Besides, the administration had been meanwhile been "playing inside games with bankers." Ordinary people were bound to smell a rat.

Obama, besides, made the mistake of letting the legislative branch write the bill, where lobbyists would load it up. And by mandating insurance, or prospectively using savings from Medicare to help pay for the uninsured, he also scared people already with insurance by proposing graduated taxes and union members who were doing quite well, thank-you.

MUCH OF WHAT Bob says is reasonable, but I disagree with its thrust. It alleges that, at bottom, by the time health care became front and center, Obama was already so associated with Wall Street--you know, the Geithner and Summers crowd, the "elites" who screwed the "people"--that he didn't have the political capital to get the Blue Dogs in line.

Okay, there is some question about whether Obama was right to let the Congress write the bill, although intuitively it still seemed a good idea to have let the leadership that had to corral the votes "own it"; once the bill got to Congress, the lobbyists would be activated in any case. And there was something to be said for waiting until unemployment numbers looked better before trying any social policy, though I'm not sure that would have satisfied Obama's "base."

But the rest of this case against Obama makes no sense--and never did. If the key to the politics of health care was that Obama had to come into the debate about it without having become the target of a populist insurrection against Wall Street and "government give aways," well, how did that insurrection get fueled? What he did to save the economy inevitably meant first, bailing out the banking system, and reassuring people who were rich.

More important, the people who publicly and relentlessly tarred the Obama administration with Wall Street associations were not Republicans--how could they be?--but "progressives." First it was the size of the stimulus, which should have been--what?--20% bigger? Then it was the treatment of the big banks which, for anyone who studied the 1930s--so the argument went--were all bankrupt, because recovery would be a 2-3 year slog--as if we still communicated by short-wave, telegraph, and surface mail. Geithner--so the argument continued--invited investment funds to profit from acquiring toxic assets, or let bankers overpay themselves too much. All of which made Obama seem responsible for, or at least cavalier about, AIG's bonuses, and so on.

But the progressives' alternative was some form of bank nationalization, a step that certainly doesn't look so wise in retrospect and was arguable even then. By the beginning of April, the most powerful public criticisms of Obama were coming from, of all people, Nobel lauriate Paul Krugman--the "loyal opposition" to the White House, Newsweek told us, though loyalty was obviously particularly strained when Larry Summers was the target. Who, if not Robert Rubin's boys, were responsible for the regulatory problems in the first place?

LET ME BE clear. I am not saying progressives like Krugman wield great power in the halls of Congress, or that the people who joined the "tea party" movement were reading The New York Times, or TPM, for that matter. I am saying that progressives were able to seriously discredit the administration as no Republicans could, especially on television, where their skepticism was ramified by cable news anchors and ditzes, who were watched by you-know-who; skepticism implying that Obama and all those smarty-pants intellectuals, who looked so much like smarty-pants investment bankers anyway, were not on the side of the "common man"; that government was becoming a give way to big shots. As I said a couple of days ago, the story was that Obama's own people had turned on him for being against the people.

This was catnip to the right. Obama came into office with an economy on the verge of a meltdown. He stopped the chain reaction, and by the summer had a little power back up. In stopping the decline in the stock market, say, he of course allowed wealthy people with stock, pensioners, etc., to breathe easier before the unemployed could. He did not immediately stop job losses, or create enough new jobs; more public sector stimulus might be best, though nobody has ever proven Obama could have gotten more through the Senate last winter.

But Obama did restore a climate for future investment, which meant less panic, fewer mortgages going "under water," hence, less toxicity in bank assets. Jobs, "consumer confidence," and so forth, always lag these achievements. And, yes, by saving the banking system he had to save bankers, too, alas. Did the people on his left have his back?

ALL OF WHICH brings us to health care itself. Since early last spring, clearly, the White House knew they did not have the Senate votes for anything like single-payer or enlarging a Medicare-like government agency, irrespective of its merits. "Democracy" is not always winner takes all. Sometimes its loser foils a great deal. The idea that Obama could have changed this Senate reality (got something closer to single-payer) with "political capital," presumably cowing Blue Dog Democrats from Montana and Nebraska, or the Senator from Aetna who supported McCain, is, shall we say, not persuasive.

But the merits of a Medicare-like plan were not so obvious in any case. Obama saw his main chance was to begin turning the economy around, and make health care reform a part of movement toward a knowledge-based economy, along with the educational and green investments contained in the stimulus; to get the best deal he could from the senators he needed for the last mile. That's why he signaled early on that he'd be open to creative ways to provide a "public option"--a market force to compete with private insurers--such as non-profit cooperatives.

Moreover, there were reasons to like that idea irrespective of whether one could get a big Medicare-like plan through the little funnel called the Senate, which one could not: reasons that are not about being a gutless and bought "centrist," but about trying to apply the lessons of the information revolution to medical provision, drug development and claims processing. (As in every other industry, the new information platforms tend to increase the power of individual enterprises, and syndicates of small enterprises, in ways only big corporations and big bureaucracies could have enjoyed a generation ago; it also makes therapies more genetically personal and expensive. As Atul Gawande wrote when the health care process was launched, counter-intuitively, small scale non-profit providers could be the best way to increase quality and reduce costs; the key to reform was first to get virtually everyone covered.)

Progressives, for their part, insisted again and again that the Obama plan would not control costs--more catnip, given that the only card Republicans had left was "deficits." But the alternative proposed was dubious on this score, too, since, as Arnold Relman, Gawande, and others have shown, Medicare-style plans were as guilty as private insurers for the fee-for-service medicine that balloons costs.

No, no, was the refrain on the left, cost control depended mainly on the "buying power" of a big government agency. This was a give away to the insurance companies. As if Walmart does not bid down suppliers. As if syndicates of buyers cannot now form as easily on the web as Facebook groups. As if giving people interest free university loans is nothing but a give away to book publishers and private universities. As if costs are not going to be brought down, if at all (given the high cost of the science that extends life), by systems that reward outcomes, digital medical records and legally mandated standards for claims processing, hospitals that specialize in particular problems and surgeries--in all, a medical industry fit for a knowledge economy.

THE BOTTOM LINE is this. Some Democrats--"progressives" seems the wrong moniker, since how many recognize the commercial and technological progress all around them?--worked inadvertently, but conspicuously, to discredit the Obama administration all spring, when it did the dirty work of saving all of our bacon. They helped fuel the "populist backlash" against Obama last summer. More recently, they opposed taxing the plans of unions as if they were defending "the proletariat." When people asked, not what is the right thing for the commonwealth, but what's in it for them, the left made this seem only natural. Then--as the wave of criticism mounted against Obama, and elections fell to Republicans--they accused him of political incompetence, faulting him for his effort at "bipartisanship," insisting that he should "fought for us."

Well, what about us fighting for him? He can't just frame things in terms of "democracy" vs. "elites." He is the president, one-third of the government, but commander-in-chief and cultural-icon-in-chief. Elites matter to a democracy more than ever. He orders people of all political views into battle. He is trying to help young benighted kids in lousy schools and a coarse, violent culture learn civility. The people who should have been reminding America incessantly where the mess came from, and the difficult work of fixing things, are us.

In memory, the Top 40 DJs of the 1950s and early 1960s like Alan Freed, Wolfman Jack, and Murray the K were cultural ambassadors of racial integration, holding together the multi-culti meritocracy of hit radio with the force of their raucous on air personalities and patter, a parallel if not explicit connection to the Civil Rights Movement. But by 1979, rock DJ Steve Dahl, with the blessing of Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck, could promote a Disco Demolition, a vinyl book burning as it were, after the first game of a doubleheader that got so out of hand the White Sox had to cancel and forfeit the second game.

In short, rock culture revealed its capacity to grow into a potentially ominous mix of white and straight resentment.

Some might see this dynamic as just another aspect of the rise of Reaganism, but I believe it was the beginning of a new dynamic. Reaganism harkened back to a bygone past that promised to put a lid on the 1960s and provide a glorious future, and Reagan himself displayed an avuncular yet firm pre-‘60s putting-the-lid-on persona. Rock era personal subjectivity was a problem Reaganism solved with repression. In that context the anti-Disco riot was too close in tone to Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement to be articulated or manipulated by the right-wing politicians of the era. In its own way, it was an expression of identity politics, as was Classic (i.e straight, white) Rock. Which would have to wait another thirty years for a DJ who could personify and harness it directly to conservative and libertarian ideology.

In those thirty years the Top 40 DJ who dispensed a liberal social glue transformed -- as the early 1960s cultural consensus cracked and refigured -- into the disco DJ, the hip hop MC, and the shock jock, each masters of reduced hegemonies, with only shock jocks taking that reduction as the suggestion of conspiracy. Eventually some would dispense with the music altogether and segue to talk radio, not in the mode of the old late night tale spinners like Jean Shepherd or interviewers like Larry King, but as entertainer ideologues like Rush Limbaugh, slathering that needed social glue throughout the show. When Glenn Beck arrived at Fox News he had traveled this trajectory from Top 40 to Morning Zoo to Shock Jock to Talker and had already made the leap to television at CNN Headline News, something Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Howard Stern all tried and failed. He didn’t just understand rock culture, he was rock culture, or at least a part of it. On TV.

Unlike his Fox News peers Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, Beck doesn’t utilize a Reaganish benign but irritated patronizing patriarchal logic to control the excesses of The Left. Instead, he dramatizes a personna under siege, struggling to stay centered, a rock era Holden Caulfield looking for an honest libertarian face in a sea of progressive phonies – with a Morning Zoo mix of skits and voices usually aimed at lefty politicians, but often doubling back on himself. Beck’s books, all bestsellers, are far from the prolonged linear diatribes and critiques of Phyllis Shaffly or Russell Kirk, but a mix of history, politics, personal anecdotes, asides, sidebars, graphics, running gags, and footnotes. Morning drive time radio on the printed page. A visually engaging printed page.

This makes it irrelevant to catch Beck in a contradiction. He hates New York City but brags about working there. He’s cries on air and makes fun of his pudgy body but flirts with old fashioned homophobic taunts. He dislikes unions but reveres his grandfather who was a shop steward at Boeing. He jokes about how conservatives don’t trust the New York Times but boast when their books are on its bestseller list. It doesn’t matter, or maybe it’s even the point. He can lay out a coherent argument, but the underlying dynamic is an uncompleted search for personal integrity in a country that’s become unmoored and needs to get back (way back, before Teddy Roosevelt) to basics.

The other Fox stars conduct interviews with politicians and policy makers, just like real reporters, but I have never seen Glenn Beck interview anyone other than Sarah Palin, whom he adores. All the rest are just a bunch of phonies, why bother. Politics, or even proximity to politicians corrupts. But Palin is different. Why?

Palin contains what Beck is seeking: rock era sincerity and authenticity, the true self maintaining an internal compass in a social order trying to impose collectivist solutions. Libertarian theory as internalized subjective struggle.

What happens as Palin maneuvers through the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment towards the elections of 2010 and 2012? Can she hold on to her bona fides with Beck and his constituency? Can she do so if she wins and goes to Washington? This is not really a question about policies or voting records, it’s a question of presentation and preservation of the self.

From this perspective, incumbents in Washington, D.C., no matter how conservative are suspect, because they’ve had to sell their souls, and the only vote that counts is a no vote against everything and anything proposed by Obama and the Democrats. This year’s Harris Poll of favorite TV personalities puts Glenn Beck second, and Oprah Winfrey first. He’s a favorite personality. And this personality, and those of his audience, can only be sustained if government is radically reduced, and soon.

That stance works well when the right wing mission is to block Obama and the all-politicians-are-corrupt analysis solves a knotty problem: how to explain the economy collapsing under Bush. Simple: he sold out with his big government bailouts. Glenn Beck’s roots in rock help him embody both the bad boy and the redeemed (he’s a recovering alcoholic and Mormon convert, both part of his public story) inside a familiar mainstream secular narrative that’s always had a spiritual subtext, without transmitting the cultural isolation of a Jerry Falwell. But politicians catering to this attractive passage don’t have a lot of wiggle room to pass, let’s say, a few small financial adjustments to avoid another meltdown of global capitalism. Will that create a conflict at Fox News? It isn’t clear what Glenn Beck thinks about insiders like Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove or really any conservative politicians elected to a position of power inside a state with a larger and more complex population than Alaska’s. And because he idolizes (as in makes an idol of) the free market as an abstraction and doesn’t see it as a mode of economic interaction improved by rules and regulations, government intervention no matter what is a mistake, perhaps a sin, and quite probably the first calculated stage of a Marxist zombie plot. Businessmen good. Politicans bad.

As a performer, Glenn Beck has opened up a new space combining Oprah
Winfrey and Rush Limbaugh, a space that so far, no one else on the left or right or middle has been able to locate, let alone inhabit. Whether Sarah Palin can open up a parallel space inside of politics and stay there remains an open question. Rock on!

Economic depressions are usually measured in the adult world by increasing unemployment, declining stock market prices, business bankruptcies and assorted ailments all too well known to require repetition. Children have a far less grandiose view of such catastrophic matters. My childhood in Harlem during the so-called Great Depression of 1929-1939, gave me a less scientific, and certainly a far less hygienic view of a depressed economy - prayerfully, an experience that neither I nor anyone else will need to repeat over the coming decade.

There were three distinct characteristics of poverty in the old Harlem. Much better than the economic barometers are levels of not-having. First, one is denied a dime for a full Saturday at the movies (it sometimes cost a little less at the Sunset and a little more at the RKO and Loews’s outlets at 125thth Street). Second, scrambled eggs replaced chicken for the Friday evening meal – the central meal of the week, even for secular and socialist Jewish families. Third, there was unanticipated movement at the end of the month from one apartment flat to another in order to escape rent payments.

Losing movie money was a serious matter: Films were a critical escape hatch from a world of grinding poverty to one of divine, if momentary, affluence. They were all day affairs. Each week included a western in which the good uniformly triumphed over evil, alongside a feature film, often second or third run affairs more than a year old. Then there were the “chapters” run in weekly “serials” ranging from Dick Tracy and 20th-th century crime fighting to Buck Rogers and 21st-st century space travel. These usually went on for fifteen weeks. Each segment ended in looming tragedy to be miraculously resolved in triumph at the start of the following week. This was the hook to get us back to the movies on a rigorous and regular basis. So not being able to go to the film theatre regularly was a painful reminder that joy has a price. It was also a heavy price paid by the parents - who appreciated assurance of eight hours of security for their children in the darkness of the movie house, not to mention eight hours of time off from care-giving for these hard- working people.

Just how important movie money was to us is suggested by the lengths to which I went to get the coin of the realm. On any number of occasions, I picked the pocket of my father’s pants. Invariably he caught me before Saturday. The penalty was substantial: being tied to a hot water pole in the kitchen area. I howled in pain for many hours, or at least until my mother worked up the courage to defy my father’s stern punishment and release me. She always reminded me of how terrible the penalty for theft would be if left to the devices of my father. Part of me - all of six or seven years “old” - did not resent punishment, but rather considered it as proper pay back for transgressions. Good guys were always being tied up at hitching posts in the westerns, so why not endure the punishment for the ultimate value, beyond good and evil, going to the movies on Saturday.

Forced vegetarianism in place of the far more enjoyable chicken or meat meal was another matter. To start with, it made for a grim table, not just exposing our poverty, but the inability of the parents to provide for my sister, Paula, and me. And being a “good provider” was a special quality of a proper parent. An egg supper does not carry the same desperate message now. Norms change as do expectations. But however dandied up, what we ate were a sure reminder that norms can shift in a downward direction. Since the meatless Fridays were a prelude to a movie-less Saturday, the dismay of the evening stretched into a week-end of sorrows.

My mother tried every trick in the trade to overcome the food problem. She would purchase a live chicken, kill it, and then pluck the poor chicken at home. It seems like a perfectly ghastly act, although I did learn from her how to pluck a young chicken with amazing rapidity. Keep in mind that a self-plucked chicken was nine cents per pound, and the fully prepared chicken cost nineteen cents a pound or more. Beyond that, there was Cushman's Bakery: where wonderful breads and cakes were sharply reduced after 5:00 p.m. I never wondered why, I simply stood in line with other poor people, mostly black women, in search of the same savings. In any event, dunking breads and cakes in milk and tea the following day or even two days later was not bad. Sweets were sweet however old! They made up in part for the meatless Fridays. My sister Paula and I never starved, we never went hungry. We took for granted that “things” were much tougher for other people. There is a distinction between being poor and being entirely without food. This was not a lesson that I easily forgot for the remainder of my life.

The more punishing lesson was moving on the final day of a month - for lack of rent money, and carrying one’s possessions - from mattress to clothing, on one’s back. The greater shock was seeing so many other people doing the same thing, moving in deathly silence on the streets as well as on the sidewalks moving from one tenement to another, one set of unfurnished rooms to another, from one five story walk-up to another. In Harlem this was the litmus test defining poverty. It converted the invisible man to the invisible family. It was hard to establish residence, hard to receive mail, hard to inform friends, neighbors and relatives of the shift in address. The difficulty was not simply logistical, but in that sense of being at the bottom of the rung, one step away from the street.

Petty business sometimes thrives in the midst of grand poverty. There were local vans perfectly capable of moving families in matters of minutes. The very poor managed to carry their belongings from one apartment to another as a family act. But the ritual of voluntary moving was well established. On those occasions - three in all for our family that I recollect - we came face to face with harsh realities that were far beyond the decline of the gross national product. After all, we did not move every month to avoid paying rent. There were relatively good times, and stability in a place to live was part of that experience. The current fears about missing mortgage payments remind me of the importance of ecological stability. Losing a job, and even a loss of savings, is unpleasant. But somehow, the breakdown of a place to live, the collapse of belonging, struck me then, as the harshest experience in growing up poor.

Adding this footnote to my childhood memoir makes me understand the difference between being poor and feeling poor. We all experienced a sense of poverty, but neither my parents nor sister every really felt poor. We had each other, as well as friends in similar straits, even in more bitter situations. We all survived a world of racial warfare on Morningside Heights, savings measured in nickels, monetary reserves measured in weeks, animosities from poor Catholics in the Irish extremities of Harlem for being poor Christ-killing Jews who after all deserved no better. And finally there was embattled America; raging to the beat of would be Hitlerite storm troopers coming up against dedicated believers in the irreversible march of history whose pinnacle was Stalin’s Moscow. All of this took place in the world of Father Divine and Daddy Grace promising salvation, if not in Harlem, then in parts of Africa largely unknown and mysterious to any of us. Hard times engender the search for utopias as well as the faith in ideologies - especially in a cosmopolitan ghetto.

The Great Depression played out in a dance macabre against a background of a Harlem world that displayed its own strange interior mixture of economic blues and theological joys. Whatever may be the economic indicators of wealth and poverty, the social sense of such extremes was barely evident to us, largely because people of wealth were few and far between in the Harlem of the Thirties. We all had time for sorrow, but little patience for pity. We all had time for divine love even as we spewed cheap hate. Perhaps walking the thin line, and talking the thick talk, was the best equipment for survival, giving me a sure sense of better things to come. Some did not survive, but many others lived to tell the story of a sad depression of the soul as well as the wonders of the big system.

I should add, at Brandeis in 1960, everyone was as unhappy as Don Nussbaum. The athletes were unhappy because most of the student body regarded them as on an intellectual plain with elm trees. The party people were unhappy because the school’s idea for a blow-out weekend headliner was Odetta. The political activists were unhappy because of unfair play for Cuba and the bomb. The scholars were unhappy because the library closed at 11:00 and they only had exams twice a semester. And the artists were unhappy because art demanded that.

Based on a free-choice writing sample, freshmen were exempted from English Comp. or assigned a section. The sample was to determine if we could organize simple, declarative sentences into coherent paragraphs. Only no one had told me. My lyric essay about a West Philadelphia pool hall won me a slot with Mrs. Medvedev.

She was a green-eyed redhead, with a tattoo on her wrist from Auschwitz. She was married to Yankle Medvedev, the chairman of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department, and, according to worldly sophomores in my dorm, having an affair with an untenured abstract expressionist from Fine Arts. She was also, when it came to grades, "Brutal." After our first assignment — describing how to tie one’s shoes — she flailed us like Xerxes the Hellespont.

The second assignment was to describe a character we admired. That, let me tell you, set competitive juices flowing. Irwin Selzman was doing Paul Tillich. (I had never heard of him.) Victor Goldblatt had Reinhold Niebuhr. (I had never heard of him.) Celia Peltz chose Eleanor Roosevelt. (Okay! One for three.) I picked Garnet "Sugar" Hart, a Strawberry Mansion welterweight, who had earned my fascination by spicing his training regimens with emcee-ing gigs in Ridge Avenue bars.

I sat beside Rick Feldman, an aspiring Beatnik from Darien. (He had gone with Jean-Paul Sartre.) "These papers are not bad," Mrs. Medvedev said. "They are abominably bad." My eyes were on my desert boots. I would have settled for a C, easy. "But one of you shows promise."

I saw a familiar paper clip.

"That’s mine," I said.

"That might be yours," Rick Feldman said.

"‘He was tall and thin and could hit with either hand,’" Mrs. Medvedev said.

My first time in Afghanistan was late winter 1968/69, making the Overland Trail fast as possible through howling cold of Central Asian steppes. Minibus from Mashhad to Heart, arriving at the border crossing: dark, dusty, cold and bleak (Later I was to discover that somehow Afghan border-crossings were always dark dusty cold bleak, even on nice summer days.) Busload of hippies pulls up at the checkpoint. Suddenly a huge Afghan officer with bristling mustaches and fierce scowl thrusts himself into the bus: “Any you got hashish?,” he screamed.

Chorus of “No,” “No,” “Not me,” “Not me, sir”—squeaky and scared. What the hell?!

“Sssooo…” hissed the officer, reaching menacingly into his jacket…”You like to buy?” He whipped out a chunk of hash the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread. “Very good, grade-A Afghani.”

I don’t know exactly when the Overland Route to India really opened. I presume not till after WWII, maybe not really till the early 60s. It lasted till 1976 when the Communists took over in Afghanistan and effectively closed the borders. Then, in 1978, with the Iranian Revolution and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the Route was sealed, perhaps forever. Like the Silk Route (which really functioned only during the Han and T’ang Dynasties and under the Mongols, and even then only sporadically), the Overland Route represented a unique falling-together of political and economic forces for peaceful trade against fissiparous war and banditry. A rare “window of opportunity” for Marco Polo—or for me. We hippies, ignorant of history, never realized our once-in-a-millennium stroke of luck. We were … just there, man; just passing through.

xxx

A few vivid memories from that first dash across Afghanistan: changing money at the National Bank in Herat:—mud floor with chickens pecking in the dirt. An Afghan soldier-bank guard asleep leaning on his rifle, barrel down in the mud; the frigid austere 5 cent per night hotel; a horde of Kuchi nomads on the move along the Herat-Kandahar highway; hundreds of camels and donkeys. People with pale blue and green eyes, some of the kids blond. (Note: I recently read that the Kuchis are Pathans but they don’t really look it. They may have a client relationship with a Pathan tribe without actually being related to them. I’d guess the nomads are “pure” Indo-Aryan remnants, like the Kaffirs or the Dards. But I’ve never found any ethnography on the Kuchis.)

In the public park in Kabul, some old men in turbans and traditional gear praying, sipping tea, smoking hookas. It occurs to me for the first time that in a society not devoted to constant “progress” and change, old people have a different meaning. They’re not obsolete human junk, they’re repositories of accumulated experience, maybe even “wisdom.” I watch the graybeards being elaborately polite to each other, like a ritual. I’d always assumed that “good manners” equals hypocritical bullshit, unworthy of an individualist and conscious rebel. But suddenly I begin to suspect that there might be something beautiful about manners, like an art form.

xxx

The Kuchi Women (like most nomads) were not veiled, and in Kabul one could see modernized Afghan women without veils, but all other women over twelve wore burqas, total sacks, the most extreme purdah in the world. I never met any Afghan women. Most Western women, especially hippies, were so shocked by the burqa they never even attempted to penetrate this secret world. I only know about it through books, especially those of my old friends Chuck and Cherry Lindholm (anthropologists from Harvard). Cherry covered Pathan women while Chuck dealt with the men. The novelist Doris Lessing (who followed Afghan sufi guru Idries Shah) visited Peshawar during the Russian period, interviewed Afghan women refugees and wrote a good but small book on the subject.

(Note: Idries Shah wrote a weird novel, Kara Kush, a fantasy of Sufi resistance against the Russians, badly written but worth reading.)

One thing I learned by talking to men however was that many of them could not afford to marry, since Afghan custom requires the groom’s family to pay a bride price, which at that time could run to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The burqa therefore cannot be seen simply as a symbol of oppression of women (though it is that) but also as a symbol of the value of daughters.

Societies without dowry customs may paradoxically seem to allow women more “freedom”: because they value them less than societies with bride-price customs. In any case, sexual tension is high in Afghan society. It’s not surprising that the Taliban came to power on an anti-rape platform. (At least according to their own propaganda.) Also, the notion that Moslems “hate women” because they veil them must be weighted against the conscious beliefs of most Moslem men: i.e., that they value women far more than—say—Hollywood America: where women are used to sell products through fleshly exposure. Given sexual relations in Afghanistan, the burqa can be seen as a form of freedom from harassment and exploitation. I’m not saying this is my opinion. I’m just trying to explain the attitude of the average Afghan.

xxx

After a couple years in India I was expelled for overstaying my visa and headed back to Afghanistan. Again it was winter, I was stuck in Kabul waiting for a money-order to arrive, penniless, in another frigid hotel, holed up with a German hippy who was shooting raw opium four or five times a day. At one point, I had to visit the U.S. embassy about some problem, perhaps a visa extension. The vice-consul I met was a young guy from the Mid-west, not much older than. This was his first posting abroad. As I seemed friendly he kind of opened up, expressing amazement at my foolhardiness in wandering alone around Afghanistan. He admitted he himself was terrified. With a shaking finger he pointed at the window, “There … there’s no law out there!” he quavered. I kept a straight face, but secretly I was quite pleased.

xxx

I got in so much trouble overstaying visas that when I finally left the country, an official wrote a huge essay (in Pashtu) in my passport, which had two 12-page accordion fold-out additions full of highly dubious seals and stamps. (I was especially fond of a page of tax-stamps from the Libyan monarchy.) An Afghan friend translated the essay for me later. Basically it I.D.’d me as a penniless, drug-addled hippy and suggested strongly that I never be allowed back into the country. Later, however, this passport was stolen—by the Visa Office in Islamabad, Pakistan—and presumably sold on the black market for $3000 (so one lone friendly official told me in secret). When I described what had happened to the U.S. consul there in Islamabad he screamed, “What, again?!” So, anyway, I got a new passport and could now safely go back to Afghanistan; and I did, many times.

Around October 1971, the owner of my hotel in Kandahar invited me to spend the evening smoking opium. When night fell cold clear and moonlit, we left town in a horse-drawn gari for the teriak-khanehm, the O-den, quite a drive over the desert to a huge old mudbrick, multi-domed caravanserai. There was no electricity, but moon and stars illuminated the scene. A caravan had come in earlier and settled down for the night. About 100 camels in the courtyard of the caravanserai plumped on the dirt with their legs tucked under them, each one glowing in the moonlight like a teapot the size of Cadillac: big double-humped “Bactrian” camels.

Later that winter I suffered on through to Bactria itself, to Mazar-i Sharif, over mountain passes in a blizzard in an unheated bus. Sometime in the middle of the night and howling snowstorm the bus stopped—to let a camel caravan cross the highway. Shivering and amazed I counted about 25 big Bactrians, humps frosted with snow, and heard for the first time the clanking of caravan bells, a sound used as a cliché in Persian poetry to signify “departure” with all its sadness and anticipation. The caravaneers muffled in padded sheepskins and turbans of snow yanked the undulating giants by ropes through their noses, exhorting and cursing as the beasts honked and groaned. Then they disappeared into the storm heading north for the Soviet border.

xxx

Later I managed to get to Balkh, the ancient capital of Bactria. The old city walls with watchtowers are still crumbling under the blows they received 700 years ago from the Mongols. We drove through a vast gate into a city that was the same desert as on the outside. I think it was sixteen kilometers, all inside the wall, before we reached the center and the shattered remains of Balkh: a ruined mausoleum (the dome collapsed) still flowery with patches of Timurid like the tomb of a Sufi shaykh in the line of Ibn ‘Arabi. In a circle around the tomb, a dozen or so teahouses were huddled together—nothing else, not even trees—just Central Asian desert and patches of snow. The great “mother of Cities,” birthplace of Jalaloddin Rumi, already a metropolis when Alexander conquered it: nothing now but a flattened waste and the Ozymandian stump of a cenotaph.

There’s an old Sufi legend about Genghis Khan (said to be part of The Secret History of the Mongols), but I could never find it in any translation: he’s just fourteen and hiding out alone in the desert from his enemies; he goes to sleep in a cave and dreams of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who gives him a gold ring and tells him that his mission is to go forth and destroy civilization, to erase the blight of cities from the world. When he wakes, the ring is still on his finger. As far as Balkh is concerned, Genghis Khan did his duty, or one of his descendents did it for him, I forget which.

Only one thing kept Balkh alive in 1971: hashish. The chai-khanehs there were set up to host a charas bazaar, and the famous north Afghan green-gold enticed gourmet connoisseurs from all over the universe. I wasn’t there to buy bulk, however, just a few “candy canes,” of the Number One, so I drank sweet green tea with cardamom and sat around sampling the product with the extremely genial host.

xxx

The “dialect” of Persian spoken in Balkh and northeastern Afghanistan is called Dari; but in fact it’s not dialect, but purer and more archaic than Iranian Persian (Farsi), rather like the Elizabethan English spoken by country people in remote parts of eastern America. Once in Tehran I met a professor of Persian linguistics from the University and he told me about his recent vacation in Balkh.

I was sitting in one of the chai-khanehs, you know, the ones where they sell charas, chatting with the proprietor, and extremely nice man and polite to a fault. Suddenly, I burst into tears. He was very upset. “Was it something I said, dear sir?” “Yes,” I sobbed, “something you said.” "Ah, honorable Presence, how have I offended thee?” “No, no! you didn’t offend me. It was your use of the subjunctive! So beautiful! Like visiting the 15th century!”

Two border towns in Pakistan—Quetta and Peshawar—have been mentioned in the news lately as refugee centers. Peshawar is mostly a Pathan city; Quetta has Pathans but also Baluchis, Brahuis (a mysterious people speaking a Dravidian language), and sprinklings of Hazaras, Turks, Persians, Punjabis, etc.—very cosmopolitan, a smuggler’s paradise. One special feature of Quetta were the sake-khanehs or teahouses, where hash was served in huge hubblebubbles. I spent months in one that was frequented by ne’er-do-well Brahui “princes” and presided over by a witty disreputable Sayyid (descendant of the Prophet); I divided my day between the saki-khaneh and the teriak-khaneh (opium den) run by a genial Uzbek called Khan Baba. Quetta food is famous: barbecued meats and rich milk sweets are the specialties. By comparison Afghanistan itself was not what we hippies called a “food trip.” Even in Kabul restaurants the cuisine was that of poor shepherds: tough kebabs, greasy pilaw, flat bread, and tea (either black or green, always toothachingly sweet).

Of course, given the crisp weather and the hash, one was always hungry and appreciative of even small treats such as yogurt or leek dumplings. One recipe I recall fondly: mutton meatballs fried in mutton fat with tomatoes and onions; add eggs to make an omelet swimming in grease; mop up with flat bread. Afghan bread, though simple, is real staff-of-life stuff. I’m certain bread in the Neolithic tasted just like that, bursting with wheat flavor and slightly smoky from the wood fired clay ovens.

Peshawar always reminded me of Dodge City or maybe Tombstone. A tough border town at the foot of the Khyber Pass, capital of “Pushtunistan” (the idle dream of Pathan nationalists), where the Great Game still seemed to go on as if Kipling had never died. The Peshawar bazaar is famous for its “breakfast” delicacies during Ramadan, the month of fasting (and feasting). I recall for instance spiced larks in brochette. I learned to appreciate the Pathans here as extreme examples of the Mountain Warrior ethos, like the Kurds: the best friends and the worst enemies in the world. (Tibetans are really mountain warriors, but Buddhists, like the ancient Afghans.) Like the old Scottish clansmen, all Pathans are “noble” even when they are dirt poor, and they act like noblemen: proud, self-assured, unconquered.

I know I’m guilty of stereotyping here, but the types seem very real when you’re sojourning amongst them. And the Pathans, unlike say the Scots or Tibetans, are still actively engaged in war, Hatfield/McCoy blood feuds in the 1970s, real full-scale war in the 80s and 90s, etc. In the Khyber Pass, the tribes ruled openly and in total disregard of all government. Up there, gunsmiths could copy any small weapon in world history from a flintlock (still very popular because you can make your own bullets) to an Uzi or AK-47, complete with serial numbers. Wild-looking longhaired types with crossed bandoliers and rifles. Shops full of smuggled electronic goods and gaudy jewelry.

The term “tribal anarchy” has been used to describe the situation. In effect, no central government has ever controlled the tribal hinterlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The unit of freedom, to coin a phrase, is not the individual, but the coherent group: family, clan, tribe. The successful military forces of Central Asia are always tribal confederations, usually with a charismatic khan (like Genghis) to unite them. When the leader dies, the confederation usually breaks up and returns to “tribal anarchy.”

In the 70s, people said the king—Zahir Shah—controlled Kabul and the other major cities and highways but the tribes controlled everything else. (Note: two stories I heard about the king: When I asked someone “Where are all the famous Afghan hounds? Why haven’t I seen any?” I was told that the king owned them. Once in Herat, some dervishes gave me the best hashish I’ve ever smoked. One hit felt like 50-mic’s of LSD. They told me that this was grade AAA first-pressing charas, the finest few kilograms of Balkh’s best, was reserved for a few special dervish shaykhs—and the king! Even if neither of these tales is true they reveal something about the magic of archetypes.)

Of course, tribal anarchy is not anarchism. For one thing, Islam—which has always been anti-tribal—has deeply influenced the Afghans and modified their customs. But I can’t help thinking Bakunin might have admired the Pathans: the people armed, resisting all other powers. Even Marx and Engels sympathized with the Afghans, whom they felt had been betrayed by perfidious British foreign policy. The Afghans missed a lot of imperialist/colonialist history. There’s something to be said for fierce independence.

My favorite city in Afghanistan—the one I kept going back to again and again—was Herat. I felt quite at home in its decayed Persian ambience, more Persian even than Iran with all its oil money and “West–intoxication.” The Timurid Mongols who ruled Herat in the 15th century loved Spring best of all its seasons, but I remember Herat in October when the sky was really a “turquoise dome,” the air crisp and clean—no factories for thousands of kilometers in all directions!—smelling only of pine trees and distant mountains. Or December with snow on the pines and mud domes, starry nights, the smell of wood fires, the sound of horses’ hooves. (I believe most of this was destroyed by the Russians in the 80s.) In the old city there was no electricity, a Luddite paradise, night alleyways black as blindness. I remember stumbling back to my hotel from the tereiak-khaneh, a cozy den under a dome in the old town. The owner, a sweet-tempered Hazara family man, had painted the ceiling of the dome with flowers, birds and pastoral scenes in Grandma Moses style, so that his customers would have something pleasant to enhance their nusha’ or intoxication. In the Herat bazaar one might see hunting hawks for sale, or rainbow striped chapans like the wasp-waisted coats of courtiers in old miniatures. Herat teahouses had no tables or chairs but only wooden platforms called takhts (lit. “thrones”) with carpets, sometimes outdoors under chenar trees or next to a little rivulet lined with watercress. Sometimes, bards played rebabs, archaic instruments never seen nowadays in India or Iran, but mentioned often in medieval poetry.

Someone told me there were 500 sufi shrines in Herat. I only managed to visit a few of the major ones. I found those wandering dervishes who turned me on to the “royal” hashish in the tomb of the famous Timurid miniaturist Behzad, perched on a bare hillside outside the city with a view of the whole valley. Most sufis in Afghanistan belong to the Naqshbandi or the Qadire orders, two of the biggest worldwide Sunni sufi turuq. Two of the mujaheddin militias during the Russian period consisted of these sufi orders armed and following their pirs (i.e., their gurus). The most famous saint of Herat was an 11th-century sufi shaykh, ‘Abdullah Ansari. I reached his tomb in Gazargah, a suburb of Herat, by horse carriage. The cargah or enclosure was rich and well preserved, and the tombstone was amazing, a lacy cake of Koranic calligraphy carved in solid marble. Ansar’s tomb enclosure was considered bast, a sanctuary for criminals. As with certain cathedral closes in medieval Europe, anyone—even a murderer—who takes refuge there is exempt from prosecution. We met a number of these fugitives: ragged and hungry-looking to be sure, and stuck inside a tiny garden. But the garden had cypress trees and mountain views, and the men were free inside the garden, not too miserable. In fact, they looked rather happy. Ansari’s post-mortem influence is warm and forgiving. (All active sufi shrines seem to take on the personality of the dead saint.)

In the agon suffered for you,
The wounded find the scent of balm:
The memory of you consoles the souls of lovers.
Thousands in every corner, seeking a glimpse of you,
Cry out like Moses, “Lord, show me yourself!”
I see thousands of lovers lost in a desert of grief,
Wandering aimlessly and saying hopefully,
“O God! O God!”
I see breasts scorched by the burning separation from you,
I see eyes weeping in love’s agony.
Dancing down the lane of blame and censure,
Your lovers cry out, “Poverty is my source of pride!”
Pir-I Ansar has quaffed the wine of longing:
Like Majnun he wanders drunk and perplexed
Through the world.

Kwaja Adbullah Ansari
Intimate Conversatons
Trans. By Wheeler M. Thackston
(Paulist Press, N.Y. 1978)

In my book, Scandal, I’ve described a number of shrines in Herat, but I can’t resist retelling the story of Baba Qaltan. This sufi came to pay a visit to Jami, the great 15th-century poet of Herat, by rolling on the ground—hence his name which means Papa Roller. An Islamic Holy Roller. At his tomb there’s an open courtyard empty and covered with small pebbles. The pilgrim lies down with his head on a broken bit of gravestone, closes his eyes and recites a prayer. Then—according to my informant—he rolls. If he’s a “good Moslem” he ends up coming to a halt facing Mecca. My informant was “Hajji,” an extremely sharp young Herati merchant whose shop was my hangout. Hajji was not a sufi but—like all good traditional Afghans—he revered them highly.

He told me that a cousin of his, a terribly worldly and sinful young man, had openly mocked Baba Qaltan’s “miraculous” tomb and announced his intention of making the pilgrimage and refusing to roll. So he did. He lay down and closed his eyes—and suddenly he was rolling, rolling around the courtyard in circles, out of control, around and around, faster and faster. His friends had to jump on his spinning body to stop it, drag it to a halt. Pebbles were embedded in his bleeding checks. “After that,” said Hajji, “He became a believer.”

I decided to try it. I followed the protocol exactly. The shrine attendant gave my shoulder a tiny nudge. I’ll roll a bit, I thought, so as not to disappoint him.

All at once I felt the world tip over at a 45 degree angle. This is not a metaphor. I couldn’t have stopped rolling if I’d tried. Nor could I open my eyes. Zoom! Finally, I rolled to a halt “Masha ‘Llah! he’s facing Mecca!” Believe me, I’m not a very psychic person. This was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.

Hajji, by the way, like many Afghans, was a phenomenal speed-chess player. I used to sit in his shop and watch him annihilate one Westerner after another. Ten seconds between moves! Good Moslems don’t gamble, otherwise Hajji could have hustled professionally.

After Zahir Shar was ousted in 1973 by his cousin Da’ud, I was sitting in Hajji’s shop one day and asked him how people felt about the fall of the Monarchy and the proclamation of a republic. “We Afghans have an old saying,” he replied: “Black dog out, yellow dog in.”

xxx

The fact that the Taliban succeeded in taking over Afghanistan has always seemed to me a certain sign that the Afghanistan I knew was completely smashed to hell by the Russians and by civil war. I never heard any Afghan, however pious, praise “fundamentalism” or mullah-inspired bigotry. No one had ever heard of this perversion of Islam, which then existed only in Saudi Arabia. Afghan Islam was very orthopractic, but also very pro-sufi; essentially it was old-fashioned mainstream Islam. The idea of banning kite-flying would have probably caused hoots of incredulous laughter. It must have taken twenty years of vicious neo-imperialist ideological cultural murder and oppression to make Talibanism look like the least of all available evils.

Since American readers have not, generally speaking, been offered a very multi-dimensional view of Islam and Central Asian culture, I thought it might be useful and amusing to dip into Afghan literature to discover what the great poets of the past might have said about the Taliban. Jalaloddin Rumi lived and died in Turkey, but was born in Balkh (his family fled the Mongol invasion) and wrote in Persian. In this poem he describes the post-mortem fate of a Khwajeh (pron. “Khoja”)—a professional Islamic “cleric” and puritanical killjoy:

What’s all this fanfare in the morning?
Ah! The Khwajeh’s going to the grave!
Won’t be back till late, I suppose:
a rather distant caravanserai, Death.
Instead of fair beauties he’ll consort
with scorpions and snakes;
he’s come from the silken pavilion
and inherited the sepulcher.
No more free lunch—
his neck is firmly broken.
How steadfastly,
how patiently he makes his exit.
While he lived no-one
had the guts to cross him;
but now, one imagines, where he’s going
the Khwajeh’s own guts will be kebabs.
He does not go purified by purity,
nor in the way of fidelity,
he does not go in God-intoxication
but stone-blind drunk on lies…
The Khwajeh: how many fine robes tailored,
how many turbans fitted—
And now, undressed by God,
a naked nobody.
Every exile returns home at last
East to East, West to West;
he who was born of devil’s fire returns to fire,
he who was born of light to light.
Spawn of the imp,
he spread out the fingers of cruelty;
do you think it likely he’ll be
rewarded with 78 houris?
The witty and nimble
are seated at God’s dining table—
but he, unsalted, unripe,
is headed for the pits.

(adapted from the version by W.C. Chittick and myself, in Sacred Drift)

I must confess that I’ve never been able to overcome my Romanticism vis-à-vis Afghanistan or the “Orient” in general. At times I thought perhaps I should try. The “Subaltern Studies” critics of post-colonialism condemn all orientalism as “appropriation.” I remember a Native American poet who summed it up thus: “First you took our land, then our languages, now you want our “spirituality!” It’s easy to see that there can exist such a thing as too much translation. Why don’t we palefaces get a culture of our own? As Gandhi told Mountbatten (when he asked the Mahatma, “What do you think of British Civilization?”), “Yes, it would have been a good idea.”
On the one hand: true, on the other hand…

It seems to me that there exists something I’d like to call an oriental Romanticism of the Orient. After all, the very idea of the romance came to us from the Islamic East. Emerson and Goethe sometimes seemed to think that Romanticism had been invented by the Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz. Chivalric love is probably an Islamic trope. This ill-defined oriental Romanticism doesn’t situate itself dialectically in relation to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but to the “worldly” world in general, in an a-historical and existentialist manner. Love, the beloved, the saki and wine shop, music, dance, the rose garden and nightingale—all these exist both as sensual reality and as an “other world” of imagination and intoxication. One illustration: a poem by “Abd al-Rahman Jami of Herat:

Edge of the garden, brink of the street, lip of the goblet:
Saki, get up! Here abstinence is crime

If the old monk of the cloister is drunk on music’s delight
I’ll take the tavern—where this state endures forever

You touch cup’s lip to your lip and I the drunkard
can’t tell which is wine’s ruby and which is yours

I’m not the only heart snared in your dark tresses:
wherever hearts are birds they’re caught in your net

You draw the sword to slice my heart in two
- don’t bother. One glance will do it

Don’t discuss love’s problems with the rationalists
and don’t tell secrets: this is a public assembly

Jami’s never seen wine nor cup yet he’s drunk on your love:
This is the banquet of love. What room for cup or wine?

(adapted from E.G. Browne’s version in A Literary History of Persia)

Maybe it’s true that we hippies were merely casting our “gaze” on such treasures. But although the treasures are imaginal, they’re real enough. And unlike other “resources,” the more such treasures are taken the more they are given. “Appropriation” renews the source rather than depletes it. When the treasures are withheld or refused, they die. Perhaps now they exist only in the form of a terrible nostalgia—a nostalgia so severe it could be called tragic. It’s no wonder that some Afghan people look back on the 60s and 70s as a kind of Golden Age. They’ve even brought back old Zahir Shah out of mothballs in Rome, like a lucky talisman lost for thirty years, even propping him up again in Kabul. Probably a big mistake. Hell, nowadays you can’t step in the same river even once.

But the romantic impulse seems irresistible. Who wouldn’t regret the peace and prosperity, or the now-long-lost pleasures of rebabs in the teahouse or kite flying in the Spring? To have been there then is to be overwhelmed with regret. I offer no defense based on theory or ideology. You can despise me for it, but you can’t argue me out of it. And you—you’ve seen all those images in The New York Times and on TV. You can’t tear your gaze away, can you? What does it look like to you? Like the last real place in the world?

Earlier this year I shared my ruminations with Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a long-time friend and co-worker. Art said that he had often sought to understand the persistent presence and power of the number 40 in the Hebrew texts. What had begun to be evident to him, he reported, was the fact that while we usually speak in our culture of nine months as the normal time of a woman’s pregnancy before giving birth, the more precise and traditional period is actually given as 40 weeks. As soon as I heard Art’s words it became clearer to me what I had been feeling, sensing so deeply. And I began to try to articulate it for myself and others: Something is trying to be born in America. Again, I’m not quite certain what it is, but the new emerging reality seems firmly related to the visionary calls of King and the earlier urgent hope of Langston Hughes (”O, let America be America again/The land that never has been yet/and yet must be /The land where every [one] is free.”) Suffusing all of it I hear as well the beautiful wisdom and strong challenge of June Jordan: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So as this year went on, as I sat one August night in Denver among the tens of thousands of on-site witnesses to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, it seemed obvious to me that my young brother was related to all of this, but more as an opening, an opportunity, a new space. He seems to offer the place where all the “we” people can stop our waiting and carry on our work to create the pathway, the birthing channel toward “The land that never has been yet, and yet must be.” Indeed, as I wrestled with Biblical symbols, the birthing imagery and the calls of Langston, Martin and June (herself the marvelous offspring of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ann Braden, and Amzie Moore), I could not escape another revelatory metaphor. Not only is something trying to be born in America, but some of us are called to be the midwives in this magnificent, desperately needed and so painfully creative process.

As so often happens, the midwife metaphor overtook me before I knew what it really meant. So I turned to Selena Green, a gifted, compassionate and socially-conscious midwife, and asked her to tell me something about what she does. Selena said that one of her most crucial roles, especially toward the final days of a pregnancy, was to help assure the mother that “you can do this,” and that she is not alone in the very difficult journey. Then this highly skilled practitioner shared with me another extraordinary element in the description of her loving ministry (of course Selena’s work deeply fulfills the basic definition of ministry as “an act of serving”). Often, especially in the last stages of a pregnancy, this spiritually -grounded companion of hope said she also speaks to the infant in the womb.

Recognizing the deep sense of safety and security experienced by the womb-kept child, imagining the great joy involved in having all his/her needs supplied almost effortlessly, Selena said she shares words of encouragement with the infant as well. Like a womb-whisperer, she says something like, “I know how good you feel, how surrounded you are by a protective nurturing ocean of love. I realize it feels as if this is the only world you need to know. But, my child, when you start to feel the urgent life forces beginning to move you down, to push you out, to press your tender head into that seemingly impossible opening, go. Let yourself move toward the light, painful though it may be. The fullness of your life is waiting for you on the other side. Go, come, my child. You can, you must make it through. You can do this.”

Even as Selena shared her marvelous work and words with me, I began to see their meaning for our nation and its social midwives. We Americans are both mother and infant, giving birth, seeking new life, full of fear, full of pain, turning away from the possibility of even more pain, feeling “the urgency of now,” wondering if we are able, afraid of what the new life demands and costs, fearful of giving up all we know (or think we know) so well, grasping all that keeps us from new beginning, from new life. Afraid of the pain, afraid of the unknown, afraid of the hope, we live urgently in need of midwives. Are we the ones?

Over the past several weeks, as I have shared these searching reflections with other people in what I like to call “democratic conversations,” my own perceptions have been expanded. For instance, in one of Atlanta’s Historic Black Colleges, a group of Morehouse men immediately grasped and celebrated the idea that they could be midwives for the nation (following in the steps of their most renowned alumnus, Martin Luther King, Jr.). In another Atlanta session two women who had given birth years before remembered their own labor. One of them recalled screaming, pleading with her midwife to find some way to stop the labor process and its agonizing pain. Then, she also shared with us the power that entered her being when her midwife urged her, encouraged her, helped her to face the pain; “turn into the pain, don’t run away,” her helper said. Facing the pain, the mother recalled, she endured and overcame. In Boston, a female hospice doctor called my attention to how much my womb-whisperer friend, Selena, was like their hospice service - helping, encouraging that fetus to give up one surely satisfying life for the great possibility of moving toward something magnificently more. So midwives and hospice attendants may work together in this powerful moment, helping us face the pain of dying and being born, letting America become the land that never has been yet, and yet must be.

Perhaps this deepening of my own vision was why I needed to return last week to Denver and share the midwife call in a class I was visiting at the Iliff School of Theology (where I taught for 23 years before retirement - whatever that means). There, a student came up to me at the end of the class, identified herself as a midwife and said “When I go through the pain with my mothers, not only do I say, ‘you can do it,’ I say, ‘you are doing it.’” Is it possible that those are the words, the hope needed for a nation now filled with political, social, economic and spiritual crisis? Perhaps the Chinese pictograph for the word “crisis” is the word that midwives must carry: “Crisis: time of great danger/time of great opportunity.” Perhaps we are the ones who will walk through the great danger into the marvelous opportunity for helping our nation begin in a new way to realize its best possibilities - to be born again. Perhaps we are not only the ones we’ve been waiting for, but we are the ones who have already begun to do the work of creating a more perfect union. And we are not alone.