The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois JaI add some context in the first comment
The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois January 27, 1838
As a subject for the remarks of the evening, the perpetuation of our political institutions, is selected.
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.--We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them--they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana;--they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter;--they are not the creature of climate-- neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave- holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.--Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.
It would be tedious, as well as useless, to recount the horrors of all of them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi, and at St. Louis, are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers; a set of men, certainly not following for a livelihood, a very useful, or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature, passed but a single year before. Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State: then, white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers, from neighboring States, going thither on business, were, in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.
Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, if anything of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.
Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more, than an idle remark.
But you are, perhaps, ready to ask, "What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, it has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil; and much of its danger consists, in the proneness of our minds, to regard its direct, as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg, was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population, that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept, from the stage of existence, by the plague or small pox, honest men would, perhaps, be much profited, by the operation.--Similar too, is the correct reasoning, in regard to the burning of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life, by the perpetration of an outrageous murder, upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city; and had not he died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law, in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was, as it could otherwise have been.--But the example in either case, was fearful.--When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil.--By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.--Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world.
I know the American People are much attached to their Government;--I know they would suffer much for its sake;--I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another. Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.
Here then, is one point at which danger may be expected.
The question recurs, "how shall we fortify against it?" The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;--let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap--let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;--let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.
While ever a state of feeling, such as this, shall universally, or even, very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom.
When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise, for the redress of which, no legal provisions have been made.--I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed. So also in unprovided cases. If such arise, let proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible delay; but, till then, let them, if not too intolerable, be borne with.
There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.
But, it may be asked, why suppose danger to our political institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years? And why may we not for fifty times as long?
We hope there is no sufficient reason. We hope all dangers may be overcome; but to conclude that no danger may ever arise, would itself be extremely dangerous. There are now, and will hereafter be, many causes, dangerous in their tendency, which have not existed heretofore; and which are not too insignificant to merit attention. That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed, and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all, to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.--Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it:-- their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded. The experiment is successful; and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.
Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.
Here, then, is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such a one as could not have well existed heretofore.
Another reason which once was; but which, to the same extent, is now no more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus far. I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice, incident to our nature, and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were, for the time, in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive; while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature, were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause--that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.
I put the conclusion of this speech in the comment section...more
I hereby repost this review of a book just out, as DEI is condemned by the present administration and Civil Rights offices are closed. The gutting of I hereby repost this review of a book just out, as DEI is condemned by the present administration and Civil Rights offices are closed. The gutting of the Department of Education that is seen as too woke and negative about white supremacy. All aspects of government seen as "racist" because it focuses on race? On equity? Because a"free market" approach to morality will just work things out? Or is it "replacement theory" fears? Get all the people of color to leave the country? Universities condemned for researching equity issues? All this is nothing new (see this book). We are not living in a post-racist society, obviously.
I went to a book publication roll-out for Chicago's own Eve Ewing's Original Sins, and the grimness of the message was countered in some ways by her personal energy, enthusiasm, political commitment and humor. The book is relatively short, weaving two strands of American racist shame together but it then situating the history of racism within the context of schooling that played an important and ugly role in the creation of a racist American society. So, timely, need I say. And yes, pertaining to that DEI issue that Amazon/Goodreads will have to deal with: Will Jeff Bezos have to put an end to the reviewing of DEI -related books? And if so, where would you start? This book, obviously, will be one of the first to be thrown on the white supremacist fire. When someone asked what we should do with her book she said read it, rededicate yourself to antiracist principles, pass it on and/or throw it at a fascist!
Ewing is a kind of literary force in the present moment, in my estimation. She wrote Ghosts in the Schoolyard about the closing of dozens of Chicago schools in poor neighborhoods. She wrote 1919 (poetry in part based on the mostly forgotten race riots of 1919 in Chicago), middle grades fiction, and she's writing comics series for Marvel! A former Chicago elementary school teacher, she (for Chicagoans) graduated from Northside College Prep, U of Chicago, and grad school at Harvard. She's a Sociologist of Education at the (typically conservative) U of Chicago.
She warns that the book is primarily descriptive and not prescriptive, which is to say it goes over a lot of well-known ground of racist history, though maybe some readers will not know the central role schools have played in that history. She frames her view of school in part by using Foucault's Discipline and Punish to show how blacks and Native Americans have historically been silenced by and otherwise disciplined by schools.
She cites David Stovall's article (I'll get the citation soon) favoring the "abolition" of schools as we know them to help us create a different society. Anarchist principles for breaking down the traditional structures of schooling.
Ewing dedicates her book to all her great teachers who didn't silence her, and to all the great teachers she knows, has worked with, and whom she knows will read her book. She knows there are today many many great teachers, and many great schools. When she was in school she always was respected as someone who could contribute to discussions. She was not silenced.
This book, while not (to me) breaking particularly new ground, is a good source of information linking schooling to racist societal practices. Some readers (I hope) will be shocked by some of her information, if they had not heard it bwefore. And it is really well-written and engaging, as grim as it is, written for a popular audience, primarily for teachers and administrators, and maybe parents, I think, but after all the horrors it ends hopefully with a discussion of "braiding" (sweetgrass, Indigenous hair braids) as a metaphor for moving forward together. She's not very specific about what we can do to change our approach to a new foundation for schooling beyond creating (Nel Noddings's) "ethic of care" in schools, but this book--just published last week, early February--will be an "it" book here in Chicago, for sure, and maybe nationally. I read it with my grad class (of teachers) who also attended the book event at UIC.
One thing I appreciated as the book moves along is that she talks more and more (as Dr King did, later, too) about the destructive forces of capitalism that in part depend on racist practices--if you were a person of color you had to move to limited areas--reservations, "ghettoes," destroying the cultures of Native Americans and blacks and others--Asians, Mexican-Americans--in different ways to move on its (white) goals--as one central structure in the process of building the US....more
Robert Sikoryak creates 46 mock superhero comics issue covers focused on Trump as villain, framing direct quotations from The Don-Old in The UnquotablRobert Sikoryak creates 46 mock superhero comics issue covers focused on Trump as villain, framing direct quotations from The Don-Old in The Unquotable Trump, which I saw in 2017 when it first came out, but I was too depressed to read it, too soon to laugh. But now with Harris and Walz we are laughing again, hopeful, so when I saw it at the library just now, I picked it up. Its an oversized paperback with appropriately garish colors and over-the-top depictions, because how could they not be? Thanks to Drawn and Quarterly for publishing this, but its 2024; we are now missing 7 years of outrageousness; volume two, Robert? Or maybe we can just stop listening?!
25% of the proceeds from the sale of the book goes to the American Civil Liberties Union!
“What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, y“What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.”
Creation Lake (2024) by Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Its press calls it a “propulsive page turner;” while I don’t agree with that, it does bear some resemblance to a “thriller” in that it involves an undercover “agent,” Sadie Smith (shh! An alias!), who is hired to undermine an anarchist (possibly ecoterrorist?) collective hiding out in a cave in France. Sadie, fired from her job with U.S. intelligence, is now working for the highest bidder: “It was a relief to be in the private sector,” she says, “where there are no supervising officers, no logbooks.” She’s willing to engage in seduction--sleeping with the enemy--and for much of the book her infiltration seems successful, but later we have questions about that; at any rate this is no page-turning thriller, for all its surface spy intrigue.
None of the characters in the book are particularly endearing, except maybe Bruno Lacombe Lucien, the collective ideologue (is he a crank? A cult figure?) who takes us into a host of anarchist/back to nature theories, some of which become persuasive, even to Sadie, ultimately. He thinks humans should return to the ways of the far past, laying out the history of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, he siding with the Neanderthals. One touchstone for the book is Guy DeBord, a French artist/activist from the Situationalist International, Paris, 1968, to help us understand some of the book's radical artistic background, but there are many other ideas and people from a range of sources that infiltrate this plot, such as it is. Late edition: Alwynne tells me that a writer Kushner admires, leftwing French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, is another key reference here, too.
Since I had just read a biography of Captain James Cook, I liked an anecdote in the book about Cook and (accomplished but misunderstood) Maori ocean navigators/mapmakers.
So it begins as a kind of novel of ideas, with a radical lecture by Bruno ala 1968 of the state of the world, and periodically returns to radical/unpopular ideas throughout. So, it’s less a book of character than ideas, except one might make a case for some change that takes place in Sadie at the very end. Sadie is sometimes played for humor, satire, as are other characters. But it’s not all satire. Sadie the seducer may have been seduced by the ideas of anarchist Bruno, and so may we be.
Me: I was 15 in 1968 and I actually read then what was going on in Paris because I was reading about politics here, during the sixties, a time of political assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, race riots, bra-burning, the war, Earth Day, all of it. I went to “information” sessions in Ann Arbor in my teens about the Weatherman, Black Panthers, SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), student activism; people gave me copies of Marx and Mao’s Little Red Book and writings from Malcolm X. I followed with interest eco-terrorist movements, beyond Greenpeace. I didn’t advocate or engage in violence, but I understood the argument: We are at war over the environment with the fossil fuel companies. We are war with the military-industrial complex about the fate of the planet. How can this war be best fought? With flower power?
I and others were probably on (minor) FBI lists just for opposing the war, for giving money to Greenpeace and other environmental orgs, though we viewed it all as participating in democracy. Until Kent State and the killing of students commenced. The killing of students protesting a war a majority of Americans had come to see as immoral?! “Our country, love it or leave it,” was a common response then to any criticism of American policy. So I read the (failed) radicalism of this book with some sad memories of lost hopes for the transformation of the world into the Age of Aquarius. But I like a lot of what Bruno says about how to survive/disrupt late stage capitalism. His question is relevant:
Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?
Kushner is interested in various notions of radicalism as strategies against the current state of affairs. Her book The Flamethrowers looks at Italian activism from another generation. But in Creation Lake, we get a picture of sixties radicalism undermined by the participants’ very youth (most of these folks were very young, of course!), a question about the depth of their commitment, sexism, lack of political coordination on the left, and so on. Can a small pocket of hippies/yippies/Marxists really create a cultural revolution against the Godzilla of capitalism?...more
Of course, his visit to Turkey’s authoritarian Erdogan, his endorsement of authoritarian Putin, his alignment with dictators everywhere, his endorsement of the terrifying Project 2025:
And their commitment to end democracy, all these things require Americans and any pro-democracy advocates to know what’s going on and act.
I read a graphic history of Stalin’s war on Ukraine, The Red Famine, and see by her own admission she is a pro-democracy, right-center John McCain/Mitt Romney/Liz Cheney-type Republican, comfortably in the alt-right Republican party in 2024. She is a worldwide expert on authoritarianism, and in various short chapters the Polish-American Applebaum tells us about Poland, Hungary, Britain and (especially) Trumpian USA. She doesn’t tell me anything particularly new about authoritarianism but I did find it interesting and articulate and inspiring.
“To some, the precariousness of the current moment seems frightening, and yet this uncertainty has always been there. The liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, or Václav Havel never promised anything permanent. The checks and balances of Western constitutional democracies never guaranteed stability. Liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens: participation, argument, effort, struggle. They always required some tolerance for cacophony and chaos, as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos.”
“Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
“The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”
“Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”
She wants raucous debate, not the silencing of choices or multiplicity. I disagree with her praise of McCain and Reagan and the like, but that's what democracy is about! I trust her perspective generally here though because she has always occupied center right positions and has hung out with conservatives most of her career, and has studied authoritarianism, so that gives her a kind of credibility to me....more
I read this book in late November 2023 and my review expresses some disappointment that the book didn't reveal much to me that I didn't already know. I read this book in late November 2023 and my review expresses some disappointment that the book didn't reveal much to me that I didn't already know. But I think Richardson is one of our clearest and calmest and most insistent voices in this current catastrophe (I'm writing this in late April 2025) and I strongly recommend you get to know her, especially now. Every single day she writes a letter on what is going on, and I highly, highly suggest you do the same.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."--The Declaration of Independence
Heather Cox Richardson makes it clear that 1) the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Indepence are still today two of the most astonishing documents in world history, committing this country to equality, diversity and democracy, but 2) there have always been people, then and now, who disagreed with these principles, who believed that some people--some white males--were better than others, and about whom--black, brown, indigenous, women--those aforementioned rights did not apply.
I sort of regret reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening now in that I had just finished Rachel Maddow’s Prequel and they make a similar point, that forces of authoritarianism/white supremacy and facism have always been part of the battle for democracy. We have faced these forces down, time and again, and the right has prevailed. Both spend ⅔ of their books detailing a history of bad actors and struggles against them, and the last ⅓ showing the way out. Both acknowledge that USA has never been truly democratic, but they nevertheless endorse this statement:
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but bends to justice”--Martin Luther King
Both books are written by historians who have become journalists and public intellectuals in the form of what might be described as popular history, something that a lay person could pick up and read. Maddow’s is the more scholarly of the two, taking a focus on and deep dive into the rise of fascism in the American thirties and again now. Richardson paints a broader stroke, with the same basic structure: These are all the bad things that have happened that led us to the brink of authoritarianism, and here is how we held them off, Richardson reminding us of 1776, the Civil War, and the New Deal as evidence of goodness prevailing.
I had an idea that Richardson’s purpose in the book was to set down in a clear narrative for a general audience how “recent events” happened. It’s as clear to me as the January 6 hearings, and little in it was particularly new to me or surprised me, but it is a good short version of my understanding of recent events (Trumpism’s ascendance). It is also sad to me that few Republicans will read this or Maddow’s book, even just to argue with it. Trump’s authoritarian hold on the party is a death grip. I’m not sure what can change things, but Richardson, like Maddow’s book, is meant to be inspiring: Pay attention! We can do this! I liked Maddow’s book better because it gets deeper into the weeds of actually historical pro-fascist US events, but both are good to read in these times when both Argentina and the Netherlands have elected dangerously alt-right leaders.
Richardson shares Hitler’s authoritarian map for world dominance, culled from an OSS report after WWII:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
Parroting the lie becomes a loyalty pledge, even if—especially if—you don’t actually believe it. I’ve seen signs in this country recently: “Hitler was right.” If we ignore those signs we do so at our peril....more
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfullTime Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfully by Angela Rodel. The skinny: An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past” that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail. Gaustine’s assistant narrates the story.
How can I describe it? Post-modern? A playful philosophical meditation on time, the past, memory. A reflection on the fact that in an aging population, someone is diagnosed with Alzeheimer’s or dementia every few seconds, and that begs the question how many are undiagnosed. It’s less a novel than it is an explosion of ideas/perspectives about memory and memory loss. Things like this are on every page:
“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.”
“We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.”
So it’s kind of exhilarating in some ways in terms of structure and invention, form, and terrifying in terms of its theme--memory loss--even as we can acknowledge that memory is one of the central foci of all literature. But it’s not a story where you “like” the characters; it’s meant to nudge you to think. I wasn’t all that engaged, maybe in part because I have been reading several sort of traditionally emotionally engaging novels, the likes of Elizabeth Strout and Kent Haruf. But:
*I have two older sibs who no longer know who I am that I visit periodically in nursing facilities. The places are filled with people like them.
*I had a talk with the 91-year-old mother of friends recently who asked me four times where I now live; on the fourth occasion, I nearly answered, “I am so glad you asked that question! No one ever asks me that!” to lighten the conversation for others in the room, but I held off. I mean, that might be me, sooner than I think.
I didn’t love this book, but I was impressed with its drive and energy. There’s a lot in here about the writer’s role in the process of exploring memory and the past, the impossibility of getting it right. It’s also about Bulgaria and the European Union generally and the anxiety of dealing with the challenges of the present as we ever forget the past....more
“ . . . one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . Political language--and with variations t“ . . . one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of respectability to pure wind.”
I am cautiously hopeful about the increasing legal challenges facing the former Cheeto-in- Chief, which made me nostalgic for the days in which an earlier version of this Demon created Chaos in American/World life and politics, leading to a satisfying conclusion. Philip Roth wrote this book in the early seventies, published in 1971, a year prior to Watergate--wait, is it possible some of y’all young-uns are a little fuzzy about just went down? Watergate refers to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, carried out under the direction of White House employees. Disclosure of the White House involvement in the break-in and subsequent cover-up forced President Nixon to resign in 1974 to avoid impeachment.
But Phillip Roth, who like many of us, detested Nixon, after writing his comic sex romp, Portnoy’s Complaint, decided to go all Swift on us, ignited by this simple Nixonian statement:
“From personal and religious beliefs I consider abortions an unacceptable form of population control. Furthermore, unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on-demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn. For, surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, recognized even in principles expounded by the United Nations.”
So Roth was inspired to write Our Gang by Nixon making this statement in the same week he ordered William Calley's (My Lai, who led the massacre of Vietnamese civilians, a war crime) release from prison to house arrest. The book is written entirely as dialogue, Imagining a President named Trick E. Dixon trying to get re-elected in 1972 by hook or. . . crook. A silly, over-the-top name, as are all others, as broad satire often warrants.
So folks such as Kissinger and Haldeman and Erlichman debate with Dixon how to get re-elected, using the abortion issue to distract from the VietNam war and the killing of JFK/MLK/RFK and civil rights riots, though Roth has no illusions about why Dixon adopts the anti-abortion issue--for political expediency, as we have seen today in the midterms as people shifted back and forth depending on how the political winds were blowing:
“I would be less than candid if I didn’t say that when election time rolls around, of course the embryos and fetuses of this country are likely to remember just who it was that struggled on their behalf, while others were addressing themselves to the more popular and fashionable issues of the day. I think they will remember who it was that devoted himself, in the midst of a war abroad and racial crisis at home, to making this country a fit place for the unborn to dwell in pride.”
Then things get weirder and weirder, as the group becomes "seriously troubled by the possibility that Lieutenant Calley may have committed an abortion" in killing pregnant women at My Lai. Nixon has essentially pardoned Calley, and now he’s an abortionist??! And on and on. Dixon orders the murder of Boy Scouts, protesting Nixon’s policies, and so it gets crazier and crazier, like Jewish lasers and murdering Democratic pedophiles in abandoned DC buildings. And so on.
The penultimate chapter has Dixon assassinated, but the last chapter is the best, the most rooted in the moment of the Quaker Nixon’s Presidency, having created one of the worst military disasters in American history and more. In the last chapter we see Dixon vying to replace Satan in Hell.
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Much as I respect and admire his (Satan’s] lies, I don’t think that lies are something to stand on. I think they are something to build on. I don’t think anyone, man or demon, can ever rely upon the lies he has told in the past, bold and audacious as they may have been at the time, to distort today’s realities. We live in an era of rapid and dramatic change. My own experience has shown that yesterday’s lies are just not going to confuse today’s problems. You cannot expect to mislead people next year the way you misled them a year ago, let alone a million years ago.”
And there’s more:
“Not even Satan, I think, with the support of all his legions, would claim that he could bring a nation with a strong democratic tradition and the highest standard of living in the world to utter ruination in only a thousand days. Indeed, despite my brief tenure in the ‘White’ House, I firmly believe that I was able to maintain and perpetuate all that was evil in American life when I came to power. Furthermore I think I can safely say that I was able to lay the groundwork for new oppressions and injustices and to sow seeds of bitterness and hatred between the races, the generations and the social classes that hopefully will plague the American people for years to come.” And on and on.
The book is about what Orwell was talking about, the decline of political discourse to the detriment of the country and the world. Lies embraced as truth for political gain. As Roth wrote in an article in Commentary in 1961, about that discourse in the era of late sixties Nixon, anticipating how things might get worse:
“It [i.e., reality] stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.”
And boy did it get worse, underlining what Hegel said two hundred years ago: “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” In Roth’s view no ludicrous satire could touch what we saw with Nixon and are seeing now.
I do not think the humor has exactly stood the test of time, and I don't love the over-the-topness of it all, but as one who survived Nixon and may survive Trump, I appreciated his Swiftian satire and his bow to Orwell and his embrace of democratic discourse.
PS: Nixon himself discussed Our Gang with his Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, who called it "ridiculous" and "sickening". Their conversations were preserved on Nixon's White House tapes. In other words, secretary Mary Jo Kopechne was not directed to erase this part of the Nixon tapes as she would later do to others. ...more
The Cold Six Thousand is part two of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. The first book, American Tabloid, written in part in “tabloid” style, feelThe Cold Six Thousand is part two of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. The first book, American Tabloid, written in part in “tabloid” style, feels somewhat similar to Ellroy’s look at corruption in the LAPD of the forties and fifties, in his LA Quartet, when tabloids and a sort of "yellow journalism" dominated. In The Cold Six Thousand Ellroy says he developed a rather different style to fit his view of the sixties, short, punchy sentences:
“The style I developed for The Cold Six Thousand is a direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards. It was appropriate for that book, and that book only, because it's the 1960s. It's largely the story of reactionaries in America during that time, largely a novel of racism and thus the racial invective, and the overall bluntness and ugliness of the language”--Ellroy
Here I adapt the opening of my American Tabloid review:
“America was never innocent.”
“It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.”
American Tabloid, and now its part two, The Cold Six Thousand, are two of four big books by major authors I’ve read in the last twelve months or so focused on what they would all agree is a key event in twentieth-century American/world politics, the killing of JFK: 11/22/63 by Stephen King; Libra by Don DeLillo, and these 1995 and 2001 publishing and award-winning sensations by the author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. A turning point in American history, they'd all agree.
The first two books of this trilogy feel like a combination of The People’s History of the United States and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but far more propulsive, with a bit of Cormac McCathy’s Blood Meridian-style ultra violence thrown in, something like being body-punched with those tough, staccato sentences, but, I don't know, even standing here, beaten up, I’m still somehow admiring him for his pugilistic skills. Ellroy is maybe the most cynical writer I know this side of Celine, but he's also politically astute. Ultimately angry, not despairing. Anti-romantic, assuredly, on the issue of Making America Great Again.
So American Tabloid ends with the killing of JFK, and The Cold Six Thousand picks up just after that moment, and is about the five year aftermath, including the mopping up and cover-up of the assassination by the slimy FBI rogues that are the main (fictional) characters, led by J Edgar Hoover. Ellroy then takes us through the civil rights movement and its ever-attendant racist pushback, and the continued right wing focus on Commies/Commies/Commies, including the military build-up in Vietnam, and ending in the killing of MLK and RFK. It’s an ugly period, especially through the lens of Ellroy. I mean, most people, on the right and left, do not think the killing of JFK, MLK and RFK--three liberal activists-- were random acts committed by solo crazy people. Ellroy’s vision may be dark, and it's (historical) fiction, but it seems more reasonable than the Warren Commission report on the Assassination of JFK. This book comes ten years after Oliver Stone's JFK, and is just as ambitious but more credible to me.
From the publishers: “On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground." The web they weave spreads to the (intended) take-over of Vegas by Howard Hughes (and Wayne Tedrow’s father, Wayne, Sr., a corrupt and violent Mormon). Plots get cooked up in connection to defaming and then killing MLK, who is over time seen as increasingly a Commie, looking at issues of economic injustice and not just racial equality. Jimmy Hoffa makes his way into it; he hated RFK’s anti-mob stance: Let's get rid of him. Hoover hated MLK’s focus on racial justice and King’s fomenting civil unrest and rioting: Let's get rid of him. There’s a solid anti-gay theme running through a lot of this narrative, too.
So this was the sixties, when racism was rampant and white nationalism (via the KKK and other orgs) reigned; anti-Communism reigned--America first! And gays were also hated. Hate proliferates, fomented by guys like Hoover. So glad we got over that and we no longer have any racism, homophobia and anti-communism/socialism anymore and we can all live without hate and divisiveness.
Anyway, it's one wild, at times exhilarating, sometimes exhausting ride. I kept imagining that if you listened to it at, say, +1.25 speed you might just have a stroke or begin having seizures. It’s so driven and angry. But it is a very very well-written trip through the most scary (and ridiculous) parts of the sixties. Real world horror.
Here’s an interview with Ellroy, who is sometimes referred to as a "demon dog" of literature:
When I was reading this song ran through my head by Dion, “Abraham, Martin and John,”, which is way more sentimental than Ellroy has ever been, but I still like the song:
Bésy (Russian: Бесы, singular Бес, bés) is the original title of one of four masterworks by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1872. Demons is the title Bésy (Russian: Бесы, singular Бес, bés) is the original title of one of four masterworks by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1872. Demons is the title translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1994) I read while listening (for 29 hours!) over the past month, off and on, to another translation. Some translate the title as Devils, or The Possessed, and they all convey different connotations, of course. The “demons,” Pevear and Volokhonsky see as better suited to these purportedly “demonic” ideas--nihilism, atheism--that Dostoevsky saw undermining his country in the mid-nineteenth century.
Dostoevsky alludes to the episode of the Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke as the inspiration for his title: "Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine. . . " Near the conclusion of the book Stepan Verkhovensky, the unwitting perpetrator of unrest and chaos through his early ideas, echoes this story as a cautionary commentary on the political climate of the mid nineteenth century Russia.
The trigger for this book came from Dostoevsky’s shock at the murder of a man by his fellow revolutionaries. It was a sensational story in all the papers. It kind of reminded me of how the Weatherman bombing of a building in the sixties--and the killing of a man--led to some remorse about ideological violence. Some critics at the time and still now see Dostoevsky as both politically and spiritually conservative, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that. This is not a political screed, nor didactic. There's as Mikhail Bakhtin said a "polyphony" of voices exploring cultural ideas in this and every Dostoevsky novel, While some characters that are admired in his books do come to faith, Dostoevsky himself was filled with anguish and doubt. A gambler, a drinker, and an epileptic given to visions, he once said he was “possessed by this idea of God he could not let go of.”
Dostoevsky had also been, as a younger man, a revolutionary thinker, was jailed for it, and was even put before a firing squad for it before he was suddenly pardoned. I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s reflective line: “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.” Maybe part of Dostoevsky’s shock at the killing was informed by the sense that it could have been one of his own group that had committed this act.
So this is a long and somewhat meandering book about a fictional town descending into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky, who was influenced by his father’s political writings. The aristocrat Nikolai Stavrogin is the central character throughout, a nihilistic upper-class, completely unempathetic anarchist; at one point he reveals he has sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl, Matryosha, a chapter of the book that was for a long time censored as too shocking, and it is difficult to read, but it is at the heart of the nihilistic immorality Dostoevsky decries in the book.
Where’s the balance of light and dark in the book? Well, it is narrated by a secondary character, Anton Lavrentyevich G—v with Dostovesky’s characteristic philosophical insight, psychological acumen, and dark satirical humor. This is the darkest, most difficult work I have read from the master, Dostoevsky--violent and grim, born of his almost despairing concerns for his country--so there is almost no one to admire, except maybe Ivan Shatov, who represents an image of Dostoevsky’s idea of an authentically Russian culture growing out of the best of its people's inherent spirituality and goodness.
This is a masterpiece, one of four--at least--he wrote, and while I prefer all of the other three, I appreciate the passion in it, the sense of tragedy, filled as it is with violence, abuse, madness (always madness in Dostoevsky) and political unrest. And humor! In a time of twenty-first nihilism--the embrace of conspiracy theories, the murder of children in schools, the gang killings in my own Chicago, the climate denialism as the world burns up, the attack on the US Capitol by ill-informed “leaders,” waging sexual and political power, feeding vulnerable folks with lies, I feel a sense of prophecy in this spiritual and political allegory. ...more
Photographer and storyteller Gillian Laub creates a kind of family album, a collection of photographs spanning at least twenty years from her UkrainiaPhotographer and storyteller Gillian Laub creates a kind of family album, a collection of photographs spanning at least twenty years from her Ukrainian-Jewish-American family, with a difference. The publisher says it well: Laub "explores the way society's biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships." Laub loves her family, but when Trump gets elected, it splits the family in two, as is the case in hundreds of thousands of American families, and she documents the schism by photographing members on both sides of the divide, with Hillary/Biden on one side and MAGA hats on the other.
And does not hide the rage, the Fox News vs. CNN, encapsulated by painfully familiar email exchanges and stories. Powerful and sad. Having just read a book about Putin and Russia's manipulation of American (and Russian) media, it seems very connected to that story. I got the book from the library to show two people in this house taking photography classes, but it turned into a real conversation about the uses of photography in political discourse....more
So I actually got from the library the book that is referred to in Penny’s title and repeatedly referred to throughout her book, Charles Mackay’s ExtrSo I actually got from the library the book that is referred to in Penny’s title and repeatedly referred to throughout her book, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Personal Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Penny has a way of urging you to go down alleys and backstreets of research with her. You don’t have to do this to appreciate the book, but if you are aware of this book it just might be helpful in understanding her novel, her purposes in writing it, and just maybe, the world we are living in.
It’s a study of how crazy ideas can be advanced through a kind of mass hysteria. Today we advance such ideas through social media, another kind of crowd, though actual crowds can also be whipped up to a frenzy, getting them to take sometimes violent action, as we have seen in many ways today. From Wikipedia: “The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.” People behave delusionally usually when they are afraid.
Louise Penny was a journalist before she was a novelist and I always prefer my mysteries with at least one foot firmly planted in the real world. I don’t just mean the world of crime, as one might expect, but in the global present. Noir usually grapples with the economic struggles of ordinary, working class people. Agatha Christie, as good as she was at mysteries, was decidedly on the side of escapism, of entertainment. And so, it seemed, was Louise Penny, early on, creating her little idyllic fantasy Quebecois village with Olivier and Gabri’s wonderful bistro. Not that I mind Christie, and not that I still wouldn’t want to live in Three Pines, with the cranky comic relief of Ruth and her duck. And the warmth of Inspector Armand Gamache, asserting that goodness will prevail. But as the series proceeds, things get darker, we see that Three Pines is not a haven from the world outside. Still, family matters, community matters, beauty matters. Love is important in combatting cruelty and hate. And that Penny has fused her interest in journalism and fiction here in ways I admire.
In The Madness of Crowds Penny takes full-on the frightening world we live in with the sword of all the remaining goodness she can find (and I am wondering if her move in the more political direction is also in part influenced by her recently co-writing a political thriller with Hillary Clinton?). We begin at a small university (we just seemed to have discovered) outside Three Pines, where the chancellor has invited a controversial mathematician, Abigail Robinson, who can show us statistics that prove that we can best survive economically and socially as a human race if we enact mandatory euthanasia for the old and infirm, and if we enforce the abortion of all fetuses that seem to indicate they will be born with disabilities, such as those with Down Syndrome. The argument is that in a world of diminishing resources, we just can’t save everyone, so let’s kill off the weak and disabled. If this seems far-fetched to you, let me remind you that such ideas are still being debated and have been enacted in various ways. The issue here is eugenics. And mass murder. Hitler and his henchmen murdered all sorts of people he didn’t want to live with. So did Stalin. And when we make moral choices that exclude others, we follow Robinson. Which lives matter?
The time of the novel is the near future when this particular pandemic seems to be over, but about which we are still living in shock. It’s still a dystopian world. People are afraid. We can see climate change, massive refugee problems, and so when Isabel Robinson comes to speak of her ideas for murder, we expect “mad” crowds, incited to violence from all possible directions. Some people want to stop her, and some people want to advance her ideas. Gamache begs the chancellor to cancel the speech on the grounds of public safety concerns, and sure enough, someone brings a gun to the talk and hysteria happens. The gun goes off, yes. As an academic, the free speech/hate speech discussion is by now an old one to me, so I wasn’t initially enthralled to read about it, but I am well aware that it is still a very relevant concern; do we invite Q-Anon shock jock liars to campus to “debate” them, inciting people on all sides of the issues to violence? And so on and on.
Nursing homes were hit hard by Covid-19, and many died in record numbers, so Penny dedicates the novel to front-line workers; she is taking the side of reasoned goodness, o empathy, as always. And Dr. Robinson will remind us of many viral whackjob politicians and scholars and social media nuts. She reminds me of mathematician Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and his statistical claim that blacks are genetically inferior to whites:
But Penny has in mind specifically a Canadian scientist, Ewen Cameron/ whom she brings into her story, a guy who performed mind-control experiments on patients:
As to the resolution of the murder of a woman who is a friend and personal assistant to Isabel Robinson, we do not know whodunnit until the very end, but the resolution is complicated and ultimately satisfying. One suspect is another Three Pines visitor, a Nobel peace prize nominee, a Sudanese hero, Haniya Daoud, a person whose views many would admire more than the ideas of Robinson, though the latter on the surface seems to be personally more likable. Polls said that people liked Bush more than Gore, found him more likable. Millions prefer the personality of Trump to Hillary Clinton's.
I very much like this book, which weaves in so many layers of ideas. Mikhail Bakhtin thought that the best of novels functioned as a kind of cultural forum, and I count this as one of those novels that takes on important social issues. It's not warm and cuddly Three Pines, it's her darkest book, but I like it a lot. I took a quick look at some three star reviews of this book, and some folks seem to be disappointed that she writes about politics.“Shut up and sing!” some folks screamed at The Dixie Chicks for taking stands on stage. I say: You go, Louise. Keep fighting the good fight....more
I had no idea what this book was about, but as I am in a group of English teachers who are reading for teaching about the environment, the group suggeI had no idea what this book was about, but as I am in a group of English teachers who are reading for teaching about the environment, the group suggested we read this children’s book (ages 9-12) and since I saw it only took 3 or so hours to listen to, I did it. It’s no fault of the book that I discovered it is not so much an environmental book, it's mainly an adventure book, where two Tibetan kids, Tash and Sam, escape to India to try and get the Dalai Lama to free her parents. Children crossing the frigid Himalayas with two yaks and no adults.
It is a book that has at its backdrop that Tash’s Dad has joined the resistance against the current government, and it is how about how kids can act for change. IF we can believe they could make this incredibly treacherous trek, do I also believe they would fairly easily get an audience with the Dalai Lama and also that he would be able to influence the political decisions of Tibet? I have my doubts.
The story gets off to a scary start as someone attempts self-immolation, as part of the resistance, and Tash doesn’t really know why. But over time, she gets a little bit of background about the resistance fighters and China’s incursions into Tibetan life. An oppressive regime.
Reminded me A Long Walk to Water and The White Rose (about a Jewish teen Nazi resister, Sophie Scholl), two stories about kids becoming more aware and active in politics. Or Tree Girl, or Forgotten Fire (YA, about the Armenian genocide) but to be truthful, I liked all of them more than this book.
Oh, and what is environmentally key about Tibet right now? It is the source of fresh water for much of Asia, so expect continued and increased oppression there:
I did not want to read Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli when it came out because I had been annoyed by aspects of the one previous novI did not want to read Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli when it came out because I had been annoyed by aspects of the one previous novel from her that I read, The Story of My Teeth (2015) as it supposedly was in part based on a collaboration with workers in a Mexican factory, though there’s not much evidence for this, and then, there’s that cute whimsical title I like that would have no relation to these people she supposedly writes with.
I finally read it because my friend Ruth used this book in a course she had been teaching on Research Genres in English Education: Fables, Fantasy and Fabulism. At a glance I thought it might shed some light on creative ways to think about “documenting” classroom stories of students and/or teachers. And it does.
I was annoyed with the pace and focus of the first half, narrated mostly by “the wife,” as I was expecting a reflective study of lost children at the border, but it seemed more like a study of her family, and duh, it actually was! That was in part the point I think. Still, I also thought all the references and notes on “lost children” were really more of a reflection of how to research about lost children--cataloging, making notes, lists of relevant texts, and so on. So a kind of meta-text on documenting “reality,” but less so on the “lost” border children and more on her own family. But all these questions I think are relevant to documenting ANY lost children. Difficult aesthetic and ethical choices.
And if the lost children are on the road to an uncertain end, so is this family, on a road trip to Texas and Arizona. Much of the book has subtitled sections as if they were part of a research project, which could in fact be the case in that the book sort of documents the end of one set of important relationships. The family all seem to know that this couple is heading to divorce. Both the narrator and her husband are researchers. They met on an urban soundscape project, contributing their audiotapes of the sounds of the city to a project archive. But husband wants to drive to Texas and do research on indigenous Americans, Apaches, including Geronimo and Cochise, lost history in some ways. Wife wants to do research on children separated at the border. They drive across the US with their two children, one five, one ten, both from previous marriages.
So let’s start with the demise of a marriage, the subject of hundreds of thousands of novels. How do you best do it? Non fiction? Fiction? Poetry? Photography? Audiorecording? Videorecording? Fiction? How do you document the past, the present in Apache history or border children, both sad passages in American history, how do you best make sure it gets documented, when they too foten get reduced to a series of political talking points in the divided media? In the process of meta-reflecting on the process of documenting both sets of children in the first half of the novel, I feel they get lost, which I think may in fact be the point. Both husband and wife have a lot of political will in common, but they both seem self-absorbed, annoying and “lost” in their own ways.
The wife reads and underlines and takes notes on everything from Sontag to whatever is in her hands, looking for insight.. She makes lists of books without even mentioning why. They are sources she cares about, will use in her work. One text she quotes and we also read sections of from time to time is Ella Camposanto (1928-2014)’s Elegies for Lost Children, a series of texts, set in unnamed lands, about children trying to make their way, atop trains but also on foot, through jungle and desert, toward the border. I liked these sections of this varied, multi-genre novel a lot.
“When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.”
And then, in the second half of the book, it kicks into higher gear, as her son tapes his version of events including the two children getting themselves lost in the desert. This is by far more engaging than the wife’s narrating. Is what being communicated here that the children need to speak their own truths and not just be written “about” by adults? The boy takes pictures, too.
One later chapter is amazing, with just one sentence over 26 pages. In that chapter is woven the perspectives of the kids with some of the lost children represented in the Elegies novel.
Here’s something I found: In the summer of 2014, the writer Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico but resident in New York and awaiting the arrival of her green card, went on a road trip. An immigrant, on the verge of “legality”, herself, she set out with her husband and their two children for Texas and Cochise County, Arizona, near the border with Mexico. So, yeah, it is auto-fiction.
What strategies and techniques do we find in this book? Multiple genres and perspectives. Photography, non-fiction, fiction, internal monologues, dialogues, lists of the contents of their suitcases, reflexive passages and description. Would it be useful for educational researchers to see different ways to represent experience? For sure. Lots of issues to debate.
I have yet to read her collection of essays, where one thing she does is write about Lost Children Archive, but it is plain to see she cares a lot about the ethics and aesthetics of storytelling, though is better about the latter than the former, imho. I heard she was well into this novel when she felt she was too angry to keep writing it, so stopped to write the collection of essays. Then came back to the novel in a coller, more distant tone. It’s not really directly about the child migrant crisis, but then again, maybe it is, in a way. ...more
Vaguely recall George Floyd, now off the news cycle? Recall the protests over his (and so many others) being kilChicago Protests: a Joyful Revolution.
Vaguely recall George Floyd, now off the news cycle? Recall the protests over his (and so many others) being killed by police last summer? Chicago Columbia College student Vashon Jordan took 17,000 photographs on his Iphone of protests here in Chicago, from May through August 2020, documenting as much of it as he could. So was there righteous anger erupting then? Of course there was. And did he capture some of that in his work? Of course. But in the process, this positive young man wanted less to empathize the rage than the joy, the positive celebratory spirit he found there.
Emma Goldman (buried close to my house) once said she didn't want to be part of any revolution if she couldn't dance in it, and that spirit is captured in this book. It’s a lively, positive, and sometimes painful, sometimes sad, but generally joyful book. What an amazing young man!
Here's three professional reviews where you can see some of the only about 100 photographs inlcuded in this book:
I am in DC, where for the first time in decades I stood near the Capitol steps and visited the Lincoln Memorial, where I read this address again as itI am in DC, where for the first time in decades I stood near the Capitol steps and visited the Lincoln Memorial, where I read this address again as it is engraved on the wall. The first real challenge to the country was the Civil War, and January 6 marks to me the second, though there may in fact have been many more.
Original review: On this day, November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, in order to dedicate the Gettysburg National Cemetery, delivered this address.
We all know now that Lincoln was not always opposed to slavery. He had, over time, to come to this position, that all humans should be free, as some are still struggling to acknowledge, apparently. He didn't always think that blacks were "equal" to whites. He was not a saint, he was probably as most whites were in the nineteenth century, racist for a good portion of his life. But he makes a good case here for freedom and equality as a basis for unity.
Here's the whole thing, in what has become known as the "Bliss" version, the one that hangs on the wall of the Lincoln Room in the White House:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863
This is a copy of the actual, handwritten final draft (no, it wasn't written on the back of an envelope, as myth would have it), of several known drafts.
I read Our Man Down in Havana because I had just had re-read Greene's Our Man in Havana, saw a rave review of this book and so listened to it on audioI read Our Man Down in Havana because I had just had re-read Greene's Our Man in Havana, saw a rave review of this book and so listened to it on audiobook. Makes it clear why, if you see yourself as a leftist and an advocate of democracy that you will choose Greene's view of espionage (and of imperialism) over Ian Fleming's escapist fantasies.
Many of you will recall the series of supposedly espionage-based lies used to justify the war in Iraq and the now endless destruction of that country and the multi-trillion dollar (and counting) bill they left our grandchildren. But of course you are smart enough to know that using spy "intelligence" fiction (i.e., lies) to justify political actions for various reasons has been common throughout history. Greene himself had in mind when he was writing Our Man in Havana the British involvement in the Suez Canal, his experience as a journalist in Vietnam that led to his critique of the US involvement leading up to that war (I'm watching Ken Burns's Vietnam documentary now, so you can see where some of my anger might be coming from). And Greene was in Cuba many times before creating his satire turned melodrama about a British vacuum salesman hired by MI5 to spy on Cuba, inventing "intelligence" by photographing vacuum cleaner parts seen as possible missile parts. Oh, ludicrous, you say? Do you remember WMDs and yellowcake, doctored photographs and claims that Iraq could create a nuclear bomb within hours? See my review of Greene's novel and others such as The Quiet American and The Third Man, too.
Greene, a novelist that deserved the Nobel Prize (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Beach), had worked all over the world as a journalist. He had also worked for MI6 as a low level spy, though Christopher Hull suggests he may never have completely given up the work for the British Empire. We are left with this thought at the very end of the book, that he may have continued spying until the very end of his life. But one thing is sure from this well-written book is that his comedy turned prescient as manufactured "evidence" helped create a near-disaster at the Bay of Pigs, also known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the early sixties, involving a stand-off between Kruschev and JFK. Just amazing that he would write this book, even make a popular movie based on the book, and then have the USA nearly replicate the (gladly not as tragic as Iraq) tragi-comedy.
The book explores aspects of Greene's leftist support of Castro over the repressive capitalist Batista whom the US and Brits had backed, as they generally did last century, with some useful history of Cuba and background on Greene's spy novels (including The Third Man) and his questionable support for denounced spy Kim Philby, his former boss. Hull doesn't deify Greene, a drunken serial adulterer (Greene's--a devout Roman Catholic--own word for it), so there's just enough salacious details to keep you interested if you are not particularly down with all the politics.
And there's plenty of literary swordsmanship between Greene and two other famous white western rich novelists, Ian Fleming and Ernest Hemingway, to make literary scholars happy (Hull prefers Greene to both Papa and Fleming). So it's a good and well-written book. I hope to go to Havana soon, so I will be reading a bunch about Cuba in the coming year. I especially liked the focus in a later chapter on the National Education program (which both Greene and Hull see as one of Castro's crowning achievements), but not neglecting Castro's (especially early on) shameful (partly machismo) record on gay rights.
I picked up this book for a buck from my library pre-sale pile. Looks like no one has reviewed it here for many years, and why should they? Bush was pI picked up this book for a buck from my library pre-sale pile. Looks like no one has reviewed it here for many years, and why should they? Bush was president many years ago, and Abu-Ghraib, Cheney, Heckuva Job Brownie and yellowcake are long in the past. Or are they?
What I liked?
*Bush in bed in his flight costume
*"And there were war profiteers giving three cheers"
*"Goodnight balance of powers"
*"Goodnight Constitution"
"Goodnight democracy, old growth trees, goodnight detainees, goodnight allies, goodnight rule of law, goodnight earth? Goodnight heir? Goodnight failures everywhere"