Nation

Roots Moves

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“Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose… We owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.”—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”

Simone Weil once lived in a building around the corner from Tiemann Place in West Harlem where we held our 29th annual “Anti-Gentrification Street Fair” in October. 

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They’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

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Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun observed that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws”.  Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is now testing an expansion of this proposition:  if you could make all the ballads, need you care what is taught in the schools?

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Timothy Mayer’s “Adams Chronicles”

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Fredric Smoler’s mockery (above) of wannabe worldly—truly deadly—approaches to the American Revolution has an extra kick for this editor. My son’s assigned reading in his 7th grade class this season is a Y.A. text, My Brother Sam Is Dead, that leeches glory—and all the juice—out of our country’s creation story.  Higher learning’s disdain for  “American exceptionalism” seems to have trickled down to progressive high schools and middle schools.

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“Hamilton”

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In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”  The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy.  And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring  a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony.  One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children.  One would be wrong.

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Is Dan Mad?

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George Trow’s magnificent, prophetic piece on Dan Rather—first published in First of the Month in 1999—never grows old.

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Ambassador Satch’s Talk-Back

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Julian Bond dug the first issue of First of the Month and stayed in our corner. While his support for First was of vanishingly small import compared to his other services to our country, it was an honor to know he was paying attention. After Amiri Baraka died last year, Bond sent First a swatch of an interview he’d conducted with Baraka under the aegis of the University of Virginia’s “Explorations in Black Leadership” program. Once it was edited and published he wrote to say “it was great to read this again, especially the Louis Armstrong section.” What follows is the section he highlighted.

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Giving Us Something We Can Feel

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You couldn’t buy a copy of Between the World and Me on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a stretch last month since it was sold out of every book store. It was rousing to find out readers were hungry for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s polemic against structural racism.

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Southern Changes

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Dylann Roof almost didn’t go through with it–“everyone was so nice to me.” The thought of him waiting/wondering in the church before he used the gun he bought at “Shooter’s Choice” reminds me of this passage in Intruder in the Dust where Faulkner claimed every white Southern boy could lock into the moment before Pickett’s Charge–the disaster at Gettysburg that came to stand for the Confederacy’s mad gambles:

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Living in Levine

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Philip Levine responded to early First of the Months with assonance-first praise of your editor whom he termed a “young warrior for justice in the nut house of America.” That praise was insanely over the top and I proved it to Levine double-quick by screwing up a quote in the poem he contributed to the next First. He gave me dispensation—“Forget it.”—and I need more now since I’m about to ignore his last bit of advice about First. I checked in with him last summer: “What am I doing wrong?” He wrote back: “Ask your wife.” Then he added: “It’s good that First lives on. Maybe fewer words would let in more light & silence.” But, a month after his death on Valentine’s Day, loss means more…

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Gentlemen of Principle, Priests of Presumption

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The following piece—originally written in the early 70s for a UK anthology (Approaches to Popular Culture) culminates with a celebration of Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.” Levine mused (a few years ago) that the essay was “so moving and so relevant”: “It should be reprinted somewhere…”

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“Selma” vs. LBJ

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In 1991, Oliver Stone slandered Lyndon Johnson in his film JFK, accusing Johnson of complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy. A number of historians and political figures (including Johnson Aide and Carter Administration Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr.) have argued that Ava DuVernay’s new movie Selma defames LBJ as reluctant to send Congress a voting rights bill and as opposed to the Selma voting rights campaign.

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Obama’s Executive Action

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David Brooks agrees with the substance of Obama’s executive action on immigration, but believes that he has transgressed the Constitution in the process. The president has usurped the role of the legislature. For Brooks, process transcends substance, so apart from expressing sympathy for the substance of Obama’s action he has little to say about what should be done in addressing the plight of millions of undocumented immigrants, given the gridlock that exists between the branches of government. When it is pointed out that Obama’s action has its precedents in the actions of his predecessors, Republicans as well as Democrats, Brooks responds by noting the scale of the action, 5 million rather than 1.5 million under George H.W. Bush. He does not explain how this makes Obama’s action, but not Bush’s, unconstitutional.

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Strangers in the Land (and Humanism in the Arena)

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“Scripture tells us we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too.”

That line from Barack Obama’s speech on his executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation took on a different resonance in the wake of Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island. Obama’s vision of a more empathetic America seemed beamish if you read Darren Wilson’s testimony about why he had to kill the “demon” Michael Brown or watched video of police taking down Eric Garner (then mulling around him afterwards like he was a beast of no nation). The retaliatory assassination of the two cops (and family men) last Saturday in Brooklyn wasn’t a blow to empire so much as a blow to empathy itself. Those head-shots went to the heart of the country.

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Field Notes from a Lagging Indicator

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Your editor struck up a correspondence with the author of this article after we both responded to a group email from William Greider linking us to one of Greider’s recent pieces. It led to an exchange about the Affordable Care Act and to this piece of “samizdat” detailing one desperate senior’s angle on ACA (and the state of his state’s healthcare system).

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Buzzfeed

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Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey is a Jeremiad about Global Warming that’s also a charm offensive. The author’s faith in the appeal of his teacherly Yankee persona seems almost as strong as his certitude rising levels of atmospheric carbon will have a devastating impact on the climate.

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A Green Army Takes on Big Oil

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First is honored to reprint this small classic of reportage on the struggle against oil and gas companies who are trashing Louisiana’s wetlands and spawning toxic sinkholes in places like Bayou Corne.

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Q&A: Scialabba & Smoler in the Court of Public Opinion

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What follows is an exchange between George Scialabba, essayist and editor of The Baffler, and longtime First of the Month contributor, Fredric Smoler. The subject of their debate (which was sparked by Smoler’s article “Democracy Now.”) is the controversy surrounding Michael Kinsley’s Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

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