Category Archives: politics

Oh Freedom

Posted on by

Today’s news reports announce that the Supreme Court has struck down section four of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that its coverage formula, which determines what areas of the country must receive prior approval for any changes in voting laws (most recently revisited by Congress in 1975) is out of date. Of course that’s not the whole story. The court has not ruled narrowly. This decision is an outrageous piece of judicial activism masquerading as something else.

Last evening we watched “Brother Outsider,” the award winning documentary about the life and career of Bayard Rustin. The ten-year-old film is circulating again in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington, which Rustin organized. The screening was presented by the Missouri History Museum and was attended by a large and diverse crowd. It was good to see such a high level of interest for this classic memoir of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Most present-day evocations of the famous march focus on Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which, though it climaxed the program, was hardly the first event of note or the only speech before the Lincoln memorial that day fifty years ago. One candid moment in “Brother Outsider,” for instance, shows Rustin walking directly behind Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing Dylan’s “When the Ship comes In.” Rustin is casually smoking a cigarette and seeming not to listen. And what has largely been forgotten about that day is the list of demands that Rustin delivered in a speech that preceded Dr. King’s, along with the fact that the march’s full title was “March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom.” It was the brain child of A. Philip Randolph, but it could never have happened without Rustin. And the presence of both men at the center of it underscores something else we have forgotten as a people: that the civil rights movement was as much about economic justice and equality of access to the goods of our society as it was about ending Jim Crow laws.

And it’s worth noting that even during the program on the mall dissent raged between members of SNCC, particularly John Lewis, and more moderate members of the civil rights coalition over the language of Lewis’s speech. A pretty good short history of the march is here, and here’s the text of the speech that Lewis delivered that day; Lewis’s unedited speech is quoted in in material I have cited previously. Fifty years later, we live in the midst of the resegregation of America. Looking back on the 1963 march, one witness, Evelyn Cunningham, exclaimed:

I must’ve cried for an hour and a half at one point during the march. Part of it was sheer happiness, part of it was pride, and part of it was my family. I’m steeped in my respect for my people. After the march, I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re almost there’ — God, was I wrong.

If you think resegregation is too strong a word, perhaps you should reflect on the high rate of incarceration among persons of color in this country along with the systematic attack on voting rights being orchestrated through state legislatures by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Resegregation is now widely documented, both in schools and in our civic life. The process is being exacerbated by the growth of income inequality, and Texas is moving a voter suppression measure into place as I write.

The President and many members of Congress have spoken out against the high court’s decision, but I don’t think the present congress will be able to act in support of voting rights. So what I am left with today is a host of memories and a good deal of anger. It was good to relive parts of the civil rights movement last evening in company with many good folk. This morning I have listened to the great Odetta Holmes’s recording of her matchless rendition of “Oh Freedom,” a spiritual that Bayard Rustin also sang beautifully. It would be fine to be able to think that my country has embraced civil rights—pretty to think so, to draw on another memory. No, it would be beautiful. It’s just not true.

back at it

Posted on by

Progress Missouri has posted a new report on the activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Missouri. As of March 2013, 45 corporations and six non-profits — for a total of 51 private sector members — have publicly announced that they are cutting ties with ALEC, according to a report from ALEC Exposed. But the organization continues to make inroads into the politics of states like ours. The Progress Missouri report makes quite a read. What’s most disturbing about it, from my perespective, is that the ability of this organization of corporations to affect legislation is roughly parallel to the ability of huge pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations to control and corrupt research about, and increasingly the production, and distribution of, food and drugs. If ALEC’s influence is waning, the influence of pharma and international agribusiness continues. And it is interesting, to say the least, to read a defense of ignorance such as this one at a blog whose subtitle is “free minds and free markets.”

Meanwhile, SLU Students for No Confidence are reporting a disturbing incident at last evening’s meeting of the SLU Student Government Association. Apparently two faculty members were ejected from the meeting. I’ll quote the rather lengthy anonymous eyewitness report posted just a short while ago:

I arrived at approximately 5:02pm. The opening prayer was being given when I arrived, and I did not enter the room until after the prayer had ended. I stood outside with a small number of people who had also arrived during the prayer. As I stood outside, I noticed a uniformed officer standing in the vicinity of the Senate Chambers. I noted this as odd at the time, but did not think much of it after that (I did not look over this individual closely, but I assume is was a DPS Officer). I entered the Senate Chambers shortly before Vice President Alberty began taking attendance. Prior to my arrival, one faculty member I recognized was already present in a corner of the Senate Chambers. Shortly after I arrived, a second faculty member joined the first in that same corner. After attendance was taken, there was some discussion about adjusting the night’s agenda due to Fr. Biondi’s presentation.

At around 5:20pm, Fr. Biondi arrived in the company of Fr. Stark. He and SGA President Blake Exline began speaking shortly following his introduction by President Exline. The conversation occurred in hushed tones, but was clearly audible. He was requesting that the two previously mentioned faculty members be removed from the meeting, citing their presence as “inappropriate” because the SGA was a meeting of “student representatives.” The two faculty members had not caused any sort of a disruption. They were sitting quietly in a corner. Following Fr. Biondi’s request, President Exline immediately turned toward the two faculty members and asked them to leave. No protest was made by President Exline, by the SGA Executive Committee, by the SGA Advisors, or by the SGA Senators. The faculty members left willingly and without protest. The entire situation lasted less than 20 seconds from Fr. Biondi speaking with President Exline, to the two faculty members exiting the Senate Chambers. It happened so quickly I believe most people in the room did not even initially realize what had happened. My own initial reaction was to walk out of the room in protest, but I believed at the time that I would be better off remaining in the room. I admit my own regrets in not standing up and protesting the removal of two faculty members from a meeting which is open to the public, as I believe that I failed to live up to my own expectations.

Following the removal of the two faculty members, the presentation by Fr. Biondi progressed smoothly. There were no interruptions of any sort. Fr. Biondi was presented with questions which had been submitted to the Executive Committee the week before by SGA Senators. I will not provide a play-by-play of the presentation, as that would be far too long and I did not have anything with me to use for taking notes.

I will, however, mention one particularly prominent portion of Fr. Biondi’s response to the second question presented to him, which asked him why he believed the No Confidence movement had started and why it grew the way it did. The majority of his answer was slanted against the faculty of SLU, and intended to make the faculty appear irrational and vengeful. Eventually, he reached the point in the No Confidence narrative when the first major protest took place in the Quad. It was at this point that he referred to the students who were participating as being manipulated by the faculty who were taking part in the movement, and even went so far as to say that students were going because their professors (who controlled their grades) were taking part in the movement. His clear and obvious inference was that students were participating in the No Confidence protest because they hoped to get a good grade from their professor.

This week’s University News is just out. I was hoping for more information about the SGA meeting, particularly with regard to what else President Biondi may have said—but see nothing. Perhaps the online edition will provide some details in due course.

CORRECTION: This week’s University News is not out yet. I was looking at last week’s edition. Perhaps by the end of the day.

Good king sauerkraut

Posted on by

Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Stephen, on which I for one would rather sing of King Wenceslas than think of the story of the ancient martyr whose suffering is a prelude to the conversion of St. Paul. It was also boxing day, the day when the British aristocracy traditionally gave boxes of gifts and food to their servants and allowed them the day off to celebrate Christmas. British tradesmen, too, sometimes made up Christmas boxes for their employees. Samuel Pepys’ entry for 19 December 1663 notes that he went “by coach to my shoemaker’s and paid all there, and gave something to the boys’ box against Christmas.” Perhaps such boxes carried on the custom of collecting alms for St. Stephen’s day in boxes outside churches.

Today Boxing Day is a secular holiday when Banks are closed in Great Britain; though the holiday is not uniformly observed throughout the former British colonies and doesn’t always fall on 26 December. Still, in general terms Boxing Day is the day after Christmas Day, the second day of Christmastide which ends twelve days later. Christmas and Epiphany sometimes overlap. The day of the Epiphany should fall immediately after Twelfth Night, but it doesn’t at all times and in all places, the Roman, British, and Orthodox calendars being different in some respects. What unites these practices is what the old carol calls ‘blessing the poor,’ something we may have to think about in more complicated ways than our ancestors did.

We live in a time when democracy and citizenship are on the wane. Traditional philanthropies survive, but the popularity of the prosperity gospel is alarming. Moreover, our new olilgarchs are not characterized by the noblesse oblige symbolized by King Wenceslas in the carol. Indeed their setbacks in the recent election seem to have emboldened them to still greedier amour propre. Gil Schwartz, AKA Stanley Bing, has written a best-selling series of books and columns over the past ten years or so that can be read either as satire or as advice on how to succeed in the climate of corporate decadence we seem to be experiencing. What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness may be his catchiest title. The bottom line: love yourself. Schwartz/Bing has so much fun being a cynic that it’s easier to to think of him as Dr. Phil than as Jonathan Swift.

E. M. Forster’s narrator observes at the beginning of chapter six of Howard’s End, that “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.” It does no disrespect to the tragedies we number in our twenty-first century landscape to say that the tragedy of poverty is not among them. Like Forster’s gentlefolk, authentic or pretending, we have lost the ability to empathize with grinding poverty, and our indifference seems to grow in proportion to the growth of economic inequality as more and more former members of the middle class are forced into unthinkability. Indeed, a cursory survey of articles about income inequality over the past three decades suggests that our major concern is not the human tragedy but economic growth, to which the poor in their burgeoning numbers seem irrelevant.

But it isn’t just poverty to which we are indifferent. Many of us are also vehemently opposed to the traditional rights of workers. The State of Michigan, in a lame duck legislative session, has just enacted a right to work law (so called) over the protests of unions. Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio remain sites of conflict over workers’ rights. McDonald’s has just joined a growing network of companies who put profit ahead of decent working conditions for the masses who labor in company and franchise kitchens, as the scandal of worker casualization grows in the food service industry and in big box stores. Who cares about the Fordist bargain when the growth of third-world markets seems open ended and when the market for labor at home seems assured to be a buyer’s market for the indefinite future?

Class warfare, you say? Perhaps we might return to King Wenceslas. The radical, Christian message for Christmastide is the extension of good will to all mortality. The child in the manger grew up to be Jesus who would share a meal with anyone. The prince of peace was also the lover of all souls, especially those of the poor. This is what Nietzsche hated about Christianity, its radical democracy, its ressentiment, its vision of a just and equal world. We celebrate these things at Christmastide, whether we like it or not.

Lincoln redux, redux

Posted on by

Perhaps it’s my early training as a New Critic, or perhaps it’s just old age; but I don’t think the present media stir over the accuracy of Spielberg’s Lincoln is very sophisticated. Part of the stir, the nitpicking about details, is critically naïve. A good index of the potential nitpicking and the naïveté as well may be found in Harold Holzer’s commentary in The Daily Beast. Holzer served as a consultant for the film and was briefly worried that he might be held accountable for some of the film’s “bloopers.”

Inaccurate portrayals of history are at least as old as Shakespeare. Of the bard’s transgressions of history one might mention two in particular that stand out for their hyperbolic misrepresentation: Richard III and Shylock, the one referable to Tudor politics and the other to the history of anti-Semitism. Shakespeare’s Richard III is not a mere distortion of the historical Richard; it is a straw person fabricated (perhaps) to please a Queen descended from the usurping Henry VII, whom Shakespeare represents as a stock hero. But Shakespeare’s Richard transcends the official villain of Tudor historiography. He is, as Harold Bloom puts it, “a great monster, but one that will be refined into Shakespeare’s invention of the human, of which Iago, to everyone’s delight and sorrow, will constitute so central a part.”1

Bloom is unable to give Shylock such a blessing. “[I]t would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish People had Shakespeare never written this play,”2 he admits ruefully and notes that there is likely no way that The Merchant of Venice can now be performed that is faithful to Shakespeare’s apparent intention. But Shylock, himself, so transcends the limits of the cultural and artistic history that surround his creation that we see the whole spectacle of anti-Semitic persecution in his humiliation, as Bloom does. We may have to relegate The Merchant of Venice to the same corner of cultural history to which we relegate Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, but to deny Shylock and his persecutors’ presence in and relevance to the human, to us as we are, may be to deny the existence of sin.

Spielberg’s Lincoln and the characters who surround him in Spielberg’s film are no less fictions than the characters of Shakespeare’s history plays. The comparison is useful because these plays stand near the beginning of modern thinking about historiography and suggest at least two standards of judgment with respect to historical fictions generally. 1) Do we refer questions of authenticity to the surface details of our knowledge of the past; indeed, is our knowledge something like the sum of such details? And, 2) do we refer questions of authenticity to what we think we know about historical causation? What place in our thinking should be occupied by modern demythologizing and deconstruction? As Tim Burke has put it, in a piece with which I more or less agree, part of the argument is “just one more front in the long struggle between social history and narrative”: that is, whether we can legitimately claim that heroic individuals have power to shape the large movements of history or even to be major participants in them.

But historical fictions are not history in any academic sense I understand. They are rather meditations on a past which perhaps never was but which becomes usable as it is reenacted. It is in the nature of such meditations to focus on heroic individuals: saviors (however flawed), princes (as in the long mirror tradition), great villains (some comic some not), etc. And, for the same reasons, such meditations are inevitably selective, partial, contingent. Focus on the collective. on the mass, gives us the less than interesting productions of Soviet realism or at best, the novels of Farrell and Dos Passos which engage us today, I think, primarily through their focus on individual characters. If the immediate object of poetry is pleasure, not truth, as Coleridge thought, the immediate object of historical fiction (after pleasure of course) is usability. And in such usability there is a kind of truth, to some present need to imagine a past of a certain kind.

Such fictions may inspire us, as Richard Rorty says they do and should,3 or they may stimulate critical thinking. But our critical thinking is misplaced if it stops at the perception that, for instance, William Slade is (perhaps) misrepresented in Spielberg’s Lincoln, along with other African American characters who are presented as passive and subservient. We should ask, in addition, why we are moved as citizens of twenty-first century America to make such a claim. Is this claim (made by Kate Masur in the review I cited in my last post) coherent on its face? Is it self-evident? Or does it too proceed from historical and intellectual antecedents that could be examined?4

As participants in a historical fiction (and for my purposes it is convenient to blur the distinction between attendings to narrative and to drama) we are more like communicants at a religious celebration than readers of history. We are not mere spectators but reenactors ourselves. We are scripted, but whether we immerse ourselves in the script or participate with critical detachment, we do not escape invention. Bloom calls such practice the invention of the human, and argues that Shakespeare is chief among practitioners of such an art—but we all practice it. As Ishmael says, “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.”

Notes

1Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, New York: 1998, 73.
2Ibid., 190.
3Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country, Cambridge, MA: 1998.
4At the beginning of her review, Masur avers, “As a historian who watched the film on Saturday night in Chicago, I was not surprised to find that Mr. Spielberg took liberties with the historical record. As in ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ his purpose is more to entertain and inspire than to educate.” I have trouble with this statement, particularly with its reference to “the historical record,” as though there were such a univocal thing. The statement also ties Masur to what Bloom calls the “School of Resentment,” which substitutes resentment of past failures (or present ones as in this case) for social hope. See Rorty, op. cit., 126.