The Liberal Conviction :: Essays & Other Writings

The Persistence of Difference in Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych

2009-03-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

The sheer magnitude of Warhol’s 1963 masterpiece Marilyn Diptych – which takes up over a hundred and fifty square feet and features fifty repeated images of Marilyn Monroe’s face, half of them in black & white and half of them in stark, nearly violent colors – is meant to leave the viewer awestruck. “This is the correct way to look at the painting,” wrote critic John Yau. “Any remark or content that breaks the spell of aesthetic emotions would be a sign of the viewer’s lack of taste” (52).

This awe is symptomatic of the painting’s size, but also of what it achieves. Warhol is often quoted as saying “I want to be a machine,” but to be machinelike, for him, was not to be cold or without emotion. Warhol knew that machines have a great capacity for inspiring worship. They can create, through repetition, symbols – and in this way they create culture. In a personal nod to the power of machines to construct culture, Warhol was famous for showing up at parties, and then leaving immediately after he was photographed. Yet, he also knew the dangers of this – that the more one worships the symbol of a person, the more the reality of that person is obscured. “The kids at the office treat me like dirt,” he wrote, “because they know me. But then there was this nice friend that somebody had brought along who had never met me, and this kid could hardly believe that he was having dinner with me! Everybody else was seeing me, but he was seeing my ‘aura’” (77). His serialized images point to the divide between these two levels of existence, the reality of the thing and its ‘aura’; the serialized print demonstrates the power that technology has to saturate a space with images, to create symbols, while simultaneously debasing the subtlety and authenticity that exists behind and prior to the images. The very act of repetition in Marilyn Diptych – the quantity of images, and the facelessness of each one – lends itself to both of these ends, both empowering a symbol and trivializing the reality behind it. The two processes move in opposite directions, and are summed up in different understandings of originality: the death of one ideal, that of artistic “authenticity” or “genius,” and the birth of practically inverted one – the rise of celebrity aura.

Yet one notices, when the awe subsides, upon further inspection of the large Marilyn Diptych, a chink in this simple schema: there are mistakes. Notice that the faces on the left have slight variations in color, and that the size of their hair varies; notice the fade out on the right; notice that one half is black & white, and other is color. The existence of these differences call into questions many of the assumptions made by critics about the Warhol’s relationship to mass culture. If he indeed wished for everything to be the same – they why did he fail in his own paintings to achieve this?

Warhol was not merely nodding to the power of modern reproduction technologies to degrade the individual and create images in his stead. The difference between the frames on the canvass points to something more complex and more interesting: Warhol’s use of “difference” – which is understood here as change from image to image that is “unexpected” – in his serialized painting of Marilyn Monroe captures the struggle that the individual makes against his own symbology, against the set of myths and images that are superimposed on top of his reality. The difference points to the failure of cultural imagery to ever extinguish time, growth, decay and also the individual’s free will to choose. The persistence of difference in Warhol’s work is the persistence of the individual in a mass society.

Theodor Adorno, the German sociologist and theorist, is famous for his characterization of the “culture industry.” He argued that mass reproduction technologies had the effect of collapsing the distinction between art and everyday life, resulting in a leveling out, a heat death. “The commercial character of culture,” he writes, “causes the difference between culture and practical life to disappear. Aesthetic semblance (Schein) turns into the sheen which commercial advertising lends to the commodities which absorb it in turn…On all sides the borderline between culture and empirical reality becomes more and more indiscript” (53).** Adorno predicts that this will lead to a loss of imaginative capacity. “Imagination,” he writes “is replaced by a mechanically relentless control mechanism which determines whether the latest imago to be distributed really represents an exact, accurate and reliable reflection of the relevant item of reality” (55). The top-down production of images creates a culture of consuming images rather than freely creating them. These images are best when they are most similar. The result is total homogenization.

Warhol, along these lines, is frequently cited as saying “I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again. If you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away.” (Wrenn 16). In an interview he responded to this:

I’ve been quoted a lot as saying, ‘I like boring things.’ Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is…Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite. If I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away. And the better and emptier you feel. (emphasis mine)

From this exchange we get an important characterization of the process of repetition: it is exact; it is a process of inuring one to an image until the “meaning goes away”; and without meaning, one feels “better and emptier.” Some critics point to these statements and say that Warhol has done Adorno one better: mass homogeneity is not only his prognosis but also his desire.

Warhol, it seems, captures this desire with more than just the images that he chose to paint, but also in the painting process itself. His silkscreening process is notable for its machinelike complexity. It takes place like a progression on a conveyerbelt. Steps include: cropping the image; “processing” it at a professional studio into a high-contrast negative; “burning” it onto the silkscreen; painting the color scheme onto the canvass; and finally “transferring” the silkscreen. Warhol was clearly conscious of this association with the industrial – he called his studio the Factory, after all. Warhol wrote on Picasso’s four thousand masterpieces: “‘Gee, I could do that in a day.’ So I started…You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day” (148). In the space that once occupied only a paintbrush, Warhol added steps and processes that further divided the intention of the artist from the canvass. His painting was, in both image and in process, a commentary on the ideals of mass culture. His effect must be measured against this intention.

But one should hesitate before judging his success. Warhol in the above passage makes a fundamental division between something that is “the same basic thing” and something that is precisely the same. Warhol claims “I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same.” Yet difference, as we will shortly explore, persists on his canvass, and persists in important, substantial ways. Likewise, if it is true that Warhol modeled his Factory on a real factory, incorporating as Adorno says “industrial forms of organization,” than the fact that difference exists on the canvass, that there is variation between images, and none are “exactly the same” must be seen as a failure of the factory ideals to replicate perfectly. Warhol attached great meaning to the process of replication embodied by his portrait; to him repetition creates symbols, and thus worship and culture and myth. Therefore, we are lead to believe that the very fact that the images in his own paintings were not “exactly the same,” where “the meaning goes away,” but rather they were, with sundry mistakes, discolorations, variations, only “essentially the same” – we are lead to believe that the true meaning of the painting is embedded in the existence of difference between frames.

To understand this meaning, we first must ask: In what sense does Warhol consider the image or the individual behind the image in Marilyn Diptych to be free? At first one might think: in no sense is she free. There is not much space between frames on the canvass, signaling constraint; the face is cropped, which indicates a moment of violent detachment between image and person; the rigid lines of the grid convey a feeling of bars and of being trapped in place. These elements point to the great power that those who “create” culture have to take hostage images, and manipulate without resistance.

I suggest that there are two senses in which Warhol’s painting indicate the freedom of the individual, residing in two examples of difference: first, the narrative structure that is created in viewing the panels from right to left and in viewing the right panel from left to right suggests change; and second, in the mistakes and variations occurring in the left panel, which show the persistence of spontaneity and thus individual choice.

First, is the individual’s capacity to change. Warhol’s decision to serialize Marilyn Monroe’s picture was prompted by news of her death. On August 5, 1962, Monroe took a deadly overdose of barbiturate sleeping pills, and it was ruled a suicide. Shortly after that, upon returning from an exhibit in Los Angeles, Warhol begins Marilyn Diptych by cropping a publicity image from her 1953 movie Niagara. 1953 was an important year for Monroe: it was the year that Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes all came out, and also a series of nude photographs that had originally appeared in the first issue of Playboy were reprinted. Monroe, by the end of that year, had been voted by the American film distributors as “the top star of 1953” (Rollyson 39-72). Thus upon her death, Warhol uses an image from the moment in which she became a star. Marilyn Diptych captures the moment when Monroe’s image was freed from her own reality, and space was opened for her symbol to engage most freely with our cultural and collective myths.

The most urgent difference that strikes the viewer is the sharp, deliberate division between the colored panel on the left and the black & white panel on the right. The title Marilyn Diptych reflects the two-ness of the image. This division reflects the division between life and death, between reality and symbol. This division is a spatial one (left side versus right side) and thus lend to the possibility of a narrative, a progression from one place on the canvass to the other that occurs like the progression of a storyboard, or of a comic strip or (one could say) of time. The diptych also reflects a change that was an important one in the 1960s media environment, from black & white to full color. Black is the mode of reality, of the past, of ink, of journalism and of fact; whereas color is the mode of a new reality, one of brands and of dreams. Everything about the left panel evokes fantasy: the vibrant, violent color scheme; the color juxtapositions; the sexual red lips and pink face; the depthlessness of the faces; its cartoonish simplicity. On the right panel, the images are more “journalistic.” They look as if they were photographs. One sees the strands of her hair and the delicate shading around her chin. The two panels are the thus two competing levels of existence. On the right, there is a black & white reality of Marilyn Monroe, which literally ended (as she died) when this painting was begun; and on the left, there is her myth, which in many ways began when the painting was first exhibited.

The images on the right panel depict reality more accurately (they are more strictly adherent to it, more photographic); but they also exhibit greater difference among themselves – one notices that the images appear to fade from left to right, each subsequent column less dark than the one preceding it, until at the border of the canvass, as if about to fall off the edge, the face is barely perceptible at all. This is also a narrative, a change evocative of the passage from life to death. And then, in the wake of her death on the right panel, we see that her image reappears on the left panel. This left panel, as we said, is the realm of myths and dreams. The narrative from life to symbol is clear. And note, in addition, that the left panel lacks the systematic change of the right panel. There is thus a contrast between change on the right panel, and a stasis on the left, thus capturing the tension between mass culture’s resistance to the working of time and the inevitable passage of it, despite our attempts to the contrary.

In this beautiful narrative are two important American myths. First, the change myth: that one can become what one wishes. Second is the opposite myth, the myth of persistence: that of the hero or the icon. The confrontation of these two myths, one of change and one of permanence, is a persistent theme in Warhol’s work. In his Before and After series, Warhol depicts a silhouette of a woman without conventional beauty on the left, and then on the rights shows the line adjustments that could be made to make her more beautiful. These images show the aspirational component of change, that aspect of self-realization that so many are told is called the “American dream.” However, the prospect of change invites the prospect of destruction and decay. His Death and Disaster captures the flipside, showing the progression from life towards death. Marilyn Monroe’s life can be said to embody both those types of changes: she rose to fame, and they she fell from grace, and indeed the right panel, in fact, can be “read” in either direction: right-left to show her rise, or left-right to indicate her fall. The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

There are more differences in Marilyn Diptych than just the color and black & white binary, and the fading out of the right side. These are certainly among the most “deliberate,” but there are others: on the left panel, notice that the two frames in the top left hand corner are darker than those around them; see the white spot on the Monroe’s blue collar in the center frame; observe that the shadows around the chin are darker on some faces than others; observe that the top of the hair in nearly every reproduction has a different borderline. Where do these differences come from? They are not systematic – they do not, as the difference on the right panel did, display any pattern – but rather appear to be random products of the reproduction technique. Insofar as they were not chosen can they be properly called mistakes? We cannot, of course, know how much control Warhol exerted over each frame, but there is reason to believe that much of the difference of the type just described was unintentional. Warhol is said to have remarked, when asked about his painting process: “I haven’t painted in years!” and then point to his staff. “They do all the painting” (189 Wrenn) The existence of mistakes and unintentional variation calls into question the very foundations of the mass culture industry: Despite our efforts, can difference ever be extinguished? This is the second evidence of freedom, the existence of spontaneity.

Adorno wrote that the “system of the culture industry that surrounds the masses tolerates hardly any deviation and incessantly drills the same formulas on behavior…” (66). The culture industry, he said, will extinguish difference. And the cost will be to extinguish free, individual thought as well. The cultural forces from “above,” he wrote, will cease to “tolerate any longer the tension between the individual and the universal…” (57). The individual, in this state of total similarity, is nothing but an “appendage of the machinery” (85). His relationship is entirely vertical: the individual is passive in his reception of the images, and can do nothing to resist their influence. For Adorno, the ultimate end of Western rationality was not democracy or socialism, but fascism because, in J.M. Bernstein’s words, it “continued reason’s work of domination through integration and unification” (3).

Adorno lined total homogeneity with the end of free thought – and therefore, the fact that difference exists on Warhol’s canvass indicates a skepticism about this process of industrial “domination.” It castes doubt on the association made between mass reproduction and the extinction of individuality. Some may argue that they are merely mistakes and therefore have nothing to do with freedom in the sense of individual choice. However, the existence of spontaneity shows the failure of total domination, and therefore a space for individualism to exist. It is in this margin of spontaneity that exists within the grid of Marilyn Diptych that individuals have the capacity to interact with culture. It means that culture is not a process of one-directional domination, and suggests – not overtly, but as if a promise – that instead the creation of culture is a dynamic process where the individual has the ultimate capacity to make the cultural image his own – to turn it on its head, to reimage its use, to synthesize it with other images.

Warhol called a good performer an “all-inclusive recorder” because he or she “always does exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment in every show they do.” Good performers are the repetition ideal. But he immediately rejects this. “That’s why,” he says, “I like amateur performers and bad performers – you can never tell what they’ll do next” (82). This spontaneity is what distinguishes a person from a machine; it is at the heart of the individual’s capacity to resist and create. Warhol commented that art was made up of “leftovers”: “ I always like to work on leftovers...Things that are discarded, that everybody knew were no good…It was like recycling work” (93). By leftover, he means instances when human spontaneity disrupts the efforts at mass society to homogenize a group. For example:

When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the audition must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing-room floor – an out-take – and the girl was probably a leftover at that point – she was probably fired – so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn’t jump is the star of the outtake. (emphasis mine, 93)
The “leftover” is the girl whose spontaneous will disrupts the intention of a system to create synchrony. According to this framework, art exists in the discrepancy between the dictates of culture and reality of its implementation; it exists on the margin between what society intends for the use of something and the way the individual ends up using it. Art resides in differences.

The fact that each Marilyn image is slightly varied is meant, in this vein, to represent the way that individuals take cultural images and make them there own. Critics claim that Warhol espoused a breed of passive art consumers. However, his entire life embodied the ideals of cultural appropriation and re-conceptualization – the opposite of a passive consumer. Meaning was the individual’s ability to make use of the images, to change them, working within the grid.

Two things can be said about this, one about the nature of art and the other about the freedom of the individual – both closely aligned. First, this view of art as a resistance to the form that was prescribed presaged the development of (in J.M. Bernstein’s words) an “affirmative postmodernist culture,” where art is not just intended for consumption, but rather functions as direct input for more art. Art, according to this ideal, is not a finished product, but a stage in a longer stage of reinterpretation, recontextualization and resynthesis. This conception of art relies on a blurred distinction between creator and receiver. “A text,” Roland Barthes wrote in his 1968 manifesto “The Death of the Author,” “is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). “To give a text an Author,” he later explained, “is to impose a limit on that text” because it prevents the exchange of “multiplicity” between the reader and the writer: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

With the advent of digital culture, such “post-modern” tendencies have gained new tools and new salience. The personal computer and the internet has put in the hands of millions the capacity to receive information, reorganize it, add to it, re-conceptualize it and publish it to the world. As one theorist has put it: “In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society” (Benkler 7) The result, he says, “is a ﬂourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production.” Lawence Lessig, a Stanford professor who has written extensively on the potential that the internet provides for a rebirth in creativity, writes of the internet that the individual can “rip creativity from culture” and resynthesis the parts into something greater than the whole. “Rip, mix, and burn.” (24) “Technology,” Lessig writes, “has thus given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others” (184). In other words, the tools of the internet are allowing people in large scale to treat cultural leftovers in the way that Warhol was doing, nearly fifty years ago.

Second, this relationship affirms the individual’s capacity to stage creative resistance against the homogeneity of mass culture. Warhol’s supposed doctrine of passivity, in what Adorno prophesied as the extinction of individual agency, is actually a doctrine of resistance: the individual should create meaning despite the rules, not according to them. Meaning is imbedded in our resistance to the grid, not our subscription to it. Theorist Michel de Certeau in his The Practice of Everyday Life identified one of the aims of those who “administer” mass culture as the “creation of a universal and anonymous subject” (94). The act of re-ordering these images is an act of resistance to the “imperialism of intention”: “[the active reader] invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended.’ He detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origins. He combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized by the their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meaning” (169). Such a space with an “indefinite plurality of meaning” is represented by Warhol’s left panel, where Monroe’s images is at once created by culture, but also subject to the individual’s personal creation of the significance of that culture. The individual can resist its meaning – he can pervert it, destroy it, create it. Warhol’s Do It Yourself series brings this theory into its fullest fruition. He depicted landscapes from a “paint-by-numbers” kit, but both the lines and the colors are chosen against the prescriptions of the kit. The individual must work within a grid created from above, but he can subvert that grid by choosing how to work within it. He can take prescribed images, and make them his own.

These acts of appropriation, according to Certeau, subvert the “logic of production” because they create personal spaces. They create margins where spontaneity continues to exist, and individuals can move freely. “Beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain” (229). The fact of difference in Warhol’s industrial grid, his large and awe-striking Marilyn Diptych, forces difficult questions not only of Warhol’s art, but also of ourselves. The fact of difference such as systematic change, evident across panels and within them, and the spontaneity of mistakes on the left panel – these point to the persistence of “opaque and stubborn places” of human agency and of time. They point to the survival of individuality, if not humanity itself – despite, rather than because of, our own tools.

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**Warhol’s Brillo Box series, which featured boxes of Brillo soap that were silkscreened to look exactly identical to the original Brillo soap box, is in direct dialog with Adorno's claim. Authur Danto writes that, “What Warhol taught was that there is no way of telling the difference merely by looking…” (137). For Adorno and Danto, the result was an aestheticization of daily life, where art said to be everywhere and in everything. This, for him, called into question a host of modernist assumptions about authenticity and genius – because if art is everywhere, even in Brillo Boxes, is it anywhere at all?

References
Adorno, Theodor W., and J. M. Bernstein. 2001. The Culture Industry : Selected essays on mass culture. Routledge classics. London ; New York: Routledge.

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks : How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box : The visual arts in post-historical perspective. 1st ed. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life [Arts de faire.]. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Klein, Naomi. 2002. No logo : No space, no choice, no jobs. New York: Picador : Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture : How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press.

Warhol, Andy. 1978. Oxidation Painting Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York, United States.
———. 1968. Brillo Box Contemporary Art (Larry Qualls Archive).
———. 1962. Do it Yourself (landscape) Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.
———. 1962. Marilyn Diptych The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976&tabview=image.

Warhol, Andy. 1975. The philosophy of Andy Warhol : From A to B and back again. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Warhol, Andy, and Mike Wrenn. 1991. Andy Warhol in his Own Words. London ; New York; New York, NY, USA: Omnibus Press; Music Sales Corp. distributor.

Yau, John, and Andy Warhol. 1993. In the realm of appearances : The Art of Andy Warhol. 1st ed. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press.

In the Wake of Genocide: Designing a Rwandan Constitution

2009-03-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Rwanda faces the dual problems of ethnic division and economic underdevelopment. In early April 1994, a coterie of Hutu elites, faced with the invasion of the Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) and fearing a dramatic shift in power, mobilized Rwanda’s eighty-percent Hutu majority to commit genocide against the twenty-percent Tutsi minority. The killings proceeded for three and half months, at a rate of more than twenty thousand a day – five times faster than the Nazi death camps. The RPF then took power, and more than two million Hutus fled to the Eastern Kivu region of the Congo, where violence continues to this day.

The Hutu-Tutsi ethnic divide at the center of the Rwandan Genocide is old but not ancient. The two ethnic groups, ascriptively and culturally similar – sharing physical semblance, language, heritage and religion – provide a textbook example of how ethnic division can be made salient by institutional design, and then made violent by political opportunism. From the 1930s to 1961, Belgian colonizers created institutions that specifically allocated political power along ethnic lines: using a card-based identification system, they stripped Hutus of their land, created a shadow extraction government headed by the Tutsi aristocracy, and gave them exclusive rights to tax collection power and state-funded education. Then in 1960, at the eve of Independence, the Belgians held an election in which they endorsed the Hutu politician Dominique Mbonyumutwa, affecting a precipitous change in political power that uprooted the monarchy headed by Tutsi aristocracy (Lec. 8.1 Levitsky). It is the major intention of this report to consider ways to reverse the very institutional incentive for ethnic identification that helped to create and perpetuate the myth of ethnicity in the first place.

The second problem Rwanda faces is that of underdevelopment and weak state strength. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa with hundreds of thousands of refugees currently migrating back from neighboring Burundi to the inner borderlands of Rwanda. Development and ethnic reconciliation are taking place in the condition of scarcity, raising the stakes for every individual involved.

Though reconciliation is treated as primary (for no governance at all can take place if the Tutsi refuse its legitimacy or the Hutus enact reprisals) there is no strict hierarchy of concerns. Neither the problem of ethnic conflict nor the problem of underdevelopment can be conceived of in absence of the other – effective governance will require ethnic cooperation, and in turn, there is evidence that economic progress tempers ethnic division (Lipset 229). The problems are not culturally endogenous. Despite decades of literature on the cultural and social requisites for modernization, there is a growing consensus that development can occur anywhere with a proper mixture of effective policies and a strong state (Fukuyama 255). Ethnic division, likewise, is a product both of ancient “dispositions” and incentives; ethnic identity may indeed fulfill a primordial human need for a “terminal,” unfaltering community (Horowitz 490), yet it is just as true that ethnic division is activated by external factors, unlikely to become salient or violent unless under conditions of fear, scarcity or political advantage. “Ascriptive identity,” wrote Donald Horowitz, “is heavily contextual” (Horowitz 499).

What follows is: institutions are very important. While they cannot prevent the Hutu majority in a democratic Rwanda from enacting a political recrimination on the Tutsis, institutions can allocate political power in such a way as to disincentive such behavior. Democracy, properly designed, is an ingenious tool, because as Guiseppe Di Palma wrote, “it is open and open-ended, and because none of its players lose once and for all and on all arenas” (298).

The institutional designed put forth is based on the premise that the Hutu-Tutsi division was accentuated by institutional design at its outset, and thus, to be ameliorated, must be blurred rather than rigidified by constitutional institutions. Consociational systems such as those proposed by political scientist Arend Lijphart would fail Rwanda for exactly this reason. By institutionalizing ethnic division according to political power, consociational systems – ethnic-based coalition seats, federal autonomy and ethnic veto power – would further divide an already relatively homogenous society. Arend Lijphart explains that consociationalism functions best in “segmented pluralist” (498) societies, those with “fragmented culture” and “little or no overlapping between its distinct subcultures” (501). Each group in such a society may live side-by-side, yet totally autonomously, each with “its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways” (504). Rwanda is not, by this standard, a plural society. Whereas the divisions in Lebanon (where consociational democracy was successful employed from 1947 until 1973) between Maronite Christians and Sunni, Shia Muslims are grounded in ascriptive physical properties, history, language and theology, the Tutsi and Hutu populations in Rwanda are phenotypically similar (vice president of the current National Assembly Laurent Nkongoli has famously said: “You can’t tell us apart; we can’t tell us apart”), linguistically similar, culturally and historically united and geographically inter-dispersed.

Thus, the following constitutional arrangements pursue a strategy of ethnic accommodation based on blurring – rather than accentuating – ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis. In addition, they place high priority on the creation of an effective governing body. To achieve these ends, five principles will be observed*:

- First, promote fluid, ad hoc legislative coalitions over a rigid, majoritarian party system. The Hutu majority will be fragmented and the Tutsi minority will be granted full representation through a proportional representation (PR) voting scheme.

- Second, promote moderation between the Hutus and Tutsis by creating real political incentives for cross-ethnic appeal. A semi-presidential system will be enacted that demands, on the one hand, wide, centrist appeal for the executive branch (which will be voted in by a preferential voting system), and, on the other hand, cross-ethnic coalition building within the legislature. In addition, a portion of the legislature will be made up of “district representatives” voted in by plurality at an election concurrent to that of the executive, promoting a wide-appeal coalition for these members, similar to the coalition that propelled the executive. Finally, a ten percent quota would be placed on district PR elections to prevent extremists from gaining seats in the legislature.

- Third, provide for fair representation of both Hutu and Tutsi by maintaining a low disparity between votes caste and seats awarded and by creating a number of dispersed points of power, preventing a zero-sum game or a majoritarian suppression. This will be achieved through mixed-member PR (plurality and PR) and semi-presidential arrangements.

- Fourth, create standards of accountability. The president as well as the district representatives will be directly accountable to constituents in a way that a pure Parliamentary system or a pure PR system would not allow.

- Fifth, promote legislative effectiveness, achieved through the important mixture of long-term policy decisions and broad coalition of the executive with the fluid coalitions of the legislature, directed by the prime minister.

These arrangements will interact in productive ways, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. In its entirety, the constitutional arrangement will involve two key institutions:

1. Semi-presidential government where the executive is elected with a preferential voting system.
2. Mixed-member proportional representation, where twenty “district representatives” are voted in by district according to plurality in an election that occurs concurrent with the presidential election, and one hundred representatives are voted in according to a proportional representative system with a ten percent quota for entrance.

Semi-Presidential

First, a semi-presidential system will be implemented, where a popularly elected president (according to a preferential vote) will be, in Giovanni Sarotori’s phraseology, a “first among unequals” (446), sharing power with a prime minister. The prime minister is selected by the legislature and may be removed with a vote of no confidence. The president cannot be removed by the legislature with a mere no confidence vote (though impeachment, under certain circumstances will be permitted), and at the same time, cannot remove the prime minister. Neither branch has veto power over the other; thus there is a sharing rather than a separation of powers: both the president, who was elected by popular vote, and the prime minister, who is in his position by legislative coalition vote, share the daily governance of the county.

Pure parliamentary lacks long-term policy guidance and accountability; and pure presidential systems are crippled under the necessary (for Rwanda) conditions of multipartism. The great benefit of the semi-presidential system is that it provides for and protects against both: there is a strong executive that is broadly supported and accountable to the people, while at the same time functions well with the very fluid, divided coalitions of the legislature.

The importance for Rwanda of the semi-presidential system is grounded in the nature of the coalitions that the system promotes. Two separate coalitions sustain the president and the prime minister: the latter created after elections, according to logrolling that transpires in the halls of the parliament, while the former is created prior to elections, according to the popular vote of the people. This allows, as I will propose below, for the president’s moderate coalition to exert a directional influence on the fluid, ad hoc coalitions within the legislature, while never exerting total control over the government. Interests will co-mingle in fluid and diverse ways and accountability will be dispersed. The results will be: 1) that no one group gains a permanent majority, because the president’s support is compositionally different from the prime minister’s at any given moment, 2) compromise is promoted between two compositionally different coalitions, 3) promotes intra-ethnic competition, 4) creates a multiplicity of power sources, in both of the executive and the legislative, lowering the stakes and reducing the number of losers and finally 5) creates a strong incentive for the prime minister to create effective legislative coalitions (for he is directly accountable to the legislature for his continued tenure) and for the president to oversee good governance (because he directly accountable to the people). As a whole, then, the system maximizes coalitional cross-pollination, fluidity, representation and dispersion.

But the major concern for Rwanda remains: how to achieve a multi-ethnic coalition at all? With an eighty percent Hutu majority, what stops the president from deriving all his support from the Hutus, at the expense and potentially demise of the Tutsi minority? How moderate and cross-ethnic the winning coalition is will depend on the extent that 1) Tutsis vote as a bloc, and 2) the Hutu party splits. There is strong historical evidence that the Tutsis, having always been either in power or persecuted, will vote as a coherent whole. On the other side, there are a number of reasons to believe that the Hutu party will split. For one, the presidency is too powerful a position for there not to be Hutu internal competition for the prize. In addition, the president’s platform is by definition broad enough to cut across multiple ideological and cultural spectrums. Hutus have different financial statuses, different regional loyalties and different opinions about the nature of economic development, international relations, foreign investment and so on. The genocide itself was caused by a dissociation like this, between moderates in congress who were engaged in peace treaties with the RPF and the radical clan that was interested in holding onto power. Thus there are historical as well as structural aspects of the presidency that indicate that the Hutus will split. Finally, in accordance with Duverget’s observation about plurality congressional district and countless scholars’ statements about presidential systems, competition for the presidency will tend to promote the concentration of power into two strong parties (for example, Lijphart 485); thus the fragmentation, if it happens at all, will likely be in a two-way split.

If the above is valid, then it is likely that three groups will be important for any given presidential election: Hutu group A and Hutu group B, each of which accounts for roughly forty percent of the population, and Tutsi voting bloc C. Tutsi group C, representing twenty percent of the population, is a considerable electoral prize to win, and moderation would seem to be the answer – but only so long as Tutsis decide to vote, and if they do, are willing to vote Hutu. If they do not vote or “throw their vote away” on a minority Tutsi candidate, then they withdraw from political relevance and the moderating effect is gone. One way to resolve this is to utilize a preferential voting system, such as the one implemented (with success) in Sri Lanka. In this system, each person ranks his top-choice candidates according to preference and if no candidate in the system receives a fifty-percent-plus-one majority of “number one” preference votes in the first round of ballot counting, then the candidate with the fewest votes in the pool is removed and all his ballots are distributed among the remaining candidates according to preference. This continues until one candidate reaches a majority. Such a system is promising: by allowing everyone to vote by personal preference, Tutsis will have a reason to go to the polls and thus be kept psychologically and political integrated. More importantly, it assures that all the Tutsi votes will end up falling onto one of the two Hutu parties. The smart party, therefore, is highly vested in winning the Tutsi’s “number two” preference. The more the Tutsi’s remain as a voting bloc, the more vital efforts to win their “number two” preference become, and the more moderation and reconciliation will result. The cost of extremism would simply be too great.

For these reasons, the president’s coalition will likely be moderate rather than radicalized. It will also necessarily be broad, because it needs to account for fifty percent of the population.

The semi-presidential system promotes another type of moderation: it generates multiple centers of power, thus reducing the importance of any one place in the system. The president will owe proportionality to those Tutsis in the coalitions that helped him get elected and likewise the prime minister will owe favors to the Tutsi legislators that hold sway over his coalition building. In contrast to Juan Linz’s argument that the president, feeling that he “posses independent authority and a popular mandate” is likely to be “imbued” with “a sense of power and mission” (412), the semi-presidential configuration ensures that the president share his power with the prime minister, reducing the singular control he has over the direction of the country. On the other hand, a pure parliamentary system, Mainwaring argues, has the potentially of giving “a disciplined majority” complete control over both the executive and legislative branch. “Here, more than in any presidential system, the winner takes all” (424). By contrast, the negotiations needed between the president and the prime minister ensure that no one person has unilateral control over the direction of the country, and many people have sway.

Finally, the system provides for more effective governance within the context of fragmented parties. Linz argues that American-style presidentialism creates a “dual legitimacy” between president and legislature, where “no democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually resents the will of the people” (415). Under conditions of multipartism, this leads to impasse or, more ominously, to the desire of the executive to override the parliament, as in the case of Yeltsin in Russia or Fujimori in Peru. A semi-presidential system, by contrast, works optimally under circumstances of multipartism. The presidential coalition guides the direction of the country and the prime ministers coalition provides the specific legislative majorities necessary. These divisions are precisely the benefit of semi-presidentialism, according to Giovanni Sarotori: they “enfeeble the president and force him into cohabitation with a prime minister of a different party; but this engenders a strengthened premier, who can and will fill a coalitional majority for his government. Thus semi-presidentialism can solve the problem [of divided majorities] that pure Presidentialism cannot solve” (448). In the context of a fractured Hutu majority – as outlined above for the presidency and applied to the legislature below – semi-presidential system is the best to promote accountability, moderation, and good governance.

Mixed-Member Proportional Representation

Second, the composition of the legislature will be determined through a mixed-member proportional representation system, where one hundred “national legislators” are voted in through proportional representation in the five already-established Rwandan provinces with a ten-percent quota for entrance. An additional twenty “district representatives” will be elected according to a plurality system vote held concurrently with the presidential election.

The fact that Tutsis and Hutus are dispersed evenly through Rwanda means that under a plurality system it is likely that no Tutsis would have a seat in the government. PR is practically a necessity for such a country, with a twenty percent persecuted ethnic minority widely distributed. “PR was designed to provide minority representation,” writes Arend Lijphart. He quotes Stein Rokkan as saying that “It was no accident that the earliest moves towards proportional representation (PR) came in the ethnically most heterogeneous countries” (486). Statistics show that under PR this representational fairness – the low disparity between votes and governmental representation – is much higher than under plurality systems. “There is little doubt that this is indeed the case. For instance, where ethnic minorities have formed ethnic political parties, as in Belgium and Finland, PR has enabled them to gain virtually perfect proportional representation” (487). So important is PR for ethnic minorities that even the British government, with a long, vaunted history of Westminster-style majoritarianism recognized the need to integrate the Northern Irish population into the political system through PR (Lijphart 488).

Not only is PR important for representational fairness, but also absolutely essential for fragmenting the Hutu majority. As discussed above, the Hutu majority must be split in order for the Tutsis to be integrated into the political system. The more ways this split can occur within the legislature, the less likelihood that there will be any one majoritarian coalition that could exclude the Tutsis. For example, a two-way split in the Hutu, while likely for the election of the president, would be dangerous if it existed in the legislature, for the two majority parties might compete for power on most issues, but agree to align against the Tutsis on ethnically sensitive ones. The more splits in the system, the more numerous and fluid are the coalitions, and the more difficult it is to align against the Tutsis at any one vote; and, at the same time, the smaller the coalitions, the more valuable the twenty-percent Tutsi voting bloc.

Fragmentation of parties occurs in direct proportionality to the magnitude of district. “The number of parties winning seats, as well as the proportionality of electoral systems, generally rises along that continuum,” states John Carey (472). The more legislators in a district, the lower the percent-based “barrier of entrance” into the legislature, and thus the higher the incentives for minority parties to formulate and run. One nasty byproduct, however, of this low barrier of entrance is that extreminist parties might be legitimized by gaining seat in the legislature. “Without PR,” notes Guy Lardeyret, “the Communists and the Nazis would probably not have been able to storm onto the German political scene as they did in the 1930s” (492). It is vital that the Hutu majority fragment, and best if this is along multiple lines; yet extremists, such as those that helped to perpetrate the massacre, should not be given a vote. To negotiate this compromise, a ten percent quota will be placed onto entrance. Ten percent is sufficiently low for full Tutsi representation and for substantial Hutu fragmentation, but sufficiently high to prevent chaos and extremism.

An additional problem with PR is that it tends to reduce the accountability of the representatives – shifting their concerns from the region to the party. “The critical distinction,” writes John Carey, “is between institutional arrangements that encourage legislators to cultivate personal reputations among voters and those that put the collective reputations of the party first” (446). Carey argues that personalistic politics is bad, because it tends to promote pork-barrel legislation and legislators without broad sophistication on national issues. These are real concerns, but less important than the benefits of having some representatives that are directly accountable to their district. The election of twenty district representatives would make sure that local issues that concern Tutsi and Hutu alike are targeted – local infrastructure, school systems, irrigation and so on. Two other reasons for accountability: one that in an ethnically polarized state accountability reduces the chances of ethnic scape-goating; and two, it allows for democracy that takes place, as Lardeyret points out, “at the level closest to the citizen” (494).

Combination of the two

The final phase of the argument for this arrangement concerns the way that the two systems interact. The mix of both one hundred national legislators voted by PR and twenty district representatives voted by plurality would reflect the mix of the president with the parliament. The plurality district representatives would tend towards a two-way Hutu split, with moderate legislators with broad-majority appeal; the PR for the one hundred national legislators would create fluid coalitions that never rigidify along ethnic lines. Likewise, the president’s coalition would be broad and moderate, negotiated prior to election; and the legislature’s coalition would be ad hoc, negotiated after election, in the halls of congress. This analogy is deliberate, and would be reflected in voting arrangements. Carey writes that, if executive and legislature are voted in concurrently, “the effects of institutional rules governing executive elections tends to spill over into legislative party systems” (473). The district representatives (plurality scheme) will be voted in concurrently with the president so that the broad, multi-ethnic coalition of the executive influence the creation of moderate, multi-ethnic coalitions within the districts. The national legislators, on the other hand, will be voted at a date separate from the executive and district representatives, helping their elections to tend towards fragmentation.

No literature [that we have studied] has explored the possibility of aligning a mixed semi-presidential system with a mixed member proportional representation system, where the plurality reps are voted concurrently with the president. The effect of such an arrangement would potentially be to create a “shadow coalition” superimposed on the fragmented legislature. The broad, multi-ethnic group negotiated by the president on a national scale, and within every district by the district representatives could provide a long term multi-ethnic framework to guide the actions of the multi-ethnic coalitions created by convenience in the legislature. Figure 1 demonstrates a conceptual framework to this. At the very least, this system confuses the lines of allegiance and disperses power points, making it difficult for the Hutus to solidify against the Tutsis. At the best, there is at once fragmentation and unity; there is long-term direction and short-term flexibility.

The above institutions reflect the national need for the gradual dissolution of ethnic divisions. There is no guarantee that the institutions outlined above will actually result in what is argued: while I conjecture that two separate groups of coalitions would be created for electing the president (broad) and for electing the PR national legislators (fragmented), Rwanda could instead create a rigid two-party system, from which it would be difficult to break. Horowitz demonstrates through Guyana’s unsuccessful attempts to maximize both representation and fragmentation, that PR cannot split a “result already entrenched in the party system” (558). On the other hand, though presidential seats tend to concentrate power, the preferential voting scheme (still novel) may incentivize the fragmentation of power because everyone gets a vote, making the president’s coalitions less broad, perhaps in unexpected ways.

The system does, however, create incentives for cross-cutting allegiances, multiple points of power, and fluidity, which in turn promotes fair representation and moderation. Moreover, the constitutional arrangements provide for a sharing of power between president and prime minister that is optimal for effective government under circumstances of multipartism. Indeed, as it is hoped with the forgoing, Rwanda may find that the very types of constitutional institutions which can be pointed to as the source of the Hutu-Tutsi division may someday be pointed to for its solution.

* These are adapted in part from Donald Horowitz’s recommendations in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985), course book pages 542 and 549.

Warning Out, Then and Now

2009-02-27T22:52:00.000-08:00

I

You might know what dispossession feels like if you’ve ever jumped into the Charles River at night. I felt something like that, I think, throughout the year of 2008, when I was living alone. And then again, having come back to my town but seeing nothing there. And then when I left again. September 8th, 2008 the first night I slept at Harvard University, I could have told you that dispossession feels something like black water, like drowning beneath the lights of a city in September, and like feeling totally alone.

I had met a girl named Joyce who was real shy. She said her father was a diplomat so she never stayed in one place for more than a few years and had never had many friends. We walked together from the Yard to the River, the lights of Dunster Street glowing as if very wet and totally yellow, like they do. We stripped off our clothes on the dock – I remember feeling very cold – and danced a little – I spun her – and then we jumped into the water. Whooo ahhh I shouted. Someone else, a boy’s voice from the road beyond the grass, said Yeeeehaaaa. When we got out of the river, we folded on the grass and sat there, in total silence, with the air, light and brilliant – the air was very light that night – mixing with the lights of Boston beyond the river, and me, I remember thinking something like This, this is the day your slumber breaks…She asked me: Are you just going to forget about this? I smiled and she smiled too and I said: Nothing counts, you know – it’s Freshman Week.

That night, I guess, rounded something off for me. It was the first time that I wondered, real hard, whether I hadn’t just walked out the front door, when I could have walked out the back. It was that night, my looking at the city from that place on the banks, thinking about place, to be one thing and not another thing, thinking that I am a small part of something much bigger, more complex and totally indifferent, that I first began to think about homelessness. I can’t say that I know what dispossession feels like today, but I could tell you that night. Tramping back to the Yard in the soaking clothes, I thought Whooo ahhh Yeeehaaaa, what a thing it is to be here.

II

One of the striking things about Harvard Square is the thick, magisterial iron gate that wraps around Massachusetts Avenue, enclosing Harvard Yard.

The other striking thing about Harvard Square is the homelessness. Bowed and veiled figures sleep beneath the threshold of the bookstore, and if you stop to ask why they come they usually say that it is a safe place to sleep and that there is good money, and that the lights never turn off.

To me, the two facts of the iron gate and the homeless population are compelling evidence that if a place can be said to have deliberate design, that if communities are a product of something more than spontaneous individual desire, then the Designer must have a poet’s eye for symbols, or at least a good sense of humor.

Reckoning with homelessness requires that the two, the gated university and the homeless population, be dealt with together. They are too closely aligned, their presence here a juxtaposition too sever to absolve my story of. And me – me too, I am too much a product of my place within this world to pretend that I am something different; if I have any authority at all, it is from that place that I am given, from inside the gate rather than from the street.

The Square at night is something like a carnival. I have seen her in the dawn; she looks half-roused and ice-cold. But at night, she spins, like a lighted wheel, glitters. The lights are bright – air cold – the nights in the Square are entirely nonviolent, very happy. A man plays a saxophone. A chilly day, the lightness of autumn, the bright lights will never go out in the Square – if I look out the window at four in the morning from by bunk bed, as I often have, I will undoubtedly see a person walking through the square, from the Coop through JFK.

How does one find a homeless person? I think to myself.

It’s odd, but perhaps entirely practical, that we go first to the saddest-looking woman. We see across the street a figure sitting, leaning forward on the brick edge of a potted tree. She is in front of the stoop – like a gargoyle, very gray, bundled like a marshmallow with two gray hats. The color scheme of poverty; vibrant colors don’t seem to last; the city is in battle against chromatic vibrancy.

“Hey. I’m Max. This is Pete. How are you doing?”

“How do you do?” She was very quiet, so low that Pete never heard what she had to say. We shook hands.

“We’re from the College. We’re working on a piece about people who live in Harvard Square…”

“I don’t live here.”

“Oh?” I told her that’s OK. We’d treat her to dinner, if she’d be willing to talk a few minutes about her time.

“I don’t live here,” she repeated.

“Where are you from?”

“North Carolina.” One could detect the drawl. That drawl – passport, place-giver, what she still has.

“Do you have a family in North Carolina?”

“Yes.” She spoke quietly, in a whisper. “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested.”

“We’re trying to help. We want to tell people’s stories.”

“All I want to do is go home,” she said.

“How’d you get to Boston? Did you take a train up?”

“I got a ticket. You know how it is. I got a ticket and now I can’t get home. I just want to go back.”

“Hey, are you sure you wouldn’t be interested in having a nice dinner with us and talking a little.”

“Yes. Thank you. I’m not interested.”

“What’s your name?” She looked up. “Oh, uh, don’t worry about that – I’m Max and this is Pete.”

She turned and – thinking back I remember vividly, as you do such things – she winked and smiled.

I said: “If I see you around, I’ll say hi.”

That was the first substantial meeting I had with a homeless person in the square. That night, if it is like most that I spent in the early part of my first semester, I spent talking about Barack Obama with my roommate – we would talk about him for hours on end – and then, other than that, not talk much at all. I would walk from class to class, wave to acquaintances that I passed in the yard. And in the dinning hall, drifting slowly from the conversation, I would look around. A small girl with a fleece squints with a tray in her hand. A blonde boy and blonde girl with freckles talk about going home with over the weekend. “Yeah, it’s restorative. You just feel like that boost will give you something, and you can last until Thanksgiving.” There was one day (I remember it distinctly) looking at this place, all these people, that I realized with embarrassment mostly and a little relief, that I considered myself homeless, and that the gates did not divide nearly as much as I thought. I began this project with the question: how far is the trip from here inside the gate to the outside; how far must one travel before one can sleep on the street. Now I’m not sure. We’re all looking to be connected. I think everyone is trying as hard as they can be not to be invisible.

III

It is the aim of this essay to describe a part of our past that concerns the creation of community and the alienation of citizens.

Harvard Square, as I’ve said, is an odd community to walk through, because walking through it is like being on the inside and the outside at once – it is to walk into the very center of a world society, of which Harvard University is both an agent and an index, and to be with those on the outskirts of that society, the kids in the pit with joints and those panhandling on the side of the street. I think it’s accurate to imagine that in the Square there is an invisible boundary line that swoops around, separating people, cutting the space into pieces, a precipice – like an iron gate – between society and those on the outside.

The act of creating boundaries achieves both inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, I know with whom I belong; I am like all these people, in at least one respect: I am a member of their group. Such communities are defined by the reciprocity that exists between members. I can help this man, because he can help me back. And the need that these communities thrive on is as old as Western society itself: to be thy brothers’ keeper. But such imperatives only go so far; they go as far as the boundary line. A person outside of the community is different from me; I cannot imagine his pain or his needs, because we are of a fundamentally different substance. He is a puzzle to me; he exists beyond the limits of my empathy.

The boundary line absolves the moral imperatives to aid those on the outside, while maintaining it for those on the inside; it reconciles the primordial need for community with the eminently practical, eminently human, need, borne of fear and of reason, to exclude other from that imperative – to not give everything to everyone. The history of American protest movements has been the history of the process of expanding this boundary line; it has been the history of enfranchising different groups into the American community, drawing the line of empathetic obligation to a still greater circumference –foreigners, African Americans, women, gays…

The process of psychological boundary-drawing that occurs in Harvard Square, between the homeless and us has its explicit analogy in history – it is, as we will see, one manifestation of a legal code, which is another manifestation of this process, brought by the earliest settlers from England and observed for at least one hundred and thirty years from the founding until the mid eighteenth century.

One strategy for understanding the present, and I suppose it is a theme, is to understand the past – to explore the attempts and failures we have made in divorcing ourselves from that plot of land we were handed to till. I acknowledge as a writer and a person that I cannot divorce myself entirely from my Self – that I can only explore homelessness from my place. America, as all nations, is just this way – it owes a great deal to the place it was given, like a child that owes a lot to its father. The notion that the settlers broke free from their history is as silly as the notion that any tramp coming to the Square can truly be said to have no past, no place, to be absent of identity-giving context.

We now turn to a look at the manner in which current psychological practices existed in the past as legal institutions, how our forefathers codified the practices of exclusion that Harvard Square, so many years later, portrays in sharp relief.

When the earliest settlers arrived in New England they brought with them the principles of English common law; in particular they brought with them an understanding of the town that is fundamentally different from our understanding of it today. For the English, the town was a collective property owned in part by each inhabitant; it was a private body rather than a public one. As per this status, each inhabitants of a town was responsible for the conduct and support of each other member of the town. Each member now had compulsory obligations to stave off the crime and the poverty of each other, provide bail when their neighbors were in binds and anticipate problems and enact justice – the individual towards the whole, the whole for the individual, each for all and all for each. The town as a unite of economic support. Francis Palgrave in his 1832 Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, writes that such a custom goes back to the principles of English Teutonic Townships. “The earliest notices respecting Teutonic Townships are to be collective from the laws of Salic Franks. A ‘Villa; was entirely the property of the inhabitants, and no stranger could settle within its boundaries, unless with the consent of the whole incorporation…”

This obligation, termed “frankpledge,” after the Teutonic law, began first as a custom. Neighbors would give money to a family that was victimized by crime, and would then search out the person who perpetrated it. After the Norman invasion, England was organized by feudal divisions, and the obligation was codified. Each town was broken up into units of ten, called tithings, and each was responsible for enforcing justice and welfare of the whole unit. One of the earliest itineration of the arrangement comes from a twelfth-century scribe who said that "It is of this sort, namely that all men in every vill of the whole realm were by custom under obligation to be (debebanf) in the suretyship of ten, so that if one of the ten commit an offence the nine have him to justice."

During the English Civil War and the confusion that followed, local governmental machinery was dismantled, and the church replaced the tithing. The “parish” took up the secular responsibility of maintaining public peace and supporting the poor. In the following years, as the population increased, towns began to increase in size, and local infrastructure was revitalized, roads built and townhouses increasingly put in roles of prominence. In 1601, when the first Poor Laws were written, the town had once again replaced the parish in its original role of providing for the mutual security of its members. The poor, affected by the inchoate symptoms of an increasingly modern England – unemployment, bad harvests, famine, disease, land enclosures, inflation, industrialization, the dissolution of monasteries, the decline of feudal families – those that dwelt on the margins of these processes – were to find relief in their towns, among their neighbors.

These were the legal foundations that the colonists brought to the new world. The town for them was a unit of support. With support, however, comes the complementary and implied right to choose to whom a town is willing to pledge it. The town support structure could not accept anyone indiscriminately, because each new member was an additional legal obligation that might potentially become chargeable to the public good. With this logic, the settlers in the New World enacted laws that strictly regulated citizen mobility. Each town in New England set up statues that defined the “right to inhabitancy,” demanding that prospective members petition for such a right before legal entrance. Towns were to be established by mutual consent, not individual prerogative –

If we here be a corporation, established by free consent, if the place of our co-habitation be our own, then no man hath right to come in to us without our consent

This “right to inhabitancy,” also called “freedom of community,” is the necessary complement to a system of mutual support. This is the necessary two-ness of boundary drawing: that the right to support implies the right to exclude. It is a fact that this asserted right to regulate inhabitancy was exercised in the New England Colonies such as New Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and Rhode Island for reasons of religious preference, nationality, prestige of the family and economic wellbeing. Regardless of the ultimate reasons for exclusion, it is important that the moral justification was based on the premise of a community of reciprocal aid; for if members are to support each other, they must also be able to consent to the parties that they are going to be supporting.

At first, inhabitancy rights were granted only to those families that the town was prepared to give land to; in time, rights were given to any family that could arrange to buy a plot of land. The Puritans, like their predecessors, regarded land as the basic unit of power, and considered any well-functioning government to be grounded in land ownership. In November, 1634 John Winthrop made a general proclamation that he and the six other chief council of the town should have the right to allocate land to newcomers at their discretion

It is agreed that noe further allotments shalbe graunted unto any new comers, but such as may be likely to be received members of the Congregation: That none shall sell their houses or allotments to any new comers, but with the consent and allowance of those that are appointed Allotters.

In Boston, March 1640 the following was issued, illustrating the connection between land and inhabitancy –

John Palmer, Carpenter, now dwelling here, is to be allowed an Inhabitant, if he can gett an house, or land to sett an house upon (it being not proper to allowe a man an Inhabitant Without habitation)

Town councils made additional restrictions on the flow of visitors. On December 29, 1657, Derman Mahoone was fined twenty shillings for apparently “intertaining two Irish women contrary to an order of the towne, in that case provided and is to quitt his house of them forthwith att his perill” The problem of guests became so bad in Boston that on June 13, 1659 a general proclamation was given:

Whereas sundry inhabitants in this towne have nott so well attended to former orders made for the securing the towne from charge by sojourners, inmates, hyred servants, journeymen, or other persons that come for help in physick or chyrurgery, whereby no little damage hath already, and much more may accrew to the towne. For the prevention whereof Itt is therefore ordered, that whosoever of our inhabitants shall henceforth receive any such persons before named into their howses or employments without liberty granted from the select men, shall pay twenty shillings for the first weeke, and so from weeke to weeke, twenty shillings, so long as they retaine them, and shall beare all the charge that may accrew to the Towne by every such sojourner, journeyman, hired servt., Inmate, &c, received or employed as aforesaid.

In these laws, we see an early American expression of social “pre-destination,” the notion that individuals inherit a place a within a structured social order. This is a very old conception of the world, indeed, dating back to Aristotle, who wrote that society was divided by birth and predisposition between those who are among the ruling class and those who are to be ruled; but the exact nature of pre-destination that the early settlers expressed was less about restricting access to positions in a lateral hierarchy – between the ruled and the ruling – than it was about placing one into a spot, and keeping one there. People were not entitled to move freely from one place to another; they were bound instead to the town that they happen to be born into, or happen to gain admission into.

One important American narrative is the myth of mobility – to move up and to move out, to gain in statured or get up and leave. Early inhabitancy rights expose some of the falsity of the American mobility narrative. They present us with a choice: either stay in the spot of admission or be free to move, not true freedom but the false freedom of homelessness. Early America was based on a permanence of place, and contemporary institutions, Harvard for one, indicate that the conceptual framework for a society based on admission has not been entirely shaken.

The word “hierarchy” here is not entirely appropriate. Puritanism, based as it is on a democratization of the individual’s role in religion, replaced catholic hierarchies, which mirror governmental monarchies, with town meetings and the individual’s relationship with the text. Yet Puritanism called for a different sort of rigidity. Max Weber called “the central dogma” of the puritan faith, the reliance on a society arranged according to the individual’s calling --

The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the word

The Puritan religion bound the individual to his “position” in the world. The Calvinists went further, arguing that from this positions one was predestined for to be saved or to be damned – any resistance is ultimately futile, for an individuals fate is inextricably bound up with his origins. This concept of calling is a particularly American one. In Emerson’s famed essay “Self-Reliance” he argued for a radical individualism based ultimately on an acceptance of his unique place within a complex and diverse society. It is often overlooked that this doctrine was not about freedom, but rather about a version of obedience. The individual was bound to his place, and it was from here – and only from here – that can he live as truly fulfilled

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age…

Trusting “thyself” is an act of acquiescence. One must “accept the place [that] divine providence has found for you.” He uses a metaphor about land – in parallel to the land requirements of inhabitancy rights – to make the point

[A man learns] that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Self-reliance, then, is the act of obeying a “Self” that was given from above; it is to take “for better, for worse” the “plot of ground” that one was given. Emerson did not think that this was a dreary prospect. For him, the Self was imperial, it was the source of great wealth and beauty. The individual Self – like the young country that he was writing for – must accept the virgin soil that it had, by the preference of God, been given, if it was to be true to its actions, and grow up in full.
The settlers based their ideals of community on these conceptions of place. The individual was born into a spot in the world, the “calling” in the words of the protestants, the “self” in the words of Emerson, and it was expected that that was where one would remain. The inchoate admission society, based on exclusion and power, which would flourish with the growing prestige of Harvard University and a diversified country with increasing divisions of labor, can be see in Cambridge (then Newtowne) at its very earliest. Here is the writ of admission that John Harvard himself received in 1637 – the first admit to Harvard College, being Harvard himself –

Mr. John Harvard is admitted a Townsman with a promise of such accommodations as wee best Can…

When I said that the colonists did not break from the past, it was meant to illustrate the continuity of laws between England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But there is greater significance, in that the laws that they inherited directly pertained to the manner in which people define themselves by the past. One’s past – according to the inhabitancy laws put forth – was the best and strictest way to determine one’s future, for it was only that spot towards which you were necessarily entitled. Accept that place and know your future.

The towns of the Massachusetts Bay not only had the capacity to enforce inhabitancy rights, but were bound to do so by early colonial law. In May 17, 1637, the General Court of the Massachusetts Colony issued the following law –

It is ordered, that no towne or pson shall receive any stranger, resorting hither wth intent to reside in this iurisdiction, nor shall alow any lot or habitation to any, or intertaine any such above three weekes, except such pson shall have alowance vnder the hands of some one of the counsell, or of two other of the magistrates, vpon paine that evry townse shall give or sell any lot or habitation to any such, not so allowed, shall forfet 100s for every offence, & evry pson receive any such, for longer time than is heare expressed, (or then shalbe allowed in some special cases, as before, or in case of intertainement of freidns resporting from some other parts of this country for a concenient time,) shall forfet for evry offence 40s [shillings]; and for evry month after such pson shall there continew 20s; provided, that if any inhabitant shall not consent to the intertainment of any such person, & shall give notice thereof to any of the magistrates wthin one month after, such inhabitant shall bee liable to any part of this penulty

In 1638 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote that constables

Should informe of newe comers, if any be admitted wthout license; & to that end warrant to bee sent out to the cunstable of each town, to infome the Court of Assistants, wch is to consider of the fines, whether to take them or to mitigate them.

In June, 1650, the colony issued the following. We see in it a characterization of the “wandering poor” as those that had chosen to break the binds of community and the ideals of the “calling” –

Whereas wee are credibly informed that great mischeifes and outrages have binn wrought in other plantacon in America by comanders, and souldjers of seuerall qualitjes, and other straingers issueing out of other parts, vsurping power of gounement ouer them, plundering of their estates, taking vp armes, and making great divisions amongst the inhabitants where they have come, to prevent the like mischiefe in this jurisdiccon, this Court doth order, and it is hereby enacted, that henceforward all straingers, of what qualitje soeuer, above the age of sixteene yeeres, arriving here in any portes or parts of this jurisdicon in any ship or vessel, shall immediately be grought before the Gounor…

These were the statutes of Colonial law, yet they were on the wrong side of history. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, New England’s economy continued to diversify, and the need for labor – artisans, farmers, goods peddlers, clergy, even doctors and lawyers – to flow from one place to another increased. Warfare, such as the King Phillip’s War of 1675-76, an Indian uprising that wreaked havoc on the Massachusetts’s countryside, provided the first instance in America of large-scale homelessness. Pious Bostonians noted in 1675 that “the sin of idleness (whc is the sin of Sodom) doeth greatly increase.” It became practically impossible for towns to enforce laws banning newcomers; and thus, impossible to prevent those that are likely to become chargeable to the town for relief – “the wandering beggars and rogues” – to become taxing on the towns support mechanisms.

With the increase of population and individual mobility as the backdrop, towns passed legislation that allowed them to legally “warn out” newcomers who had entered the town, telling them to leave immediately or else stay without the privilege of public charge. In other words, the towns passed legislation that allowed them legally to exclude those living within the town the benefits of communal support. They enacted legal mechanisms of boundary drawing.
In November, 1692, the following act was passed in Massachusettes, to provide for the legal exclusion of certain people, keeping a record of their name, and using a court for the purpose –

If any person or persons come to sojourn or dwell in any town and be there received an entertained by the space of three months, not having been warned by the constable, or other person whom the selectmen shall appoint for that purpose, to leave the place, and the names of such persons with the time of their abode there and when such warning was given them retunrd into Court of quarter sessions, every such person shall be deemed an inhabitant of such town and the proper charge of the same in case through sickness, lameness, or otherwise, they come to stand in need of relief to be borne by such town. Unless relatives be of suffiencient ability to do so &c.

March 14, 1700 a further act was passed, which recognized warning out, stating that no town shall

be chargeable with the support of any person residing therin who has not been approved as an inhabitant by the town or the selectmen…[unless they had] continued their residence there by the space of twelve months next before and not been warned in manner as the law directs to depart and leave the town, any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding”

These laws were taken seriously, from the early 1600s to the 1700s when warning out provisions were passed until finally, in February 11, 1793, when new settlement rights were drafted for the town of Massachusetts, erasing all provisions for inhabitancy rights and warning out.

Warning out reconciled the Christian imperative towards the beggardly figure who is Christ-like in his humility, with the basic capitalist and Puritan imperative to affirm the importance or work and self-sufficiency. William Perkins, a Calvinist minister at the time, warned fervently against that “wandering beggars and rogues” who were not only a financial plague, but a religious one, who should “bee taken as enemies of this ordinance of God.” The American founding was a dialectic between these two impulses: the Massachusetts Bay Colony established as a religious refuge, and the Jamestown established because of entrepreneurial desire. By warning out a family, a town could continue to fulfill their obligations towards their spiritual brothers, while also respecting the autonomy of the individual who earns his keep and deserves what he receives.

With this came the first class of American untouchables. From the middle of the 18th century to its completion, more than nine thousand people were warned out of Boston, with more than two thousand people in the year 1791-1792 alone. These numbers not only reflect a propensity for warning out, but a need to do so in the first place, a reflection of a class of migrants that had emerged in America, traveling largely from the countryside to the cities in search of labor. When they entered a city and were warned to leave, many of them did. Forty percent of those warned out in Boston in 1780 were not there in 1790. Entire families were legally expelled from towns, left to wander in search of a fixed abode. Such a class has never left us.

One of the first homeless men that I met in Harvard Square was named James. He had biked from Minnesota to Boston, and now lived on the streets of Cambridge. We had invited him to eat lunch with us at Unos, just a block from Harvard Yard. James looks like Charlie Manson, though, as he pointed out: “I don’t have a Nazi tattoo on my forehead and I don’t have blue eyes and anyways Charlie Manson was a total bastard.” James had signs that he wrote on lined notebook paper. He showed them to people who passed by, and sometimes they gave him money. He said that he was doing God’s work – Just Walk Away, said one of the signs. “That’s what the Jews did in Egypt. All you’ve got to do is to walk away.”

We see in the practice of warning out in the towns of New England an early genealogy of distinctly American narratives: the value and utility of work, life on the road, the limits of kindness, the conceptions of community. The first American underclass was not only poor, but literally expelled from a community oftheir peers; whatever aid they received was because of altruism rather than community, founded on a distinction between classes, rather than reciprocity and mutual help. And such a class is still with us, continuing to perpetrate a violence on the myths of our country. The ways that our Christian forefathers elected to categorize people, through the process of inhabitancy rights and warning out, is not entirely distinct from the manners that we attempt to do the same, creating titles (victims, lost souls, deviants, waste products) for the men and women sleeping on the ground tonight, in Harvard Square, outside of the gate this very night.

IV

“Being homeless is not some sort of club.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to college in Maryland, dropped out. I became a carpenter and now I don’t have a job, so I sit here during the days. There, that’s my story.”

His voice was very steady, authoritative, commanding – it pierced through, like something very shameful in myself had been exposed.

“Well, you know, I just thought if you’d be interested in talking, then we –” The other man started to grab at my shoulder. He smelled of hard alcohol and his eyes were wild.

“Yeah, I know what you want,” he said, drunk, clearly, with a voice that was high and hard.

“You’re going to write this up in some special school report. I know exactly what you want. Yeah, I know you.”

“Look,” said the man sitting on the ground, with a hat on and the guitar in his lap, “look, I’m sorry, I want to be able to help you out – it’s just I’m tired, you know, some girl came the other day and she was talking with us. You know, I just don’t want to do another one of these interviews.”

“We’re freaks. Yeah, freaks. I’m a vet, you know that.” He put his arm around me. “Wanna go into that store over there, buy me something.”

“I’m not 21.”

“Of course he’s not,” said the steady man on the ground.

“I’m sorry to bother you guys – the point, I guess, was to try not to be, you know, stereotyping, to tell the story very plainly.”

“I’m sorry not to help you with your report,” the man on the ground.

“No – what, don’t be sorry.”

I left feeling great shame in myself, the shame of a voyeur, or a person who had committed something – I would later think – of a great act of dehumanization: I felt like I was treating people as types, the same anger in myself that flows from Baldwin to Stowe. He wrote that she had was dehumanizing by sentimentalizing, that she had turned African Americans into caricatures – and types, no matter how grandiose, can never, after all, be fully human. “The mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel” was how Baldwin wrote of sentimentality.

To step forward into Harvard Square, is to open myself to hearing other people, is to enter a hailstorm of self-reprisal, to question the nature of human interaction and the limits of human empathy. To be at Harvard is to be at the very center of society; to be homeless is to be outside of it. What is the path that one takes to get from here to there?

To put this question of limitations another way: am I going to live my entire life within that small subsection of humanity that I was born into – will I ever be anything but the Self that I was given?

“How does it feel?” Bob Dylan asks. Well maybe to have no home is the opposite of the feeling I get every time I walk to the Square. Every time I see someone I am not, I realize that I am someone. Homelessness lives in that limitation of traversing empathy. It exists in the boundaries between people. It says: I can go anywhere; I can do anything.

Homelessness lives in that limitation of traversing empathy. It exists in the boundaries between people. It says: I can go anywhere; I can do anything.

But is this freedom, the freedom of searching – the search is for somewhere to stop, it is not endless. It is defined by its negative, by the search for the home, the road extending only so far as it must, before you find somewhere called Forever that smiles back.

I went up to my room. A girl was there at my desk doing a problem set with my roommate, and she didn’t even look up when I entered. I sat for a while without saying much and then I went through a blizzard of arguments with my self and my roommate, who could not finish his problem set. The girl, as it were, did not even look up as I spoke.

“There is nothing wrong,” I said. “Simply, nothing wrong with trying to understand people. Yeah, they don’t want to be observed under a microscope. A disorienting disruption of the paradigm,” I said loudly, now, gesticulating. “It’s a class thing, a class hierarchy that is being confused, the collapse of two supposedly autonomous spheres in society. I walk to Pinocchio’s and they sit and beg. We are different – I see that, but I reject the premise, I reject the premise that divisions are autonomous, totally final.

“There is nothing wrong with noticing. That is all. I want to understand people. Certainly our world would be better if we could extend empathy farther, and the 20th century, surely one of the most deadly in history, would be much different if we could walk out to Harvard Square and understand each other a little better.”

A yearning to be a part of a place, to be a citizen again, is, I believe, the ultimate connection between people.

V

In the end, if this period of my life, which I believe in some ways is ending, when I thought a lot about homelessness, and I had pretentious to believe that there was something I could say about dispossession – if it is judged as a failure, then I have to believe it is because I feel like shit about it, because I feel like a failure about it, and because I have been inured to believe that feeling like shit is reciprocally bound with failing, that feelings are twisted together with reality like ribbons in a rope and the rope either pulls you over the side of the boat or that slips through your fingers and lets you slap down to the water.

I don’t know much about the relationship between feelings and reality, but I think that it is a key to my place in this community. For a lot of people, life is a hell of a lot harder than it is for me, and they manage to feel pretty good. Some of the people I met in the course of doing this project had the whole world conditioning their own self-loathing, and they barely showed it at all. Where does the feeling of shame exist? And love? Is it in God? is it in our hearts? is it outside, floating in the streets? does it dwell on the lips of girls? I don’t know much about the answer to that, either. But I think – I’d like to think – that feelings exist as a collective. That every feeling exists as some big force between people, that we take when we need it, that we all share, a big bowl above us, from which we all eat, existing in the sky…

Let’s just for a moment, for the sake of those more-destitute people, think of the feelings rather than the fact, and accept that all the virtues of the latter rest ultimately on the existence of the former. That a man cries and that he wishes to act, and the way that the world is refracted within the prism, is due to his having feelings, and let us just accept that fact.

If this period of my life was a failure it was because I am too cowardly and not nearly creative enough, and because my heart is too small, and, ultimately, because I couldn’t feel enough. I feel like shit about it, but that alone does not mean I have failed. In fact, that’s the only success I’ve had in four months since I jumped into the Charles. I feel ashamed – good, piercing, shame.

Works Cited

Benton, Josiah H. Warning Out in New England. Boston: W. B. Clarke company, 1911.
Boston (Mass.). Registry Dept, and Boston . Record Commissioners. "Records Relating to the Early History of Boston." (a).
---. "Records Relating to the Early History of Boston." (b).
Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in the Wilderness : The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742. New York: Knopf, 1960.
Coser, Lewis A. Men of Ideas : A Sociologist's View. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays. Vol. 3. Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and company : the Riverside press, Cambridge, 1904.
Kulikoff, Allan. "The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston." The William and Mary Quarterly 28.3 (1971): 375-412.
Massachusetts, Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, and Massachusetts. General Court. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. New York: AMS Press, 1968.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. "The Founding of Harvard College." (1995).
Morris, William Alfred. The Frankpledge System. Vol. 14. New York: Longmans, Green, and co., 1910.
Palgrave, Francis. The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth. : Anglo-Saxon Period. Containing the Anglo-Saxon Policy, and the Institutions Arising Out of Laws and Usages which Prevailed before the Conquest. London: J. Murray, 1832.
Weber, Max, and Stephen Kalberg. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Use of Religion in Du Bois and Douglass

2008-11-18T03:22:00.000-08:00

Protest literature changed after the Civil War. A number of style devices – such as sentimentalism, omniscient narrators, the blurring of fiction and fact, apostrophe – were shed from the subsequent texts; but these losses accompanied a much more striking one: the entire genre lost its rallying cry. The slave institution was so horrifying, so glaringly at odds with human justice, morality, and freedom that it functioned as a point of departure for all political writing of the time. Though writers would find other causes in time – Upton Sinclair would attack wage “slavery” a few years into the turn of the century – Black protest literature lost, after Emancipation, a great guiding purpose of its movement.

Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois wrote on either side of this divide. Though towering figures of their own right, not merely “products of their times,” their writings, as documents meant to guide and instruct movements, were indelibly connected to the two different historical needs of the their respective historical moments. Douglass wrote looking at the Promised Land from the outside, and the Du Bois wrote looking at it from within. Douglass’ “What to the Slave of the Fourth of July?” was, thus, singularly channeled to affecting the overthrow of the institutionalized slave system. Du Bois, on the other hand, in The Souls of Black Folk, having witnessed this “dawn of freedom” that left more than four million ex-slaves floating without direction like a “dark human cloud” (Du Bois 17), takes up where Douglass left off, attempting to find historical meaning and direction in the aftermath of a practically illusory Emancipation. The divergence of these historical perspectives and intentions is capture nowhere better than in the rhetoric and formal language that Douglass and Du Bois use when they invoke religion. Douglass’ conception of Christianity was about unity and the hope for redemption; Du Bois used religion as a means to understand the founding division in America.

Christianity for the Abolitionists was the moral basis for bringing an end to the slave system. In his “Fourth of July” oration, Douglass channels Harriet Beecher Stowe by presenting Christianity as a creed that calls for the unity of all people. Christianity, he says, is “a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man” (Douglass 46). He calls slavery the “grossest infringements of Christina Liberty” (Douglass 46), because it violates this call to unity. To think anything else is to “strip the love of God of its beauty” (Douglass 47). This conception of religion as unity is the fundamental claim of abolitionist Christianity of the time period, and an important point in the protest literature tradition. Harriet Beecher Stowe consistently used the image of black and white hands touching, to portray an egalitarian social order propped up by Christian doctrine. She wrote that “in the gates of eternity, the black hand the white hold each other with an equal clasp” (Stowe 276).

A second characteristic of Douglass’ Christianity is its narrative arch. Like Stowe’s, Douglass’ conception was of a fatalist religion, where the damned can either remain in sin or can strive for redemption. His understanding of America was fit within this framework: damned, but still poised for redemption, an idea that was used powerfully by abolitionists in their call for the end of slavery and birth of the “millennium.” “Fourth of July” is divided into three sections, paralleling the Christian prophetic tradition: first, the original ideal of America, second, its present state of hypocrisy and finally, the potential for a hopeful future.

In accordance with the first part of the this narrative arc, the speech begins, as it must, with the statement of the holy “ideal.” Christianity is a monotheistic religion – it stipulates the existence of a set of fundamental, unalterable truths. Channeling this monism, Douglass rewrites the founding of America to be based on a similar set of unalterable ideals. To begin, he says that the Founding Fathers did not adopt the “fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts” (Douglass 38). This is a nod to Christian “transcendence,” where one is asked to look past worldly materialism (the acts of government), and instead appeal to a more essential code. Douglass then says that the founders fought against that which is “unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive” (Douglass 39). Thus, the transcendent ideal of America, according to Douglass, is this: “justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression” (Douglass 40), and it was on these principles that our nation was founded. This first part of the speech is biblical in that it attempts to portray men as prophets – whose “admiration of liberty” caused them to lose “sight of all other interests” (39) – and the founding of the country according to an transcendent and objective good.

The following section concerns the present, and begins with the claim that any understanding of the past is only valuable insofar as “we can make it useful to the present and to the future” (Douglass 41). This is a decidedly unmodern conception of history. It echoes Judeo-Christian use of the past: the bible is a series of stories and laws that occurred in the past but ought to be read as allegories imputing meaning onto our contemporary lives. Douglass declares that the present must be measured against the transcendent-monistic ideals established in the past. He writes:

Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the great sin and shame of America! (Douglass 42)

The failure of America is a measurement of itself against is own ideals, the slave institution and “everything that serves to perpetuate slavery” set side-by-side against monistic values such as liberty, the constitution, God, humanity and the Bible that were established at an earlier period. The present state is characterized as a “fall from grace.” Rather than point out the cruelty of slavery, he points to its hypocrisy. “At a time like this,” he says, “scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed” (Douglass 43). He makes the case that America is damned not by showing what the nation is doing, but by pointing to its contradictions, its “national inconsistencies” (Douglass 48). He lists the hypocrisies of a people that “boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization and your pure Christianity” that would speak with “fire at the mention of liberty for France” but “are as cold as an iceberg a the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America” (Douglass 48). So long as there is slavery, “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future” (Douglass 42). This is the dynamic of sin – a nation inconsistent with his moral foundation, like a man who disobeys the word of God. Slavery is the “the great sin” (Douglass 42) of America.

Finally, Douglass tells his listeners, that despite the picture he has drawn, “I do not despair of this country” (Douglass 50). In this way, he closes off the narrative arc of prophetic Christianity – fatalism with the promise of the millennium. The sin of slavery has inherent in it the promise of redemption. Two things are noteworthy. First, that he suggests that this is the natural progression of the world. Throughout the speech, Douglass calls Americans “children”: they received a “child’s share in the labor of your father” (Douglass 41). He notes at the outset that, “seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation” (Douglass 37). By calling Americans children, he places them at the beginning of a narrative arch, and suggests a certain teleological certainty that they will grow up to understand the injustices of their youth. He suggests that though our actions are a choice (like the freedom God conferred to us by allowing us sin), the end of slavery is inevitable. “‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain” (Douglass 50). Modernization, what he calls “commerce,” like growing from childhood to adulthood, is a force that will dispel injustice everywhere. It will spread like “fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light’” (Douglass 50). The second point of note, then, is that this narrative arc, accompanied by modernization, adulthood, the dispelling of light onto all palce in earth – that it comes to an end. Douglass castes this as a Judgment Day: he says: “no abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light” (Douglass 50). It is as if he were asking, though without saying any of the words, When the judgment comes, which side to you want to be on?

To this very question, fifty years later, Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk reflects the realization that there is no simple answer. Emancipation proved not to be a panacea. Thus ends the unity, hope and fatalism of Douglass – like a clan that predicted a Judgment Day that never came, or, more precisely, one that came as a false hope or empty illusion. Du Bois writes of the ex-slaves after Emancipation:

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live… (Du Bois 64)

What was “vanquished that deserved to live” was the Christian belief in a final redemptive millennium. If Douglass’ conception of religion is the abolitionist twinning of unity between people and then hope for redemption, then Du Bois’ reflects the opposite: his discussion of religion explains its function in social division and how it will augur the permanence of struggle between people. The language that Du Bois mobilizes to discuss religion reflect the very ambiguities at the center of Du Bois’ famous statement, that Blacks do not strive for unity, but for simultaneous division, “to be both a Negro and an American” (Du Bois 5).

Du Bois’ most complete treatment of religion comes in his essay “Of the Faith of The Fathers.” The title points the reader back in time. Du Bois, like Douglass, believes that history can be used to reveal truth about the present; however, while Douglass maintains that we can measure ourselves against the past, as if it were a standard, an objective moral fiat, Du Bois sees the past as the very the source of our present conflicts. This is a key theme of the essay collection, and begins when states, as he does a number of times, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (Du Bois 1). The color line is the fundamental tension of our country, begun at our founding, with White masters importing Blacks half-way around the world to be enslaved. This conflict, he suggests, is an inextricable aspect of America’s national identity and will ripple from its historical origins out into every aspect of national culture, so that there are “millions of black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up with that of the nation” (Du Bois 148). Douglass believed, as many protest writers did then and even today, that the world is flowing indubitably to an ideal, some perfect future that seems to always be receding from the horizon. Du Bois breaks from this tradition. He suggests that history cannot be perfected; it is always bound to the tensions of its origins. The “color-line” will persist in America throughout time.

Du Bois examines religion through this past-present framework, tracing the origins of the “Negro Church” to its present condition. Du Bois uses language of savagery in his description of the Church: the “frenzy of a Negro Revival” as a “sort of suppressed terror…a pythian madness, a demoniac possession” (Du Bois 155), “the stamping, shrieking, and shouting the rushing to an fro and wild waving of arms” (Du Bois 156). The present “Negro Church” came about by the rather simple, linear path it took from the “polygamous clan life” of Africa to the slave plantation, where its “religion became darker and more intense,” with the fatalism of Douglass and Stowe, aligned with the “dream of Abolition,” and finally to the “present critical stage of Negro religion,” in the aftermath of Emancipation. “No such institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definitive historical foundation” (Du Bois 159). The division inherent in religion comes from the realization that it owes its present state to the cataclysmic tensions of its origins – the “mingling of heathen rites” (Du Bois 160) with American Christianity, all within the broken family structures and topsy-turvy morality of the slave system.

The tensions are manifold, but each, as Du Bois presents them, are characterized by their binary structure. Faced with impotence after Emancipation, the ex-slave, in regards to his religion, became radical or complacently resigned, “the one almost ready to curse God and die” and the other “too often found a traitor to right and a coward before force” (Du Bois 165). There is the Sorrow Song which “breaths a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things” (Du Bois 213), contrasted against the “Frenzy” of the Church revivals. There is the modern use of the Church as a “social centre of Negro Life” (Du Bois 157) and then the primitive manifestation of its polygamous origins in its revivals’ atmosphere of “demoniac possession” (Du Bois 155). In effect, Du Bois invokes two conflicting vocabularies, each borne out of the irreconcilable elements of the slave’s condition. He write that there exist in the slaves, “two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus sought to make clear that wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North and South; and their religious life and activities partake of this social conflict within their ranks” (Du Bois 167). Du Bois’ religion, in this respect, is the very opposite of Douglass’s. Religion is a stage to play out the double consciousness, the two-ness that he suggests is at the heart of the Black condition, where “the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteen century…” (Du Bois 164) applies to his religion, as much as to the way that he relates to American society.

In other words, religion encapsulates the very extremes forces and ambiguities that the ex-slave has to negotiate within himself in his attempt to find a place within American society. “He would not Africanize America” just as he “would not bleach is Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism” (Du Bois 5). These two forces are working within the “Souls of Black Folk,” just as they are working within America, as if in a productive dialectical contention. This contrast is epitomized in the closing religious section of the essay “Of the Coming of John.” John comes back to his rural hometown in southern Georgia, from his stay at college in the North. In church, people ask: “This silent, cold man, -- was this John?” (Du Bois 195). His demeanor appears to be foreign. He stands before the congregation and begins to speak about the “broader ideas of human brotherhood and destiny” (Du Bois 196). He speaks of the role that Blacks were going to face in a new world, in an age that “demand[s] new ideas” (Du Bois 196). The speech he gives is a classic discussion of liberal, modern values. But it is greeted with silence. “A painful hush seized that crowded mass” (Du Bois 196). No one moves until “an old bent man arose,” walks to the pulpit and “burst into the words, with rude and awful eloquence” (Du Bois 196) – he gives a retort to John, dismissing his “‘fool notion’” (Du Bois 195), and calls for solidarity. “John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself up to scorn and scathing denunciation from tramping on the truth Religion” (Du Bois 197). John then arises “silently, and passed out into the right” (Du Bois 197).

Religion is not, as it was for Douglass, a source hand in hand with the process of modernity, the continued dispersion of “light” into all corners of the world. Instead, religion is in conflict with modernity – it is a countervailing force to the pure Americanism, its Mammonism, which Du Bois despised, but also its cultural ties with the West, to which Du Bois, in some respects, dedicated his entire life. Inherent in the religion of the ex-slave is the division faced between the modern and un-modern, the radical and resigned, the “soul” of Black folk and the “soul” America, and all the divisions that are caught up with the difficulties of relating into an American society without forfeiting one’s identity. How one accomplished this, it is still not clear today. To conclude: Du Bois, in his discussion of sorrow songs in the final essay and his juxtaposing them through with European hymns, suggests an answer: integration through the self-assertion. He wants both Black and White elements of society to be at once productive and self-containing, to interacting in the theatre of society as “co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 5). These Sorrow Songs represent all that is important to Du Bois’ conception of religion; in them, there are all the gifts that Blacks brought to America, “the soft, stirring melody,” the “the gift of sweat” and the “gift of Spirit” (Du Bois 214). Thus, religion encapsulates the divisions that not only threaten to paralyze blacks, but also the very divisions that make their identity so important. He asks: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” (Du Bois 215).

These are the differences in the religious conceptions of Douglass and Du Bois. Douglass used religion to unite people, to damn them and to promise their redemption. Du Bois used religion to communicate a sense of eternal division, of conflict within society and within the individual “soul” – but in addition to the costs of division, come the pride of identity, of owning a gift that is unique in its beauty. In keeping with the initial observation that no two great men can be pushed together as if they were simply products of the time, the two sketches of religious conceptions were made independently. But they relate in the important fact that within their respective conceptions they summed up much of the anxieties of protest literature at their respective times: for Douglass, the fierce demand for freedom, and for Du Bois, the struggle to find meaning in the wake of this realized freedom, to be more than empty and not to be totally confused.

Bibliography

Bois, W.E.B. Du. The Souls of Black Folk. New York, 1996.
Douglass, Steven. "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Stauffer, John. Literature and Arts A-86. Cambridge, 2007. 37-52.

Obedience and Destiny In Emerson's Self Reliance

2008-11-18T03:18:00.001-08:00

[1] “Self-reliance,” Emerson’s phrase, was something of a rallying cry for 19th century America. Ralph Waldo Emerson published his short essay “Self-Reliance” in 1841, four years after he delivered his Phi Beta Kappa address to Harvard, where he identified the quiet emergence of the first distinct group of “American Scholars,” including men like Oliver Wendell Homes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and David Thoreau. America at time is often characterized as a land of virgin soil. Its soil was “virgin” in the sense that it was still largely uncultivated, with thousands of miles of unexplored woodlands, mountains, and rivers beckoning in to the West; but the soil was “virgin” in yet another way. America’s ground was unencumbered by any physical reminders of a singular cultural inheritance – no medieval churches, no ancestral mansions or battlegrounds of perpetual war. America as a culture was still unformed. Emerson saw himself as a member of the group of American Scholars who were engaged in a project of forging a national culture, self-creating in the way that the individual pioneer was forging for himself a new life in the West. “Self-reliance,” as a rallying cry, thus communicates on two levels: the words bring to mind the severe and beautiful natural woodlands of the West and the individualism of the pioneer, both of which Emerson wrote beautifully about as key aspects of the distinct American experience; but self-reliance was also was a national idea, a bigger project of a new nation forging itself for itself, creating a thoroughly unique, wholly original national cultural identity, a task for which Emerson was a leader.

[2] One might ask: how is it that Emerson, the epitome of individualism, who tells one to “cast off the common motives of humanity” (Emerson 131) and to be a “law to himself,” (131), who writes of association as if it were chainmail for the human soul – can also be engaged in the collective project of creating a unique national culture? More specifically, doesn’t the first aspect of self-reliance, the doctrine of radical individualism, run directly contrary to the second aim, which is that of national unity? It is true that Emerson demands that the individual, in order to create the “wholly strange and new,” (129) conform to nobody. But, nonconformity is not the same thing as negation of society. In fact, to Emerson, the true nonconformist is actually firmly grounded in his place within a social hierarchy. His originality does not come from his active creation of Self, but from his passive embrace of the unique position in the larger order of society and the universe he has been gifted. This embrace of position means that Emerson’s Self is not the product of free agency, like an anarchist who believes he can simply do what he pleases regardless of anybody else, but rather the Self is a product of destiny. Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance, far from requiring the individual to absolve himself of society’s circumstances, requires the individual to obey them, which applies as much to the pioneer as it does to a larger project of national culture creation.

[3] Emerson uses one poignant metaphor about land early in the essay to frame his discussion of Self. His second paragraph begins: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide…” These statements are tempting to read as a statement on the “anarchist model” of Self, to which Emerson is far too often associated. In this model, the Self is a source of freedom. Envy is a reliance on another person’s authority, and therefore “envy is ignorance” because it strips the individual of freedom. Imitation is suicide, likewise, because to imitate is to accept authority, and any restraint on freedom is slow death. However, Emerson quickly qualifies the initial two statements with two more: the man arrives that the conviction, “…that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that thought the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till” (emphasis added, 121). These second two statements radically change the meaning of the initial two. Envy is ignorance not because it relies on false authority or diminishes freedom; envy is ignorance because imitation is literally impossible. The individual “for better, for worse” must acquiesce to that “plot of ground which is given to him to till.” This land metaphor calls to mind the early American claim that the westward land was a “manifest destiny,” a phrase which notes that America was not entitled to the land because it was “free” but because the land was part of its national destiny, as fact preordained by God. America was realizing a Self that was given to it by God. Emerson’s use of the land metaphor must be taken the same way. This “land” is given by God to the individual. He has only this, and nothing more, “to till” and to gain his “kernel of nourishing corn.” Emerson is placing the individual on a small pocket within a larger society, a pocket handed to him by God.

[4] Emerson uses a nearly identical metaphor to begin the very next paragraph: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age…” (121). He constructs this metaphor in the same way: he begins with “Trust thyself,” but quickly qualifies by saying that this Self is “found for you” by “divine Providence,” that it is to be “accepted” rather than chosen, and that it is defined in relationship to “the society of your contemporaries.”

[5] This “passive” acceptance of Self is part of the essential structure of Emerson’s argument. Emerson strictly divides the Self and from the “I”. The former, the Self, is something of a mystical essence that precedes the individual, like the “plot of ground” given to him by “divine Providence” before he is born; it is the ultimate actuality buried deep within all the roles and guises of an individual; it is fixed and unchangeable and given by God. The latter, the “I”, is meant to be understood as the human superstructure on top of the Self, the person endowed with the free will to choose one path over another. Emerson repeatedly assumes this division of autonomy: “Absolve you to yourself,” (122) “Trust thyself,” (121) “Absolve you to yourself,” (122) “Insist on yourself,”(134) “he must take himself” (121). Even the title phrase, “Self-Reliance,” implies a strict sharing of authority between the man and his “Self” – for who, if not an “I,” would have the conscious choice to rely or to not rely on the “Self”?

[6] Regarding the relationship between the two, Emerson is unclear. He attributes to the individual some sort of freedom to ignore the essential structure of his Self, but it is a hazardous freedom at best. The call for “Self-reliance,” as mentioned, only makes sense if one has the free will to choose to rely or not to rely on Self – otherwise the phrase would be incoherent. This construction has its theological precedent in the concept of sin. God handed down law at Mt. Sinai, but implicit in his covenant was that the Israelites had the freewill to disregard it. Sin implies the free will to disobey. But of course, just because it is possible to disobey, does not mean that one should, or that ultimately one’s wishes will be borne out. In fact, Emerson’s whole essay Self-Reliance can be seen an attempt is to convince the reader to obey the authority of the Self. In the end, he argues, it is a false choice. “I suppose,” Emerson says, “no man can violate his nature” (125). He who tries becomes, “not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not he real four: so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right” (124). A man who is divided from his Self simply cannot stand as a man; nothing about him is quite right; everything is false. Prayer, he says later in the essay, “supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness” (132). Emerson is calling for a total merger of a man with his Self, and thus a proximate a merger of man with God. All told, Emerson’s supposed doctrine of “defiance” quickly reveals itself to become a doctrine of obedience. Self-reliance might as well be God-reliance.

[7] Today, we have a word to describe this Emersonian merger of the I with the Self: authenticity. The authentic person acts according to his Self; the inauthentic person imitates and is untrue to his Self. That we now lavishly praise “authenticity” as a high moral attribute is direct testament to how successful Emerson’s conceptions of Self and I and of God-reliance have been at permeating our value system. However, Emersonian self-reliance is not just an individual virtue, but also social virtue. Self-reliance, according to a jump that Emerson makes midway through is essay, is a necessary attribtute for the functioning of a society like America and for the fomentation of a true national culture.

[8] Self-reliance, at its core, is a doctrine about the genesis of ideas. The Self is the secret key to creating art and it alone is the dark source of all originality. Yeats had this in mind when, in looking for the source of the truly original poem, he wrote that, “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” (qtd. in Trilling 11). We come back to the very important question of, What is this Self? Only now, having touched on the Self’s relationship with the Individual, can we discuss the Self’s relationship with the universe – a large, semi-mystical interaction, which accounted for the basis of Transcendental thought.

[9] The search for the answer, Emerson says, “leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct…that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, where all things find their common origin” (127). Emerson’s Self is derived from common substance of all things – what he calls the “last fact,” the darker, primordial, connective essence from which “all things find their common origin.” This “lap of immense intelligence” is from where Originality is born. Only by relying on the Self and its unique place within this essence can we become, “receivers of its truth and organs of its activity… we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams” (128). The relationship is two-fold: individual should trust his spontaneous thoughts, because they are the direct products of all the thinkers and writers and artists of that have preceded him; and, that those spontaneous thought are original, because they pass through the individual’s Self, which gives a unique perspective based on the position that the self occupies. To illustrate, Jack Kerouac’s “bebop prosody” was a modern adoption of this older transcendental, Emersonian idea. Kerouac wrote his entire book On the Road in 27 days, in one paragraph, flowing continuously on one 120-foot long roll of paper copy. He wanted to type without thinking. He wanted to “keep it kickwriting at all costs” (qtd. in Charters xviii). In doing this, he hoped to dissolve the boundary between the individual’s active perceptions and the collective intellectual environment of 1950s America, which he had spent eight years exploring on the road. He wanted to localize the genesis of ideas to, in Emerson’s words, “that gleam of light which flashes across his mind” (121). By not consciously thinking too much about what he was writing, he could traverse the boundary between the individual consciousness and the transcendent collective consciousness; in other words, he could dissolve his active I to the unique position occupied by his Self within a broader society; he could be Self-reliant.

[10] The Self is thus redefined. It is entirely unique, but only in its relationship to other people. It is a distinct mixture of properties culled from the common substances that make up all life. By fulfilling the role that is handed to him, the individual is participating in a long chain of events responsible for the “genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable…” All these links in the chain, however, function independently, and thus all are “demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul” (130). This is Emerson’s vision of a collective society: each individual doing his work, using what gift’s he’s got, a single part in a consensual whole.

[11] Emerson’s Self is part of the American tradition of democratic individualism – the rugged pioneer coupled with the experiment in a self-governing republic. The individual must create his future, but in strict relationship with his countrymen and only on that spot which he has been given in society’s complex web of political, social and economic ties. To this spot he must “submit childlike” (121). In this way, Emerson’s individualism overlaps with his nationalism: the Self is outward-looking, existing for the good of the whole, the advancement of the collective project called “nation.” But the ideal is particularly American in another way. Emerson’s Self is the “virgin soil” that a man is to till his whole life forward, and it is the “virgin soil,” providential and full of hope, that stood to Emerson and early American thinkers and writers and pioneers as both the promise of a national identity and the dark and mystical source of it. The “virgin soil” is the individual and collective testament to a single destiny according to the “Almighty effort” to advance on “Choas and the Dark.”

Bibliography

Charters, Ann. "Introduction." Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. vi-xxxi.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First Series. Boston: Henry Altemus, 1894.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Watching Ayacucho

2008-04-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

What is this feeling? He shuddered. A mix, a mix of grief and joy and loneliness – and the realization that he could do anything he wanted.

Max walked down a small street in Ayacucho, watching the yellow in the streetlamps shine against the sky. It had rained during the night and the day; and though the sky was clear now, thin drops of water still fell from the gutters of the buildings above; the cobblestone, smooth and wet, reflected the yellow beams of the streetlamps, in a glowing yellow.

His scarf was wrapped around his neck, French-style and in his hand he held a book by Jack Kerouac. As if, thought Max, I have pretensions to be free and without fear. Though he knew at times that he did.

Yes, yes, he thought, who am I kidding? I am free. He smiled. I, a poor man's Kerouac. Nobody knows me here and nobody knows where I am. Free to glow on the margins and make love to that nothingness and do nothing. I can do everything. Freedom as weakness. Freedom as invisibility. Free because I am small. That's Kerouac's freedom. Max saw himself beneath the yellow streetlights. He felt vicious and even trembled. How simple it is to be a mouse.

The Plaza de Armas was filled with people. A crowd of fifty-thousand or more, Max guessed, circling the street. He had come to Ayacucho to see the final days of Holy Week. Ayacucho was famous for Holy Week. Tonight was Good Friday and late tomorrow night was Easter Mass. It wasn't as a pilgrimage or anything, that Max came. He traveled simply because he could, and because he wanted to. Sometimes things where he lived were sad; the girls felt trapped and alone and the whole hotel that they lived in was like net for hatching butterflies, and then lettering them go. Max could leave too, and he had. That was part of his feeling. He hoped that by leaving, just leaving he would find something real and big. For that is what his heart persistently sought.

In the Plaza, people moved about. Max, having nothing to do, sat on a bench. He listened to the clacking of shoes. He watched couples dance in the steet. A drunk man danced alone, looking sad. A little girl jumped in a shallow puddle. Above these things – the hundreds of families and vendors and murals that lined the ground – sitting at the center of the square was a large bronze horseman statute. Max admired its noctilucent beauty. Beneath it a tiny old woman sat selling candy applies. She was murmuring something soft. Surely, thought Max, Christ would bless that woman and those apples. He had no doubt about that.

On the bench, he tried to read his book. Kerouac, praying in the woods, had this to say: “'My pride is hurt, that is emptiness; my business is with the Dharma, that is emptiness; I'm proud of my kindness to animals, that is emptiness; my conception of the chain, that is emptiness; Anada's Pity, even that is emptiness' Perhaps if some old Zen Master had been on the scene, he would have gone out and kicked the dog on his chain to give everybody a sudden shot of awakening. My pain was in getting rid of the conception of people and dogs anyway, and of myself.”

Max thought deeply about this. Even the dog's suffering, that too is emptiness? I can't believe that, he thought. I want the conception of people and dogs and myself. Hell, I struggle for that. On that bench Max had a million thoughts like these – about Christ and loneliness and about the stones in on the walls in the street. He thought about luck, that he was a creature of great luck. When he looked at the sky, he saw the white moon that shined like a wink.

In time, the procession began. Max was still sitting and contemplating stones. He looked up and saw a black solemn ocean of people. Thousands of people were holding candles. Have I been sleeping? Max thought. The lights of the candles glowed against the sky in a yellow color, like fat drops floating in a broth of soup. Max worked his way through the crowd. On the street, a clear coffin rode on the shoulders of the marching priests. Max strained to see the body. Christ's hands lightly rested on the white sheet covering his body. Hundreds of people beside him on the street watched, and some cried. The horseman! Max thought and turned around. He saw that old woman still selling her apples. A soft soul prayful beneath iron rectitude. Christ continued to lay in the coffin. Max waited for something to happen with the body. All he noticed, though, was a pain in his legs and that sweat on his hands as he held the cover of his book began to feel like wax. He felt guilty, a little bit, for not understanding much.

When the procession ended Max sat back on the bench. He watched the crowd retreat from the plaza. The streets seemed hollow now. Cleaners were sweeping bits of litter from the tarmac, the tawny gold of the streetlights reflecting against the ground. Time passed and the lightness Max had felt earlier seemed distant now.

He watched the streets. The festival was dissolving into nothing. He looked at the clock on the church: it was past twelve. Max squinted. He felt his powers of perception sharpen. That was his habit when he felt small: to notice. He noted the colors beneath the flowers in the center of the plaza and the way water bent in puddle-forms on the street. A young mother with big eyes far from Max knelt down to her daughter. She was saying something soft and wiping spittle off her daughter's cheek. A hundred thousand million people in this world, Max thought, and they all have mothers. They all wipe the cheeks of their children. They grow up and old, read Baruch Spinoza, play chess in silent cafes and they fall in love. And me? Well, I'm on this bench. Perhaps, I have fallen, somewhere, from this wagon of common experience. Is this the feeling?

This was a foggy point in the night, to note the obvious. As Max was thinking these thoughts, an old man walked towards the bench and sat down. Max did not turn. Had he, the old man would have seen Max's face, which at this moment was so odd – distant, wistful, comedic, intense – that one might rightly have wondered whether this boy was equipped at all to bare the bone-breaking weight of selfhood. Perhaps I should live amongst the animals, thought Max. He did not turn. He just sat staring, dangling like a peach in a distant yellow garden.

The old man, though, began to talk. Softly at first, only to himself, but then to Max. He asked about the night, and Max said that he thought it was very beautiful. The old man's hands were leathery and dry, the circles in his cuticles like the half moon that was still winking in the sky. He held bits of bread in one hand, and in the other an unlit candle. Max was happy for this old man; he looked so gentle. A bread loaf was on the bench, and when the man picked it up his hands shook so much that it crumbled on his coat. Max helped him with the bread.

They both looked out at the Plaza for a long time. They talked about small things. The old man fingered the candle in his hands, sitting still. At one point he said something very softly about Christ. Max turned and saw that he had begun to cry. Small, diamond tears on his cheaks. Max continued sitting, watching the yellow plaza, almost tropical and desolate in the dark. Anguish and pity burned in his eyes. I cannot watch, he thought. He took twenty soles from his pocket – he didn't know why – and handed it to the man. The man's eyes were shining and wet, as if they came from beyond the grave. Max felt deep and sad. To watch, to watch, to watch he said to himself and got up from the bench and walked away, besides the church, besides the street cleaners and the iron statue and the old bastard moon – all immortal, somehow.

· · ·

At the hotel, Max lay in his bed. He thought he could see the old man's heavy gray face staring at him through the dark.

He turned to his side. The night was black, and he could hear cars honking and Occasionally teenagers would passed by his window. He could hear them laugh. He thought of his book, Dharma Bums. He could picture the name Kerouac written in yellow. Max thought of the treehouse he built in the woods. Kerouac would have approved. Those were happy moments in that treehome of theirs. He remembered how the sunsets would mix with the leaves on the trees. They sat by the fire and Conor would talk and the bright spots of the flames would dance in everyone eyes.

Max blinked and turned to his other side. He noticed that the room was cold. Everyone thinks about themselves when they read Kerouac. Usually they think about their childhoods. But the thing is – the thing is – Kerouac was not a child, and neither am I. He rubbed at his face. It was late, and he felt the lucidity of insomnia.

He thought: Kerouac, I am not ignorant that sometimes it takes a while to get young. You loved beauty and that's more than most of us can say. But to be child forever? To peer at old men on benches and remark yes, this is a glorious and peculiar world. Is that what we are to want? The freedom of being invisible?

Max felt his blood running in his veins. Birth is a chancy thing, he reasoned. Yeah, I was quite lucky. Freedom, in my opinion, has go to start there: that it’s all luck what we’ve got and I’m pretty grateful. It’s not mine; it’s everyone’s. I am for everyone. We’ve got to look out for each other. That's where my freedom starts – as pity and love as Progress. He thought of Kerouac meditating in the woods. “my conception of the chain, that is emptiness” No, that is not emptiness. That is real. Don't you realize, Mr. Kerouac, that before you can have Freedom, you've got to be alive. Those chains are not emptiness. Yes, before your soul can be liberated, you've got to have food on your table. And if you believe in Freedom before Progress, then that is called narcissism.

Max! he scolded, get to the point. But what is the point? The point is knowledge and love and human suffering. That is the point. The trains that Kerouac jumped existed because of collective man and radical hopes and the slouching and trembling brotherhood I call progress. What a fool to revolt against the very society that permits your existence. Kerouacs glowing on the margins – we cannot have that, in this struggle to survive. The real kind: people are dying.

At this, Max got from his bed and turned on the light of the room. He felt the dizzy tranquility of four a.m.. He paced for a while staring downwards and when he climbed into his covers he once more felt the silence and warmth and darkness of night.

· · ·

The following day, a crowd had gathered in the Plaza. The hot morning sun was oppressive; Max felt the headache of late-night revelations. Ha, he's had those before. Ideas, truth-like, swooping and flopping like bats in the night. At least I didn't write any letters, he smiled. That always gets me.

As he walked he saw a stray dog was licking itself on the street. (More with his habit of noting. He wasn't observant, his mom always reminded him. But he did note and note.) The white dog had fur matted with dirt. Flies buzzed around its head. A group of boys sat beside the dog on the curb. “¡Gringo!” one of the younger boys said, his mouth revealing his teeth. He wore a baseball cap and his grin was like half of a loop. Max looked with eyes wide like train terminals. “Your brother?” the boy asked pointing to the dog. He laughed. “Your brother? Your brother? Gringo.”

Max looked at the boy with the looping grin. He looked at that sad, sick dog. At once Max said: “Esa perrita? No, esa perrita es tu madre,” (That dog? That little dog is your mother.) All the boys laughed and Max smirked and walked, skipping lightly in his step.

At the plaza in the distance, men in white suits were holding trumpets. The metal shined in the sun. Max felt alive, and he cheered with the rest of them. With one remark, it was that simple he thought. He had pulled his soul from the quiet depths towards which it had receded. He knew he would go back home. The trumpets began and a bull charged into the street. Woman threw beer from the balconies above. Max did not see the face of the bull, but he imagined he imagined it was filled with shame.

Their own version of existence under the crushing weight of mass.

2008-02-29T12:52:00.000-08:00

In his novel Herzog, Saul Bellow creates a character more complex than the one I see, late at night, looking at myself.

This is to say a number of things – Not least, a certain narcissism on the part of this writer; but we can leave that for later. To say that Saul Bellow creates a character, is to note first that he is writer of a certain kind, of an older tradition that believes in literature as exploration of the self, or better, as exploration of the human soul. People in Bellow´s novels are not ideas, wielded like surgical tools (as in the thesis novel of Camus or Sartre), or figures to be pushed through the elegant twists of narrative (like the action novels of Hemingway). It is to say that Bellow is a novelist who believes in character. Also, it is to say that Bellow's characters, many-dimensional, rich, complex, enigmas – that they are just like us.

Thus, we begin with a vision of what it means to be human: freed from type. Freed from the predictable. Too diverse for ideology, too beautiful to be any one thing. Humans are not photographs, constituted of one moment, but portraits, layered with time. Montainge remarked that man is ondoyant et divers – wavelike and varying. To this end, when a Peruvian friends asked me the other day at the dinner table, “Estás triste?” I responded, “No. Yo Soy humano.”

This understanding of character and of humans is not evidently true. It is an expression of self-understanding, which came about in the 17^th century, with the growth of city life and a shift in literature.¹ What is modern about this vision is only that it is now a subject of discussion. Character and what it means to be human are no longer entirely synchronous.

“The novel of characters belongs entirely to the past.” Saul Bellow, in his Nobel address, quotes Alain Robbe-Grillet as stating. “It describes a period: that which marked the apogee of the individual.” Any account of the artistic enterprise in the past decades says a similar thing. We live in an age more modest, they say, as we no longer believe in the unlimited preciousness of the individual spirit; but also more ambitious. We can look beyond what is human, only human. To conduct a discussion like this, tracing the history of "the self " in literature – this is to dance with shadows in a dark land. But it must be noted, however briefly, that the very existence of a book entitled Loss of Self in Modern Literature is indicative of our times. Something has changed. What would Doestovesky have thought, I wonder, of a literature divorced from the human?

This is not a stodgy point or a pedantic one, mainly because books are not written in a vacuum. If one is to believe these critics when they talk about the decline of the self in literature, then one must also believe that a similar phenomenon coterminously is occuring with how we perceive ourselves. T.S. Eliot said that “the progress of an artist is a continual sef-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” and Joyce that “personality...finally refines iself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.” What does this indicate about the role of the individual consciousness in the modern world?

· · ·

To this question, Moses Herzog, Bellow´s protagonist, might begin, “Dewey tells us that mankind distrust its own nature and tries to find stability beyond or above, in religion or philosophy.” Then: “Come to the point. But what was the point?...Let the enemies of life stand down.”

Herzog is a well-regarded but failing professor; he is a failed but loving father; and – the axis on which the book turns – he has suddenly become a failed husband. His wife left him for his best friend. Herzog, amidst this royal screwing, finds that his academic thoughts provide no answers to cure him of rage, weakness, defeat. Much like the novel (which has almost no action) Herzog is set adrift within a relentless, vital, nervous stream of voices, theorems, clarifications, explanations. “There is too much of everything,” Bellow says in The Adventures of Augie March “...too much culture to keep track of, too many details, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent."

It is from this this mass of everything, that Bellow begins his exploration of character.

The book of has been criticized as solipsisitc. (Saul Bellow after all is a man of magisterial arrogance.) This is true, but it is also just the point. The novel´s narcissism and self-infatuation, its rage, its pity, is because Herzog is not just a book with character, but also a book of character; its purpose is as much to use humans, as it is to understand humans, the modern self and how it exists within an increasingly universal age. Herzog, that bundle of contradictions and jarring self-divisions, filled with marvelous qualities, vaguely comprehended, is a character, free from definition, set in a world equally labyrinthine and contradictory. But Herzog is also trying to understand character. Sitting at his desk, with his letters, Herzog is reading Herzog.

Bellow is not just a returning to a more humane literature. He is, with exploration of character, making a statement about how to survive as a human within a modern mass, filled with a nervous stream of voices, too many voices and too much indiscriminate authority.

· · ·

Herzog has read all the books; he has lived throughout Europe, Chicago “clumsy, stinking, tender, Chicago,” New York; he has rode on the subways, with their “subterranean roar of engines, voices, and feet in the galleries with lights like drops of yellow brother...” Herzog has confronted the mass. “You – you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest” he says to himself. To continue the duties of living, you find a place within this

...what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do …

We live in what must be considered a universal age. In 17^thcentury this concentration began, when feudalism declined and cities formed. Cultural historians tell us that all the complex pycho-historical developments resulting from the shift to cities – the emergence of the individual self, for example (the genre of autobiography began at this time) and the large-scale liberation of the mind from the “idiocy of village life” (Marx´s term) – all this can be summed by saying that “society,” as we understand it now, first appeared, simply because men were forced unto themselves, in great number, for the first time, seen, heard, smelled.

A society of the mass (a universal age) is now forming, as accumulation continues today, with no end in sight. We are lavishly poured together. Blogs, YouTube videos, city squares with throbbing crowds, libraries with too many books. Billions of collected insights from people I have never met, from places I will never travel. We all feel it. There is the prospect that our technology might indeed sum-total and index all human knowledge Ten millions genes have been identified, catalogued into a database. Craig Venter says that number will be doubled by the end of the year.

None of this is news to anyone. People, of course, have no obligation to be philosophers, and few read philosophy. But this collected mass can be felt in the air. Uncertainty, nihilism, massacre, cubism, democracy, emancipation, etiquette, analysis – these, once our highest ideas, are now everywhere, sensed atmospherically, like a foggy cloud floating among us.

In the January 7^th copy of Newsweek (of all places) the article “The New New Thing: Same as it Ever Was” tells us: “A wrinkle or two, sure, but another major breakthrough now seems unthinkable: every possibility has already been thought of, and acted upon.” We are an old society, with too many ideas.

Many have been lifted from the idiocy of village life, that is true; and we thank our forces of accumulation. But many, like this Herzog, are lost within the mass. Suffocated. Frightened and confused. Even Newsweek tells us that there is too many, too much and nothing new can come about. How might I keep up the burden of self-hood despite the excess of everything. Who I am among this mass? Where does a feeble voices fit, among this group, these thinkers, possessors of every wisdom, alive and dead, among this great authority, indiscriminate, teeming, swollen, vast. I am completely lost.

This is Saul Bellow´s modernity: the man within the mass. It is this condition that accounts for the excesses of Bellow´s engorged prose; it is this condition responsible for the anxiety, floating like a cloud in Seize the Day, that grips, ravagely, the heart of Herzog.

We see this in his letters. Letters he sends first to family, the newspaper, the government, then to the personal dead and finally to the famous dead: to Heidegger (“Dear Doktor Professor...I should like to know what you mean by the expression ´the fall into the quotidian.´ When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened”), to city officials (“The size of the rats in Panama City, when I passed through, truly astonished me...My suggestion is that you put birth-control chemicals in the baits”) and finally, to God (How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it.). Philip Roth wrote in his introduction, that in this book of a thousand delights, none is greater than these letters. This is true, they are delightful; but there is also something pitiful about it all: a grown man desperate to make sense, to explain, to clarify – but most of all, a man, like a small child, needing to be heard. He wants to be noticed, by someone, by anyone. He is lost within this mass. “As if anyone cared what he was doing here. As if it affected the fate of the world in any way.”

There is vanity to this feeling, of course -- How I must be special. It is to understand that particular bitterness of the modern man, the knowledge that he is not a genius. “Three thousand million human beings exist, each with some possessions, each a microcosmos, each infinitely precious, each with a peculiar treasure” – each telling Herzog that his own uniqueness is bunk. But if this is vain, then it is a human vanity. It is the fear that the individual is lost within an infinite greatness. We hear in Pascal´s remark that “the eternal silence of this infinite space frightens me,” feel it looking at the night stars; it is that fear which brings us to religion, or to cry, alone.

T.S. Eliot said, ninety years ago, that “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives.” The artist has to break into this order; art is a process of supervention; to murder and to create, they necessarily come together. This brings up the question of how to continue being a human – and what it means to be human – despite the mass. This is not, Herzog tells us, in our universal age, a question for only the artist.

· · ·

If Bellow´s novel does not give us an answer, then at the least, it hints at a solution: You´ve got to survive. You human, rich, complex -- you´ve got to continue being.

There is a story that is relevent. Saul Bellow tells of a doctor who wrote a letter to Freud. The doctor writes that he lost his nerve for professional medicine when he saw the body of a beautiful young woman on a dissecting table. Freud responds, saying that “of course” what the doctor had seen was his mother, lying there on the operating table.

To Bellow, this is intellectual fascism, directly offensive to a vision of character as freed from the predictable. Baudelairian, Nietzschean, Marxian, Psychoanalytic, etcetera, etcetera – these are the masterminds whose plans push the individual into the fixity of an idea. Grab onto a truth, no matter how limited, or how cold. Accept, for truth, the grand systems of a mastermind, coming down on the spirit like a butterfly net.

Bellow´s question to Freud is: “Was it not possible to experience beauty or pity without thinking of your mother?”

In an interview, Bellow said that Herzog is a man who “comes to realize that what he considered his intellectual ´privilege´ has proved to be another form of bondage...He needs to dismiss a great mass of irrelevancy and nonsense in order to survive” Before we accept authorities, with their love of apocalypse; before we accept the Ramonas in our lives, telling us to “renew the spirit through the flesh (a precious vessel in which the spirit rested), we must simply be human. Before we accept the Sandor Himmelstein that tells us that facts are nasty and

you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality – which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persist infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property – to historical necessity. And to truth. And trth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth.

Before we accept any of this higher eduction, we must first live. “Your extremists must survive...your immoralists also eat meat.”

Herzog has not succeeded as a professor and it important that he has failed, because Bellow´s point is that ideas must fail. We are too limber and too rich to be pushed into any one thought. Trying to clarify the streaming and mildly audible voices in the human mass, can never be done, sufficiently exact. One must accept ambiguity: the luxary of bewilderment is the central claim of character in a novel, and of a human freed from predictability.

“We love apocalypse too much...Excuse me, no, I´ve had all the monstrosity I want...No more of that for me – no, no! I am simply a human being.”

Accepting the inexact, the ambiguous, the richness of simply a human being is what allow us to survive in the mass, to cut out the irrelevancy, to enjoy simpler, more durable human goods. Hundred of letters later, Herzog lies in the hammock besides the Locust trees on his property. The sky has a blue intensity, he notices. The birds are loud. He has nothing more to say.

1. Before the period of Shakespeare and later of Montainge, the prevailing theory was that personality was the product of chemicals which ran though in the veins called humors: black choler, yellow choler, phlegm and blood. An overabundance of one or the other resulted in the melancholic person, the phlegmatic, the choleric or the sanguine. ↑

Barack Obama and the Importance of Change

2008-02-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

A year after his high moment in 2004, Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” fell into utter disgrace. His privatization scheme fell flat; the Iraq war proved to be unwinnable; Hurricane Katrina; Harriet Miers; and Bush´s poll numbers dropped lower than any president in history.

It turned out, Rove was appallingly inept at turning his visions into reality. And this illustrates a simple piece of political wisdom: getting into office and governing once you're there, are two different skills indeed. Dividing the country proved effective campaign strategy, but terrible governance principle. Karl Rove´s fall reminds us that a great politician is not always – and not often – a great leader.

- -

Hillary Clinton, by all consensus, is a great politician. She and her husband control the machinery of the Democratic party, and insiders from the outset believed her nomination to be inevitable. If the measure of a president were, as Clinton wishes us to believe, a matter of experience as a politician, then she deserves to win. And Barack Obama, by that standard, could have waited to run for presidency.

However, the case for Obama rests on the assumption that he could not wait to run. That his skills are not as a politician but as a leader and that this specific moment in American history, when the world and our role within it is shifting – “the urgency of now” as he likes to say – uniquely calls for a world leader, rather than world politician.

- -

For fifty years, the politics of the Baby Boom generation has defined our political discourse. From the creation of a capitalist, democratic world-order after World War II, to the advances of Civil liberties and the triumph of West in the Cold War, the post-WWII generation´s particular brand of optimism – that the evil can be and must be combated – has wielded force with great success.

But its fallout has fragmented our country. Our fervor and vitriol much less reflect the substance of our differences than the rigid moral framework that we define ourselves within. Bill Clinton was a moderate, but to many he was a pot smoker and draft dodger and a sexual deviant. He epitomized one side of cultural worldview that – incredibly – was formulated during the Vietnam war, and forty years later still defines the terms of our debate.

Hillary´s candidacy is situated firmly within this context. In foreign policy, she holds onto Cold War mantra that ideology is king and at a time when we need to integrate the emerging world she refuses to even talk to it. And domestically, few public figures derive so much of their legislative and political strength from the their base, and engender so much animosity from everyone else. Her world view harks back to the political divisiveness of the past. Even her last name exhorts us to believe in the strength of the status quo.

- -

It is true that Barack Obama´s personal atributes are impressive. Yes, he is probably the most intellectual candidate in the race. In a time when our executive branch has expand enormously in unitary power, and wielded that power to spy on its own citizens and torture detainees without habus corpus, I feel reassured by the prospect of man who has taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And as an orator, he is unmatched. Of course also, he is a black man who came from nothing and therefore, there is reason to believe he knows how to fight and knows how to survive.

But Clinton is smart and politically agile too.

Obama matters, instead, because he is the candidate best equipped to reach beyond the generation-old cultural divisions that have pitted us against the world and fragmented us at home. And it is now when we need this most.

This fact is at the center of Obama´s biography. His race is at once two stories of hope: hope that the black American has a place in our government and the hope that the immigrant who holds onto the dream that America is for everybody can succeed too. And this message is at the center for the narrative of his candidacy. While all other candidates have chosen fear – slandering, fear of immigrants, anger at the powers in Washington, fear of what might be – Barack Obama has chosen to run on hope. Clinton represents legacy; Obama, breaking barriers. One candidate asks us to look backwards, at the achievements of the past; the other asks us to look forwards, at the potential for the future.

- -

All my views, as they must, begin with the personal. A caterpillar looks at the world differently than a giraffe and so must I look at the world from my place within it. Above all, I am boy who is standing at the gates of his future, and seeing its challenges and its opportunities for the very first. Perhaps it is not a coincidence then that I believe in the message of hope. I am understanding Barack Obama´s relationship with the world in the same way that I understand my own.

But this is not meant to discredit: an adolescent believes in change, because he must. The demands of youth are once again the demands of America: we must recognize and reconsider our role within the world. At the heart of Obama´s importance is not only his message of hope, but that America, like an adolescent, is a juncture when it must hear it.

- -

We live in a critical time. A time when developing states struggle for cultural resilience against the forward march of modernity. It is in this context that China rises to power, and must choose – in what may be the great drama of the 21st century – whether to play within a rules-based capitalist and democratic system lead by the United States, or to subvert it. It is here that globalization promises to increase world interconnectedness and overturn cultural difference. And it is on this issue that America itself struggles with the role of faith against the dual forces of technology and science.

So what does he offer? To start, Obama´s foreign policy expresses willingness to forge a new role for America – his readiness to talk with outlier states is a move towards integrating gap states into a Western systems; his vow to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and the Al Queada cells in Pakistan, against the the wishes of the illegitimate and terrorist-harboring Musharaff, is in decisive contrast with Clinton cold-war politics of political allies; he opposed the Iraq war from the begining, with prescient accuracy.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, one of the most important foreign policy thinkers alive, maintains that “There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs...And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world."

But it goes beyond these issues. Obama´s experience is derived from the ground upwards, and for this, he has the potential to be the face of a new America. Barack Hussein Obama grew up in the largest Muslim nation in the world, so he can talk to a leader in the Middle East; He knows struggle, because he spent his life organizing impoverished communities and fighting for civil liberties; When he talks about global economic injustice, he thinks of his grandfather living in an African town without water.

And at home, his own struggle to find faith was “a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey.” He believes in belief, but he is not paralyzed by dogma. “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts” he says. And from this, you can glimpse at his world view.

By the accident of age, and by the strength of his character, he is not a member of the Baby Boomer generation. He does not lash out at enemies or fixate on hostiles or believe in a world where values are mutually exclusive and one must swing singularly “from naïve idealism to bitter realism.” At his core, he believes in a world system not defined by the ideological struggle between good and evil, but by that very struggle within oneself.

- -

Bill Clinton said voting for Barack Obama is a roll of the dice and it is. But voting for Hillary Clinton is a gamble too. It is the gamble that at this moment in which we can decide the course of American history, we ought to look towards the same solutions – the same political divisions between good and evil – for very different problems. A vote for Clinton is the gamble that we should look to the past; Obama is the gamble that must look to future.

Caramoor: A Made-up Story about the Decontextualized Life

2007-04-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

Lucie met me late that night. I was sitting on a shadow in front of the soda fountain. She ran out the door that night I guess, like a fighter coughing blood but swinging with too much spite in his stomach to have pain anymore, whose cells and brain and everything that develops with time stops controlling his swinging arms but that boiling spite in his stomach keeps them swinging. She was quivering, of course, the way girls do when their worlds collapse in a little bit. She sat on the shadow with me and she did not cry, and I loved her for that, because I knew she wanted to cry, but that she wanted silence even more. So we both sat there, daring God Almighty to make the first discordant sound, in the perfect, odorless darkness that was cleaning us from everything.

An hour passed, maybe less, before I mustered a "hello." She said "hello" back and we began to speak. She told me what she was doing sitting on a shadow with me late at night and I told her that I wake up in the morning and pray that no one notices that it is all smoke and mirrors imported from a distant land. She began to cry and so did I.

We slept on the grass next to the soda fountain and the following morning we waked to the sun overhead. We were laying together and she smiled when she saw that my eyes were on hers. The sun was beating down on my face, so I decided to lay for a while longer. I did not love her, at least not the way I loved other pretty girls that I met. Her breath smelled sweet like perfume, and after a while, I was no longer aware that my own breathing was gently coaxing her placid head, which laid on my upper chest, up and down, like a buoy that floated past the breaking coast. In fact, after a while, I was no longer aware of anything, but the beating Now of the sun. The hands of my watch stopped moving, so thoughtlessly I lay there, because the earth stopped rotating, and there is not much to think about during the wakeful sleep when Time takes a break from the crashing waves of the beach to watch the buoy head of girl, whom I did not love, but lived a very long while with her head on my chest.

♦ ♦ ♦

The estate was a series of boxes that materialized in layers like a magnificent work of paper-maché. The whole edifice wrapped itself around a great courtyard at the center of the estate. Flowers filled the courtyard, and chirping birds swooped down on the branches like tears.

Within the grand room of the mansion, a potpourri odor of chamomile, lavender and rose petal drifted around erotically. It was traditional of European royalty to have a great doorway in their grand rooms that did not open. The functional door was down a humble corridor, meant to deceive vagabonds and thieves, and to keep out the poor. The imported glass next to the door that did not open had ripples in it and iron bars on the outside, and through it, the outer world seemed blurred from focus. From her seat at the center of the room, Lucie Rosen fogged up the windows with pallid eyes. The eyes were translucent and empty, but, you wondered if crouching beneath the white vacuum of the eyes there was some raging compulsion banging to escape.

Lucie used to think herself quite lucky that the great door did not open, and that she was inside of it looking out at the workers in the garden, blurred by imported glass, with snow drifting down on their shoulders and steam rising from their necks, not the other way around. She was not sure she thought herself to be so lucky anymore. The potpourri scents that wafted from floor to ceiling, lingering each like purring felines, seemed to Lucie to carry the muted reminder of tragedy. Maybe it was that the herbs were uprooted and destroyed for the sake of their smell and that from the moment the aromas were released, they were quietly cascading towards their own deaths. Perhaps it was that all things beautiful are tragic, especially on dark February days, such as today, at the mansion.

It was the type of house that seemed to be owned by a man with a white coat that he takes off and drapes over a wicker chair, that he then reclines on with his feet up and a cigar in his hands, staring at windows barred with iron but detailed with the same egg-white as his evening coat. It was the type of house that seemed to be owned by a very wealthy man who was trying to fool himself and everyone else into believing that he lived at a Mediterranean villa, though he knew that he did not breath Mediterranean saltwater, but the ascensent fumes of poverty that were just about now making smoky emanations from New York City, an hour north to Caramoor, during the heart of the Great Depression in 1931. It was the type of house though, that, if the sun was perched high enough in the sky to reflect mirages off its barred, clinquant windows, a passerby might just think old Walter Rosen was not a businessman, who was a slaved to utility and to the invisible, capitalist hand of consumer misfortune, but an aristocrat well groomed at uselessness. The slouching passerby might just believe that the man with the European white evening coat had silence in his brain, which was warm like the chamomile and lavender and rose petals that filled the grand room, and that Caramoor itself, built on the soggy soil of depression, was a 15^th-century villa in Tuscany.

A murmur in the room caught Lucie Rosen's attention. Two well-dressed caterers brought out on their shoulders a pink-frosted cake. The two caterers were beaming at Lucie and she knew that they wanted her to get up from her chair and walk to the table, which, by now, was lined with smiling guests who looked quite foolish to her as they grinned and clapped and started that song people sing on this occasion. The guests motion for Lucie to get up from her chair. Lucie, though, was content to remain at her seat. The room itself, and thousands of cakes all over the world, exhorted her to get up and walk to the table, but she just looked with those pallid eyes at the window next to the door that would not open.

Those translucent eyes seemed locked on the window, as guests began to laugh and get up from their seats to get Lucie to celebrate with them. A great force pushed her through life, she fancied. In her head she saw her life one stumbled, inebriated step after another, over the differences without distinction, victories and defeats that did not mean a damn thing, that were scattered about the hall of her days, like mirrors reflecting against each other, coming together in a grand illusion of any choice at all, but the greatness still forcing her to walk in the direction of the cake which she did not even bake, and did nothing at all to deserve, except exist for another year.

It was Lucie’s birthday and it was for this reason that the guests were at Caramoor this particular February day. Exactly seventeen years ago, Lucie's mother was sweating on Pope Urban XIII's bed frame, which was imported from Rome. She was groaning on sheets once owned by the Medici family of Florence. This family was known to kill its enemies with rose petals, laced with poison. The chemicals blinded and deafened the enemies, and made them completely without capacity to do anything but whimper as their hearts slowed and their lungs filled with the noxious scents of Valentines Day – which, as it so happened, was Lucie Rosen's birthday, seventeen years ago, exactly today. Lucie got up from the chair and flashed a false grin. The partygoers began to whoop and shout, and cut into the cake.

Maybe it was the audacity of the dreary weather, or just that birthdays have a way of making the cheerful melancholy, but when Lucie walked to the table she hung her head. She thought back to the day she realized what death meant. She cried when she was eight years old at eleven o'clock, stumbling downstairs, because she began for the first time understand that impossible abyss of the future, or, so to speak, that impossible ecstasy of nothingness that was creeping forth irrevocably. She wept with her mother, hoping deep down that from her mother's arms would sprout a sturdy tree, nourished from the salty tears of sadness, that would hoist her from the unknowing. They call the tree that Lucie hoped to grasp onto the Tree of Knowledge. They tell us to hate Eve for touching it. If Eve's sin was knowing, then Lucie's was lifelessness and she learned to hope for that tree.

You see, there is no Eden outside of Caramoor. There is no direction to travel in the search for salvation, in the grand room of the mansion. It is as though the compass dial was finally placed on top of the point it had always reached towards. Without the gyrating struggle, what becomes of the compass? The answer, we can suspect, is the same as to the question about Lucie Rosen, the girl born in the architectural metaphor for heaven. Perhaps, to the privileged few, utopia is not on a map -- it is getting up in the morning without the pangs of emptiness.

So Lucie sat at the table and ate the food with the guests, and remained quiet. It was very lonely, though, the walk from her chair to the table, towards a cake that she did not deserve, to celebrate the passage of time.

“The marvelous thing," Lucie's father boasted, "is that there is not a plank of wood in this house that was not painted and carved by another person, a master from another place, and imported by me personally"

"Father, they know the house -- they read the papers"

"Tremendous, just fabulous, Walter. You've really outdone yourself," said a guest, with a cigar in his mouth.

“Oh Walter, if only we could all be so lucky" said another.

“To take from others?”

“Of course. To not have to be ourselves. To think the thoughts of others."

“Our music room is imported from Toledo. We have a 19^th-century green-jade screen from China. You've heard of Donatello and Della Robbia, I am quite sure."

“I think I'd like to be a poet, or a king from Europe. Yes, I simply adore art."

“In our bedroom, we sleep on the frame once owned by Pope Urban VIII" said Walter Rosen, as he sipped his cocktail and cooed in the ears of his guests. He had spent his life searching out all the artistic styles and architectural predilections of every civilized age, and gathered them together in Caramoor, the name he gave to the house that had successfully claimed every idea from every age except its own.

"Oh, and what is that?" said a rich woman with sexual lips, who attended parties like this one at Caramoor, this particularly dreary February day. She pointed above one of the gated doors. Her legs were smooth and severe like rivers stones.

"That is a model of the ship used by Francisco Pizarro when he traveled to the New World. Pizarro conquered Peru, you know. Do you see that sword above the ship?

"Yes"

“That sword is the very one used by Pizarro's brother to defeat the Incans. One-hundred-and-sixty-seven soldiers ragtag soldiers defeated eighty thousand Incan worriers. 1542 was the year, if I remember correctly. It was the clash of civilizations. The Incans were using heathen weapons, piteous, that's the word. The emperor, the fellow Allahalop, you say, thought Pizarro was a god, a demon, I don't know. Pizarro destroyed that army that day; his nation destroyed all their armies other days. Isn't that something. Splendid, but terrible – like everything these days. The roses are beautiful, but they die for their scents," he said, motioning to the herb sachet in the corner, with chamomile, lavender and rose petal.

"Walter, that is tragedy." she said from her throat, the tone as affected as the sentiment and she touched his knee.

"I weep and laugh, darling. The Incans were believed to be the fiercest fighters, of all the Indians. Not one of Pizarro's men died."

Five of the sixty-or-so guests that circled the Grand Room sat on a plush couch with Walter Rosen, far away from Lucie, his daughter, who was sitting on a chair at the center of the room. He seemed to need pleasure more and more as he aged. He whetted his voracious appetite with artwork and women, hungry always for more, because the need became greater, not lesser, the more beautiful things he brought to Caramoor . He looked over to Lucie, grinning, like he was watching a horror picture, and he knew the happy ending and that the whole thing was scripted anyways. Sex and death always seemed to go together. The massacre of the Incans seemed to get her, he mused. Sex is for creating life, surely, but it is also for destroying life. The good destruction, though, with pleasure. You are with the person and it does not matter anymore who she is. She is just now and again and again but never what came before, only what is coming now, now and more, at that moment now always, never back where the person has lived life and formulated thoughts and expectations and sowed seeds. The past dies and pleasure lives. Sex and death tasted like the alcoholic mix in his cocktail, which, at eleven o'clock, was coursing thickly through his body, making him a bit dizzy. He might as well have sex before death, he thought, as he touched the rich woman's shoulder, and called for more liquor. It does not work the other way around.

She was like one of the paintings he bought in Italy, this empty, this rich bitch. He knew too much about his wife to love her the way he loved the art he collected. You would cry for the Incans if you knew too much about them. Yes, he thought, if you knew the Incans, then Pizarro's beauty would be muddled. Splendid and terrible were the same; they were both beautiful because you can put them in a case with velvet and glass. Yes, there were always new women hungry for money, death and beauty that he could import, like the relief by Donatello behind him.

Walter whispered something in the woman's ear, and got he up from his seat. She remained on the couch, and turned her crimsoned cheek and curled her finger muscles.

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incans who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

That night, Lucie she could not sleep. She could rarely sleep at night. Instead, she would toss and turn, frustrated that she could not sleep. The door out of Caramoor or the book with knowledge or the road, the branches on that Tree of Knowing that we hate Eve for grabbing, seemed to whisper with their design and existence a sultry promise in her ears that there is something better, out of the grand room soaked with chamomile, lavender and rose petals. And that if she could get there, she would not have to look anymore into the mirrors that have faded with time, or the reliefs or paintings or anything else for a sense of who she was. And it is nice, late at night, to believe that this is true.

♦ ♦ ♦

So Lucie and I traveled around in her father's black Cadillac without anywhere in particular to go. From the road a rainbow effluvium rose into the air, from the dead, towards the sky and heaven. The road made sultry promises in our ear, so we drove around for days, but only at night, because it is so dark on the road late at night, and the winding of the pavement and the tall trees that obscure the vista, that we could not see anything but the divider lines that seem to flick on forever. I learned that if I stared at the divider lines, their forever flickering rocked me to sleep like a lullaby. I liked to watch the line because I realized that if I am hypnotized it does not matter that I was afraid that we were never going to stop searching in the black Cadillac on the road late at night for that somewhere to finally sleep. I wished to be off the road, in the standstill of time. But instead the headlights beat against the darkness, pointing forward. They pointed in the direction of expectation, and that hope for the Tree that Lucie and I wanted so much, that we assumed was waiting just a little farther down the line, I am told, is the American dream.

Six days after we cried on the shadow, Lucie returned to Caramoor. Her mother and father kissed and hugged her, and her maids prepared the bath. I came to Caramoor with her, but Walter could not see me because his senses had atrophied and fattened. The adipose tissue softened his soul like it softened his thighs. Lucie took the bath, and ate her supper, and said goodbye to me. She kissed me on the cheek and whispered in earnest that she was an Emperor of a Paper-Maché kingdom built a long time ago by some dead guy and that her palace was crumbling. I nodded, knowing that she was wrong, for it was not crumbling, but that it never was anything more than glue and paper and lies in the first place. So I left the mansion and disappeared on the elegiac road and she woke up from the dream.

Crisis At Home and Abroad

2007-04-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

The American people face the dilemma of the man whose willful apathy allowed him to be robbed of his wealth and status by those closest to him. The dispirited man could choose, as he likely might, to ignore the theft of his identity. He could elect to deny the character inefficiencies that allowed his cherished possessions to be purloined so effortlessly, from beneath his trusting nose. Otherwise, he could admit that something valuable was lost and that he must, once again, try to regain it.

We the American people must make this choice – to concede that the checks and balances of our little-r republican government are eroding, that bits of our democracy and freedom were taken from us with nary a muted objection, and that we must now fight to regain them. Or, we can blithely ignore the situation, until we arrive finally at the constitutional impasse towards which we have been heading, and the principles that define our nation become completely up for grab by those in power.

Nearly everyone – the American electorate, its representative organ in Washington, our military and diplomatic experts, world opinion and the Iraq government itself – resoundingly opposes our presence in Iraq. If one man can lead a nation to war, despite its citizens and legislature, in order to gratify his own ideological predilections and consolidate his own executive power, then do we have a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word? The rift between public opinion and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years. However, as the ruckus over Bush’s prime-time “surge” reveals, we have not admitted to this democracy deficit, which accompanies, of course, our budget and trade deficits. Instead, we have buried our heads, like the robbed man in denial, within the minutia of logistics. While we debate troop levels, the political fundamentals of our nation crumble. The question is not, How did we lose the war? It is, Why have we waged the war, and at what costs in American treasure, blood and constitutional integrity?

The American struggle in Iraq is less about oil or democracy or terrorism than it is about power. That Bush wanted to invade Iraq before September 11^th is a fact beyond dispute. Iraq is but the amphitheater of chaos and blood, not the play itself. The war is about the power of the president as he consolidates his unitary control over the American state. The war is the struggle between republic and empire.

History has proven that the two – republic and empire – cannot not be simultaneously sustained. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and destroyed Rome’s republic in order to preserve the empire. Great Britain withdrew forces from around the world in order to renounce its empire and salvage the democracy. Like its predecessors, the United States must make the choice in the tug-of-war between the primacy of its democratic heritage and that of its imperial ambitions.

Empire is defined as a militarized state with a global, hegemonic agenda. The Golden Age of the American Empire thus began, appropriately, with war. World War II taught America the value of a sustained military establishment – importantly, not just as a tool for expansion abroad, but as a means for creating an efficient and obedient society at home. Indeed, the American military establishment did as much to save Europe from the hell of fascism as it did to lift the United States from the hell of poverty. If the New Deal “primed the pump” by providing civil service jobs, then the military economy did the same, with the added bonus of loyalty and national obedience – jobs were supplied to the unemployed from bullet metallurgy to detailing the planes that the government hoped, one day, the workers would die in fighting for their nation. Exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki described the process of predicating the national economy on the national military establishment as “military Keynesianism,” a tactic which, simultaneously, revitalized both the American and German economies, inaugurating the empire of the former, and collapsing the empire of the later.

The short-term economic gains of a militarized economy are obvious, but the price, paid with our national character of boisterous democracy and grassroots dissent, is insidious. Since its inauguration at the onset of WWII, the behemoth weapons industry – the industry of commercialized violence – has been entrenching itself into the American economy like an octopus, fed by nearly a trillion dollars a year, more than one and a half times all the other countries in the world combined, and smothering our republican virtue. The cephalopodan tentacles reach not just to the thousands of good American families who depend on the manufacturing of weapons for their daily sustenance, but, increasingly, to the capitalists and corporate profiteers, whose businesses depend on the exportation of mechanized carnage. Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in the American state, during his 1961 presidential farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower knew that militarism and democracy do not pair well. The arms race has the momentum of provocative rhetoric and the inertia of national loyalty, so it stifles debate. The race depends on a constant state of emergency, and thus plays out most effectively in a simplified world of allies and enemies, terrorists (or fascists or communist) and freedom-lovers. The establishment sustains itself when national prosperity is intertwined with the specter of war, and no one wants to stop priming the pump.

Arming for prospective war tends helps the economy, but it also tends to lead to real war. America has found out that bombs have a peculiar tendency of being dropped. And it is during times of war, when our nation is most vulnerable to evildoers abroad, that the president can arrogate the rights and power of a free state – unregulated speech, open elections, due process of the law – for himself in the name of national security. Thus there exists a feedback loop between the powers of the executive and the size of the nation’s military: the greater the American war machine, then the stronger the executive and the quieter the masses. James Madison warns us:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. In war…the discretionary power of the executive is extended…and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…

In this way, in every way, constitutional crisis at home is inextricably related to military crisis abroad. Take, for example, Richard Nixon whose unlawful expansion of executive might came at a time when the United States was floundering in a likewise debacle of imperial nation-building, Vietnam. His power abuses at home were utterly linked to his power abuses abroad. And so reveals the rift between democracy and empire. Nixon wiretapped Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the pentagon papers; he broke into Watergate to monitor war critics; and he compiled an “enemies list” cataloguing American treason, as troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and bombs were piercing Cambodian skies. Indeed, the overall atmosphere of mistrust and presidential paranoia was borne out of fledgling foreign intervention. The expansion of empire demanded the reduction of democracy.

Nixon's dual crisis abroad and at home is eerily similar to our situation today. In the fall of 2002 the administration announced its National Security Strategy of global dominance: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” The Bush Doctrine equates to the declaration of unquestioned supremacy. Implied is that no country can ever confront the unipolar power of the United States and, if it does, we retain the right to invade at any moment. Our intentions are so brazen and disrespectful to the premise of a global order that, surely, imperialism will be one of the profound legacies of the Iraq war.

To enforce the Grand Strategy of preventative imperialism, Bush has used executive power as a birthright. Bush's expansion of our military might thus is intimately connected to his expansion of his executive might. He has pitted our empire against our democracy.The enraging narrative of his affront to American democracy -- aggrandizing the powers of the president in war time at the expense of the powers a free state in peace time -- is both over-repeated and undertold. To the minority that cares about the dire state of our union, it has been heard too many times. But the audible silence of our national media and citizenry suggest that the story, both repetitious and unheard, bares repeating: Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were not weapons; he said that Al Qeada was implicated in 9/11, but it was not; he officially sanctioned torture at prison cells like Abu Ghraib and Uzbekistan; he has detained “enemy combatants” without habeas corpus; he used the National Security Agency to “data mine” American speech, violating an explicit congressional law banning such an action and fourth amendment restrictions of search and seizure; and he has penned secret memos about the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of soldiers that, if accepted, would fundamental alter the structure of American government. "We're at war," the president maintains. "We must protect America's secrets." The premise of sustained war has allowed the president, in the name of national security, to appropriate the tools of tyranny.

Republic is not feasible with an empire abroad and a congress, corrupted and complacent, that has forfeited its right to regulate the president, whose unilateral aggression, domestic spying, arbitrary violation of federal law and unregulated torture are hallmarks of dictatorship. However, empire itself is no longer feasible – and self evidently not moral. In a post-imperial world, with heightened sensitivity to local autonomy, the United States cannot hope to absorb other nations into its dominion. Also, in a post-nuclear age, it cannot hope to defeat its rival nation-states on the battlefield. We cannot be Rome, in a world so very different. And by reenacting, or, one might say, re-reenactment, the follies of this delusion of imperial grandeur, we pay too high a price with the fabric of our national republic. We should wake from the soporific of empire and resolve to fight to gain back what we have lost, like the robbed man who has dried his tears, stood up from the curve and stares into the sun.

The Human Connection in For Whom the Bell Tolls

2007-02-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

There is something mildly perverse about love at first sight. In one glance, the whole of human experience must be felt. In one glance, the lovers must see parts of themselves unfulfilled, fragments of their future that must be righted, bits of their world that need to be completed. First-sight love – extolled by poets as an emotional apotheosis, denounced by cynics as rubbish, idealized by teenage girls with bubblegum mouths and cordless phones as an expectation – depends, in this way, on the utter destruction of time. It depends on life lived in the instantaneity of “now.” Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway, saw the young Maria at his guerrillero camp over a pot of stew and immediately felt “a thickness in his throat” (22). Their love jammed the cogs of time into a standstill, allowing Roberto the Inglés and Maria the Rabbit, like the first-sight lovers and their furtive glance, to live the entirely of their lives in the few hours of togetherness they had. Their passionate love scenes chart this gradual cessation of time, reinforcing Hemingway’s belief that the most intense reality is of the singular moments when man feels a brotherhood with the entirety of the human race.

Robert Jordan is a dislocated journeyer. Fighting as a Republican in the Spanish Civil War, he witnesses collective atrocities against humankind, nonpartisan and nondiscriminant. “A Spaniard was only really loyal to his village in the end” and Jordan “never felt like a foreigner” (135) in Spain. Like the Spaniards, he was fighting a war not of ideals or hopes or dreams or fears, but of villages, man against man, boy against boy. He questions the moral foundation of his actions and realizes it does not exist. “What were his politics then? He had none now, he told himself.” Instead, unhinged from moral righteousness, he is left with nothing but the mechanical march of duty. “You’re a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker” (17). Without any meaning to call his own, Robert Jordan, at first, sees the transition between his life and his death as nothing but patriotic decoration,

“And you have no fear?”

“Not to die,” he said truly.

“But other fears?”

“Only of not doing my duty as I should” (91)

Ordered to blow up a bridge despite staggering odds and questionable necessity, Jordan shows a martyr’s willingness to the fulfillment of a task doomed for failure.

However, in the wake of this disillusionment, with the loss of purpose and the encroachment of cynicism, Jordan finds a love, deep and sincere, that salvages his hope and redeems his idealism. Maria gives him reason to fight. The burning strength of this human connection manifests itself throughout the course of three days in four passion-filled love-makings.

The fundamental assumption of time is that that it progresses steadily and forever. Like Jordan’s blind march towards fulfillment of duty, life hollowed of any meaning travels unwavingly towards death. Life dies a little with each passing second. However, Jordan’s love of Maria disrupts this assumption, knocking life off its morbid course of gradual, disgusting decay. Their love questions the progression of time. In the carnal repeat-rhythms of love-making, Jordan can surpass physical reality, hanging on “to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere” staying “all times always to unknowing nowhere.” At the height of sexual satisfaction, “up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all time having stopped,” they feel, “the earth move out and away from under them” (159) and their surroundings dissolve away. The passion of their love telescopes inward the meaning of time, suspending – if only momentarily – the systematic, tick-tocking advancement of the world’s clocks and the dreary nock-on-wood existence of anything around them. This allows them to enjoy each other instantly for an entire eternity. “There was no such thing as a shortness of time” (164). Gazing at his watch with Maria by his side, Jordan found “he could almost check its motion with his concentration.” The hand on his wristwatch moved “slowly, almost imperceptibly” and “he held Maria close now to slow it” (378). Because circumstances – like shattering love – bring fulfillment, and not time itself, “It is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years” (166) and to enjoy the whole of the world in only one moment: “You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now…There is only now and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion” (169). To Robert Jordan, life can be lived untethered from time, for reality only exists in the instant and no truth is beyond the moment.

This transcendence of linearity reinforces Hemmingway’s cosmic perspectives about a world enjoyed through the senses. Sexual fulfillment is an intensely temporal experience: the feeling of the other’s skins, the fragrances of her hair, the movements of her body. It is about experiencing physical pleasure in the world of the present, not intellectual postulation in the world of the future. Life is to be felt and enjoyed, not abstractly speculated. Robert Jordan avoids the “luxury of going into the unreality” (342) because life is to be experience in the now. Life is in the “tongue-numbing, brain warming” cup of absinthe that brings one back to “all the old evenings in cafés” (51). Life is in the beauty of the “the curve of her throat” and the “fluttering of lashes of the eyes tight closed against the sun” that “all his life he would remember” (159). Life is in the rabbit stew cooked by Rafael the useless gypsy, in the smell of crushed heather and the touch of loved one: “He held her feeling she was all of life and it was true” (264). Life is not meant to be skewered and dissected; it is meant to be enjoyed in the perpetual now of the lover’s embrace.

Sexual embracement – needed for the survival of the species and the regeneration of the individual – thus, is ultimately universal, and, lying on nature’s simultaneous birthplace and cemetery, the forest floor, Robert and Maria unite with all species of all time when they make love. “Now in the night he lay and waited for the girl to come to him…The trunks of the pines projected from the snow that covered all the ground, and he lay in the robe feeling the suppleness of the bed under him” (258). Their union with each other embodies their union with the world. When Jordan holds Maria, he is coalescing mankind’s natural heritage and inevitable destination with its current reality. He is embracing Mother Nature manifest, Maria, whose skin is “tawny as wheat” (158), breasts “like two small hills that rise out of the long plain” (341) and hair “rippling” like “a grain field in the winds on a hillside” (23). Like the Spanish countryside that was pillaged by planes that “move like mechanized doom” (87), Maria’s body too was traumatically violated. However, like the redemption of Jordan and the salvation of the beautiful serenity of natural Spain, if Maria is “loved” then “it would take [the destruction] away” (73).

Love is a force of salvation, a catharsis for the wronged Maria and an awakening for the hollowed Robert Jordan. In their love, they unite two disparate bodies under the fundamental commonness of humanity. They unite under the forces of brotherhood. As Anselmo, the old, wise guerrilla fighter waits in the snow, the reader can hear the fascist soldiers too waiting cold in the snow. Anselmo remarks “The fascists are warm…and they are comfortable, and tomorrow night we will kill them” (192). Political distinctions – fascist, communist, Republican, anarchist – are spurious categorization of humanity because they undermine the fundamental sameness of all people. Robert Jordan’s enemies are neither gods nor beasts, they are humans, beautiful, sensitive and flawed. “How could the Inglés say that the shooting of a man is like the shooting of an animal?...[T]o shoot a man gives a feeling as though one had struck one’s own brother” (442). This human connection is achieved gloriously and idealistically in the spiritual connection of Maria and Robert Jordan. Maria remarks, “Afterwards we will be as one animal of the forest and be so close that neither one can tell that one of us is one and not the other. Can you not feel my heart be your heart?” (262). Likewise, Robert reminds her, “‘I am with thee…I am with thee now. We are both there.’” When Jordan sacrifices himself for the safety of his hillside brethren, he is really sacrificing himself for the safety of all mankind everywhere; When Maria unites with Robert Jordan, she is uniting with all mankind everywhere.

Conversely, cowardice is not the individual’s abandonment of himself (“‘It is not cowardly to know what is foolish’” (54) says Pablo), it is the individual’s abandonment of his brother. Of Finito, Pilar’s past bullfighter lover, she remarked, “Never have I seen a man with more fear before the bullfight and never have seen a man with less fear in the ring” (185). Bravery is not lack of fear; it is a solemn willingness to conquer fear and to defeat the wild, savage bulls within. After the second night with Maria, Robert Jordan waked and felt the “long light body” of Maria “comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulder and of feet, making an alliance against death with him” (264). They need not fear death, because they are spiritually bound to protect each other with the depth and intensity that they would protect themselves: Robert “kissed her once” and then “pulled the pistol lanyard up and put the pistol on his side where he could reach it handily” (264).

The novel begins with Robert Jordan lying “flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest” (1) and it ends with his “heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest” (471). At the beginning of the novel, Jordan is united with nature. At the end, the same is true, but his heart, beating against the soft needle-strewn ground, is awoken. Born cold and calculating, he spent “all [his] life” in the three days on the hill eating rabbit stew, with Anselmo as his “oldest friend” and Maria as his “true love” and “wife” (381) and he dies with a heart, wild and alive.

Robert Jordan, fulfilled and purposive in his final hours, at the height of sexual experience, realizes that he will live always in the instant of Maria’s love, “They were having now and before and now, and above all now, there is no other now, but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now” (379). As he waits to die on the pine-strewn forest floor he finds solace in the life he lived that day in the darkness from dusk to dawn, a string of singular, eternal moments. He is “completely integrated” (471) and never alone, always alive, and forever united with the whole of mankind.

Concept of the "Home" in Beloved by Toni Morrison

2007-02-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

- Bob Dylan

Feminists have discussed the concept of the home as the earliest school of social justice, a place where people foment their egalitarian values. Communitarians, on the other hand, have envisaged the home as the realm of personal solace where people equip themselves with the skills to belong as prosperous members of a society. Both understandings emphasize the role of the home as a repository for the hopes and dreams and fears of its inhabitants. The home is less a physical edifice than it is a spiritual one. It is constructed not with wood and tools and concrete, but with the sum of the emotional strength of its indwellers; it is not a geographical location, but a “space” for the mind and body to gather strength, rest and formulate strategy. In this way, “home” is not a utopian or dystopian “destination,” but a very literal extension of the self – a personal history that catalogues the triumphs and follies and hate and love of the past. Without a home, one is stranded without a past, and – with no history – without an identity.

Unlike the thousands of immigrants who have traveled to America to forge for themselves a new home, imported Africans were forced into America as property. They were stripped from a livable past and shackled into a foreign, unlivable future. The story of the American slave is thus the story of the African’s search for a home in a hateful land. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, each generation hopes to find a better home despite a malignant world: Sethe’s mother traveled from the slave ship to the plantation, Sethe from the plantation to Cincinnati, Beloved from Cincinnati to death, and Denver from a strange, haunted land of ghosts and despair to her community at large. To Morrison, the various “spaces” of the Sethe’s life constitute a broader understanding of her “self.” Each of the three understandings of what a home might be, as developed in Beloved – the Sweet Home plantation, the Clearing and 124 Bluestone Cincinnati – fails because it prevents the dynamic interaction of all the elements of life: one’s spaces of interaction, one’s past, present and hopeful future. Through the concept of the home, Morrison shows that if we estrange one element of our lives, then we have estranged our identity from ourselves.

Life is not a state, but a process. Beloved’s role in Morrison’s book, as a manifestation of a slave history and a personal history, underscores the fluidity of life: she transitions from a corporal child, to a ghost child and then to a resurrected spirit. The narrative structure of the book, too, emphasizes the seamless transitions each character must make to create a life: mentally hurdling from present, to a scarring past and then to a prospective future. Morrison concludes, at a fundamental level, that lives are not sustainable in isolation from these elements: past, present and future.

The home, likewise, is not self-sufficient. It depends on the lively interface between all the “spaces” of one’s existence – the past, present, the future, but also race, violence, trauma, the surrounding community, and love. Just as the characters and narrative transition from one state to another, the homes in Beloved too phase-shift. And these shifts happen with moments of apocalypse. When Sethe kills her own child, she destroys the open, boisterous role 124 Bluestone played in facilitating the interaction between all the elements of her life. The walls of the house literally stymie her interaction with the community, and thus metaphorically serve as boundary between her and her diverse, multifarious life. Three models of the home were developed in Beloved: the Sweet Home slave plantation, the Clearing and 124 Bluestone.

§ Sweet Home. The devastation wrought by slavery is the destruction of the human identity. As a slave, Paul D was stripped of his manhood: the Schoolteacher put a bit in his mouth, preventing him from engaging in the most human process of spoken word. The chickens on the farm retained more identity than he did, with a bit in his mouth, domesticated and emasculated, “‘Mister [the chicken], he looked so…free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher” (72). Sweet Home – whose name rings with dark irony – serves to demonstrate the impossibility of creating a home within institutionalized slavery. The home concept is the intersection of one’s life with one’s identity. Without an identity, slaves cannot have a home. When Sethe asked the dying Mrs. Garner what the word “characteristics” mean she answered, “A characteristic is a feature. A thing that’s natural to a thing” (195). Sweet Home robbed slaves of their identities because it shifted the process of determining what is “natural” from the individual to the institution. It destroyed the dynamic of discovering oneself. Schoolteacher imposes a definition of self onto Sethe: “‘No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right’” (191). When the students abused Sethe they alternatively defined her as an animal – “And they took my milk” (17) – and an object of human sexuality. Her identity was theirs to determine.

These insidious tendencies of Schoolteacher’s “hard” slavery were latent in Mr. Garner’s “soft” slavery; for all slavery robs the man of the his home because all slavery dynamics destroy his identity, making him a stranger to his past and future and outside community. Halle said about slavery that “It don’t matter Sethe. What they say is the same. Loud or Soft” (195). Sethe tried to “love the work she did, to take the ugly out of it” (22), but ultimately she could not create a home because she could not own her surroundings in a meaningful sense. Though they were treated with a level of kindness under Garner’s authority, the slaves were entirely unable to design their own future or community: “One step off that ground and [the slaves] were trespassers among the human race” (125). Morrison’s point about the interconnectedness of the home – interweaving all elements of one’s life – is violated by an institution that depends on the systematic isolation of the individual from his “self” and from others. “Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyways to show him that definitions belong to the definers – not the defined” (190). On a plantation, the human identity is up for grab; and the home is sold to the highest bidder.

§ The Clearing. For Sethe, the most important freedom enjoyed in the world beyond Sweet Home was that “you could love anything you choose – not to need permission for desire” (162). In the Clearing, described as a “wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to the deer,” (87) Baby Suggs, full of vigor and emotional strength, taught the black residents to exercise their freedom to love what they chose. She preached to them, first and most importantly, to love themselves. “‘[I]n this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard…Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them” (88). In the Clearing, the ex-slaves were told to renounce their past in order to salvage their futures: “She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more…She told them that the only grace the could have was the grace they could imagine.” Because, “if they could not see it, they could not have it” (88). This is the message of owning the future, and of owning the self. If the plantation functioned as a machine to erode the slave’s identity, the Clearing functioned to erect once more that identity.

However, the Clearing failed because it did not account for the world “yonder”; it isolated the individual within his own heart, denying him the interconnected world he lived within. Because of this, when Sethe visits to contemplate her newfound life with the mysterious girl and Paul D, she is blinded by her own future, and so caught up with herself that she mistakes the strangling hands of Beloved for the healing hands of Baby Suggs: “Sethe was actually more surprised than frightened to find that she was being strangled” (96). If Sweet Home estranges the individual from himself, then Clearing estranges the individual within himself. Its message is narcissistic. The townspeople begin to resent it: “Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy? Why is she and hers always the center of things?” (137). Baby Suggs too realizes that imagining love alone cannot create it. “Baby Suggs, holy, believed she had lied. There was no grace – imaginary or real – and no sunlit dance in the Clearing could change that” (89).

§ 124 Bluestone Road. Unlike Sweet Home and the Clearing, the present home of Sethe, 124 Bluestone Road, changes dynamically, and is personified at various points in the book as “spiteful” (3), “loud” (169) and “quiet” (239). The shifting state of the home underlines the shifting emotional identities of its inhabitants. At first, for twenty eight days after she first moved there, 124 played a lively, boisterous role in the community. In the “cheerful, buzzing house” Baby Suggs, holy, had “loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed.” It was a place to relay messages from one person to another, “for whoever needed them was sure to stop in one day soon” (87). Then, however, ironically, the openness of the home became what allowed the Four Horsemen of the past to stomp so ruthlessly through the yard gate and into Sethe’s life. It was at that moment of claiming her ultimate freedom, when she professed her love for her child with a jagged handsaw, that she elected to end the future of her child and that 124 became haunted by the specter of the past. At the definitive, apocalyptic moment when the slave catchers arrived, the spaces of Sethe’s life intersected: the repression of Sweet Home with the freedom of the Clearing. Those two homes – one that forced her to renounce her identity and other that forced her to be absorbed by it – collided, and she choose to kill both of them, with one fitful stroke of her arms, and blood everywhere.

Because of this decision – to kill the other spaces that constitute her self – Sethe’s home was hurled out of time. She no longer lived in the chronology of past, present and future. Instead, she became trapped in the visitation and revisitation of the deeds of her past. She chose to murder the two homes she knew, closing 124, literally and metaphorically, from the lively interaction of many elements of the life so vital for survival. Literally, the house gate, as a boundary between the community and the individual, that once was “always latching and unlatching in the time when 124 was busy as a way station” was “smashed” leaving “124 desolate and exposed at the very hour when everybody stopped dropping by” (163). Metaphorically, she became dominated – haunted – by her past, and the autonomous ghost that tyrannized her surroundings. When Paul D arrived, he tried to destroy the past in order to salvage the home: “[H]e bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house” (18). But then the haunt returned as corporal existence that, like a parasite, ultimately destroyed Sethe’s spirit.

They say that no word is spoken in America outside the context of race, that as a nation, we shall never be liberated from the tragedy of our slavery past. In the words of Baby Suggs, “[n]ot a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (5). Just as a nation inherits as a part of its character the entirety of its history, a home too exists as an embodiment of the whole of its emotional and spiritual past. Morrison believes that the home can only exist as nexus between all the aspects of an individual’s life: his past, his emotional fortitude, and his hopes. In the Clearing, the ex-slaves heard a version of themselves very different than the one constructed by their white overlords. However, submerging their past into oblivion does not in-and-of-itself liberate the slave from oppression. Instead, he – as we all – must synthesize his past with present, and all the trauma and violence and love and tears associated, before he can forge a future. When Denver walks out of 124, she carries with her the entirety of her past as she faces her future unknown, hopeful and fearful and different.

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wilde’s Aesthetic Philosophy

2007-01-04T17:43:00.000-08:00

First published in an 1890 addition of the literary journal Lippincott’s Magazine, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, was received with a furor of unrest and disapproval. The book seemed to confirm the public’s most sordid suspicions of Wilde’s notorious dandyism: its blistering paradoxes, blithe praises of selfish hedonism and its homoerotic undercurrents all appeared just too immoral to a Victorian age still stuffy and self-righteous. However, rather than bemoan the disapprobation, Wilde accepted it as but verification of the book’s overriding theme; the disapproval confirmed for him his fundamental distaste of the naïve society he inhabited, an age prone to discuss beauty in terms of morality, as good or wicked, godly or satanic. Perhaps disgusted by the simpletons who could not read beyond the story’s clinquant prose and scandalous epigrams, Wilde added to the second book-addition of the novel a preface noting that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.”

However, more than a rebuff to critics, the assertions that books have no moral undercurrents and that “all art is quite useless” can be accepted as a lens through which to understand Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy about the role of the artist in society. He believed that art was intended to be nothing but abstract and imaginative – not a means for life or death or guidance. Characterizing how his work had been at the onset of the novel, Basil Hallward, the tragic painter who worshiped the beauty of a fallen man, captured Wilde’s concepts of aesthetic beauty, “And it had all been what art should be – unconscious, ideal, and remote” (119). Importantly, before he had become entranced by, captive to, the beauty of the novel’s protagonist, Dorian Gray, Basil had created art from within himself, made only to be beautiful. In his portrait of Dorian, Basil betrays Oscar Wilde’s belief that there is no morality in beauty and that art is to “conceal the artist.” Thus, borne out of idolatry, the portrait, changing to the tune of its model’s decaying soul, functions to explore the consequences of an aesthetic philosophy about the uselessness of art that is violated by both its painter and model.

On the surface, the function of the portrait is simpler, intended to be but a spectacle of allegory. Its role, at first glance, is to play out and revisit some of the most staid themes of western literature. For one, it takes center stage in the eerie fable of a man who has made a “deal with devil” to sell his soul for triviality, the prospect of staying forever young. Lord Henry, Dorian’s quick-witted, irreverent confidant, tells him upon meeting, “Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away” (39). Dorian resolves that “Youth is the only thing worth having,” and that if it were he “who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old” he “would give everything!” (43). Dorian’s cry is answered. He remains forever youthful, while his portrait grows decrepit and old as an expression of his decaying soul. He sold his consciousness, now embodied in the changing portrait, for the vanity of youth. Wilde, in this way, characterizes youthful beauty as a juxtaposition of both good and evil: the gods grant it but only the devil can maintain it. Youth is a democratic concept, for all individuals to have and for all time to be dying: “Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful” (39). The only way to maintain it is to replace the mind – the consciousness – for the body. The painting, at first hollow, becomes filled with Dorian’s spirit, and Dorian becomes but a beautiful shell of a man, like a finely brushed canvass, never changing.

After the deal is made, the portrait functions to exhibit (as artwork is characteristically intended, “to exhibit”) the subsequent allegories of the novel: “the fall from grace” of the once-chimerical, now stained and ruined Dorian, the “doppelganger paradigm” of a man’s saint-like appearance animated, paralyzed by his dark, sordid spirit manifest, and finally, the “youth entrapment,” like Grimm’s Hans and Gretel, of an older man (Lord Henry) intent on killing the innocent (Dorian Gray), in this case, with devilish ideas of immorality and excess.

Nevertheless, Oscar Wilde intended his novel to be much more than a fable; in his preface, he says that “those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” daring his reader to take up the challenge. Beneath the surface, the function of the portrait – the picture of Dorian gray – can be seen as highly serious meditation the role of the artist in society. As a commentary on the obligations of a painter, the circumstances of the portrait’s creation can be seen to foreshadow the circumstances of its destruction. Basil Hallward, at the beginning of the novel, understands Wilde’s conception of the artist’s obligation. Hallward echoes Wilde’s assertion in the preface that “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” with his statement that “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them” (29). Aesthetics, to Wilde and Hallward, are intended for the simple enjoyment of an “abstract sense of beauty” (29).

However, when Basil Hallward meets Dorian, he violates this understanding of art. Rather than merely as beautiful (for Wilde tells the reader that “those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated”), Hallward sees Dorian as a divine embodiment of “an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style” (27). His presence no longer inspires art, but is art itself. Basil remarks that “Some subtle influence passed from him to me” allowing him, for the first time, so see “the wonder I had always looked for and always missed” (28). Basil becomes enchanted – utterly dominated – by Dorian’s aesthetic beauty, which he sees as an artistic apotheosis that he cannot escape. Basil does not reveal art, but the art – Dorian – reveals Basil, exposing his soul for the world to see. “I really can't exhibit [the portrait]. I have put too much of myself into it” (20). The portrait, at its birth, thus represents the obscured line between art and reality, where beauty has an inescapable influence, constructing the artist rather than the artist constructing the beauty.

If Dorian is the incarnation of this “new mode of style” whereby reality is art and art is morality, then his corruption represents the failure of this ideal. And the putrefaction of the man in the painting serves to belie the moral worth that Basil ascribed to this new understanding of painting that “without intending” exposes all the “artistic idolatry” (28) of beauty.

The portrait therefore functions to represent the first consequence of Wilde aesthetic philosophy: that art cannot be life. The novel confuses the boundaries of life and art. Dorian, like a piece of artwork, never ages, always remaining beautiful and hollow. The portrait, contrastingly, becomes like life and must suffer from the gyrating, ostentatious decay of Dorian’s soul: “The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience” (106-7). In this way, very literally, the portrait aids in protagonist’s tragic confusion of life and art. The portrait becomes his life and his life becomes superficial artwork. Lord Henry tells Dorian, “I love acting. It is so much more real than life” (95). Dorian heads this message, that art is more real than life. In his preface, Wilde states that “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirror.” Sibyl Vane, Dorian’s first love, understands this dichotomy. When she finds love, an emotion that burns in her more real than any stage scene, she realizes that “art is but a reflection,” (101) kaleidoscopic and superficial, rather than a reality, and she no longer needs to pretend. Dorian, on the other hand, is convinced that art and life are but two words for the same thing, “How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! What are you without your art?” (102). Wilde believes that the cardinal sin is using art to live one’s life; Dorian relishes in the sensation of this sin: “to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation” (143).

Fundamental to Wilde’s aesthetic philosophies is the prospect of a new Hedonism, expounded throughout the novel by Lord Henry, who fancied Dorian as its “visible symbol” (24). Henry’s doctrine depends, more than anything else, on the intense processes of self-realization. It depends on the individual thinking of nothing but himself and his identity. Henry tells Dorian that “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for” (34). To do this, we need to never relent in pursuing pleasure, “One could never pay too high a price for any sensation” (73). This process of self-realization depends on an entire disregard for others: neither charity nor reaching out, only an attention to the “highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self” (34). In his essay The Critic as Artist, Wilde expressed these views as his own, that

They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to one about one's duty to one's neighbor. For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.

The aggrandizement of the individual is at the heart of the new Hedonism. The realization of this ideal requires that the individual renounce all external forces of guidance. “There is no such thing as a good influence” Henry tells Dorian, for to influence someone is “to give him one's own soul” so that it becomes but “an echo of someone else's music.” Henry sums up Wilde’s broad, subterranean theme: “To be good is to be in harmony with one's self” (93).

Lord Henry’s philosophy, like Wilde’s, was of a process of intense self-discovery through pleasure. Dorian, however, wildly perverts these intentions. Rather than treating aesthetics as a means for gratifying and shaping his identity, he slays his identity to gratify his pleasure. “[Pleasure’s] aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be” (144). He becomes a hollow shell ruled over by the prospect of base satisfaction. Rather, as Lord Henry subversively suggests, than using pleasure for his own purposes, he allows pleasure to use him, systematically degrading his consciousness. “There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.” At these times, the body is ruled over by its sensation: “Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move as automatons move. Choice is taken from them” (201). The New Hedonist is a master of his own desires. Dorian is a slave to them.

Thus, another function of the portrait is to illustrate the second, perhaps more fundamental, consequence of Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy: that art is self-realization, absent of external influence. Basil Wallward is destroyed his worship of physical beauty, and the portrait embodies his definitive start towards downfall. Dorian tells him, “You met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks” (169). Basil is killed by the vanity he inspired in with his deification of Dorian’s beauty. Of this control Dorian had over his identity, Basil remarks to Lord Henry “‘I did not want any external influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray’” (24). Basil died because he worshiped external beauty, failing to attend to his own precious selfhood.

Dorian’s identity too, most profoundly, is a constellation of external influence. For one, he is a product of Lord Henry, who found, “something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence” because it lets one “hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth” (52). Also, he product of the lush book that spins a tale of a “Parisian who spent all his life trying to realize…all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own” (139) whose “influence” Dorian “could not free himself from,” (141) whose story, indeed, alludes to his own life story, of a man trapped young who can think all the thoughts of the world and experience all the sensations of the world, except his own. Finally, Dorian is a product, perhaps most stultifyingly, of “the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament…the mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses” (133). He is a product of his own unquenched urges for carnal sensation and pleasure. He lives his life a slave to his appetite: “The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them” (143). The portrait thus emphasizes that his soul, quite literally, is trapped outside of his body, subject to external control. Imprisoned by the force of its presence, its influence, Dorian knew that only through with the portrait’s death could Dorian’s self live once more. By stabbing the painting, he knew he could stab at the chains that shackled him and “[the knife] would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free” (234). However, it was too late to salvage his identity, and he died, as he stabbed the painting, decrepit and hollow from sin.

Oscar Wilde wrote in the first stanza of his 1881 poem Helas!: “To drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, / Is it for this that I have given away / Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?” With his novel, Wilde examined, for the world, this haunting question. Dorian, tragically, was willing to forgo his “ancient wisdom” so that he could “drift” with the whims of his passions. He was willing to sacrifice his “austere control” over his identity on the altar of an aesthetic art he worshiped, that, like a god force, ultimately enslaved him. The portrait thus functions as a cautionary tale to a world too willing to give up itself at the prospect of the beautiful, whatever form that may be: the morally good, the sinfully bad, the righteous, the wicked – to Wilde, these are not from “art” external and imaginative, these are from oneself. Art really is quite useless.

Cameron's Culture

2006-12-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

A youth sits in the passenger seat of a car, as it motors down a country road, going nowhere in particular. It’s one in the morning on a Saturday, and rain is pattering on the windshield. Its rhythm is bleeding into the car, competing against the sound system in a cacophonous symphony. As the driver drives, the youth looks out the window. Tonight, unlike other nights obscured by darkness and rain, the youth can actually see the country road passing by him – the stone walls and crooked mailboxes, the potholes like shallow ponds teaming with life and the moon’s gentle smirk. While gazing sleepy-eyed and empty, he begins to notice, quite subtly at first, that the dirt road is rapidly disappearing behind the car. He begins to half-appreciate that the unremarkable road and its hollow whimpers are receding with each turn of the tires, never to be there the same way again.

They turn right into a lot and park the car with unintended ferocity, jerking the two forward in their seats. For tonight, at least, like last night, these youths of excess and vacuity, of suffocation and alienation, fraught with contradiction and naïveté, can drive around aimlessly. For tonight, at least, like last night, with nowhere to go and nothing in store, they can search for quick thrills and small miracles at the picnic tables and checkout lines of Cameron’s Deli, the hang-out for dislocated youths like themselves.

They open the door and step out into the miasma of rain and cigarette smoke and semidarkness that lingers at the Cameron’s Deli parking lot late at night.

“Hey,” says a high school student with designer clothes and wild eyes and a cellphone at his ear.

“Hey, what’s up,” says the youth, extending his hand and grinning truthfully. With this ceremonial extension he is offering both assertion and admission; he’s affirming and conceding that, for tonight, like last night, he is his brother and that their promises of fraternity and togetherness are only as deep as the skin on their palms that they shakes with. His greetings are hybrids, like everything under the smirking moon. He is a hybrid. He is a male of suburban paradise, of picket-fences and golden retrievers, who is animated – paralyzed – by sordidness and deception. Paradoxically, like all adolescents, he is stuck at the cross-roads of juvenile sensibilities and mature responsibilities. He is not a kid, but he is not a grown-up either. And in this no-man’s-land between the innocence of childhood and the dreariness of adulthood, right off Route 35, is Cameron’s Deli, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

◙ ◙ ◙

He walks to the lighted windows of the deli, shining like a neon oasis in the middle of the suburban Sahara. To him and his compatriots, the Deli is a teaming forest of glitz and lights and softcore pornography in the middle of miles of nothingness. Absurd and disillusioned Arabian bandits meet to plot their next escapades. Fools and swindlers and wise men can try their hands. The youth opens the door and walks in. And Arabian thieves bustle about. They buy their specialty-sandwich rations, sharpen their scimitars and adjust their turbans. They make their emergency cellphone calls and network their necessary connections. They are brave crusaders awaiting a fight.

The youth grabs a can of Red Bull, waits on line, pays the cashier, and swaggers between the bandits with smokey-jackets and stubble beards, and opens the door. He leaves the Deli to walk into the surrounding camp of soldiers. They are perched on picnic tables and cars and fences. They are having clandestine conversations of pot-hookups and parties and beer and girls. He overheard two in front of him.

“So what are you doin’ tonight?” asked a backwards cap.

“I don’t know. I heard X is having people over,” responds the other backwards cap.

“Obscenity that. I hate that kid.”

“Yeah. Muck that” said the former, extending his hand and spitting on the grass ground in front of him. He stands up, adjusts his sagging pants, and moves on. The latter does the same.

For a moment, the youth watches the two, and cannot help but think of a ballet, only a late-night ballet; a ballet not quite of dancing, but of frantic feet shuffling. Yes, a ballet with twirls, the youth thinks, but more like spinning than twirling, spinning around and around, with a ferocious, dizzying laxity. How odd, he thinks, that we are always fetishizing on expectation, always moving, yet, night after night, we always seem to spin back to the wet picnic tables of the 24/7 Deli. Maybe it is more like a carnival ride than a ballet. Yes, he smiles to himself, one that spins you around and around until you get off and throw up into the helpless dirt. He pops the can of his Red Bull and takes a sip.

◙ ◙ ◙

Amidst the bustle, a cop car pulls up. The policeman gets out, not with a stomp but with a click and a swoop, not with a bang but with a sigh. The whole night sighs. In a moment, there is a frantic movement of bodies and vodka-filled water bottles and car keys and swearwords. In moment, the Tunisian horsemen become drunken teenagers; the rebels become school children with SATs scores; and the crusaders who have fought valiantly against the hypocrisy of their surrounds become nothing but the scabs and skin lesions of the suburban mange they fight against.

The cop puts a chain between two posts that abut the entrance of the area where the Cameron’s Deli picnic tables sit, but the ragtag militia stays to hold the fort. Without their canteen, the drug dealers might have to find another pit stop for cheap dreams and broken promises.

“Let’s get out of here,” the youth says to his friend.

“Don’t be a coward,” his driver says. “This is all we mucking have and this obscenity cop obscenity wants to take it away.”

◙ ◙ ◙

With no other option, the youth turns to walk home, thankful that the rain had stopped. Walking in the dark, at first, of course, he is afraid – of tripping over the pebbles beneath his feet, of agitating wild animals, of the stirring of the wind. However, as the Deli retreats from visibility step by step, the youth slowly becomes more familiar with the contours of the road he had raced vulgarly over many times in the past, and indeed just five minutes before. The parking lot becomes but a neon pinhole of the past and the natural moonlight takes its place. The youth knows eventually he will arrive home. Until then, in the darkness from dusk to dawn, with not a Cluckin’ Russian novelty sandwich in sight, he begins to listens only to the beating of his heart, the pattering of his footsteps and the quiet dance of the world around him.

As he walks away, retracing steps he had taken so carelessly in the past, he does not even have to turn around to know that Cameron’s Deli is gone for good.

Zero Tolerance and Prison Ethics

2006-12-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

New York state generally believes that no rehabilitation measures can cure the latent danger of murders, rapists or other menaces who diminish the wellbeing of society. If the warden, twirling his nightstick, sees drugs in the prison yard or knives in the cafeteria or hears threats shouted through the cell doors, he punishes the prisoners quickly and without remorse, without discretion and without leeway. After all, inmates detained in high security prisons are dangerous folk, and nothing can fix that.

This Draconian discipline philosophy makes a great deal of sense in a system designed to punish and ostracize lowlife prisoners. But in a suburban school in place to equip teenage boys and girls (who aren't dangerous folk) with the skills needed to succeed in the real world beyond Cameron's Deli, the prison ethic that knives are for killing and drugs are for destroying is wayward, dangerous and the cause of a great deal of human unhappiness.

In the age of zero tolerance, the buzz-word for school administrators, discipline hearings conduct themselves as trials in carnival courtrooms of the absurd. A picture with a beer bottle means forced abdication from peer group, National Honors Society, suspension from sports teams, poetry clubs and Campus Congress. No questions asked. A pocket knife equates to five day suspension regardless of intent or motivation or circumstance. Signing a yellow pass without a monitor so one can go home on the late bus – a requirement bafflingly illogical – means forgery and theft and destruction of school property and a five day suspension reported on the college application.

Teenagers do foolish things and make nonsensical decisions; That's the hallmark of being an adolescent. We're certainly not children, but we're not yet adults. Sure, mistakes are made, but even by the most decent and forthright students. Gratuitous violence is a rarity, so why assume that a pocket knife is a weapon? Fraternizing and co-mingling with others that drink beer is a requisite, so why treat such actions and wicked and evil and punishable in an extreme degree? Because there's a slip-up doesn't mean we're armed and dangerous, prepared to destroy the world's gentle. It means we're teenagers. It's gleefully understood by administrators of school justice that no-mitigation five day suspensions are permanent fixtures on a student's college application. If we're decent and well-meaning students and not despicable fugitives, why do our punishments damage our futures rather than guide them? Why do they destroy rather than improve?

It's a truism that any philosophy taken to the extreme is bad. But the impulses behind zero tolerance (the name itself belying its sanity) are a reflection of the broader impulses behind Americanism. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that zero tolerance works to decrease school violence or drug use; Instead, it's a political and symbolic policy that reflects in a nation whose flag colors don't run our collective fetish for “personal responsibility.” We pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, we wage war on poverty, drugs and terror and we need to take ownership of our actions. We prosecute the “bad apples” at Abu Ghraib, but don't investigate the insidious undercurrents that the apples grew from. To admit that perhaps teenagers drink because they're stifled and bored or cheat on tests because they're beaten by the high expectations of John Jay hyper-competitiveness, to suggest that certain banalities are symptomatic of broader pathologies of adolescence would be permissive, and permissiveness is the sign of an ideology which is in serious disfavor. The advocates of zero tolerance scoff at nuance as yellow-bellied and discretion as weakness.

Zero tolerance leaves a profound impress on the minds of the decent future leaders of our world that they are not teenagers who might make a few mistakes, but are inmates in a dreary bureaucracy where procedure takes precedence over common sense, where authority is the enemy, justice is irrelevant and the distinction between a school system and prison system is merely rhetorical decoration.

Escape in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

2006-12-03T19:28:00.000-08:00

The destruction of human life resonates on a deeply personal level. Despite utilitarian principles of aggregate happiness, the heart refuses to believe that a person is a dispensable commodity, to be weighed on scale or quantified with arithmetic. Cannibalism, infanticide, or like practices have been stigmatized as egregious or inhumane by nearly all societies throughout all of history because they violate the deep, bedrock commonness of humanity. They violate human brotherhood. “Reason,” the magnificent cornerstone of human uniqueness, is also a corrosive force that wears away this bedrock common ground. It can be used to dignify transgressions beyond the confines of humanity. When situations are most dire, the antagonism between brotherhood humanity and reason is most profound. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s haunting, allegorical novel Crime and Punishment critiques action motored by cool rationality alone as hollow and chillingly misguided. According to Dostoevsky, to escape hopelessness, one must appreciate the limitations and powers of humanness.

Crime and Punishment is set within St. Petersburg destitution, an environment of poverty and sadness, of desperation trenchant and seemingly inescapable. In a humid, dark bar, Semyon Zakharovitch Marmeladov, a drunkard who wantonly wastes money at the expense of his family’s wellbeing, remarks that “hopelessness” is the state of existence where there is “nowhere else one can go!” and that though “compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself,” there is always an escape, “For every man must have somewhere to go” (I.2). To be elevated above their circumstances, their hopelessness, each character in the novel must disturb the course of his personal world. To Dostoevsky, reason alone cannot achieve escape, and thus each character fails to the degree that he distills emotion from action, external morality from internal motives, humanity from humans.

“Theories” – political, mathematical, or scientific – depend on the application of an objective set of rules on a confined set of data points. Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, the novel’s wayward protagonist, attempts to rationalize murder, pushing a person, multifarious, nuanced and unique, into a formula. His theory that one life can be exchanged for the elevation of other lives fundamentally objectifies his human brethren. “One death, and a hundred lives in exchange - it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm” (I.6). To Raskolnikov, passion and emotion obfuscate analytical reasoning and clear analysis, “It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease” (I.6). Raskolnikov violates the human spirit by reducing humanity’s labyrinthine complexity to a set of arithmetic figures. There is no morality in calculus.

One of the most difficult feats of the human intellect is to understand its own limitations. Raskolnikov implicitly assumes that his paths need not be illuminated by concepts of right and wrong, that man can escape his circumstances and destitution with rationality alone. In doing this, he fails to appreciate that actions must be buttressed by morality and external forces of guidance. He fails to understand that the mind is limited by the heart. “‘Granted, granted that there is no flaw in all that reasoning, that all that I have concluded this last month is clear as day, true as arithmetic.... Why, why then am I still...?’” (I.4). He does not understand why he is hesitant to act on logic alone. Raskolnikov ultimately fails because, absent of ethical constraint, his logic, pushed to its limitations, affects consequences that do not meet the world’s moral demands. This is the limitation on the human mind.

Believing in the ultimate, sovereign power of reason, Raskolnikov develops a theory to prove to himself that logic supersedes humanity. His theory “that an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea" (II.5) aggrandizes the role of the individual in the process of engineering fate. Like John Milton’s fallen angles in the epic poem Paradise Lost, Raskolnikov believes that he can escape his destitution by gabbing at his fate from the ground up, that he can prevail against hopelessness absent of godly aid or forgiveness or external interaction. He believes that, in a society of dependence, he is a unilateral force, an extraordinary man. “Yes, that's what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her....” (V.4). It is clear that Raskolnikov’s murder cannot be brandished as utilitarian altruism; it was nihilistic egomania, the desire to prove himself above the benevolence of others and beyond the moral guidelines of society. He destroyed life in order to vindicate his own. He neglected passion and human togetherness in order to prove the prerogative of the individual over society, not the other way around.

This rejection of external aid and interconnectedness alienates him from society and removes him from humanity’s bedrock brotherhood. “He felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could never more appeal to these people in the police office with sentimental effusion like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police officers, it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life” (II.1). Asserting himself as a sole arbiter of right and wrong, he is no longer able to work within the confines of the human identity. He is alienated from the human spirit by his own delusions of superiority.

Dostoevsky’s other characters tragically complement this theme, each illustrating a varied angle on the self-centered rejection of the human spirit. The demise of Katerina Ivanovna, Marmeladov’s wife, is the result of consciousness insulated by intense, unyielding pride. “Katerina Ivanovna observed contemptuously that all knew what her family was and that on that very certificate of honour it was stated in print that her father was a colonel” (V.2). She dies in the street, begging God for justice, “‘We will see whether there is justice on earth!’” (V.2). Consumed by her own victimization, she fails to comprehend that justice is brotherhood and love and togetherness not egotistical affirmation. Likewise, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, the wealthy courtier of Raskolnikov’s sister Dounia, fails because he too is intensely wrapped up in his own wellbeing. He purchases humans like he might purchase cattle, “Pyotr Petrovitch had apparently not at all expected such a conclusion. He had too much confidence in himself, in his power and in the helplessness of his victims. He could not believe it even now. He turned pale, and his lips quivered” (IV.2). He is stunned by the power of a human to transcend her circumstance without dependence and exploitation. Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov, perhaps the most tragic of all the characters, represents the hollow terrain of complete moral equivalency. To him, good and bad are equal, murder and generosity the same: “I never blame any one” (VI.5). Confronted with the utter purposeless of a life consumed in moral laxity and guided by nothing but hedonism, he takes the only option left to a man with no ethical foundation upon which to stand: “a trip to America,” self-wrought annihilation.

Raskolnikov’s suffering, like the gradual, systematic demise of Katarina, Luzhin and Svidrigaïlov, is a commentary on the vacuity of his ethos system. The tumultuous agony endured after his murder of the pawnbroker and her sister is a manifestation of the contradictions that arise when an ideology is taken to its logical extreme. Redemption is painful. It requires the abandonment of what Raskolnikov holds most dear: his pride, his arrogance, his despotism. His suffering is Dostoevsky’s warning to the world.

The alternative to complete logical supremacy is an acceptance of a meta-rational “faith” in moral guidance, in the power of the human spirit to guide, at least to some degrees, the human intellect. Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov, Katarina’s self-sacrificing stepdaughter, meager and illiterate, embodies the strength of meta-rational guidance over logical rationality. Though she cannot articulate it with her mind, she knows in her heart that action must be aided by higher-level interaction. She knows that no man is an island, that no individual is free from the limitations of human intellect and the needs of human interaction. When indicted as a “religious maniac,” she can say only, “‘What for? You don't believe?...’” (IV.4). The antidote to a world of vacant intellectualization is an acceptance of the beautiful power of this human spirit to overcome its circumstances. Dimitri Prokofitch Razhumikin, Raskolnikov’s close companion and guardian of Dounia, condemns the socialist doctrine that all crime is a product of circumstance. He recognizes the capacity of the individual human to break free of hopelessness, to disturb the contours of his universe with methods more rich and optimistic than chilling logicality. Of the socialists, he remarks “Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! … they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process!...The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde!” (III.5). Razhumikin’s words affirm, resoundingly, that the human soul is precious and not to be quantified or categorized. He affirms that to elevate oneself beyond one’s circumstances one must appreciate humanness, recognizing not only its limitations but also its magnificent powers.

Every man can see a little of himself in the eyes of his neighbor. Each understands that he or she is united with the other on a fundamental, richly human level. The interconnectedness of mankind depends on a certain degree of faith in the invisible hand of social morality. It depends on a willingness to guide one’s logic with emotion. Those who value the progress and survival of mankind in a world of shifty relativism and capitalistic initiative ought to take seriously Dostoevsky’s warning about moral bankruptcy. If these impulses towards fraternity and love are cauterized, then man is left with nothing but empty dogma and soulless calculus. Though aimed at 19th century Russian thought, the novel’s challenges are still relevant to humans at dawn of the 21st century, neither gods nor beasts.

In Defense of Bias Within America's Universities

2006-06-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Archibald MacLeish, American poet and minister of propaganda during World War II, said in 1954, that, "The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."[1] MacLeish said these words knowing very well the repressive power of the social herd. He said these words knowing very well that more than the size of America’s guns or the tenacity of its Army, the bravery of its dissenters, the men and women willing to cast aside the warm comforts of intellectual conformity, is the most important defense against encroachments on beloved freedoms and ways of life.

Truth, the goal of the dissenter, is a peculiar concept. It is stubborn and uncompromising, yet elusive and unsettled. Bias too is truculent in its certitude, but forever unresolved. The distinction between the two – truth and bias – is no one’s job to determine. That’s the beauty of a marketplace of ideas, of pluralism of thought. Recent legislation, including the “Academic Bill of Rights” pushed by conservative intellectual David Horowitz, intends to broaden the ideal of “academic freedom” to mandate “intellectual diversity” on university campuses. The aim, simply, is to eradicate bias. However, in the process of eradicating bias, the locus of regulatory control is shifted to the student body. The uncomfortable student gains the prerogative to destroy truth labeled as bias, and the dream of higher education, the dream of answers, is subverted, only to be replaced by the dreary acceptance of political correctitude. In the quest for “intellectual diversity,” students gain new weapons to attack the dissenter who – if only momentarily – leaves the herd to think for himself.

The history of academic freedom is the history of liberal thought. It is no coincidence that the rise of academic freedom as a stated initiative paralleled the upsurge of free expression in Europe. The liberal outlook on knowledge states that all truth is questionable in various degrees, and from there, that the most important safeguard against myopia and bigotry is pluralism of thought. The protection of academic free thought thus facilitates the quest for knowledge in the liberal sense. Liberalism makes no judgment about the veracity of dissent; instead, it pits dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, and truth rises to the top of the intellectual free-for-all. The function of academic freedom, broadly, is to protect this clash of ideas and values.

Pedagogy has never been a strictly asymmetrical process. Instead, thought is a collective enterprise between both teacher and student. Socrates’ great Athenian Schools functioned with a rich exchange of ideas between student and teacher. Though the teacher may have a greater depth of understanding, the reasoning went, the skepticism of his students helps to define anew his understanding of truth.[2] Late philosopher Sir Bernard Williams found the linguistic origins of “Truth” and “Truthfulness” to be, “connected with [the word] trust ... the word 'truth' and its ancestors in Early and Middle English originally meant fidelity, loyalty, or reliability.”[3] This dynamic between student, teacher, truth and trust establishes the working framework for the concept of academic freedom.

Though the United States’ understands the term academic freedom as a shield intended only to protect the dissenting professor from the scimitars of the masses, in fact, the concept was originally devised to protect much more. Originally derived from the German words Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit in the 1850s, academic freedom is a three-way dynamic between the facility, the teacher, and the teacher’s students.[4] First, it is the freedom of the educational institution to progress unhindered by serious external restraint, to design its curricula and to hire its teachers. Second, it is the freedom of the teacher to voice his opinions without being stifled by majority consent. Third and last, academic freedom refers to the right of students to learn without indoctrination or authoritarian demands on the progression of their thought.[5] The boundary of this final freedom – the freedom of the student to learn – buttresses the demands for “intellectual diversity” within the classroom.

The call for “intellectual diversity” is grounded in contemporary politics. A number of surveys in recent years have indicated an overwhelming preponderance of liberal professors within America’s universities. The most reliable collection of quantitative data, the survey, “How Politically Diverse Are the Social Science and Humanities?” conducted by economist Daniel Klein and social scientist Charlotta Stern, indicates that professors in America’s universities vote, on average, Democratic over Republican fifteen to one.[6] Trumpeting the seemingly-benign, even progressive concept of “intellectual diversity,” conservative thinkers are proposing means for increasing ideological representation in higher education. At the forefront of this campaign is David Horowitz, who has helped to push his Academic Bill of Rights through a number of state legislatures in an effort to expand academic freedom’s embedded protection of the students, empowering them to lodge complaints against professors who violate a standard of nonpartisanship.[7]

The question of academic bias goes to the role o the university within society. The cardinal value of a university is the quest for truth. The university functions in order to seek a better understanding of truth, to disseminate that understanding, and to equip students with the tools to question it.[8] Because of this, diversity of thought should be rejected as a guiding principle of academics.

The Academic Bill of Rights rests on the liberal concept of intellectual pluralism, mandating that professors provide, “students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.” The Academic Bill of Rights states that, given the, “unsettled character of all human knowledge,” teachers are obligated, “to promote intellectual pluralism” and thus “protect the principle of intellectual diversity.”[9] It is sloppy thinking, however, to progress from the premise that 1) truth is always challengeable to 2) challenges must always be provided. As discussed, “pluralism” and “diversity” are fundamental aspects of liberal education, of a system that depends on the emergence of answers within a marketplace of ideas. However, “intellectual diversity” is a means to the ends of truth. It is a not an ends within itself. The goal of “intellectual diversity” confuses truth with the pursuit of it, and resolves instead to always leave the questions open.

Though broad questions of knowledge and truth may never be put to rest, much truth in an academic sense is localized. Simply, if all things are theoretically questionable, then a fact must be measured to a standard of certainly. The world is round is accepted as truth because it is a statement measured to a certain standard of certainty. Though, theoretically, new evidence could emerge that proves the world to be flat, or square, or cylindrical, it is accepted as fact that it is round nonetheless. Diversity of thought may have been an important means to reach the conclusions (that the earth is round), however, the ultimate goal was truth, not diversity. Mandating diversity and not truth leaves the question of the earth’s geometry open to a hopeful many.

Diversity of thought, though important, is stratified on an academic, not political level. True intellectual diversity is not found in broad-based domestic or foreign politics; true intellectual diversity is predicated on interdisciplinary interpretation. The fact that fifty-four philosophy professors admitted to voting Democratic and only four admitted to voting Republican in Daniel Klein’s survery, therefore, indicates very little about their interpretations of the subject matter.[10] Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University, made the point:

When I teach [John] Milton, I teach a Milton who is basically a theologian, whose only interest is in a certain set of theological problems allied to the imperative of obeying God. Other people teach a feminist Milton, or a psychoanalytic Milton or a historicist Milton, or a revolutionary Milton. Those aren’t my Miltons. Neither do I say that their Miltons are, in fact, interesting or worthy of study. I say their Miltons are wrong.[11]

Disciplinary interpretation of subject matter leads to diversity of thought; it is a misguided assumption to correlate political interpretation with academic interpretation. The former has no place in the classroom and the latter is inherent within the classroom. The fact that thirty times as many anthropologists voted Democratic as Republican indicates very little about their understanding of the curriculum or their interpretations of the cultural development of humans.[12]

In his search for truth, scholarly and scientific self-respect mandates that a certain professor stay allegiant to his beliefs. Fish remarks, “I say their Miltons are wrong” because, as an expert in his field, he has arrived at his version of truth. He is not willing to undermine his destination in the name of diversity. Asking a professor to provide a diverse array of opinions undermines the role of the institution in its quest for understanding. Similarly, a class on Christianity should not be obligated to teach militant atheism. A class on Peace Studies should not be made to investigate military conflict resolution.

The inevitable outcome of pursuing an ends (in this case, diversity) that is in fact a means is that one reaches a destination quite unlike what one desired. By perverting “diversity” to be an ends when in fact it is a means, one reaches an ends that is unfortunately but undeniably political. The fact that the goal of “intellectual diversity” is not grounded in academic necessity leads its pursuit to become fueled by political desire, the desire to alter the academy to reflect a partisan vision of United States’ political composition – affirmative action for conservatives.

The game of abstraction concerning the role of the education institution now snaps into a much more sordid reality: the call for “intellectual diversity” is fueled by the political desire to stifle radical liberalism. An apt analogy can be made between “intellectual diversity” within the classrooms and the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Fairness Doctrine. Inaugurated in 1964, the Fairness Doctrine mandated reasonable opportunity for both sides of a political debate to air their opinions. This might sound reasonable; however, the Doctrine was soundly abolished in 1987 because it functioned not as a check on fairness, but as an instrument for political vendettas.[13] Political scientist Jesse Walker remarks, “In theory, [the Fairness Doctrine] promoted the free exchange of ideas. In practice, it was a way politicians or interest groups could harass stations that aired views they disliked. (The Nixon administration, for example, used it as a club against coverage of the antiwar movement.)”[14] Though the destination of print and news media punditry is not truth, the analogy is still valid. Under the rhetorical guise of “intellectual diversity,” like the Fairness Doctrine, a great number of voices can be attacked and purged and disinfected of controversy.

Throughout American history, patriotic clamor about subversive American professors has come in undulating waves. During the 1920s, a war-weary America strove to “return to normalcy” by persecuting professors that revealed any sympathies for the Russian “reds.” [15] In the 1950s, McCarthy Hearings sought to disinfect America’s higher education of incendiary voices. Now, with progressivism dead and liberalism severely wounded, the threat of a leftist coup d’état on America’s government is nonexistent. Why then, must the dissenter who travels from the herd be lassoed and forced back into line?

During the periods of academic suppression in the past – dark scars on America’s history – “big brother” was the government; now, if “intellectual diversity” becomes a mandated goal, the regulatory force is the student, benighted as he may be. In January of 1920, Mitchell Palmer arrested 6,000 citizens without trial because they had allegedly penned communist and anarchist treatises.[16] From 1951 to 1955, the Responsibilities Committee headed by J. Edgar Hoover and endorsed by Joseph McCarthy disseminated derogatory information about over 400 school teachers and college professors to their employers. [17] These acts of academic censorship were headed by governmental powers. The new, broader concept of Academic Freedom, on the other hand, extends the regulatory powers not to the government, but to the student. Teachers would no longer be the ultimate arbiters of their own curriculum. If legislation mandating political diversity is passed, then new shields will be burnished for students to use against any ideas that threaten their presuppositions about the way the world works, any thoughts that might upend picture-perfect concepts of reality. Each complaint by a student would necessitate a detailed investigation into the accused professor’s syllabus and teaching. It would necessitate careful monitoring of the teacher’s intellectual expression. Education is not about compounding students’ assumptions about the world; it’s about revealing new perspectives, no matter how unsettling they may be. The political result of the seemingly-progressive ideal of “intellectual diversity,” is an Orwellian gaggle of students, flexing their muscles to decide what their teachers teach – thought police on skateboards.

There is a fundamental methodological error being committed when one asserts that a certain ideology is disproportionally underrepresented in a university setting and that therefore, that ideology poses a threat to the minority – an allusion to James Madison’s famous “tyranny of the majority.” This argument tacitly assumes that college students are passive and frail, susceptible to indoctrination. This infantilization is unworthy of the liberal doctrine of Marketplace of Ideas. Instead of destroying students, underrepresentation should empower them to fight harder, to shine a light on their own preconceived notions, to vindicate their own beliefs. The plight of the ideological pariah invokes the verses of the Shel Silverstein poem, A Boy Named Sue, popularized by singer Johnny Cash. The male protagonist is named Sue, and is consequently forced to defend himself throughout his life:

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,[18]

Of course being the minority is uncomfortable, but who said education was about being comfortable? When you tread against the norm, you have to overcome a greater academic burden, to prove your case with greater precision. The goal of the university should be thought-centric. Students should be taught to question the status quo, to question prevailing assumptions, to think for themselves. Bias achieves these goals because it forces individuals to adduce their convictions with evidence. Janny Scott of The New York Times writes in 2005 about Chief Supreme Court Justice’s experience in a predominantly liberal Harvard University campus during the 1960s and how it aided in his political ascendance. She references a fellow member of the conservative Federalist Society:

Asked how the experience of being a conservative in the Ivy League at that time influenced what he did afterward, Steven Calabresi, one of the Federalist Society's founders and a 1983 Yale Law School graduate, said: “Enormously. I think in retrospect it was probably one of the most important things that happened to me as I was growing up. We were inspired to start the Federalist Society because of that.”[19]

The experience conservatives had in liberal universities forced them to vindicate their convictions. Surely, in a mature society, an individual knows not only his mind, but that of his opponents. This mutual understanding is a prerequisite of democracy. Bias necessitates active pursuit of understanding; diversity legitimizes passivity.

It’s true that a nasty byproduct of free speech is bigoted ignorance; of the thousands of professors employed throughout the country, some inevitably will extend their powers of persuasion too far. Those professors should be fired. As is unfortunately the case, on the most fundamental level, freedom of speech empowers brilliance and bigotry in the same fitful stroke. No student should be penalized for his or her philosophical orientations; however, the way to combat bias is with more speech, not less. "One of the strengths of science," writes the philosopher of science David L. Hull, "is that it does not require that scientists be unbiased, only that different scientists have different biases."[20] Bias should not be eradicated. Instead, it forces others to examine their own deepest prejudices and substantiated them with evidence. If they can do so, then they are right; if they are unable to, then they are wrong. This response to bias is the goal of education. It is the search for truth. The distinction between someone possessing truth or merely possessing bias is for no one person to decided. To oppose bias or to substantiate truth, one must foster the habits of minds that provide for analysis and self-reliance, that require the use of evidence and causality. “Intellectual diversity,” on the other hand, dignifies bigotry as legitimate and passivity as an end-product. This is not a good idea gone awry; instead, it is a fundamentally misguided idea traveling in the only direction it can. “Diversity” is an academic Trojan horse, which, despite its intentions, will unleash its repressive might on the dissenter who tries – if only momentarily – to resign from the herd and think for himself.

[1] Lewis Lapham, Gag Rule (New York, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 1.

[2] Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 89.

[3] Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: : An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[4] Kenneth Kemp, “What is Academic Freedom?” (Dissertation, University of St. Thomas, 2000), 6.

[5] Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 327.

[6] Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, “How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?

Survey Evidence from Six Fields,” Academic Questions 23 (November 2004).

[7] Full text of the Academic Bill of Rights can be accessed at

http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/abor.html.

[8] A discussion between Bill Wasik, Stanley Fish, David Gelernter, Lani Guinier and Elizabeth Hoffman about

the purpose of the university can be found in “Affirmative Reaction,” Harper’s Magazine,

September 2005, p. 63.

[9] Academic Bill of Rights, http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/abor.html (2006).

[10] “How Politically Diverse,” p. 17.

[11] “Affirmative Reaction,” p. 67.

[12] “How Politically Diverse,” p. 23.

[13] Steven Simmons, Fairness Doctrine and the Media (University of California Press, 1978).

[14] Jesse Walker, Chilling Effects, http://www.reason.com/links/links091703.shtml (September 2003).

[15] Warren Harding’s 1920s campaign statement, 1920 Presidential Campaign Slogans, http://www.presidentsusa.net/1920slogan.html (2002).

[16] Palmer Raids, http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/red.html (2003).

[17] M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Real Story of Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against his

Enemies (New York, New York: Crown Forum, 2006).

[18] Shel Silvertein, A Boy Named Sue, http://www.toptown.com/hp/66/sue.htm (2004). The song was

recorded by Johnny Cash on February 24, 1969.

[19] “Robert’s Roots as a Conservative,” The New York Times, 21 August 2005, p. A1.

[20] “In Defense of Prejudice: Why Incendiary Speech Must Be Protected,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1995.

What's your favorite word?

2006-05-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

Words are the musicians of the free. To the freeman, ears not muffled by bigotry, the ponderous Oxford dictionary that sits quietly on the shelf comes to life as a boisterous concert hall packed with restless musicians tuning their instruments, preparing to play various themes and multifarious interpretations on the age-old sonata, the quest for understanding. The musicians will argue with their notes and chords that when enough is said, when sufficient ideas are shared and hopes and fears are illuminated, when words have been exchanged freely and unfiltered, Truth can be reached by mankind. No, not today before dinner, perhaps not tomorrow before math class, but some day when enough people have access to accurate words the extent of human imagination can be revealed within the far reaches of the realm of human capacity.

My favorite word, more than my favorite baseball card or Crayola crayon, is my guide as I approach a world undiscovered, full of untapped potential and vivid dreams and fears. The word is “candor.” To me, it seems that this is perhaps the single most important word to a liberal society built on the lumber of free thought. However, it seems also that this is perhaps the most impoverished word within the lexicon of our politicians, businessmen, and mainstream media executives. The true story, built on candor, is, I would imagine, quite unprofitable to tell. The world I see around me as a young, decidedly idealistic journeyer into the arena of political truthiness and deception and chicanery is a web of decayed linguistics, purged of controversy, deodorized and disinfected. The CIA tells us in its core statement of belief that, "Objectivity is the substance of intelligence, a deep commitment to the customer in its forms and timing." We are told not to think beyond the two-dimensional image on our television set, to present our ideas on bulleted PowerPoint slides, “prioritized” and “context sensitive.”

However, any true comprehender of the power of words knows that he is no more the master of words than he is their servant and that the survival of democratic free thought cannot withstand the slovenly use of words which abounds in present day dialogues. Simply, words use us more than we use them, for we cannot achieve a utopian ideal if we cannot imagine it with words more hopeful than Las Vegas or American Idol.

Thus, I beat on against the current pulling me into the corporate machinery of soporific prose. British economist J. M. Keynes said that, "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking." With this suggestion in mind, I want to live life breaking the “audible silence” that Lewis Lapham tells us has descended on a public coaxed into the complacent comfort of political correctness, intellectual objectivity and mental disinfection.

Words, when set free, are beautiful. There is a gentle irony to the haughty, multisyllabic word “sesquipedalian” that means, “a haughty, multisyllabic word,” or the lugubrious “terpsichorean” which means, “the grace and charm of a dancer.” A true story must, it seems, be given free reign over these beautiful words, over loose periodic sentences and sardonic tones. I want to live life betting my pot on a metaphor or a flip-flopping literary device. I want to live life knowing that subordinate clauses are not wicked and that parentheses are not elitist. I want to live life having faith in the meaning of words. The collective enterprise between words and writers and readers – exposed naked by candor – conjures up the creative energies that give rise to the mental freedom feared by so many. I hope, with this in mind, to live life respecting words and respecting candor and respecting Truth.

Whiteness as a Social Phenomenon

2006-05-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Whiteness is ownership of the earth. -- W.E.B. Du Bois

Black advocate Mark Haley tells a story where he and Malcolm X are in an airport together. A plane lands and a group of bright-eyed Eastern European children take their first steps on American soil. Malcolm turns to Haley and says, "Pretty little children. Soon they're going to learn their first English word: nigger."

Broadly -- very, broadly -- Malcolm might be right. The viral permanency of “race” as a social concept is a uniquely American phenomenon. America is the one nation in the world that imported a group of people half-way around the world, bred them and then enslaved them. As a result, no facet of modern American society can escape the ever-presence of race -- no social progress or economic betterment or political victory is exempted. In fact, as citizens of a nation whose identity is a product of its history, no person in america can act, personally or institutionally outside the framework of race relations, who is advantaged and why.

Of course, the word “race” refers to much more than biology or skin colors. “Whiteness,” specifically, is a social construction, aptly conceptualized as cultural property. It is a possession that provides tremendous material and symbolic privilege. It is a constellation of norms, ideologies, economic factors and social predisposions that gives rise to a hierarchical system of existence, created at the birth of this nation for the expressed purpose of power and subjugation. The 2005 academy award-winning movie Crash provocatively and unflinchingly examines this concept of whiteness, in essence, the concept of ownership over society.

American progressives work to inculcate children with the truth that racism exists in society. They weave the familiar narrative that oppression puts people down, and that American culture has nurtured – even today – this oppressive dynamic. This story, however, is not complete. Importantly, the accepted concept of racism neglects the reciprocal relationship between oppression and profit, that whiteness depends not just on the elevation of one culture, but also, fundamentally, on the devaluation of other culture. This story neglects that the existence of “Black disadvantage” necessitates the existence of “white advantage.” This unacknowledged privilege, enjoyed by every single white person in society, is the essence of “whiteness” as a social construction.

Race solidified as a particularly American occurrence at the birth of the nation. Early colonists at the Jamestown settlement were predominately Anglo males looking to make money off material investment. In tobacco farming they found an economically solvent system. The tobacco crop, however, dependeed on cheap labor, and an indentured servants system where bond-laborers exchanged work for land precipiated. All evidence indicates that when Blacks emmigrated from the Caribbean to Virginia, they were treated as equal members of an oppressed class. By the 1660s, tobacco farming continued its concentration wealth into the hands of an increasingly select colonial plantocracy. By 1673, indentured servant, poor and disenfranched, errupted in rebellion Bacon’s Rebellion.

In an effort to both placate indentured servant discontent and still feed the voracious appetite for cheap labor, the plantocracy begins to construct a system of “race” subjugation in the most modern sense. By the 1670s, the House of Burgess imposed legislation mandating that all descendents from “non-Christian” nations (Blacks) must serve a lifetime tenure as an indentured servant; In 1691 a law was enacted for the "prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue" of intermarriage of Black men with "English or other white women." Historian Theodore Allen remarks on the fermentation of “whiteness,” “The exclusion of free African-Americans from the intermediate stratum was a corollary of the establishment of ‘white’ identity as a mark of social status.” Thus, the division of races and the development of “whiteness,” borne out of a need for cheap labor by the Virginian elites, continued to a point where no hypocrisy was seen by the framers of the U.S. Constitution in designing a system that propped itself up on the pillars of liberty and equality while simultaneously facilitating the enslavement of Blacks. Race was therefore made not born.

Modern-day whiteness is seen in two forms. The “material” privilege of whiteness is, quite clearly, the explicit ownership by whites of the political and economic mechanisms that control society. Aside from knowing that “the man in power” is a member of one’s own race, the white privilege abounds on an everyday level because of this material privilege. Access to top-notch education, for one, is statistically reserved within whiteness. African Americans, left in poverty after years of enslavement, are forced to stay there by the archaic tax-law system that funds the U.S. public education system. Inequality is compulsory. In a nation that prides itself on concepts of capitalistic individualism, its no surprise that a private property taxes pays for educational opportunity; however, no child owns what is his. A poor man might be discredited for laziness or drunkardness, but a poor Black child has lost nothing but a genetic lottery. As Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities points out, it isn’t survival of the fittest in this nation’s public education system, it’s survival of the children of the parent who are the fittest. The de jure segregation of America’s public education system does much to define and propel whiteness. Kozol remarks that America has “turned its back upon the moral implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of the Brown [v. Board of Education] decision” mandating integration of public facilities. Because of this, “the fact of ghetto education as permanent American reality appear[s] to be accepted” (4). Education is thus a material and tangible aspect of white privilege.

The daily guarantee of civil liberty and respect, moreover, is an unquestioned layer of whiteness. In Crash a wealthy African American couple is pulled over because their car is vaguely similar to one reportedly high jacked; a hard-working Latino locksmith promises his daughter that they are safe now, because they moved to a white neighborhood. Those two examples indicate a broader theme: Racism is embedded within patterns and systems. The white privilege on a microscale, therefore, might be knowing that if you’re targeted by the IRS or the police it is not because of the color of your skin. The white privilege is moving to a safe neighborhood and being accepted; the white privilege is moving to a neighborhood where you’re accepted and being safe. It is having access to legal and medical help without skin color working against you. It is not questioning the racial overtones of everyday occurrences, the events that compound and interact to shape the concept of whiteness.

Beyond the more documented injustices of material whiteness lies the realm of symbolic whiteness, where “beauty” and “success” are defined relative to whiteness as to implicitly exclude people of colors. Whiteness is normalized within society; as the norm it tyrannizes the efforts for advancement by non-whites. It crowds out Blacks as “Others.” Seen as “exotic” or politely ignored by well-meaning whites, all non-whites are “marked” as deviations. Whiteness therefore is the standard by which other aspects of society are judged and neatly categorized.

The implications of a normalized and naturalized whiteness are important; sitting comfortably as the norm, in and of itself, is an aspect of white privilege. When American children learn “history,” for example, they are really learning “white history.” However, the concept of whiteness has pervaded to the point of implication; it has become both indivisible and mutually understood. Learning about the plight of the African American, however, is denoted as “Black history.” Whites are privileged as the norm because acceptance facilitates complacency. Whiteness protects the individual from being called forth to speak for the entirety of his race. It protects the successful individual from being applauded as credits to his race. Fred, an advisor to L.A.’s Attorney General Rick Cabot in Crash, asks the Black detective, Graham whether Black children need another “‘drug-dealin’ corrupt cop.’” White privilege protects a failed individual from putting his race on trial. Whiteness as the norm, therefore, demands less self-understanding.

Whiteness as a norm, moreover, constructs a system where non-white success is predicated on exceptionalism. Few people, for example, tout the fact that a newly-elected Senator is white. On the other hand, a successful Black man is defined often by the nature of his non-whiteness. Whiteness thus monopolizes the concept of success. A proactive Black man must often face the unfortunate decision to accept whiteness as success or decline success to perpetuate a cohesive identity. Being successful is acting in accordance to whiteness. A dialogue in Crash transpires where a successful African American director Cameron is confronting his wife Christine. After being sexually violated by a white cop, she remarks of his subservience to the concept of whiteness. Cameron tells her, “It's about time you realize what it's like to be Black.” She replies, “Oh, and you're talking about being Black? The closest you ever came to being Black, Cameron, was watching the Cosby Show.” The implication, of course, is that his success had violated the cohesion of African American movement, that he rejected his Black roots. Later in the movie, the mild-mannered Cameron confronts a cop to flailing and conspicuously vindicate his Blackness. The cop says, “I’m trying to help you here.” Cameron shouts back, “I didn't ask for your help, did I?” The African American director rejects the help of the white cop in order to assert his identity as a non-white entity. He rejects the cop in an effort to reject his emasculation as a Black man within the upper echelons of society, to reject the racialization of his success. As a successful cop, Graham tells his mother about his killed brother, “I promise, I’m gunna find out who did this.” She tells him, “I already know who did this. You did.” Success, she seems to tell him, is violating his racial destiny.

Whiteness must be accepted beyond biological fact. It is a lens through which members of society are afforded symbolic and material privilege. This lens is not fact. It was no spontaneously assembled within the contours of American social progression. Instead, whiteness was manufactured by a moneyed elite for the purpose of domination and subjugation. The value system of whiteness, however, rests on more than just greed. Greed is a force confronted by all people throughout history everywhere; it is often deterred and invariably frowned upon. Instead, the idea of whiteness is about control. Every member of white society – well-meaning or otherwise – must come to terms with the advantage of control. The ultimate white privilege, perhaps, is the power to acknowledge unearned advantage – to look it in the eye – and decide to ignore it.

Works Cited
Allen, Theodore. The Invention of the White Race: the Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. Vol. 2. Verso Books, 1997.
Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X : as Told to Alex Haley. Ballantine Books, 1987. 1-496.
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Harper Perennial, 1992.

The Rise of American Nativism from 1900 to 1930

2006-04-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

American society esteems itself as a sanctuary for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses of the world. It adamantly claims to celebrate the principles of rowdy ethnic pluralism and colorful cultural diversity at the core of its identity. However, the proverbial melting pot of American society has not, and perhaps never will, epitomize the egalitarian spirit of the American Dream – the belief that this nation is an unlimited beacon of hope and opportunity. From the 1798 Alien Acts, which required the immediate expulsion of foreigners “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” to modern-day Islamophobia, American patriotism and fear during times of change have drummed up anti-foreign stirrings to a shrill pitch. Nativism, in simple terms, is a dogged adherence to the belief that race functions as the most important determinant of cultural identity; this played an important role in the shaping of America at the dawn of the twentieth century. The self-righteous clamoring of reformers during the progressive era coupled with the drastic changes of post-World War I America incited a new sense of nativism during the 1920s and 1930s that aimed to preserve a rose-colored conception of true Americanism.

The heart of the progressive reform movement during the first decade of the twentieth century was quite unlike anything American society had ever experienced before. Rather than campaigning for the government as a bulwark of individual liberty, progressive reformers fought for the government as an agent of human welfare. They felt that the burden of purging social, economic, and political corruption should be accepted by the government – that unbridled capitalism and unregulated politicking are dangerous for democracy.

However, an unfortunate extension of the logic behind economic and political regulation was the misguided belief that all aspects of society must be stringently monitored and delicately disinfected. Indeed, this Panglossian campaign for an ideal America provided the foundation for the upsurge of nativism in the 1920s and 1930s. To the progressives, compromising civic and economic freedom in the name of social sanitization was wholly justified. This mentality led to benignant new business regulations as well as coherent and odious eugenics and temperance movements. In his book Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius’ remarks, “Seeing their country as a land of innocence, many Americans had long clung to the idea of self-purification, attempting to excise that which posed a danger to the social good” (Satel 2). The temperance and eugenics movements, quite simply, were organized attempts at restricting personal freedom in the name of societal betterment. For example, the eighteenth amendment, the brainchild of early temperance crusaders, was the only constitutional alteration designed principally to restrict individual liberty. Likewise, America’s compulsory sterilization programs – having begun in 1907 when Indiana passed a law allowing doctors to sterilize the mentally or physically unfit – were borne out of the desire to control the genetic makeup of the electorate. For the first time in human history, doctors were instructed to operate on unwilling and healthy patients in the name of promoting social good.

The concepts of social restriction and genetic sanitation clearly buttress nativism. Harry Laughlin, an influential developer of the eugenics movement, remarked, “The recent immigrants (largely from Southern and Eastern Europe) as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do older stocks” (Quinn 39). Nativism was a logical outgrowth of a social mentality that pushed for a large-scale government-sponsored cleansing of American society. On a philosophical level, progressivism and nativism were reflections of the prevailing utopianism in the American public.

The aftermath of World War I left American society disillusioned by foreign intervention and apprehensive about the rise of radicalism abroad; these conditions provided an ideal setting for the fomentation of social purification programs developed during the progressive era and for the upsurge of nativism. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 fanned the flames of the isolationist movement by inspiring new fears of communist agitators in the minds of Americans. Many angry citizens blindly ascribed the scourge of labor strikes during the period between 1918 and 1919 to Russian revolutionaries. War-time American author stuck a chord in American nativism by declaring, “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell” (Bailey 280). The paranoid anti-foreignism and vindictive censorship of radicalism of the day are two hallmarks of nativism.

The hysteria reached epic proportions during 1919 and 1920, culminating in the first organized manifestation of brewing anti-foreignism, “the red scare.” Attorney general Mitchell Palmer capitalized on frightened Americans by zealously rounding up over six thousand alleged enemies of the state. Moreover, he successfully forced the deportation of 249 suspected radical communists back to Russia. In the name of protecting American freedom, Palmer fought for the passage of criminal syndicalism laws in each state; with this, he carelessly tore down the distinction between actions and words, made all threats of violence treasonous in the first degree, and abandoned fundamental principles of first Amendment freedoms. The reasoned remark by newspaper editor William Allen White, that a radical who “merely preaches his creed and does not preach violence, [ ] can do no harm” (Bailey 280) fell on the deaf ears of an over-patriotic American public.

No better example of the subversion of American justice in the name of American nativism exists than in execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The men were convicted of murder not because their guilt was proven beyond all reasonable doubt, but because their blasphemous ideology was known beyond all reasonable denial: they were atheists, Italians, anarchists, and draft dodgers. Vanzetti famously acknowledged, “But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical” (Bailey 281). The supercharged atmosphere of post-World War I America – vivid dreams of a better future and dark fears of social collapse – provided an ideal environment for the triumph of narrow-minded bigotry.

Congress responded to the nativist pressures of the 1920s by passing the Immigration Act of 1924 – codifying the nation’s calls for provincial Americanism. According to this legislation, number of immigrants allowed from a certain country was set to the quota of 2% of the number of immigrants in 1890s America. Essentially, the system reflected prevailing prejudices by blatantly discriminating against foreigners of Eastern and Southern European descent. That year, Professor of Columbia University of president of the American Museum of Natural history, echoed the dark tone of the day by insisting that the battle “to maintain the predominance of our race,” has not yet been won, and that American must learn from the “decadence and decline of which undermined the great republics of Greece and Rome” by rejecting “the appeals of false humanitarianism.” The immigration restrictions were a collective triumph for eugenics movement: the legislation homogenized ethnic differences and shifted the racial composition of the country to its Anglo-Saxon origins. The racial restrictions, moreover, were a victory for pervasive nativism because they were pacified all society: the plutocratic alarm of immigrant restlessness, the middle-class vision of a pure society untainted by unworthy blood and the working-classes’ fear of labor competition.

Finally, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan during the first quarter of the twentieth century – membership exceeding a staggering 5 million by 1925 – embodied, perhaps more so than anything else, the violent nativism of the age. Spawned by the dizzying effects of rapid change, the Klan rose on the pillars hate and intolerance; it added antiforeignism, anticommunist, and antichange to its typical arsenal of hate. Reverend Bob Shuler of Shuler’s Magazine excuses the violent tendencies of the Klan by noting that “the tenets, principles, and aims of the Ku Klux Klan” include a “positive emphasis for Americanism as opposed to foreignism”; and therefore, the “the principles of the Klan are not so damnable as pictured” (Bailey 286). Pro-Americanism dignified violent antiforeignism, and the Ku Klux Klan rose to power.

The widespread bans on interracial marriage, the compulsory sterilization programs, the systematic deportations of intellectual radicals, the strict racial quotas, and the powerful vigilantly group founded on hate and bigotry cumulatively gave 1920s America the right to consider itself one of the most culturally repressive nations in the world. Nativism rose in the void left by the purgation of social corruption from American society and triumphed in the fearful paranoia of a post-War nation. Insular dread and idealistic fervor invariably bred nativism and ethnocentrism. The nation’s cultural beliefs swayed then – and indeed today – in the winds of political, economic, and social change: from acceptance to intolerance, from a call for diversity to a call for purity, and from an open democracy to a stifling tyranny of the majority.

Works Cited

Bailey, Thomas A., and David M. Kennedy. The American Spirity. Vol. 1. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Quinn, Peter. "Race Cleansing in America." American Heritage Mar. 2003.

Satel, Sally. "A Better Breed of American." The New York Times 26 Feb. 2006.

The Stylistic and Thematic Similarities of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay McInerney

2006-04-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

During the 1920s he had it all: F. Scott Fitzgerald was fabulously wealthy and tremendously famous, he was married to the most beautiful woman in town, and author of the novel that seemed to both define and embody the extravagance, decadence, and evolving values of the Jazz Age. He reached near-superstardom and he did this all before 30 years of age. Amidst this whirlwind of social chance and dizzying prosperity, Fitzgerald began to work on his greatest literary masterpiece yet, a book that would solidify his place among the greatest authors of the 20^th century and go on to define American literature.

In the summer of 1924, when Fitzgerald was only 28 years old, he wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins of his novel The Great Gatsby, “I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.” Fitzgerald goes on to say that, “This book will be a consciously artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not.” Fitzgerald seemed to have understood that his novel would reach artistic significance that would pervade well beyond the commercial success of his other two books. Indeed, one of the most profound legacies Fitzgerald’s novel left on America’s literary landscape was its tremendous precision of language, its depth of imagery, and its capacity to evoke emotional response not just through content, but through poetic sound and rhythm. Embedded within his style, Fitzgerald's vivid pictures paint the 1920s as an era of decadence, corruption, and moral decline only combated by hope for a better future. Jay McInerney in his book excerpt It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are? emulates Fitzgerald’s style, likewise commenting on the vacuous existence of society’s upper echelon, and the importance of hope in a time of such vivid social adulteration. Jay McInerney stylistically parallels F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in order to evoke similar mental and emotional images about the debased morality of society’s wealthiest class during the roaring 1980s.

Part of what makes Fitzgerald writing so fluid and poetic is his remarkable economy of expression and clarity of design: rather than using explicit statements and superfluous details, Fitzgerald develops themes through parallel plot occurrences and incremental repetition of ideas—through methods of implication. For example, in Gatsby car accidents are paralleled to show a disturbing disregard for other people’s wellbeing by the wealthy class. Owl Eyes, one of Gatsby’s drunken guests gets into a terrible car accident in the middle of chapter three; Jordan Baker, a spoiled and cynical suburbanite, comes so close to hitting a man with her car at the end of chapter three that the fender flicks his coat button, nearly killing him; Daisy, also a wealthy, powerful, and beautiful socialite, in the moral low point of the novel during chapter seven, runs over and kills Myrtle with Gatsby’s car and speeds away without so much as stopping to help. These parallel events of carelessness and striking disregard for Other humanity imply to the reader the decayed sensitivities of the upper-class during the 1920s. In fact, when Nick, the novel’s neutral center, comments on Jordan’s carelessness, she responds, “‘They’ll keep out of my way…It takes two to make an accident’” (63). Jordan’s carelessness is given significance by the fact that this mentality is imbued within many of the wealthy elite within Gatsby. Fitzgerald uses parallel events and implication to embed theme within style.

McInerney, whose literary role model, in fact, is Fitzgerald, uses similar parallel plot occurrences to imply themes within his literature. Many times throughout It’s Six A.M. the narrator uses drugs to boost waning moral, “You remember the Bolivian Marching Powder and realize you’re not down yet” (137). This events when viewed singularly does not seem morally significant beyond the surface danger of drug use; however, the subtle parallel between a “creeping sense of morality” and the desire to do drugs connotes to the reader that, just as Fitzgerald parallels reckless driving with reckless values, the characters of McInerney’s book are using drugs to suppress lingering senses of sin and immorality. “…Sunday morning, and as long as you have any brain cells left there will always be this resonant patriarchal basso echoing down the marble vaults of your churchgoing childhood to remind you that this is the Lord’s day. What you need is another overpriced drink to drown it out” (139). Here, like many times throughout the excerpt, moral values are being suppressed through mind altering drugs. Drugs, within the mores of 1980s social culture, were not means of bringing about happiness, but a means to escape unhappiness; however, rather than explicitly stating this outright, McInerney, like Fitzgerald, uses incremental development of ideas to imply this fundamental thematic concept within his book.

Furthermore, both Fitzgerald and McInerney use sensual imagery which, like the poor driving and drug intake, gains symbolic importance only through repetition. Fitzgerald threads specific colors throughout the novel. For example, he uses the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock to represents one man’s idealistic hope for a more perfect future. Gatsby’s infatuation with the green light establishes the color’s thematic significance in the beginning of the book, “[Gatsby] stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock” (26). Likewise, green light is paralleled at the very end of the book to solidify its importance, with New York called “a fresh, green breast of the new world” and the claim that “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” (189). Green in The Great Gatsby represents hope for the future and an important divergence from the corrupted principles of the 1920s—it embodies the noble values of the true American dream.

McInerney, rather than threading a visual cue throughout his book, weaves an emblematic aroma within his story to conger up emotional and mental imagery. Once again, like in Gatsby, this imagery only gains thematic significance through repetition. For the unnamed narrator within It’s Six A.M., the buttery croissant—the perfect complement to a Sunday morning newspaper—idealizes an existence of substance and moral certitude, an escape from the nihilistic corruption of the power hungry 1980s. “You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes early on Sunday morning and steps out to pick up The Times and croissants” (137). Bread, most specifically the smell of bread, represents to the narrator in It’s Six A.M. what, in some ways, the ray of green light represents to Gatsby: a shimmer of hope within a world of dizzying superficiality. “As you turn away, what is left of your olfactory equipment sends a message to you brain. The smell of fresh bread. Somewhere they are baking bread.” The narrator’s smell of the bread, weakened by the damaging effects of cocaine, is a striking analogy to a diminished hope of survival paralleling the continued rise of irresponsible living. At last, however, the narrator finds redemption from within the bag of bread, “You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushed over you” (142). It is at this moment that the narrator realizes the necessity of escape. McInerney’s scent thread throughout his story, as a vehicle of hope for the character, makes a strong connection to Fitzgerald’s use of the color green with Gatsby.

Another developed stylistic parallel between McInerney’s and Fitzgerald’s writing is the use of a narrator who not only reports the occurrences of the story, but plays a pivotal part role in the progression of the book. Part of Fitzgerald’s literary genius was choosing to narrate the book through the honest and morally upright eyes of an narrator named Nick Carraway. “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,” Carraway says, “and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (64). Fitzgerald mimicks a person’s social interactive real-life social interactions by developing characters through gradual addition of facts, not omniscient floods of information. Rather than forcing the reader precariously between the event and the narrator, Fitzgerald unabashfully allies the reader with the narrator -- his hopes and dreams only humanizing the tale. The reader is able to sympathize with Gatsby’s tragic pursuit of dream only because Gatsby is judged though the realism of human understanding; he is able to feel the emotional depth of the plot only because it is portrayed through the heart of Nick, whose character is rooted in honesty and purity.

Likewise, Jay McInerney’s book gains great realism and thematic substance through his ingenious use of narrative point of view. McInerney rejects Fitzgerald’s use of first person point of view; indeed, he writes one of the only novels ever entirely in second person point of view. The excerpt begins that, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning” (135). Just like Fitzgerald, McInerney instantly thrusts the reader into the physical and emotional backdrop of the story, creating an intensely personal literary experience. However, more so than Fitzgerald, McInerney uses the unique point of view to underscore his thematic concerns. The protagonist of the story is an unnamed, emotionally unstable adult who is lost in the clamoring hedonism of the glitzy and decadent club scene of the 1980s. The use of “you” not only creates a sense of involvement, but more specifically a sense of entrapment within the occurrences of the novel; the reader's existence as the narrator is dictated by outside forces, not free will. This point of view therefore engenders an emotional response that’s appropriate to a critique of the consumerist values of the 1980s, values which McInerney believes to be prescribed by expectations and mass-conceptions. In a sense, by using second person point of view, McInerney develops the theme that in the 1980s freedom of choice was merely illusionary, that people were enslaved by their appetites for pleasure and their preoccupation with image. It was not until the very end of the story that the narrator began to understand this and reader was broken free from their dictated entanglement within the story, “The first bite [of bread] sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again” (142). The narrator learns that morality and mental salvation can only come about by breaking free from the procrustean chains of the 1980s cultural values. McInerney, like Fitzgerald, uses point of view to create an intimate relationship between the reader and the plot, and to accentuate key thematic concerns within the novel.

Beyond concept repetition and unique point of view, McInerney’s It’s Six A.M. and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both tend to emphasis a class of similarly descriptive phrases and thematically important diction. Firstly, both Fitzgerald and McInerney used oxymoronic characterizations to emphasize the narrators’ ambivalent attitude towards the wealthy leisure class of the time. Nick classifies the characters of the book using contradictory phraseology such as Jordan Baker’s “charming, discontented face” (15), Daisy’s “absurd, charming little laugh” (13), and Tom’s “magnanimous scorn” (142). Likewise, McInerney’s protagonist comments that Tad Allagash, the embodiment of the morally vacant pleasure-seekers of the time, “is either your best self or your worse self, you’re not sure which” (136). These apparent contradictions only reinforce the uncertainty and indecisive moral landscape of the time.

Additionally, vocabulary of impermanence is used throughout both texts to reinforce themes of lonely nihilism and moral subjectivity. In Gatsby, the term “drift” is used twelve times and the term “restless” eight, “I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game” (10). This drifting mentality is reflective of the purposeless pursuit of pleasure during the 1920s. Similarly, McInerney embeds the concept of continual movement right within his text, “You started on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot moving around, since there is always the likelihood that you are missing something” (136). This continual motion too suggests lack of security and purpose during a time of lavish and excessive wealth.

Finally, there are striking religious overtones propagated by specific word repetition within both Fitzgerald’s and McInerney’s work, suggestive of an omnipotent force observing the moral decay of the times. George Wilson, when discussing the death of his wife: “I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’ Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. ‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson” (167). The presence of this force is an important moral absolute in an era characterized by changing values and evolving standards. Likewise, McInerney’s text uses words such as “righteous,” “salvation” and “mortality” to emphasize a similar all-knowing force of judgment, “There is a bum sleeping on the sidewalk, swathed in garbage bags. He lifts his head as you pass. “God bless you and forgive you sins,” he says. You wait for the cadge but that’s all he says. You wish he hadn’t said it” (141). The bum, mercifully devoid of extravagance and consumerism, illuminates the importance of an objective set of values in a culture based only on pleasure. These religious overtones, created through linguistic repetition, imply the watchful presence of a godlike figure that forces people to account for their actions of immortality and impurity—to repent for their sins. Though never explicitly illuminated, its parallels in style which develop thematic similarities in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and McInerney’s It’s Six A.M.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is universally acclaimed as the voice of his generation; likewise, Jay McInerney, although no doubt less well-known, too has captured, in some senses, the voice of his 1980s generation. Paralleled in style—rhythmic, imagistic, and poetic—both writers encapsulated two periods of time, though more than half a century apart, not so different from each other. Both novels masterfully embody the social ills of their generations: they capture the youthful restlessness, the prodigal lifestyle of the wealthy class, and the vacant sense of morality shared by so many who have been corrupted by extravagant wealth and prosperity. In the end, the American dream, a concept at the heart of Fitzgerald’s and McInerney’s novel, was never just about wealth and prosperity—just look at the soulless products of excessive materialism and consumerism within their books to see that—it’s been about living a better and brighter future, about being content and happy. Indeed, money’s a vehicle of idealism, not the goal itself—that, in it’s barest element, is what Fitzgerald and McInerney are trying to tell us. The American dream, inflated by myths and misconceptions, represents not an attainable goal that we can hope to achieve, but hope itself. Without this hope, Fitzgerald and McInerney seem to ask, how can we survive?

Being There: Kosinski’s Reality

2006-04-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

Mankind’s vivid dreams and fears occupy a realm of fleeting abstraction known only in the mind. Ideas and emotions – engulfing thoughts, passionate desires, and dark secrets – cannot be touched or smelled or tasted; they cannot be set down in a dresser drawer or studied with magnifying glasses. Ideas are but ephemeral concepts dancing naked in our psyche, blissfully disconnected from a tangible reality. The five senses work to connect the brain’s helpless abstraction to the world’s cold sterile reality; thus, ideas are important not in-and-of themselves, but as means of influencing and interpreting the perceived world. Images and words, inherently limited in scope and narrow in dimension, are powerful and dangerous vehicles of reality distortion: they become mere projections of one’s intellectual landscape, rather than accurate representation of the world. Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, in his iconoclastic novel Being There, examines the delicate relationship between the mind, the media and reality, famously contending that “life is state of mind” predicated on abstract expectation.

Chance, the novel’s existential antihero, is a simple man of simple intent. He tends to a garden from within mansion walls he has never set foot beyond and he watches television to learn of a society he has no interest in inhabiting. He has no family, no true name, and indeed no intellect by which to protest his servility. He is a prisoner ignorant of his chains. He is a man without a self.

However, like the plants within his garden, Chance is firmly rooted in existence. Awareness of eventual annihilation is an ever-present fact of human life; it motivates actions and limits intentions – it shapes life absolutely. However, Chance has no conception of his own self and thus is blissfully unaware of his own imminent destruction. Instead, like a plant, he grows from within himself, unphased by his own precarious position within the inevitable cogs of the universe, yet warmly content with his place in the garden. “Plants were like people; they need care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully. Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face; no plant can do anything intentionally: it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream” (3-4). Kosinski contends that life is merely a distinction manufactured from within the mind; that in the fundamental perspective of the universe, the death of one man is merely the birth of another, and so turns the cycle of life. Like a garden, life provides for death, and in turn that death facilitates and nourishes new life: “And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden’s surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing” (5). Life is merely a mental state in which man decides that he owns his self. Chance, unaware of his self, lives and dies in peace: “A breeze fell upon the foliage and nestled under the cover of its moist leaves. Not a thought lifted itself from Chance’s brain. Peace filled his chest” (140). The words “breeze,” “foliage” and “moist leaves” personify the intimate connection Chance has with the cyclic advancement of nature: his life is merely fertilizing other life.

Thus, “being there” is the state of human existence where a man stands as a man. Chance dissociates from the solipsistic life of self-contemplation, yet rejects an understanding of the world around him; instead he peacefully wanders without directions, occupying a realm of sincere existence. “What was particularly nice about the garden was that, at any moment, standing in the narrow paths or amidst the bushes and trees, Chance could start to wander, never knowing whether he was going forward or backward, unsure whether he was ahead of or behind his pervious steps. All that mattered was moving in his own time, like the growing plants” (4). Chance does not know of his position in the universe, so, like the plants, he is unaware of whether he is traveling towards death or towards birth, whether he is traveling forward or backward.

When Chance is forced into the world beyond his secluded garden, two fundamentally different concepts of reality emerge. In the outside world, Kosinski argues, existence is predicated on visual stimulation and mental interpretation. “As long as one didn’t look at people, they did not exist. They began to exist, as on TV, when on turned one’s eyes on them. Only then could they stay in one’s mind before being erased by new images” (14). On the other hand, to a man foreign to mental interpretation, reality is real merely because it is there, “Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself be” (5). When two lawyers enter Chance’s mansion after its owner died, the reality antithesis is exposed: “‘We shall need some proof of your having lived here,” Mr. Franklin said firmly,” Chance responds, “‘You have me. I am here. What more proof do you need?’” To Chance life is self evident. To others, life is merely a state of mental abstraction: if you are not seen and contemplated, then you do not exist.

When Chance is exposed to the world, he unknowingly begins to embody the philosophic duality between corporal reality and mental reality; in effect, he simultaneously is two opposite reflections on the universe. Chance, the man, lives within himself, but has never existed. His counterpart, Chauncey Gardiner, the image, from the moment he enters the world to the moment he dies, exists in everyone’s mind, but has never lived. The irony is strikingly apparent: Chance lives a pure and unadulterated life, while Chauncey simultaneous occupies an abstract false reality. Before appearing on television, the schism is examined, “What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show: one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it?” (61). Essentially, Chance is both a stunning example of life rooted in existence and a disheartening embodiment of life constructed through image.

Television – by definition – is the world’s most effective forum for reality construction; it exacerbates the potential for image dispersion and distortion by allowing millions of viewers to project their own hopes and fears on the two-dimensional images that pass by their faces: “Television reflected only people’s surfaces; it also kept peeling their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the caverns of their viewers’ eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to disappear. Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became an image for millions of real people” (65). The words “sucked,” “caverns,” “disappear,” and “peeling” construct in the reader’s mind a vacuous reality where emptiness replaces firm existence.

Chauncey Gardiner, perhaps mostly because of television, is a social fabrication. Chauncey, unlike Chance, is an image constructed by society’s boundless hopes and desires, existing only in the fleeting but passionate realm of the mind, personifying society’s exalted expectations, and reflecting its aggrandized interpretation of its own form. In short, society sees Chauncey with an expectation of itself, “When on was addressed and viewed by others, one was safe. Whatever one did would then be interpreted by the others in the same way that one interpreted what they did. They could never know more about one than one knew about them” (34). Elizabeth Eve (EE), for example, becomes infatuated not with Chance the man but with the idea of Chauncey; however, she loves him only to the extent that she loves herself: “‘You make me free. I reveal myself to myself and I am drenched and purged” (116). Likewise, the Russian ambassador sees in Chauncey what the ambassador sees in himself: “‘I must tell you, our firm conviction is that Gardiner is, in fact, a leading member of an American elitist faction that has for some years been planning a coup d’état” (128). To businessmen, Chauncey is a thorough-bred capitalist, “‘He’s personable, well-spoken, and he comes across well on TV! And, as far as his thinking goes, he appears to be one of us. That’s all. It’s clear what he isn’t. Gardiner is our one chance’” (139). And finally, to a disparate nation he’s a unifying voice of optimism, “‘Thank you, thank you, Mr. Gardiner. Yours is the spirit which this country so greatly needs. Let’s hope it will help usher spring into our economy. Thank you again, Mr. Chauncey Gardiner – financier, presidential adviser, and true statesman!’” (68). Chauncey, the image, becomes an embodiment of what others see in themselves.

Kosinski’s haunting assertion that “life is a state of mind” must be considered through the analytical lenses of Chance as an existential traveler and Chauncey as a media construction. Chance said to the world, “‘In a garden, things grow…but first, they must wither” (67). Those who listened added profundity to his words based on the complexity of their own lives – his words quickly became manifestations of society’s deepest hopes and fears. Thus, in one sense, life is a state of mind because our world seeks truth from mental abstraction rather than simple existence. In quite another sense, however, his words were profound, if only because they were true. Indeed, it wasn’t the profundity that was false, it was the complexity; perhaps, life really is a garden where men and women need only “care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully” (1), Kosinski seems to suggest. Chance is but a simple gardener; Chauncey is a by-product of mental abstraction. One man is both the solution and a chilling reminder of the problem. When the two spheres collide, reality seems a little more like an empty state of mind.

July’s People and Intellectual Freedom

2006-02-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

In South Africa, dancing naked in the rain, exposed to the explosive freedom of natural existence, liberated from the cold tethers of suburban sterility, Maureen Smales begins to reflect on intellectual superficiality. In a small hut, during the interregnum between the destruction of the apartheid government and the birth of a new order of thought, Maureen learns to reject narrow-minded assumptions and to question archaic senses of sin. She learns to embrace human diversity. July’s People, by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, teaches us to look critically at our belief systems and our world. White, liberal, and affluent, we’re all a little like Maureen Smales. We’re all a little trapped in this quaint suburbia, sheltered from human suffering.

However, it’s exposure to literature—to other worlds and other people and other ideas—that frees us from the repressive homogeneity of everyday existence. A diverse literature base functions as one of the most potent safeguards against stereotype and narrow-mindedness; and ignorance functions as the strongest bulwark of prejudice.

Indeed, one of the most important goals of education—of John Jay High School—is to teach students to analytically approach a diverse array of facts and opinions, to weigh pieces of evidence, and to make educated conclusions. Any person who wishes to stifle this diversity of thought—in the name of personal values or community standards—is promoting a certain breed of bigotry and simplemindedness, and I refuse to be silent.

As many know, a single-man campaign is being waged against the school to censor the book July’s People from the tenth grade required-reading curriculum. The book, according to a February 2nd letter to the editors of The Lewisboro Ledger by the man at the forefront of the campaign, “contains graphic descriptions of female genitalia and sexual intercourse,” as well as, “profanity of the type that is not acceptable in any other organization.” He cited the book’s study guide as evidence. He misspelled the author’s name.

By definition, parental concern crosses the nebulous line towards “censorship” when it seeks to restrict not just one child from reading a book, but an entire grade. This precisely what the man is aiming to achieve. Questioning a book is fine, but seeking to ban it is censorship—plain and simple.

Censorship, like a poisonous gas released in open air, threatens to stifle and destroy based on the direction of the wind. We should not restrict the intellectual freedom of John Jay High School students based on the social winds of contemporary times. We should not limit the freedom of information in this school based on the moral decisions of a few. What is at stake, my fellow students and teachers, is nothing less than human prosperity: the magnificent diversity of opinions, ideas, and thought so essential to the betterment of mankind cannot flourish in the cold conformity sought by a repressive few.

Liberal freedom of thought is paradoxical. Indeed, at first glance, we find that the philosophy behind censoring July’s People might make sense. Consider this: a free society functions by allowing individuals to make choices concerning what media they’re exposed to. Essentially, freedom of choice supersedes any conception of right and wrong: I may not support homosexuality, but I support one’s right to make a personal decision; I may not support euthanasia, or Howard Stern, or even Playboy, but I support one’s right to choose. Without the ability to make choices, we can no longer consider ourselves free, right? So, in a way, I ask myself, Why should a community’s value system be imposed on this man’s son? If this were a racist administration pushing a racist book, don’t we have the right to exempt ourselves from reading it? Who are we to judge the validity of one concern over another concern?

Though attractive, these arguments are fundamentally misguided: in the schoolyard freedom has a different face. Educators in our school system are endowed with the unique responsibility of determining what is valuable and what is trash; what is good and what is bad. Sure, in the public world everyone gets to choose his or her own path in life, and everyone gets to change the channel, put down the book, or turn off the radio. However, it’s in the educational world that we equip ourselves with the intellectual resources to makes these choices. So, it’s in the educational world—by its inherent didactic nature—that we must trust those above us to make educated and prudent decision concerning the media we’re exposed to. The school system is a training ground for the development of opinions and insights, not a microcosm of modern society where everyone has the ultimate freedom of choice.

In fact, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Miller v. California, it was found that no material containing, “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” can be banned from the public sector or the school systems. Likewise, John Jay’s humanities department selection criteria states clearly that, “the fact of sexual incidents or profanity appearing in a book or passage will not, of itself, disqualify a book from selection.” Simply put, any censorship under the guise of enforcing “community standards” demands a higher burden of moral consideration than simply do I agree with the material being taught? Instead, educational value must play an integral role in the decision of literature inclusion.

In The Ledger, the man writes, “[I] placed my trust in the administration of our school to protect my child.” It’s true that our High School must consider freedom of speech based on the social utility that it provides.

It must be made explicitly clear, however, that July’s People—considering its author’s Nobel Prize, its towering themes of social justice, and its beautiful glimpses into the human spirit—is a literary masterpiece, and provides an important social utility to the school and to the community. July’s People, reviewed by the New York Times as, “so flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible,” is not pornography and is not filth, it’s a work of art.

Though sexual undertones make important commentaries within the book, in no way is sex a central aspect of the text. “I hope that as our teachers access worthy texts with their students,” writes Mr. Cass, director of John Jay’s humanity department, “they will help to distinguish the gratuitous from that which enlarges a view of relationships, the prurient from the honestly human, the sleazy from the artistic. In a small way, July’s People allows us to do that.”

As a community must stand by the unequivocal declaration that there is nothing bad about sex, and that debasing sexual knowledge as wicked and sinful is a morbid and intellectually repressive practice. We must acknowledge that official ignorance of sexual matters, when coupled with the inevitable knowledge disseminated in locker rooms and weekend parties teaches children to be deceitful and hypocritical to their elders. We must assert that virtue based on deception is not virtue at all, and that knowledge based on delicate filtration is not knowledge at all.

It’s true that democracy of action is the surest form of government; however, democracy of thought is dangerous, for the suppression of legitimate intellectualism demands more than a mere preponderance of opinion. Tyranny of the majority must not threaten the diversity of our school system.

It’s the liberal view of knowledge dissemination that all things, in varying degrees, are questionable; and it’s the strictly illiberal conviction that certain facts must not ever be subject to the critical hands of human reason. With that it mind, we must have faith that dissent will only elucidate the truth. That discussion rather than legislative force must determine the content of our school’s curriculum, and that open lines of communication concerning what is appropriate and what isn’t are fundamentally important to the health of our school district and indeed our democracy at large. And as students we must not be short-changed, infantilized, and isolated from this important dialogue concerning our academic freedom. We must not let the poison gas of censorship and moral agenda be released to obscure our vision and sedate our quest for knowledge. We must not censor July’s People from our school’s reading curriculum.

Marriage and Female Vulnerability

2006-01-14T12:26:00.000-08:00

American society prides itself on its social freedoms and egalitarian values. Democracy has had a rich legacy in American history, and indeed great strides have been made within our nation to construct a more equitable social code, one that deviates less and less from the promise of “liberty and justice for all,” recited daily in our Pledge of Allegiance. However, despite advances, tremendous sex-based inequalities still exist. A woman employed fulltime earns a startling 75 cents to the likewise fulltime employed man, more than one half of poor families are headed by a single mother, and more than twice as many elderly women are impoverished when compared to the number of men in the same age bracket.[1]

Vast inequalities between male and female social status are no longer borne out of legal mandates, but out of underlying conceptions about gender-based obligations. Though legal provisions have attempted to establish female equality within the workforce, few provisions have done the same for the protection of justice within the domestic sphere, and the advancement of women has continued to be tyrannized by antiquated social dictations and constraints. The expectation and actuality of the division of labor between household management and money earning within the home creates a dynamic of power that devalues female contributions and emasculates their social, economic and political influence. Moreover, despite rapidly expanding female employment, archaic gender expectations still define marriage and childrearing, forcing even working women to make unfortunate decisions between their careers and their families amidst great social pressure. Fundamentally, it’s the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid resources within the institution of marriage that leaves women economically and socially vulnerable; domestic inequality that transcends into every facet of American society. Wedding rings, in many respects, dignify the suspension of social justice.

The institution of marriage is a social relic; a vestige of a time when gender roles were cemented firmly in place and women wielded no political or economic power. Socially constructed concepts of “gender obligation” helped lay the framework for “matrimonial obligation,” and sex-based stereotypes became constituent to marriage’s existence. Certain sexes, it was once believed, were naturally relegated to certain spheres within society; men, of course, asserted themselves as being intellectually and physically dominant, and roles in society were sorted with such conceptions in mind.

The Awakening, a novel published in 1899 by Kate Chopin, poignantly depicts the repressive power dynamic within late nineteenth century domestic life. Edna, the novel’s main character, struggles to achieve recognition as an individual within a society that prescribes female subservience. The ideal women of the time, the book remarks, were those, “who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals” (18). Here, an important causation is established early on: a female’s role as the caretaker of her children and husband leads to the suppression of her individuality. This argument holds true throughout the book as Edna’s gender-based obligations create obstacles for her development as a person. Mr. Pontellier, Edna’s archetypical husband, comments that his wife had, “failed in her duty toward their children,” criticizing her, that, “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman” (20). The assumption and glorification of certain gender-based “duties” within society led to the fermentation of a rigid marriage structure that made women dependent on their husbands and defenseless in a world beyond the secluded realm of their homes.

Though many of the arguments made throughout the centuries about the biological inferiority of women have fallen out of favor, the patriarchal power structures that naturally extended from these beliefs so evident in The Awakening, to a large extent still exist and thrive within today’s society: despite increasing female participation in the workforce, it is still widely assumed that a certain division of labor should position women as the primary caretakers and men as the primary money earners. Marriage throughout the ages has served as a bulwark of the status quo, amidst great tides of liberalization. Though women have drastically increased their potential to affect change in modern society, a result largely achieved due to the efforts made during the upsurge of feminism within the 1970s, the institution of marriage continues to propagate a repressive power structure that prevents women from getting ahead.

The cycle of vulnerability perpetuated by marriage begins early. Society places tremendous pressure on women to vindicate their social status through matrimony; in fact, young women are significantly more likely than young men to regard having a “good marriage and family life” as extremely important factors for future happiness.[2] As such, the expectation of marriage becomes an important and dangerous factor in female career ambition. For example, in a 2005 New York Times article, highly motivated and disciplined Yale University student Cynthia Liu articulated the constraint imposed by domestic expectations, as she justified her decision to be a “stay-at-home mom,” remarking, “‘My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time…You always have to choose one over the other.’”[3] Simply put, the importance placed on marriage, compounded with female’s responsibility as the primary parent, affects the level of education and the fields of expertise sought out by females in today’s society. Such domestic expectations force women early in life to make the precarious choices between their families and their careers—decisions men simply don’t have to make.

When women envisage a future of familial responsibility, they naturally tend to choose careers that accommodate their positions as primary caretakers. Though it’s true that female education and employment have been steadily increasing, and that a small minority of women wield tremendous economic power, the vast majority of women are still relegated into facets of the workforce that provide lower pay, poorer working conditions, and fewer opportunities for job mobility—because of matrimonial expectation and domestic obligations. For example, though three out of five college graduates are now women, women are still far more likely to work in administrative fields such as secretaries, typists or book-keeper, which hold no prospects for advancement; in 2000, more than twenty-five percent of working women occupied this category, as a opposed to only eight percent of working men.[4] The social expectation of marriage thus perpetuates a sex-segregated workforce.

Marriage continues this vulnerability set in motion by societal expectations. Women enter the relationship stifled by a sex-segregated workforce, frustrated by dead-end jobs, and disenchanted by poor working conditions; many women thus come to believe that they stand to benefit from the acceptance of their husband’s career as the number one priority, and find no reason to question the traditional structure of marriage. It is no secret that in almost every family in America, the wife does the majority of the child rearing and house maintaining. Many accept the traditional division of labor as efficient and biologically predisposed. However, this distribution of unpaid and paid labor that has been accepted for centuries leaves women economically vulnerable and politically codependent.

In a society where social power is measured by economic means, the reciprocation of unpaid labor such as housework for actual financial resources creates a power dynamic where the female is economically and psychologically dependent on the male; two-thirds of wives subscribe to traditional gender roles in the United States and stay at home fulltime.[5] The skills gained by the unpaid labor within the home hold little weight as career credentials and little esteem from society at large. Indeed, the traditional stay-at-home mother subjects herself to tremendous degrees of social devaluation and economic dependence, a structure that enables male usurpations of power. Men can use this economic leverage to supreme advantage, withholding money during disputes and even using economic threats to mandate tolerance of (say) infidelity or physical violence. It’s true that from a pragmatic point of view, many stay-at-home mothers are unable to support themselves free from matrimonial bond, and therefore at times must accept a position of subservience in order to secure economic wellbeing. Female psychology expert Linda Gordon concludes that, “The basis of wife-beating is male dominance—not superior physical strength or violent temperament…but social, economic, political, and psychological power…Wife-beating is the chronic battering of a person of inferior power who for that reason cannot effectively resist.”[6] The concentration of money in male hands neuters makes women substantially vulnerable.

Fortunately, it’s true that female economic autonomy is steadily improving, and therefore economic vulnerability is lessening; however, despite increased female (and mother) participation in the workforce, women are still expected to incur the vast majority to domestic duties. A double burden between the mother’s children/housework and her career is incurred, and her male counterpart seldom works to increase his own responsibilities of around the house.[7] Instead, the standards of child care and house maintenance are decreased or (among the elite) compensated through professional help—not through help from the husband. One study concluded that, “husbands of wives with full-time jobs averaged about two minutes more housework per day that did husbands with housewives maintaining families, hardly enough additional time to prepare a soft-boiled egg.” As a result, a fulltime working mother, who incurs a dual burden, works more statistical hours per-week than her husband, 71.1 hours compared to his 64.9 hours. More significant, however, is the fact that she is clocking more than 43 hours of unpaid labor, whereas he is only working about 9.s hours a week without being financially compensated. [8] This, once again, establishes a relationship where social power and societal value are maldistributed based on who is doing the majority of paid labor. Moreover, the female fulltime worker who is forced to incur responsibilities within both realms of society must compete within her job against males who face none of the same domestic obligations—a fact suppressing female success.

Finally, one of the most substantial vulnerabilities faced by women who readily exchange unpaid labor for their husbands’ paid labor, is the potential for complete separation from their husbands. The traditional system of marriage that stipulates gender codependence, where the male assumes the role as the provider and the female as the caregiver is irreconcilable with on-demand divorce and separation. The male within the relationship fosters economically valued careers skills that allow him to easily provide for himself independently; the female, on the other hand, is denied the opportunity to develop similarly economically valued skills, and is thus severely disadvantaged by such an absolute division. Philosopher Robert Goodin in his book Protecting the Vulnerable argues that asymmetrical vulnerability is acceptable only when no-harm withdrawal is plausible: “as long as the subordinate party can withdraw from the relationship without severe cost, the superordinate cannot exploit him.”[9] The female in a traditional marriage can only separate from her husband at the cost of her economic wellbeing, and therefore withdrawal without severe cost is non-existent.

Indeed, it’s a philosophical truism that to treat unequals as equals is fundamentally unjust—however, in a liberal society that tries to provide equality for all, such a concept is oft-forgotten. No fault divorce, where financial assets are divided evenly, attempts to treat men and women as equally self-sufficient members of society; however, such equality is simply not the case. The majority of American marriages give priority to male work; when females do work, they account for only a small fraction of the family’s total income. Though tangible assets are split evenly, the prospect to make money is retained by the husband. Also, the female almost invariably gains custody of the family’s children, increasing her labor burden and limiting her economic and social independence. The extra domestic burden of childcare compounded with less auspicious career prospects causes female standards of living to plummet after divorce, decreasing by 45 percent as of 2000, whereas male standards of livings to rises sharply, increasing by 57 percent.[10] A woman who has contributed her fair-share of unpaid labor to a relationship built on the tenants of codependence is treated unjustly if she is fully estranged from her ex-husbands enhanced financial position. However, in today’s divorce realities, this is precisely what happens.

In a just society, women and men should share the same opportunities to wield economic power, to affect social change, and to develop their intellectual capacities as valued individuals. The United States’ today simply cannot say that it has achieved these goals. Marriage is an archaic institution that is a reflection not of America’s egalitarian achievements, but of its dark legacy of sexism and discrimination, an institution that makes women politically, economically, and social vulnerable, yet an institution that has proven tremendously important in the shaping of our nation’s moral righteousness. Indeed, the facile dichotomy between the political world and the personal world established by many is only a myth. Personal is political, and no justice can be claimed by the community at large if it fails to extend the same moral law to members in all facets of society. The intimacy of the family should not dignify the suspension of ethical judgment; instead, conversely, should be granted the utmost moral consideration as social unit that provides the backbone of our moral code of our nation. Families—through love or hate, through stability or chaos, and through displays of equity or servitude—serve as the earliest schools of social justice within our society. As Americans, how much do we truly value the equality of all citizens? How long can we deprive citizens of consideration based on sex? And how much injustice are wiling to tolerate and dignify based in the name of tradition?

Works Cited

Bergmann, Barbara. Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Basic Books, 1986. 263.

Bianchi, Suzanne, and Daphne Spain. American Woman. New York: Norton, 1989. 9.

Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1985. 197.

Gordan, Linda. Heroes of Their Own Lives. New York: Viking, 1988.

Okin, Susan M. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989. 153.

Rathje, Kelly. "Male Versus Female Earnings – Is the Gender Wage Gap Converging?" Economica (2002). 10 Jan. 2006 .

Story, Louise. "Many Women in Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." The New York Times 20 Sept. 2005.

United States. Bureau of Census. U.S. Department of Commerce. Current Population Reports. 2000.

United States. Bureau of Census. U.S. Department of Commerce. “Stay-at-Home” Parents Top 5 Million, Census Bureau Reports. 2004.

[1] Kelly Rathje, “Male Versus Female Earnings – Is the Gender Wage Gap Converging?,” Economica, Sept. 2002 < http://www.economica.ca/ew71p2.htm>.

[2] Bianchi and Spain, American Woman, p. 9, quoting Arland Thornton and Deborah Freedman, “Changing Attitudes Towards Marriage and Single Life,” Family Planning Perspectives 14 (November-December 1982): 297-303.

[3] Louise Story, "Many Women in Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood," The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2005.

[4] Current Population Reports, Population Profile of the United States 2000, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census.

[5] “Stay-at-Home” Parents Top 5 Million, Census Bureau Reports, Newsroom 2004, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census.

[6] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 251.

[7] Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 153.

[8] Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 263

[9] Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 197.

[10] Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, p. 163.

The Case for the Withdrawal from Iraq

2005-11-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

There can no longer be any doubt: the Iraq war, immoral and unjustified, is the greatest threat to United States’ national security and the most potent danger to our principles of freedom and cultural respect. A war waged on pretexts of fraud and deception, our presence in Iraq has strengthened and emboldened terrorist organizations worldwide, resulted in the death of more than two thousand American soldiers and ten and a half times as many innocent Iraqi civilians, rotted our domestic and military institutions, and devastated a country to the brink of civil war. Do not be fooled by the hollow and self-congratulatory rhetoric of our president, this is not a war of Jeffersonian idealism, but of insidious and undeterred imperialism. Before anymore American blood, wealth, or political effort is poured into this futile and illegal war, U.S. forces must make a speedy withdrawal a top priority.

A discussion concerning our withdrawal should begin with a discussion concerning our invasion. In 2002, Colin Powell voiced to the World Economic Forum the official justification for a United States’ invasion of Iraq, claiming that we have the “sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves” against “evil regimes” possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and assisting terrorist. The collapse of this justification—when the harsh reality that Saddam Hussein neither had WMDs nor ties to al Queada emerged—is well documented and well known. However, the Bush administration quietly dropped this standard of imminent threat, asserting that the mere “intent and ability” of a country to create WMDs, not the possession of them, justified and warranted American violence. All countries have the ability to create biological weapons and the intent to do so is strictly subjective; therefore, there is practically no country that Mr. Bush, with his doctrine of preventive war, could not justify invading and demolishing. This National Security Strategy—the right to invade any country we please—cannot logically be extended to all countries unless chaos reins, and therefore undermines the most fundamental moral truism of universality. The United States has claimed its unilateral and exclusive right to invade any country at any moment. It’s hard to envision that American imperialism will not be one of the lasting legacies of the Iraq invasion.

Self-righteous patriotism is becoming increasingly transparent as our real reasons for war become increasingly evident—the rationale transcends far beyond a concern for wellbeing of the Iraqi people or for the danger of the Hussein regime. The truth: the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq well before 9-11, well before the phrase “war on terror” was even coined. The reason is simple: to establish military bases and a pro-U.S. government at the heart of the world’s oil supply. To achieve this goal, the success of the war depends not of freeing the democratic voice of the Iraqi people, but suppressing it. Our presence is stained by putrid intentions.

After previous pretexts had been debunked, Bush contrived a new rationale for our occupation (adopted November 2003). The war is justified not because Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States, Bush claimed, but is justified as an effort to bring freedom, stability and democracy to the Middle East. Conservative warmongers and idealistic liberals alike (myself included) ate the rhetoric up. Sanity, however, demands skepticism over a rationale for war used only when previous justifications have collapsed.

George Bush promised the United States, the Iraqi people, and the international community that a victory in Iraq would bring peace and democracy to a country that knows only dictatorship and jihadism, and safety worldwide. We know now that none of this is true, of course. Democracy in Iraq is nothing more than a bureaucratic morass, peace is nonexistent as long as U.S. forces occupy the country, and, as Americans, we are far less safe now than before our soldiers risked their lives and our wellbeing in this war.

To some, the reason we should stay in Iraq is an idealistic (and naive) submission to concepts of Jeffersonian democracy—that democracy and freedom are the United States’ to spread. However, the sordid deviations of the president’s rhetoric from his actions make it hard not to dismiss his talk of freedom and democracy as nothing more than self-serving and self-congratulatory babble. For Bush, talk of democracy perpetuation is the means for a much more sinister agenda, not the ends. How can America preach democracy to a region where we send shackled and hooded prisoners to be tortured? How can America preach freedom to a region we’ve been cozying up to dictators within for the past 60 years? The United States has handicapped its democracy-building efforts by coming into the war in Iraq with a history of selfish support of dictatorship, arrogant disregarding for international mentality, and cruel sponsorship of torture.

To others, the argument for a continued occupation in Iraq is that if we leave now, things will become much worse. Bush claims, “In Iraq, there is no peace without victory.” However, all evidence indicates that he has the argument backwards: it’s the hulking presence of American forces within Iraq that is feeding, rather than averting, the ravenous fires of chaos in Iraq. The quote should read: in Iraq, there is no peace until we leave. Before we suggest that chaos will ensue if we withdrawal from Iraq, we must acknowledge that there already is chaos. We must acknowledge, as former top military official Gen. Richard B. Myers affirms, that the insurgency is no less powerful now than a year ago and that rebels such as these have been known to survive undeterred for 7 to 12 years. We must acknowledge that unemployment is up 60 percent, malnutrition has increased nearly 75 percent, food and water are rare commodities, oil reservoirs are well below prewar levels, Baghdad, lacking electricity, is dark and gloomy all day long, and military incidents have increased from 150-a-week to nearly 700-a-week.

Most fundamentally, we know that if we stay the course, continued mayhem is guaranteed; however, if we withdrawal, though Iraq’s future would be uncertain, a chance for peace would be relinquished. There is much reason to have hope in that uncertain future. The Sunnis, who provided the base for Saddam’s support and currently head the insurgency, would be more likely to participate in an Iraqi government after the withdrawal of American troops, and they would be more likely to counterbalance the theocratic and paramilitary Shiite rulers now controlling Iraq’s fledgling democracy.

There is no way, under these circumstances, that a continued presence in Iraq could ever help the Iraqi people. The longer American forces remain in Iraq, the more we compound the cost of the original mistake. Our occupation has pulverized the country, galvanized terrorist to an ear shattering degree, and reduced, not fostered, chances for a better future in Iraq or America. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges remarks, it is “simply unbelievable how the war has revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in a real decline after 9-11.” It’s widely acknowledged that the way to fight terrorism is two pronged: increase effective police work and battle the reservoir of potential support. Terrorists see themselves as a vanguard of a righteous cause, by inciting their causes, we can only work to increases their furry, not decrease it. Anger over U.S. occupation is the most effective sales pitch to the al Qaeda recruiters. That’s a fact.

Domestic and military institutions too are rotting at feet of an Iraq presence. If North Korea were to invade South Korea right now (a much greater threat to our national security) we wouldn’t have the military strength to defend the South Koreans, and nuclear war would be an inevitable outcome; our army is the smallest it’s been since before WWII. If a natural disaster were to strike, we wouldn’t have the domestic strength to allay the suffering; the war is going to cost more than 600 billion dollars by the end of Bush’s second term. The dominoes aren’t falling in the Middle East, they’re falling in America. That’s a fact.

Finally, invading armies don’t have rights, they have responsibilities; indeed, the most rational argument for a continued presence in Iraq is that the U.S. Army now has a duty to promoting the wellbeing of the Iraqi people—such liability is inevitably incurred when an army illegally invades a near helpless country, decimates its cities, and kills more than 30,000 of its innocent civilians. However, a better future isn’t the end of the argument, it’s the beginning. Iraqis want electricity, they want food and running water, and they want material necessities. We should give them aid and supply them with these necessities. We should organize a national coalition, express confidence in the United Nations and our European allies, and work to stabilize the region. The U.S. should continue economic assistance, but end all military operations and withdrawal immediately. We owe the Iraqis a better future; we can’t give it to them at gunpoint.

As you reflect today on the disaster of Iraq—the death of your fellow countrymen and innocent Iraqi civilians, the billions of dollars you will someday be made to pay, and the terrorists emboldened by a desire for vengeance—consider this: nothing is worse than knowing that your mother, your father, your brother, your aunt or your uncle died in vain. The Iraqi people—though at times it’s hard to imagine—also want democracy and freedom. Let's heed their call for autonomy, for representation, and for peace; let's give a noble purpose to an ignoble war. The United States can't ship Iraqis democracy on the barrels of M-16s and AK-47s, we can give the Iraqis freedom by allowing them to be free—free from American rule.