Ransoms & Ripeness

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Fr. Frechette has been writing regular updates from Haiti since the earthquake on August 14th. What follows are his two latest missives, starting with his most recent, which is marked by an undeniable urgency. His earlier update has an up ending that should give readers a genuine lift since Fr. Frechette’s good faith is the opposite of beamishness. His invocations of viridians in that first note made your editor think of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballad:

Green, how I want you green
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.

Maybe “Romance Sonámbulo” isn’t quite apt for a priest, but Fr. Frechette is large (and Lorca’s mountains and sea seem right for Haiti). Fr. Frechette may not be forever young but he is surely unwithered.

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Whitewash as Public Service

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The following takedown of The 9/11 Commission Report by the late Benjamin DeMott first appeared in 2004 in Harper’s Magazine. DeMott’s essay remains vital because it’s an act of imagination as well as an act of protest.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

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First published this essay—a transcript of a talk on 9/11 and American intellectuals that Marcus gave at a synagogue in California—in the spring of 2002. Marcus wasn’t in First’s corner in the magazine’s early years. (He was put off by the harsh review in our second issue of his book on The Basement Tapes.) But Charles O’Brien’s rage at the “Vichy Left” in his post-9/11 essay “The War” spoke to Marcus. He bows to O’Brien’s polemic in “Nothing New Under the Sun” (and takes in a post-9/11 point made by First‘s Fredric Smoler as well), yet his own piece isn’t delimited by 9/11’s aftermath. It’s a kind of case statement for anyone who wants to know what distinguishes intellectuals from typical academics, hacks or other purveyors of the given. There’s been a link to “Nothing New Under the Sun” on the right column of First‘s homepage for years. It won’t be coming down any time soon. B.D.

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After the Fall

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First’s original editors, longtime New Yorkers, were fully alive to experiences of love and death on 9/11. We printed a set of responses to the attacks that implicitly contradicted those who assumed “anti-Americanism is a necessity” (without imposing a patriotic litmus test). Our post-9/11 issue featured red, white and blue colors above the fold, though that wasn’t a simple flag-waving gesture. The exemplary citizens (and New Yorkers) invoked on our cover were Latin Americans and an Afro-American: La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Jay-Z.

I’m reminded of how our colors seemed out of time to the all-knowing Left when I listen to commentary by pundits like Mehdi Hasan who link the post-9/11 “War on Terror” with l/6. That tendentious timeline all but erases the threat once posed by radical Islamists. It assumes American Islamophobia/xenophobia was always a scarier thing than Islamofascism. (I wonder if Mehdi Hasan noticed what happened to Samuel Paty—the French middle school teacher who was decapitated last October after he dared to teach his students about the Charlie Hebdo murders.) While it’s probably true the threat to Americans and Europeans from Islamist terrorists has diminished in recent years, that’s due largely to those Kurdish fighters who turned the tide against ISIS at the battle of Kobani. Future historians may come to see the Kurds’ victory there in January 2015 as the true culmination of the war that blew up in America on 9/11. The Kurds certainly grasped the meaning of their victory: “The battle for Kobani was not only a fight between the YPG and Daesh [ISIS], it was a battle between humanity and barbarity, a battle between freedom and tyranny, it was a battle between all human values and the enemies of humanity.” The clarity of these (mainly Muslim) soldiers who beat an international army of Islamists underscores the not-knowingness of Mehdi Hasan et al.

The following set of posts—by Donna Gaines, George Held, Hans Koning,  Wendy Oxenhorn, Fredric Smoler, Laurie Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Lamborn Wilson—mixes pieces from First‘s back pages with writing by authors who published their first thoughts on 9/11 in other places. B.D.

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Left of the Left: Sam Dolgoff’s Life and Times

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What follows here—after this introduction—are excerpts from Left of the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, who was a large figure on the margins of American life in the last century. Dolgoff embodied an ideal once celebrated on the American left. He was…

a worker-intellectual—someone who toils with his hands all his life and meanwhile develops his mind and deepens his knowledge and contributes mightily to progress and decency in the society around him.

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Presente: The Eternal Alina Sanchez

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Per the Emergency Committee of Rojava: “This month has been a difficult one for the people of Rojava, as well for Kurdish and Yezidi communities in Turkey and Iraq. Taking advantage of the world’s focus on Afghanistan, Turkey has escalated its attacks against communities struggling for autonomy throughout Kurdistan. But these communities are not simply victims, they are resisting every step of the way and we are standing with them!” To find out how can you act in solidarity with the Rojava, please visit the Emergency Committee’s website here.

What follows is a tribute to Dr. Alina Sanchez — a Argentinean doctor and  internationalist who went to Rojava in 2011 in search of a truly free society. Committed to the Kurds’ fight against ISIS and Erdogan’s Turkey, she died in an accident there in 2018.  It seems right to summon up her life as First upholds the legacy of Sam Dolgoff. There’s a pretty direct ideological link between these two freedom-lovers. Rojava’s Kurds have been inspired by the work of Murray Bookchin — a close comrade of Dolgoff’s (though they had a falling out). Along with blueprints (and disputes) about the workings of a humane society, Dolgoff and Dr. Sanchez shared a soulful worldliness.

The following film tribute starts off in medias res, but you’ll find your footing quickly if you stick with it. (Click on “Read More” below to see it bigger.)

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Uncertain Trombone

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Hopefully final covid update: 

I realized earlier this week that I’m nothing but grief these days. I think some of my loved ones already knew and that’s why it seemed like they were looking at me funny. There’s the grief of doing everything I was told for eighteen months and getting covid anyway. There’s the grief of so many people’s first question being not “how are you?” but “how did you get it?” (Licking doorknobs and vents at an orgy, of course—there, now do you feel safe that it can never happen to you?)

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Putting Women First

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The first photograph I remembered showing the Taliban at work actually dated to the Soviet occupation. It showed a victim of the mujahedin, a woman in a burqa lying on the ground with a caption explaining that she had been shot to death for teaching girls to read. I think my mistake came from later reading about such killings by the Taliban. One of the more horrific newspaper anecdotes I can remember about the Taliban was very recently repeated, probably in either the Times or the Washington Post, by a reporter apparently once as startled by it as I was—it related Taliban amputating the finger tip of a woman who’d applied nail polish. The most memorable internet-viewable home video showed a middle-aged man identified as a member of the Taliban morals police repeatedly beating a woman in a burqa with a leather paddle, the woman screaming, and her screams translated in the subtitles as something like “Just kill me”. The relatively frequent news stories about the forced marriage of quite young girls to Taliban fighters were much more common, also arguably worse, so it is presumably the rarity of the video, perhaps surreptitiously recorded on an early smart phone, that made it stick in my mind.

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Bridges to Misogynists

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A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:

Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.

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Returning to “Normal” in Education is Not Good Enough

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The late Bob Moses’ last word on overcoming caste in the classroom was posthumously published here by “The Imprint” online news magazine on August 24th. His comrades at the Algebra Project have asked everyone who has kept up with the AP and Moses’ post-SNCC work to help them expand the readership for his final testament.

They are encouraging the use of the following hashtags to help circulate Moses’ Call to the nation:

#bobmoses

#algebraproject

#qualityeducationasacivilright

#mathliteracyforall

#SNCClegacyproject

#youngpeoplesproject

#southerninitiativealgebraproject

#OSUMathLiteracyInitiative

#BaltimoreAlgebraProject

#FloridaLocalAllianceForMathLiteracyAndEquity

#WeThePeopleMathLiteracyForAllAlliance

Here are online coordinates for the Algebra Project:

http://www.algebra.org

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Algebra-Project/154755754558564

Got To Be Real

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Click HERE to watch the Zoom tribute to Bob Moses hosted by Florida International University, with the participation of the Moses family. (There will be another homegoing ceremony in Cambridge in September.)

The presence of figures from FIU and Broward County’s public school system spoke to the Moses family’s will to keep on pushing the Algebra Project’s program in Southeast Florida. The AP has been integrated into FIU and Broward schools for over a decade and the Moses memorial became another occasion to strengthen institutional connections. (The AP/Broward County link is one more sign of Moses’s instinct to go where America Dilemmas are right in your face. The Broward County School Board is currently resisting Governor DeSantis’s threat to withhold salaries from administrators and teachers who enforce mask mandates.)

Bob Moses’s daughter, Maisha (who Zoomed in at 10:30), and his wife, Janet (who joined around 1:14:45), gave clear-eyed (if sometimes tearful) testimony, fusing kin-folk truths and the book of Curtis Mayfield with The Autobiography of a Yogi and musings of Movement elders. Informed by organizers’ imperatives, their tales of Moses’ life in struggle steered listeners out of doomy darkness. The way forward came into focus for me when another speaker, Whitney Brakefield, made the Moses family’s sense of what’s possible real. Ms. Brakefield instantiated an American future that might seem unimaginable, until you hear her. (She zoomed at 52:25.)

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What is the Truth, or…How the Roto Rooter Man Tried to Kill Me

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We live in a self-made adobe house and every year the line from the sink to the septic tank backs up and we need to have the Roto Rooter man come out to unclog the pipe. He kneels beneath the kitchen sink with his long electric snake, and unclogs the drain. And that is what happened a few days ago. It took him twenty minutes. Afterward he came  outside to figure up the bill, and  as the Roto Rooter man stood by his White Roto Rooter Van, I asked him if he had been vaccinated.

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