Heroes of the American Republic

Recently, Gore Vidal was quoted saying, on Barack Obama’s candidacy for President, “Slaves have a hard time making poetry, unless it's got a beat.” Vidal’s iconoclasm serves him well here, in his deep offensiveness but also in his astute revelation of the cultural politics of race in the United States. Such a remark, of course, illuminates a number of different national preoccupations. Suffice it to say, Vidal reveals a tin ear not only for poetry, but also for national poetics.

I suppose I could address this in a variety of different ways. Those of us who study the American Republic as well as live in its current manifestation are acutely aware of the rapturous as well as tortured transformation of the national concept. In this spirit, I offer a pantheon of American heroes, not the usual suspects but remarkably important nonetheless, who in thought and action counter Vidal’s witty racism on this, the penultimate eve of portentous national change. In spite of struggle, hardship, and violence, Americans have never given up at chipping away at the edifice of exclusion. That is the optimistic American tradition worth honoring and preserving.

Dred Scott

Homer Plessy

Fannie Lou Hamer

Harvey Milk

Fred Korematsu

Mildred and Richard Loving

Dolores Huerta

Shirley Chisholm

Our America (2): La esperanza

On the day of the national election, I shall be serving as an Election Judge in a Latino-majority precinct in the city, speaking pidgin Spanglish and smiling like a lunatic. At our training a few weeks ago, in a stuffy conference room adjacent to the warehouse of the municipal Elections Board, the diverse faces of American democracy were on glorious display. There was no satin red, white, and blue banner, no complimentary flag pins, just uncomfortable plastic seats crammed into a small, fluorescent-lit space filled with a wide variety of people: Subaru matrons, blue collar workers, secretaries, hipsters, silk headscarves and North Face jackets, clogs and work boots and discreet pumps.

The training facilitator, an older white woman with a mild limp and a desperate need for a deep conditioning, covered an incredible amount of information in two short hours joyfully and efficiently, while soberly reminding us that as Guardians of Democracy we were not meant to deny citizens their franchise, but to facilitate their voting experience with efficiency and friendliness. We had to be as fresh and helpful at 7:00 pm as we were 12 hours earlier, when the polling station opened.

The phrase ‘Guardian of Democracy’ struck me as amusing, while at the same time also deeply apropos for arguably the most important federal election in my lifetime. The symbolic value of an Obama victory is overwhelming for a slave-holding white settler colony with a violent history of racial subjugation. Symbols, of course, are important, perhaps more important than we think. It has been fashionable on the Left to dismiss mainstream symbolism as empty gesture, to mock the pretension of participatory democracy, to cluck at party politics as ineffective and corrupt, regardless of political party. And indeed, those expecting a magical transformation after a potential election of Barack Obama will no doubt be sorely disappointed. I, for one, fully expect to be thrown under the truck almost immediately.

This self-assured skepticism has played a role in the politics of the avant-garde for quite sometime. But the time for such shadow boxing seems, at least at this moment, to have become less important, the position of cynics, sociopaths, and ideologues, a self-indulgence we can no longer afford. And the outpouring of energy and emotion in the current election cycle reveals not only the marginality of this avant-gardist cynicism, but also and more importantly the belief people still have in the American project, whether from the regrettable position of conservative reaction and fear to the hope for a better, more equitable American society.

I have surprised myself with my own investment in our peculiar American exceptionalism, and not only in agreeing to spend my election day in a tacky VFW. To wit, I regularly teach a course on American immigration and race, and this semester, the course has been wrapped up in references to the election and the possible futures of the American project. As the class focuses on the violent histories of American racism and exclusion as it connects to the mythos of immigration and assimilation, such contemporary political eruptions into the classroom space are to be expected, as students naturally connect the course material with the drama playing out in real time on television and the street, on the radio and in conversation.

While not quite Fishian in maintaining a strict kosher separation of personal politics from the teaching space, I am loath to proselytize in the classroom. Frankly, I find it unprofessional. Yet, I also don’t believe in maintaining the fantasy of apolitical transcendent omniscience that so distorts classic disciplinary education. What we teach and how we teach has political implication, even if at the same time, as Freud noted, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

The negotiation of this both/and position can be tenuous, like walking a tight rope every class. One theme that has been a constant in the Immigration class has been my use of the first person plural in discussion. My professorial insistence on ‘we’ and ‘our’ rises above, I believe, simple jingoism. Phrases such as ‘our society,’ ‘our history,’ and ‘our experience’ are meant to reassert ownership of the fragile, imperfect American experiment, to place the ‘I’ within the ‘we,’ to insist on the collective nature of our racialized histories, our violent traumas, and our timid and piece-meal emergences from those nightmares into the light of hope, of promise, and ultimately of hewing more closely to the Enlightenment principles contained in our founding documents that form the basis for some of humanity’s finest expressions. It is also meant to unite the fragments of the classroom, the disparate identity politics of different standpoints, racial and gendered identities and experiences, under the rubric of shared experience. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we either hang together or we hang separately.

The first-person plural pushes white students to think of themselves within racial-ethnic experience, while also connecting students of color and New Americans to the troubled collectivity of dominant society, both of which they are a part of, naturally. Such a position, while progressive in its own instance, also strikes me as old fashioned, perhaps a bit démodé in its assimilative principle. But more largely, I really do feel the first-person plural in these instances; it’s not just an act to convince skeptical students I am not an Amerikkka-hating ideologue. I really do believe in the promise of America, the hope of the American experiment, the potential of American exceptionalism, not in its limited, expansionist and xenophobically nationalistic senses, but in what it means to create new societies forged in hope and violence, blood and joy.

Over one hundred years ago, Jose Martí, in exile in New York, formulated a new hemispheric ideal for hispanophone America, “Nuestra America.” Our America, or at least my thinking on what that phrase might mean now, for me, for us, borrows from Martí in its recognition of the potentials of our society, of our historical mestizaje here in anglophone North America, a recognition of the nexus of connection between races, standpoints, and experiences that forms the collectivity that is the United States.

And it is with that idea in mind that I approach the coming election, not from a position of fear, but hope. An evolution, perhaps, into something more perfect, something greater than what we have been, yet not as great as we have the potential to be.

Our America (1): American Psychos

Tonight I got caught after dark in the woods. The sun here is setting ever earlier each night as we slide towards winter, and after an unexpectedly enjoyable warm autumnal day, I returned to a favorite but relatively remote nature reserve for an evening promenade. A storm moved in suddenly, and grey clouds obscured the sunset, and before I knew it, dusk had become dark. Although I know this reserve rather well, and am a large man generally unafraid of the dark, the walk back out of the forest was more nerve-wracking than I would have expected, the gravel path obscured, trees and glades dim but full of noise and shadow, illuminated ghostly by occasional flashes of distant lightening.

In an odd version of whistling past the graveyard, I imagined myself a Native American, or a Witch, at home in the gloom, familiar and well trodden. But I was relieved to be back in the car, merging into the river of interstate light that led me back to the electric city, alive with streetlamps and horns and crowds on the sidewalk enjoying the humid interlude.

The allegorical meanings of such a moment for the last two weeks is perhaps too obvious, too ham-fisted in its urgency. But we seem, as a national body, to have become caught in the forest after dark, unpleasantly surprised as the light has faded as suddenly as someone putting out a lamp. This week I felt, in addition to the usual annoyance and frustration with American politics and society, for the first time real, palpable fear. In a drumbeat fed, admittedly, by an unhealthy addiction to Internet political commentary, the twin engines of financial doom and rabid rightist mobs seemed to overwhelm the potentialities of the coming national election, the chance for renewal, however mild, the metaphoric turning of a racial page onto, at the very least, someplace different (not, of course, the vaunted end of race).

This is, understatedly, a dangerous moment for our Republic. Few realize how close we came, in the Great Depression of the 20th century, to fascism, how close to the surface such sentiments were, how many Americans actually admired Hitler and Mussolini (and to a lesser extent, Stalin) for making the trains run on time, for their strength, their masculine heroism, their ideological vigor. But if it is anything the past two weeks have demonstrated rather strongly, it is the truism of what is old is new again, both in the inept Hooverian economic bungling (and, more optimistically, the potential for Rooseveltian reemergence) as well as in the ugly political spectre of race-baiting, our old friend and compatriot, our American fellow traveler.

On one hand, such socio-political cycles are exhausting to the historically informed, like reinventing the wheel. On the other, the fact that they often aren’t recognized as cycles, or are interpreted as such but without nuance, is even more distressing. It is as if we are, as a society, doomed to recognize, every half-century or so, the necessity of the social contract, and in the interregnums between such periods of clarity, we are free to engage in Roman orgies of self-aggrandizing selfishness and self-destruction, for what is the last twenty-five years of Republican-led and Democratic-sponsored deregulation other than an incredible abdication of responsibility and self-awareness, a strange self-mutilation of the state, a resentful hangover from the end of formal legal white supremacy?

I recently began re-reading, before the current crisis, Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, an instructive primer on how we came to be where we are. Like Alan Hollinghurst’s more introspective and dreamlike The Line of Beauty, Ellis’ controversial murderous epic, published in 1991, neatly delineates exactly what was wrong with the emergence of Wall Street culture and the rise of the political Right across the anglophone world in the eighties. But the big reveal is not in the murder scenes, which while horrendously graphic, almost ridiculously so, are a rather transparent metaphor.

Rather, they are to be found in the detailed, obsessive lists of consumer goods Patrick Bateman, the central protagonist, recites about himself and the characters he encounters. Often paragraphs long, these descriptions of what characters are wearing, or what their homes contain, designer and brand names, textures, the descriptive apparatus of magazine advertising:

Price seems nervous and edgy, and I have no desire to ask him what’s wrong. He’s wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass and cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted silk, all by Valentino Couture, and perforated cap-toe leather shoes by Allen-Edmonds. Once inside Harry’s we spot David Van Patten and Craig McDermott at a table up front. Van Patten is wearing a double-breasted wool and silk sport coat, button-fly wool and silk trousers with inverted pleats by Mario Valentino, a cotton shirt by Gitman Brothers, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass and leather shoes from Brooks Brothers. McDermott is wearing a woven-linen suit with pleated trousers, a button-down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph Abboud and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards. (31)

These obsessive lists are vertiginous in their detail, but capture through that dislocation, through the attention paid to such things, the fundamental illness of late Capitalist consumerism and in particular the bonfire of vanities that seems now to be crashing down around us, to which Bateman’s murderous splurges are but the final coda on a society that prizes appearance and things over more socially ameliorative values, like our fellow citizens.

It comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with the echoes of American racial histories that the race baiting of the Republican candidates and their surrogates over the past two weeks dovetails nicely with the rising urgency of the global economic crisis, the ostensible end of the era of the Patrick Batemans and their existential lack of humanity. The only surprise, depressingly so, is how potentially effective such strategies remain, at least for a fringe of deeply unsettled people, angry at the world.

Instead of being afraid, as a McCain partisan claimed this past week in Minnesota, that he was afraid to raise his (unborn) child under an Obama presidency, the angry crowds gathering under the Republican ticket would perhaps be better served by pondering the effects of rising inequality and the inhumanity detailed in Ellis, how we all came to embody the psychopathological lack of Wall Street and Patrick Bateman. It is to Wall Street that the American Republic has been given exclusively for the last generation, and we see now where that all has led.

I, for one, am quite glad to be labeled a Commie Faggot.

Strange Days

While it would not be true to say that we are experiencing an “Indian Summer” in its most classic manifestation, it has warmed up after a disturbing dip into fall here last week, with a spate of cold, wet grey days. The sun is warm again, and even though the foliage is moving increasingly towards changing, smatterings of yellow breaking up the chartreuse monochrome, one can for the briefest moment pretend that summer is actually not on its inevitable way out, that l’air douce of warm nights and sunny days shall continue unabated, in perpetuity, that we can stay this way forever.

As the unwelcome spooks of autumn creep forward, however incrementally, up the stairs, banging on the floorboards like an unhappy Poltergeist, blowing out candles and moving things mischievously, so our national mood has too an almost unbearable sense of foreboding, an unsubtle foreshadowing of disaster, if not disaster itself. The tension is palpable— in the almost-histrionic back and forth in the press over the national election, the cascading economic crises whose final coup de théâtre remains as yet unseen behind the curtain, in the taciturn classroom atmosphere this semester, students tense and crabby.

For my own part, I have found it increasingly difficult to contain my withering scorn over the state of the national body in the classroom, the outrageous fact that the criminal political party responsible for our national decline is even running a candidate, much less the two they have chosen to represent their idea of leadership. This is a dangerous position, considering one is already discussing hot button topics in courses focused on race and sexuality. And as much as I may strive to maintain an apolitical classroom atmosphere, students themselves reference political events beyond the classroom, which even if triggering only a silent grimace, betray personal sensibilities that inevitably offend others, the put-upon conservatives who describe undocumented workers in discussion as “illegals” and sit sullenly when conversations tend towards the critical, which is to say, pretty much every session.

Last week, the Dean sent out an advising email about student complaints, reminding all of us of the risks of political commentary, no matter how brief, to classroom atmosphere (and, as an aside, apparently to the Dean’s voicemail, which has been receiving anonymous messages describing the college as a site of indoctrination and “despicable”). To the Dean’s credit, there was not a subsequent finger waging about avoiding politics in the classroom, but practical solutions for reframing political discussions and debates in ways that empower student voice, theoretically enabling conservative students to argue, or at the very least state, their opinions.

And admittedly I attempt to do this in class as well, often ventriloquilizing those positions by anticipating and naming common sense perceptions of race and sexuality (and then, of course, demolishing them). But since so much of conservative rhetoric is ahistorically misinformed and reflective of socio-economic ressentiment, it can be hard to find a rational place of engagement with such positions and the students who hold them.

In a piece on teaching in the New York Times Magazine, the following observation is made:

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat? Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest. The historian sees the election not through the latest news blast but in the context of presidential politics from George Washington to the present.

What is left out, unsurprisingly for the New York Times, is that increasingly seeing the election in historical terms is itself a political position, which only means that it has become, over the last eight years of rapacious governmental criminality, even harder, more political dangerous, to teach critically, even to the text, much less voicing informed personal opinion. Those of us in the reality-based world now must confront those who do not wish to participate in such things: reality, that is. That this is a long-held truism in teaching, the disabusing of students of their preconceptions, their “common-sense,” seems to have been transformed, accelerated, and perhaps fundamentally challenged by the fantastical political polemic world of extracurricular culture and, more importantly, the apolitical culture of pleasure and consumption that, thus far, has largely insulated Americans of the last thirty years from making hard choices.

The grinding you hear all around you is that pleasure-consumption nexus achieving critical status. If indeed what we are looking at is a fundamental restructuring of American socio-economic expectation, then the stark political choices of the national election stand in marked contrast to such a crisis. The fact that one could even have a debate about the merits of the Palin nomination, outside of political theatre, is, frankly, absurd. And that is what, unfortunately, historical knowledge gives you, not the least of which is a rising Arendtian suspicion of mass enfranchisement, especially in a voraciously white supremacist capitalist culture that is trapped in a dream state, sleepwalking through history as the sun sets on a thousand dreams of widescreen televisions and cheap travel abroad.

Anne Lamott recently published a soft piece for nice Subaru-driving leftists on dealing with the political stresses of the moment, oddly echoing but not resolving the challenge of a conversation at a party last weekend with a completely drunk colleague, who wondered about the political apparatus for people like us, not moderates or conservatives, but dedicated leftist progressives, people who believe in and want to see things like comprehensive and universal national health care, paid maternity and paternity leaves, generous annual paid vacation time for all workers, subsidized affordable education, steep progressive taxation and an end to corporate welfare (or at least its most egregious forms); in short, a return to the commonweal, a commonweal that includes everyone, not just white Americans who bitch about socialism and the government and unfair affirmative action, even as their entire lives have been based on such benefits. Considering the current trillion dollar bailout being engineered to save American Capitalism from itself, such things are, ultimately, quite affordable in comparison.

Those of us in the reality-based world recognize, perhaps too critically, the array of possible futures before us. It is the American dreamers, those caught up in the night terror of consumption and resentment, falling towers and American flags, Rapture and Pretty Princess politics, which one must be concerned about. For the time of American Dreams seems over, and now the ugly drudgery of reality, or in Zizek's memorable phrase, the desert of the real, lies before us like a barren plain. It could all be such a nice teachable moment, if it weren’t all so vivid, so felt.

Travelogue

And the moral of that is: Be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

— Alice in Wonderland

3000 miles and one windscreen crack later, courtesy of the city of Cleveland, I have returned to my flat in Cold City. The newly painted white walls, redone whilst I was away, brighten the space, however, all of my framed artwork still remains resting on the floor, leaning against the walls and off their hooks, a wholly appropriate metaphor. I had great hopes for my summer road trip, and while it had many enjoyable moments, I remain largely the same person I was when I left. I was hoping, perhaps irrationally and naively, for a greater change, a more impressive temblor, a wider break between the proverbial before and after.

Yet, as I reentered the urban precincts of Cold City on the final leg of my return drive, past the familiar landscapes, the skyscrapers and crowded exit lanes and Cold City U’s campus, I did not feel changed; at least not in the way I had wanted to be, bright and shiny, like a ferocious starlet, all legs and ambition and cannibal smile outlined by blood red lips. But I suppose that is OK. Such dramatic breaks in character might be appropriate for performances under the proscenium arch, but fall a little flat in the three dimensions of lived experience. There is no easy avoidance of the heavy lifting of self-transformation, yet the exercise of such atrophied muscles is beneficial, even if the short-term results are subtle, invisible, more sweat than substance.

The bustle of the new school year is upon us, with its mandatory meetings and obligatory social events, classes on the verge of commencing, new faces and familiar challenges. Summer here heaves its last, heavily humid breath. In September, the light will change. Such things distract positively, occupy the mind. Somewhat differently, 3000 miles of solitary road trip over two weeks does have a Zen effect, clearing the mind in the blankness of the road, the reach for the cigarette, the adjustment of the radio, motions that become automatic. Yet, the mind remains active, pondering and introspective, anxious for the life to come, revealing the limits of my own particular meditative practice I suppose, which is to say hardly any of worthy discipline.

Life, in spite of what we have come to believe from Hollywood and rapacious government bureaucracies, remains resistant to representation, which would include our very own clumsy efforts to ground it in narrative, and subsequently, attempt to know it completely, the fantastical dream of the 19th century, the glorified corpse. But that is OK too. The hooks may remain upon the walls, but the order of the pictures, through design or fancy, can be changed.