another season’s promise . . .

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feelin’ fine for now goin’ down the road

Since the inauguration I’ve been alternating between a combination of elation and relief and a now familiar anger as the Republican rump continues to assert itself. But first elation and relief and a few observations about current trends in popular culture.

The Tik-tok sea shanty craze has made popular culture icons of old songs like “Leave Her Johnny” and “The Wellerman.” It has also reminded me of the late Stan Rogers, who liked to sing sea shanties and wrote a few of his own. Rogers’ untimely death in 1983 was a loss to Canadians and the to the rest of us as well. A consummate talent, he lost his life in a horrific fire aboard an airplane as he returned to Canada from the 1983 Kerrville Folk festival. Here he is, performing a song by Mary McCaslin, in a live concert recorded just five days before he died.

“Feelin’ fine for now” sums up my present mood, and I love things about this performance a lot, especially when Rogers urges his audience to sing “like an organ.” But my personal favorite Rogers song is “The Field Behind the Plow,” whose theme I have stolen for my title. I want to claim that if there is hope for another season’s promise in our present day politics, that hope may have more than a little to do with American popular culture and yes, with the bashable villains of social media, which make it possible for ordinary folk to combine disparate elements in novel ways, something the pedant in me can’t help but point out was Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘the metaphysical’ in poetry. There’s already a Bernie meme, for instance, that features the grizzled and be-mittened Senator singing “The Wellerman” along with a crowd of other Bernies.

I am thinking now of Amanda Gorman’s fine inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb” with its affinities with slam poetry and Hip-Hop and its evocation of a perpetual and normatively unfinished America. I like that idea and wrote about it in my last post. As Timothy Egan speculates in a recent New York Times piece, it may be possible for Biden to govern in poetry. As Egan puts it, “Why not reverse the political aphorism, and govern in poetry after campaigning in prose?” American popular culture was on full display throughout the inauguration, especially the poetry of popular song; though not without some detractors. Lots of folks noticed Lady Gaga’s switching from 3/4 to 4/4 time as she belted out the National Anthem. I personally thought her performance struck a fine balance between rendering the anthem as a pop piece (what we have become accustomed to at sports events, for instance) and the more traditional rendering we might have expected from a classical singer. And I liked the switch to 4/4 because I took it to be one of several rhetorical devices that gave emphasis to text in what has become for most Americans a forgettable national anthem (parts of which need to be forgotten). And while Amanda Gorman has received well-nigh universal acclaim for her poetry, there are some who have derided her as inauthentic. Here’s an example, for which I have to thank my friend Moumin Quazi who collected it on Facebook. In “The Hill We Climb,” as elsewhere, Amanda Gorman speaks out of various traditions of popular poetry and oratory. One suspects that is part of what this writer finds amiss about her. But the country loved her, as did I, and it was her poem that started the thoughts I am exploring here.

As I say, American popular culture was on powerful display during the Biden inauguration festivities. “What about Yo-Yo Ma?” I can hear someone ask. But Ma is a popular culture icon equivalent to Bruce Springsteen. He is a Rock Star in an age that blurs distinctions between genres. That blurring is the life of American popular culture, however much it may trouble folk who find it inauthentic. In the remarkable display of popular culture featured in last week’s inauguration, the Biden administration stands in sharp contrast to its predecessor, whose central figure didn’t like to be upstaged. But it will take more than blurring to overcome Republican determination to prevent Democrats from governing. The Biden team might consider harnessing the power of popular culture both to promote policies clearly desired by the great majority of Americans, especially policies that pertain to desperately needed efforts to combat the covid pandemic, and also to shame Republicans who need to be held accountable for the growing covid death spiral and the countless other anti-humane policies of the previous administration. Republicans are presently behaving in predictable fashion as though only they have a right to govern: all the way from the Texas lawsuit over immigration and voter suppression measures being proposed in many states to Mitch McConnel’s cynical effort to preserve the filibuster in the Senate. The time has come for Democrats to fight back, and a popular culture campaign may be just what circumstances call for in today’s political climate. The Tik-tok sea shanty phenomenon is a recent development in the history of what Howard Rheingold calls Smart Mobs. I’m wondering what applications of the same might be explored by media savvy Democrats who gave us a memorable virtual convention this past summer. I am thinking here of the ways in which popular culture has been harnessed against tobacco use, for instance.

Back to poetry–Biden’s love of modern Irish poetry is well known. We are told that he recited poems by W. B. Yeats in front of a mirror as part of his youthful effort to overcome stuttering. And his use of a fragment of Heaney’s play, The Cure at Troy, which he has quoted in a number of contexts over the years to advocate for a circumstance in which “hope and history rhyme,” draws on an already iconic item of popular culture and amplifies it. In a recent piece in the Washington Post, Teo Armus points out that “By 2000, [Darach] Ó Séaghdha noted, the line had become famous enough in pop culture that the Irish rock band U2 alluded to it in a song.” “Hope and history don’t rhyme” in the U2 song “Peace on Earth,” but Heaney’s poem had already anticipated the event would take a miracle.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

As I write, Republicans are accusing Democrats of vengefulness in calling for the impeachment of the former president for his role in planning and inciting the January sixth attack on the capitol. And as Biden has proceeded with his ambitious program of executive actions undoing some of the egregious effects of Trumpism, Republicans are seeking political cover in familiar tropes of movement conservatism as though it were still possible without irony to deny the pandemic and plead impecuniousness in the wake of their party’s record of deficit exploding tax cuts. While major parts of the Biden covid relief program can clear the Senate through budget reconciliation, most of the president’s ambitious legislative program cannot. Faced with that fact I see no alternative to abolishing the filibuster. Recalcitrant Democrats need to be brought in line. Lyndon Johnson could have done it; we’ll see whether Chuck Schumer is up to the task.

For the rest, I think it undeniable that the last four years represented a triumph of American Fascism, a thing that has been part of our politics since long before we could call it Fascism. Recent history presents us with two models for dealing with the remnants of that Fascism; The Nuremberg Trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission. Current law enforcement efforts have been directed solely at the foot soldiers who did the bidding of the former president and those of his followers in government who played a role in the the January sixth attack on our capitol. Because of the extent to which Fascism remains embedded in our politics, in states like my own state of Missouri, in Texas, in the Republican Party and elsewhere, I doubt whether the South African model is applicable to our present situation. In fact, I am convinced that we require an American version of the Nuremberg Trials if we wish to recover as a society from the last four years. Conviction of the former president in the coming impeachment trial and barring him from holding public office again is only a beginning, it seems to me. It will need to be a priority of the incoming Merrick Garland administration of the Justice Department to do the rest.

Advent IV: Something Like a Star

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Brightest and best of the sons of the morning
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid.

I have yet to encounter the Southern Cross outside of Dante, who may or may not have known of it but gave allegorical preeminence to a group of four bright stars “known by the first men but since to no living eye” in Purgatorio I, 23-24. The Southern Cross is now known as an asterism, part of the constellation known as Crux among the eighty-eight constellations recognized by modern science. Crux, as Dante may or may not have known, has not been visible in northern latitudes since around 400 CE, as the precision of equinoxes has gradually altered earth’s position with respect to the so called “fixed stars.”

I say encounter rather than see as homage to a poet who taught me first to think of southern constellations and how various astronomies have tended to map the constellations to their parochial mythologies. But I also use the term encounter because I awoke this morning thinking of two things: how the history of our epoch has once again brought us to a time we might aptly describe with the title of P. F. Sloan’s 1964 protest song, “The Eve of Destruction”; that, and the final lines of Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.” Perhaps you remember that the poem addresses a mythopoeic star asking for a statement, “we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.”

The speaker’s first thought upon imagining such a star is that it it says only, “I burn.” but after having played, perhaps forgettably with a few bits of science, the speaker again encounters the star by way of answering her own question:

It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

I will forever encounter this poem in Randall Thompson’s musical setting in Frostiana, which I had the pleasure of performing as a chorus member some years back with Hal Gibbons and the Denton Bach Society. Thompson’s setting gives the poem that “certain height” to which it aspires but then loses in ideology until those wonderful two lines at the close, “We may choose something like a star / To stay our minds on and be staid.” Still, I find I welcome the poem’s ideology as I read of recent violence that seems to be erupting almost everywhere in my country. I also welcome the poem’s emphasis upon choosing. It affirms the element of risk posed by ‘the mob.’ That mob violence is being driven on the surface by strife over our recent election results and resentment of public health measures enacted around the country to slow the spread of our current pandemic, is the preoccupation of a seemingly endless stream of media.

Some media are aware of the extent to which violent trends are being stoked by the unscrupulous leadership of the political right. But most left leaning analysts, including our incoming political leaders, seem loath to betray a core theoretical commitment of liberalism (not to be confused with liberal practice) to wit: that at all times persuasion is preferable to force when dealing with enemies. Liberal practice has never eschewed force, but it has been a constant  theme of liberal talk to proclaim righteously that force must be the last resort of liberal practice, to be employed only when all other means to solve a pressing problem have failed. The Republican rump, however, doesn’t share this aversion to force. This is how I am understanding our present politics in America (to some extent around the world as well). While the tenuous consensus among liberals and progressives within the Democratic party affirms the validity of our recent election (making constant reference to its peacefulness and the accuracy of its vote counting), and while the same consensus proclaims the legitimacy of needed public health measures, the Republican rump shows up with guns to protest.

I used the expression Republican rump during the government shutdown in 2013 because it had occurred to me that that hostage crisis somewhat resembled what happened during the long parliament that issued in the English civil war of the seventeenth century. Now that events in my country have come more to recall those that preceded our own nineteenth-century civil war, perhaps I shouldn’t use the term. But I want to link my thoughts today with those I expressed back then, and besides, the Republican rump doesn’t represent the Republican party as a whole. Witness The Lincoln Project. Witness the efforts of heroic Republican election officials around the country who ensured the integrity of our recent election in spite of the constant barrage of attacks on the process by Trump and his pack of loyalists. Perhaps I should call it the American rump; its historical roots are in the Democratic party. Most recently, though, the ideology that has come to be called Trumpism seems to belong to the remnants of The Tea Party together with its adherents among the donor class such as Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson and its fellow travelers such as Lindsay Graham whose sycophancy would be embarrassing if it weren’t sinister.

I cannot imagine an innocent vote for Trump. To be sure the intellectual engine of movement conservatism will likely rev up to chase arguments why the [T]rump campaign against public health and the election was justified within the constitution; but my counter argument has to be that a campaign that demonstrably has caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and arrayed itself against the vote, itself, in the recent election cannot have been innocent. However it is framed within whatever constitutional justification it may claim, [T]rumpism has violated the very principle of a free society. And it doesn’t matter from this perspective how loudly or how often [T]rumpist sycophants proclaim that the United States is not a democracy. By now it ought to be plain for all to see just how much contempt the Republican rump have for the republican institutions of our country. After all, it has been the settled determination of the Republican Senate to subvert our court system, and as we have recently seen, the Republican rump are not above attempting to subvert the electoral college, an attempt that may have another few acts to play out before the election is done.

But soon perhaps, we will be able to look back upon this election season and observe the justice of Marilynne Robinson’s thoughtful prediction that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by.” If so, it is to be hoped we shall realize as a people that we have escaped the destruction of our republic by the proverbial skin of our teeth. Perhaps we needed reminding that [T]rumpism has deep roots in American life, in my lifetime in the America First Committee, the the Dixiecrat movement, McCarthyism, and the Reagan revolution. We should recognize it as a potential manifestation of the American spirit whatever our history. And at present it appears that [T]rumpism has upwards of 74 million adherents. How to meet the challenge of their influence on the collective life of our republic will remain an open question for for those of us on the other side in the foreseeable future. The choice between [T]rumpism and affirming the pluralist society emerging around us is what William James called a genuine option: living, forced, and momentous. It is essentially a religious (or at least a mythic) option between two versions of American exceptionalism, which is likely why it tends to defy rational analysis. Apropos of such options (and stars as well–I’ve not forgotten stars) I’m remembering that Tim Redman liked to introduce the topic of Ezra Pound and fascism with this question: “How do you reconcile the poetry you love with the politics you hate?”

Both Pound and Martin Heidegger remain anomalous in the history of modern humanism. The history of our republic is one consequence of that history, stemming as it does from the enlightenment. Both Pound and Heidegger became Nazis in spite of (or perhaps because of) having received humanist educations of the highest order. Neither recanted in later life, though Heidegger was forbidden to teach in a German university and Pound lived out his days in a mental institution after his friends intervened to prevent his going to prison. We humanists are squeamish about the idea that Nazism is a possible outcome of the training we revere, but we shouldn’t be. Not only is humanist history filled with bigots and bigotry, but its core proposition that history is in the first instance an order of texts has meant that humanist history is itself a disputed territory, filled with arguments some of whose pettiness can still surprise us. Descartes and Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century couched their arguments against the humanists of their day. But those arguments hardly escaped humanism, just as the arguments of latter day postmodernists have proved not to escape humanism, sharing core assumptions with humanists and finding themselves equally susceptible to its pitfalls. It likely remains to be seen whether scientific and humanistic “cultures” are truly separate or whether their separation in modern universities is a product of arguments that remain merely academic. But I want to raise Tim Redman’s question again, having enlarged its context. Is the poetry of American exceptionalism that was part of my education and yours inevitably productive of hateful politics?

Part of my argument in this essay is that the exceptionalism of the Republican rump is indeed hateful. The history it promulgates is a false history whose original design was to assert that modern America had escaped its racist antecedents, had escaped accountability for its ethnic cleansing of the continent. If we hope to rescue American exceptionalism from its dependence upon that unusable past, we shall at the very least have to reckon with the Nazis among us and mount guard against the future emergence of their hateful politics. Indeed we shall need to prefer force over persuasion in some measure in dealing with their leaders, partly because their behavior borders on sedition and partly because many of those whom they lead are not capable of being persuaded. This will mean allowing the aftermath of the election to play itself out in the courts, taking whatever measures the law permits to prevent those who do not occupy protected positions within the government from holding public office in the future, and mounting an extended and enlightened campaign to free state and local governments of their influence.

But the United States of America that is the dream of liberal hope is equally a manifestation of American exceptionalism, and that is in no small part because it has always been a movable feast. Jefferson, Whitman, Lincoln all were racists; yet they each left us a set of texts that would inspire future anti-racists and will continue to do so until the crack of whatever doom awaits this planet. I shall not live to see the dawning of the republic of my dreams. We shall have to escape Trumpism first, and it remains too soon to tell whether we shall actually do so. But if that republic arrive one day, its arrival will mark the fulfillment of a significant movement in the history of my country, in the history of its humanist founding documents, and in the overall history of humanism—the thought itself is something like a star as is the thought that we Americans will have to choose that republic,

Some Catching Up

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All Saints Day came and went, but I took no joy in it this year. The weather didn’t feel right. Outside my window at noon the temperature stood at 48 degrees, but the sun blared down just as it might have on any high summer day. On the TV set downstairs the pre-election news made me nervous as I watched armed Texas thugs in pickup trucks flying confederate flags try to force a Biden campaign bus off I-35 between Austin and Pflugerville while the president gloated. We we’re told that police and national guard units were alerted all over the country to the possibility of election day violence. In Alamance County, North Carolina, police pepper sprayed a crowd of peaceful protesters that included children, and dragged a disabled woman from her motorized wheel chair in the process, offering the lamest of excuses for their outrageous behavior.

My beloved again served as a drive-by poll watcher on election day, and I again took one of her shifts with her. In addition to our city’s ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, which have never really stopped in spite of the pandemic, we have several local issues that are stirring the pot of potential violence. Our city’s only organized fascist group is our local white police union. (We also have a black police union.) But our local politics remain mired in the machinations of political machines, both white and black. This election featured a local proposition for the use of approval voting in mayoral and aldermanic elections, establishing a general election runoff between the two top vote getters in the primary. The measure will dilute the importance of political parties and disrupt machine politics in ways that its opponents were late to understand. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of the measure’s merits, it passed overwhelmingly. My beloved worked on a steering committee that guided that passage as a representative of the League of Women Voters. I’m very proud of her these days.

Opponents of approval voting received, however late, a couple of infusions of PAC money as they awoke to the possibility that approval voting might just pass. That cash enabled a spate of virulently negative campaigning against the proposition from all sides of the political spectrum as groups and individuals whose power and influence has rested upon minority constituencies that have had the ability to game our present hyper-partisan system within the Democratic party for decades, joined forces. Most of the negative campaigning featured blatant falsehoods, one of the more interesting of which adorned the headquarters of our local white police union and featured the slogan: “No on Prop D, D=Defund Police.” The St. Louis American, our local African American newspaper, endorsed approval voting, along with newly elected congresswoman, Cori Bush; however, many local black politicians and groups opposed the idea. For a more balanced presentation of their views, see “Antonio French: St. Louis’ election recent history underscores the folly of Prop D.” I think French’s argument is badly flawed, but it at least contains no outright falsehoods. On the other hand, the sign at our white police union headquarters is especially worrisome.

I skipped virtual church on All Saints, though the occasion is one of the days in the church year when my church considers I am obligated to participate. Last year at this time I rejoiced that I had completed a round of rehab and recalled a past epiphany that seemed, then, to sum up how I like to feel in the late autumn. This year, with chaos swirling all around and the threat of more chaos in weeks to come, I shared my country’s somber mood. Then, upon returning home after my election day jaunt, I fell in my living room and sprained my right knee badly enough that I had to stay off it for a couple of weeks. I’m still recovering from that adventure. My doctor has recommended PT at home with a traveling therapist and offered to send a tech to my house to draw some blood she needs from me at the moment. I’m mulling those recommendations over still, trying to overcome my aversion to risking COVID exposure.

And we have a new member of our household. Not long after election day we lost our beloved small gray Poodle, Maxie. I still miss him, as I miss his sibling, Murphy, whom we lost six years past. Quite fortuitously we now welcome a new dog, whom we are calling Maisie. A rescue dog, she comes to us from APA, whose service we can’t recommend highly enough. She immediately captured all our hearts, but especially the hearts of Kathleen and Ed. We think she has some Whippet in her and may for a lark have her DNA tested. Right now she is still a puppy, but we are all enjoying one another’s company as we become socialized together. Here she is posed on Kathleen’s recliner a week or so ago. Click on the image to enlarge it.

In my next post I talk about the election, getting off my chest a number of matters I find I want to discuss now, at this very uncertain time.