A Website of the Radical Imagination
Benj DeMott Yesterday’s Papers
An elderly friend of mine—a white southern liberal—once told me a tale that helped me grasp how far his kind traveled in the 60s. He came from a close-knit military family and he’s never doubted his father was one of the wisest—and bravest—of men. Yet one day, as my friend was reading a New York Times report on a firefight in Viet Nam, he was shocked to find he was siding with enemies of his country (and his daddy).
On Inauguration Day and on the day before the State of the Union address, I went to Serious Times dialogues – academic seminars (at New York’s School of Visual Arts) where American radicals ponder “Why doesn’t the United States make social progress?” What follows here takes in the distance between doomy discourse there and spectacles of social progress enacted by Obama et al. as he launched his second term. But it’s not locked on that opposition. I try to say true things about where we’re at now by treating old and new acts of mimesis, including classic Russian novels by Vasily Grossman and a soon-to-be classic hip hop CD by Kendric Lamar. My approach to politics and high/low culture is intuitive. This is not a scholarly essay. Call it an experiment in synchronic method.
“You should be asking what his wife thinks of him.” That was Bob Dylan last month stiffing a Rolling Stone interviewer who entreated him to endorse Obama or at least concede racism was at the root of right-wing rage against the President. Dylan’s evasions got me thinking about who he is now and how he became an American avatar. I’ve gone on to consider the aspirations of other pop artists who’ve dreamed big in the Age of Obama.
“I won’t change my mind…Keep your hand on my thigh tonight!” That’s a line from the chorus of the echt Springsteen track of the past decade. But it’s not by Bruce.
James Brown once wondered at anti-war protestors who headed for Canada in the 60s – they wanted out of the U.S.; J.B. wanted in. I’m reminded of the distance between him and them, when I try to take the measure of “hard” left disdain for Obama.
What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like A Rolling Stone.” (Or did that Dylan imitation follow “Positively 4th Street”? Ellen—Mother of all Dylan critics—would’ve known!)
I went to Cairo a couple of years ago to attend a conference on international health. It was held at a hotel down the hill from the pyramids at Giza and on a free day I did my touristy duty. The pharoahs’ tombs didn’t get me too high. Maybe because I kept my head down to avoid all the con men on camels (the sort of hard guys who were recruited to ride out of Giza and bumrush the crowd at Tahrir Square). I finished up at the Sphinx, which paled next to the realer-than-neo-realist spectacle of hungry kids begging under its broken nose, fighting over scraps and almost falling off ramps with no railings to protect them from fearsome drops.
Prologue: New York Story
I went in for the matzo ball soup and ended up married to a Muslim. I met my wife-to-be while she was working as a hostess at Carnegie Deli. Her New York immigrant story has been in my head as I’ve read political narratives about the “Ground Zero” mosque. I might have given New Republic editor Martin Peretz the benefit of doubt when he wondered whether he should “honor” the people behind the mosque by “pretending they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment when I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse it.” But I knew in my gut he was out to lunch once he’d spelled out his own bias in his now notorious statement: “[F]rankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” When I read that line, I flashed on my wife leading me around a Senegalese Sufi cemetery on a blindingly hot day in search of her beloved grandmother’s grave.
A week is a long time in politics, as Tip O’Neil once said.
“My heart is full of love for this country.” Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope
“I actually believe my own bullshit.” Barack Obama (quoted) in Renegade
Witness – Whittaker Chambers’ account of the Hiss case and its back story – is the fount of modern Movement Conservatism. (Ronald Reagan credited it with converting him from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican.) Ideologues on today’s Right are still playing changes on the persona – “a solitary man in a gregarious land” – Chambers perfected in his great American autobiography cum anti-communist moral tract. But torture-mongers and Tea Partiers on the Right will find it hard to assimilate certain implications in Chambers’ thought. Meanwhile, leftists who instinctively avoid Chambers – ally of Nixon and the man who shaped Reagan’s brain – are missing out on a 20th Century mind whose testimony seems especially pertinent now.
A defender of Israel’s Gaza incursion emailed anti-Islamists the following excerpt from a front page story, “Fighter Sees His Paradise in Gaza’s Pain,” in the January 9 New York Times:
21 year old militant with Islamic Jihad awaits treatment for shrapnel wounds:
“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting…We are fighting the Israelis…When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.”
He continued smiling. “Why are you so happy?,” the reporter asked.
“Look around you. Don’t you see that these people are hurting?”“But I am from the people too.” he said with his smile incandescent.
“They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
I’d seen the original story in the Times where that bright, shining smile lit up the madness of Jihadis. But there was something vital missing from the e-mailer’s excerpt. Right after Times reporter Taghreed El-Khodary entered her own story to address the happy militant – “Look around you.” – she brought readers inside the hospital’s emergency room:
A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
Only then did El-Khodary turn back to ask the militant: “Don’t you see that these people are hurting?”
Her story of the smiley Jihadi stuck with me in part because she nailed the pain the wannabe martyr refused to take in. But it seems the Jihadi wasn’t the only imperfect witness. I suspect the “pro-Israeli” e-mailer cut El-Khodary’s passage on the victims in that hospital because it brings home the excruciating consequences of the Gaza incursion. Jihadists who provoke Israel bear much responsibility for causing the suffering of Palestinian civilians but so do Israeli politicians and the population who overwhelmingly support the operation in Gaza.
Excerpted from First of the Year: 2008 Copyright Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
It’s been an elegiac time for our crew lately. In the past year, we lost (among others) Hans Koning, Ellen Willis, George Trow, Kurt Vonnegut and, a year before that, Benjamin DeMott. They were First readers as well as writers for our tab. You could count on them to give it to you straight and there were occasions when one of their opinions could outweigh all others due to its cogency. There are no substitutes for irreplaceable elders but we’ll try to sustain what they valued in First by finding new originals to help carry us into the future. Which, sorry to repeat myself, remains unwritten (despite the chorus of that slack Natasha Bedingfield song).
Your parents had a third parent – television. If you went back to 1952, you would be surprised. Many people – of all kinds and conditions – had just two parents.
George W.S. Trow