Category Archives: culture

everything old is new again

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Today I went searching for something John Dos Passos wrote in The Big Money about the execution of alleged murderers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had read the USA trilogy, which contains The Big Money, back in the 1950s, when its radicalism seemed a little dated, given that of Allen Ginsberg. I didn’t know it at the time, but Dos Passos had already completed a transition from 30s radical to 50s neocon, as so many American writers of his generation did. Still, the passage in question has stuck with me over the years as a cry of hopeless rage on the order of Ginsberg’s Howl.

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do we are beaten

….they have built the electricchair and hired the executioners to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

I found it in plenty of places; a poignant blog by Kevin Drum came up among them. “Everything old is new again,” Drum writes at the end, echoing the Peter Allen song. And it all seems to coalesce into a huge pile of significance today as I read reports of a federal secret police unit raging round the city of Portland, Oregon detaining and maiming peaceful protestors and fast backward to the re-institution of the federal death penalty by a venal Attorney General and a Supreme court that can hardly be trusted to avoid equal venality.

I add these abominations to the list of crimes the president and his minions (among whom I include his enablers in the United States Senate) have got away with: cheating to win the 2016 election and then covering it up, the latest chapter in that sorry story being the Roger Stone commutation; wholesale scapegoating of immigrants including the now infamous separation policies, concentration camps, and other efforts to subvert immigration statutes, undermining our nation’s public health service as part of an overall attack upon the provisions of the Affordable Care Act with the result that we now have the worst of the worldwide coronavirus epidemics whose death toll is now over 140,000 and rising; attempting to seize control of messaging to the nation about the current pandemic first by holding daily press briefings that were little more than campaign rallies and when that didn’t work launching a series of attacks on Anthony Fauci and when that began to backfire demanding that hospitals and states bypass the CDC and submit coronavirus data to the White House; subverting half a century of foreign policy in eastern Europe to further the geopolitical ambitions of Vladimir Putin while ignoring Putin’s cash bounties for the lives of American soldiers. The list goes on and on. George Will has charged that our country “is now being administered by a gangster regime.” I agree.

The Sacco and Vanzetti execution was clearly a miscarriage of justice by legal standards that constituted norms only yesterday. We can now add those norms to the list our present regime seeks to overturn. Support for that regime continues to wane as the coronavirus pandemic grows worse, but leaders, supporters, and enablers of the regime continue to laud and to pursue its criminal agenda, all the while attempting to ratchet up its authority. As of today I am no longer interested in the niceties of analysis. Like George Will I hope for an electoral tsunami in November so profound that it destroys this present regime and the Republican Party with it.

While I intend to vote for Joe Biden, I believe Biden will have to relent about Medicare for All and abandon his historic commitments to the banking and insurance industries. He will also have to confront his record of uncritical support of policing This present Republican regime has exhibited the death throes of late capitalism, particularly its violence against struggling minorities. Perhaps late capitalism will maintain itself by force among us; it can only do so by displaying its illegitimacy for all the world to see. Democratic socialism is the way of any viable path out of our present decadence. What stands against democratic socialism is massing now to support the continuation of our present kleptocracy. Its playbook will include the time-honored tactics of smear and voter suppression, which loom particularly large this election cycle because of the pandemic. Added to the usual tools of voter suppression now are lack of federal support for election reform and the current effort by Republicans to destroy the US Postal Service, which will be charged with transporting the millions of mail-in ballots expected to be cast. But the most disturbing elements of that emerging Republican playbook are a federal secret police of unknown size and the thousands of militarized police forces throughout the country who through their national union have now declared support for the Republican gangsters and their president.

The Fraternal Order of Police supported Obama and Biden in past elections but endorsed Trump over Clinton in 2016 claiming that she ‘snubbed’ them. It is time for Biden to repudiate police militancy if he is to represent the hopes and dreams of the thousands of Americans who have now taken to the streets. This will be a massive task, but it might begin with a truth and reconciliation commission, modeled on the South African experience but with some added legal authority. A more massive task will be to restore the rule of law. It isn’t true that we’ve never before been where we are now as a people, or that the character of our times “isn’t who we are.” But it is true that we have never before confronted so massive a task as it will be to establish justice in a land that can no longer forget its sins nor sweep them under the rug.

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

But we are the strangers who beat our nation bloody. We are the crooks and liars who bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp. We turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people, and we didn’t care as long as it wasn’t us who got herded into those slums and factories and sweatshops. And we have now got this miserable excuse for a government because we voted for it. And it may be too late to vote it out. We can now certainly not vote it out before countless more Americans die. We have hired the executioner to administer the lethal dose.

Yet once more . . .

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And I am crushed by the knowledge that another black man has been lynched, this time in Minneapolis in full view of spectators who were able to film at least part of it. At a time when I am numb with outrage already, yet another detestable, brutal, violent injustice. And I reach for words—because I am old, I feel impotent as a citizen, I am shamed.

All the usual responses are in evidence, as if prepared. Police who lynched George Floyd have been fired but are yet to be charged with any crime. Protests began almost immediately and continue, eliciting predictable responses from local police, who have denied reports of rubber bullets, but cannot deny reports of fire hoses and tear gas. Social media again fill with support for the protestors side by side with now familiar attempts to exonerate fired police. Black lives matter memes circulate widely; no doubt there will also be memes asserting the primacy of blue lives once a justification of this new murder coalesces on the political right.

Now, notice of Larry Kramer’s death reminds me that the pandemic goes on, that my doctor yesterday reminded me to get a pneumonia vaccination when even massive suffering and death can no longer move many of my fellow Americans, as it failed (or fails) to move many during the continuing AIDS crisis, which has killed 675,000 since its beginning and continues to kill some 13,000 people each year. I’ll get my pneumonia vaccination the next time I can visit a doctor in person, and I’ll continue to be shamed by the cesspool my country has become. How is it that we tolerate this present regime as lynchings, mass murders, antisemitism, and the other trappings of fascism surround us daily. I want to scream, to run into the streets with the protesters. I find myself understanding, perhaps for the first time in my life, the impulse to throw a bomb.

It takes training to return violence with violence, force with force. I lack such training, but I begin to understand how one might become so desperate as to go in search of it. I am developing some new understanding of what it might mean to become radicalized. And at the same time, I’m troubled to be using such language. Do I really want to incite violence? Normally, I’d have answered “No” with alacrity, but today I am angry, and my anger puts me at odds with myself. In order to write my anger I should have to overcome my own stoicism and in the act of that face the question, “Do I really want to do this?” I don’t want to face that question, but perhaps I should.

What I am describing is the dilemma that gave rise to Stevens’ “Mozart 1935,” a poem I’ve written about before in the aftermath of the Michael Brown verdict. As I read back over what I wrote then, I find that I used Stevens’ poem to image a feeling of being marooned that is similar to what I feel today, and I remember something Isaiah Berlin Says of Verdi.

He was the last master to paint with positive, clear, primary colors, to give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion; grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, faith—the passions that all men know.

Verdi, as praised by Berlin, was perhaps the last Major European humanist who was not at war with himself.

When Haemon asks his father Creon if it is reasonable never to listen to reason as the catastrophe of Antigone unfolds, the answer is obvious—the question is merely rhetorical. But in our time perhaps a different answer might be returned. In a time when even God can be put on trial, as in Guenter Rutenborn’s The Sign of Jonah, when the world as we know it seems poised on the brink of a new era of Fascist strife, and nobody seems able to stop it, and “good” people seem determined to inflict it upon the rest of us, perhaps it is no longer reasonable to listen to reason.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.

Perhaps ours is less a time to ‘return to Mozart’

He was young, and we, we are old.

than to join the stone throwers.

Loveliest of Trees

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I wish I could have thought to post this back when cherry trees were blooming. Still, perhaps somewhere a lone cherry tree still blooms like the one at the end of my mind.

Mack Harrell said once in my presence that great poetry doesn’t make for good songs. It seems a truism. Great poetry is complete in itself. A musical setting could add nothing to a great poem.

But I think it may be a rule that admits of exceptions. I certainly make some. I am still haunted by Hugo Wolf’s setting of Goethe’s little meditation on Anakreons Grab, so haunted indeed that I once sought to remedy what I thought to be the fault of the little poem’s common English translations which seemed to me to falsify its utter simplicity. Here’s my translation.

The Happy Poet

The damask rose blooms here
laurel and scuppernong knot
cricket climbs as ringdove croons

wherever gods themselves have planted
Anacreon rests.

The happy poet laughed his way
through springtime, summer and autumn before
winter finally laid him under the hill.

And here it is in a 1952 performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.

Wolf understood this poem, I like to think, and took his inspiration from its last couplet, which is as follows (Goethe’s Hügel likely refers to a little grave mound).

Frühling, Sommer und Herbst genoss der glückliche Dichter;
Vor dem Winter hat ihn endlich der Hügel geschützt.

And just now in the kitchen as I was loading the dishwasher and congratulating myself on my last in a current round of virtual doctor visits, I began to sing to myself John Duke’s wonderful setting of Houseman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” And I realized that I can now never recall that poem without John Duke’s music. Here it is in a performance by American Tenor, James Taylor. The pianist is Donald Sulzen.

I love the way the primary vocal melody returns at the end of the song (cf. Duke’s treatment of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . .” with his treatment of “About the woodland I will go . . . .” The speaker has seen his own end and found it a trifling matter, whether his present springtime adventure is a one-off or one of many. And I am thinking that such poetry, that is poetry that lends itself to song, may be characterized by a voice without apparent self awareness or consciousness of a rift between itself and its milieu. Schiller called such poetry naive and distinguished it from sentimental poetry which he averred must perforce create that nature it strives to limn across the boundary of the poet’s self awareness.

You could read Schiller’s once famous Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung. Better yet, you could read Isaiah Berlin’s 1979 essay entitled “The ‘Naiveté’ of Verdi,” whom Berlin calls “the last of the great naive masters of Western music,” though he recognizes that Verdi is “not without ideology.” Interestingly Berlin dedicated this essay to W. H. Auden, whose “Hymn to St. Cecilia” contains a few lines that attempt a description of the naive:

I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play . . .

but which is finally a sentimental poem, wearing “its tribulation like a rose.” Or perhaps Auden had Shiller’s distinction in mind and perhaps that is a part of what the “Hymn to St. Cecilia” is about. I first encountered Auden’s poem in Benjamin Britten’s famous setting, and that setting comes to mind when I think of the Hymn or reread it, but music does not come essentially to mind  as it does with John Duke’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

So, whether there were cherries blooming anywhere around the world today, I had my woodland ride with Houseman and Goethe, with Wolf and Duke and Anacreon, whom Goethe calls

—The Happy Poet.

Memorial Day thoughts about public health

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I grew up with books. From the time I was eight or nine years old I had a library card. It seems strange to me now, but from the time I got that library card I was allowed to walk from my grandparents’ house on Merchant Street to the old Abilene Public Library building on the edge of downtown. That building has long since been replaced, and my second home town now boasts branch libraries in addition. Present plans call for moving the main library to the building that once housed my old high school. Talk about deja-vu all over again.

Thinking of that place as it was in former times conjures up memories of sitting on dusty, hardwood floors between the stacks as cicadas shrilled outdoors and an occasional blue-jay shrieked, of studying for school projects and debate cases with friends around the old oak tables there, of chatting with Mrs. Hutto, my favorite librarian, at the circulation desk on the main floor. This photo hardly does justice to my memories, but it is what I could find. I share love of that remembered place with my friend, the late A. C. Greene, as I share the fact that the librarians allowed me to check books out of the adult stacks from the time I was twelve or so. In those days, our library in Abilene was housed in this airy, two-story structure, built of native sandstone; and it was a Carnegie Library, having been built during the years when grants of $10,000 could be got for the purpose from the Carnegie foundation.

But it’s the books on our shelves at home that I chiefly remember. I recall reading “the Barrel Organ” and “The Highwayman” in one of a couple of English poetry anthologies my mother had left from her college days, and falling in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose “Recuerdo” I can still quote from memory, of being frightened by the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen and comforted by Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I remember some books of my father’s as well. Mother had sold the equipment and books from my father’s Albuquerque medical office after his death was confirmed in 1945 (he was originally listed as missing in action) but had kept his books on the shelves at home mixed in with hers.

I vividly remember reading two of my father’s books. One was entitled Devils, Drugs, and Doctors, by Howard Wilcox Haggard, the other An American Doctor’s Odyssey: Adventures in Forty-Five Countries. The woodcuts reproduced in Devils, Drugs, and Doctors rivetted my thirteen year old attention and drew me into the stories as much as Haggard’s vivid story telling. Afterwards I binged on books about the history of medicine and surgery for a while.

Both books are now out of print but still available, and if you browse through the Amazon buying options and reviews you will perhaps see why. Both are still relevant to the study of Public Health. The first is a history of childbed fever; the second a memoir that describes “conditions on ships and trains, in cities and country sides around the world,” as told by one Amazon reviewer. The author is Victor George Heiser, who served as chief health officer at the American colony in the Philippines and later as public health adviser to the international public health team of the Rockefeller Foundation. It occurs to me that my father may have run across him during the 1930s when he held a series of Rockefeller Fellowships to study at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and earned a master’s degree there in 1939. In one of his letters home, my father writes favorably from the Philippines of public health initiatives about which he had studied at Hopkins.

All of which perhaps explains why the idea of public health, that is the idea that society as a whole has an interest in the health of individuals, seems normal to me and why I have been troubled to discover the disarray and disestablishment into which our American system of public health (if we can even call it that any more) has fallen over the decades since we began dismantling it in favor of the present fee for service medical system we see struggling on every hand to combat the pandemic we now face. My father served in the United States Public Health Service during the 1930s, then made the choice the rest of the country would ultimately make. He resigned from the Service in 1939 and entered the private practice of medicine. Unfortunately for us all, his National Guard unit was called up in late 1940, a circumstance that would be for him a death sentence. I have written about him many times, Here is an essay that will connect you with some of them, if you’d like to read.

But it is the idea of public health that many Americans have now determined to be excessively burdensome in this era of late capitalism. I’ll not list the ways Americans have found to protest current public health initiatives; they are all too familiar and there is nothing new in them. We have always endured anti-vaxxers and others who have protested, refused, and otherwise attempted to stymie public health initiatives. Many Americans still smoke. The Catholic church staunchly maintains its opposition to artificial birth control. Once in the not too distant past, during the 1918/1919 influenza pandemic, we have even experienced a bad government in this country which, like our present government, attempted to suppress public knowledge of the spread of the deadly disease for political reasons. And there is a dark side to the history of the public health idea. We recall the Nazi determination to eradicate everything from Jewry to epilepsy in a series of racialized public health initiatives. Some of us recall with horror our American experiments with eugenics and the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study.

Much recent public behavior might recall those past examples of radical indifference to cruelty and suffering. We are all familiar with a photo depicting an armed protester wearing no mask as he screams obscenities in the faces of masked guards stationed outside the Michigan state capital building. We are now familiar with a politics that urges sacrificing the elderly and vulnerable in order to ‘reopen’ our consumption driven economy. Even more insidious is a species of argumentation that recommends against social distancing measures on the grounds that pandemics are a ‘natural’ part of our planet’s ecology, a means to control population. etc. This argumentation moves quickly (and incoherently) from claiming that social distancing doesn’t work to questioning the numbers of deaths being reported in the media and asserting that some balance needs to be struck in public policy between concern for the suffering and death caused directly by the pandemic and other so called “deaths of despair” presumed to be occasioned by social distancing. A recent good piece in the Arizona Mirror reviews these arguments.

What to do with this when one is an asthmatic octogenarian with COPD and heart failure and a stroke survivor as well. I am among the most vulnerable segment of my country’s population when viewed from this perspective. But from another perspective, I am comfortably retired, own my own home, and can stay more or less out of harm’s way as long as my spouse and my son, who must make periodic trips out to purchase provisions, do not contract the virus. My experience over the past many months has taught me to live with risk, though I must say I became convinced many years ago that my life hangs by a thread. The pandemic adds a further level of risk to my life, but it has not made me fearful. I should be fearful if I were homeless, or in want, or in jail, or forced to work in a meat-packing plant, or live in a nursing home. Perhaps I am not fearful because I am conscious of being blessed, or in a condition that resembles being blessed.

But this memorial day I am thinking again about my father and about this very fine polemic by Marilynne Robinson in the June 11 issue of The New York Review of Books. I cannot know what my father would have made of our present crisis in America, but I like to think he would have recalled his own years in the United States Public Health Service in some meaningful way, for public health as an idea, as a dream, points steadfastly at the same truths Robinson asserts in this essay. Our notion that a system of authentic human flourishing could be based on a competition for wealth could never have been sustained. Such a competition inevitably leads to the vast inequalities we now see as the system collapses around us leaving some of us well off and others destitute, or near destitute. It is at this juncture, when deaths by virus and deaths by despair may be seen to converge. For public health cannot be sustained by a winner-take-all casino economy such as ours. A public subjected to the tyranny of the marketplace is by definition unhealthy. Any public will be sustained in health either by a generalized good will or not at all. And that good will in turn must be sustained by an economy that puts no one in want. Our problem as Americans is that we have subscribed to a zero sum economic ideology that requires poverty in order to generate wealth. We are presently living with a public health system that is characterized by manufactured scarcity, and in that environment “for [many] ordinary people there is no success, no benefit” no means to a healthy life to be had from the common cost benefit analyses to which we are traditionally accustomed. This present might lead us to a common perception of human fragility not unlike my own. Robinson hopes it will, to a revaluation of human nature that might enable us to see again both how fragile we are and how wonderful. As the psalmist knew, we are both ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’ But there is a sequel to this essay, that I’ll not write today. It might begin (or may) with Robinson’s perception that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by.”

As I write these thoughts in advance of tomorrow’s Memorial Day I think of headlines in this evening’s Washington Post to the effect that Covid-19 is now surging in rural American areas where there are no longer hospitals to care for the sick. Nevertheless, crowds have thronged nearby Lake of the Ozarks in defiance of the conventions of social distancing. This is the chaos of present day American life. It takes my breath away and makes my heart heavy. Still, for every image of chaos in our media there are other images of philanthropy, from Bill Gates (whom I mention because he is the subject of a particularly distasteful conspiracy theory) to my friends who are risking their lives daily to deliver meals to the homeless on our downtown Saint Louis streets. If only we made nobody homeless. If only we made nobody poor. That’s not Karl Marx, by the way; it’s William Blake. My wish for my fellow citizens this memorial day is that we collectively desire the health, safety, and security of others as we desire our own.