Against Moral Imposters: Mourning the Dead as a Part of the World

Upon reading the details of the Paris suicide-terror attacks this morning, I turned to a Counterpunch piece by Chris Floyd. After reading the Floyd piece I wrote down some thoughts of my own. These are them, as posted on CP.

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CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd has put into words some of how I’ve been feeling this morning, in response to the horrific news out of Paris.   I recommend reading his piece.  I won’t restate the facts and arguments he makes, but they are crucial.

I will only add this:

Doing justice to the human misery of this moment means both attending to the particular experiences and desperate needs of those affected right now in Paris, *and* relating what has happened to the rest of the world, and to the history that has brought us to this desperate point. Still a rare occurrence in the West, such blinding terror attacks have become an apocalyptic commonplace in the places that Western states have helped to ravage. While it is totally unacceptable that places such as Paris are made to look like battlefields, it is equally crucial that we seize upon this moment to reflect on those other places, with histories and culture just as rich as Paris, that have been torn apart by recent wars and sectarian violence, often as a direct–and sometimes an indirect–response to Western imperialism, and often under US leadership.  Places whose suffering seldom makes it onto our TV screens, and even then, when it does, is generally shorn of the historical context that makes it comprehensible.

Read the rest of the article here.

Let America Be America Again... Again?

Recent #BlackLivesMatter-affiliated disruptions of Bernie Sanders campaign events (first at the NetRoots convention and more recently at a rally in Seattle ), remind me of a famous—though widely misunderstood— poem by the black radical poet Langston Hughes.

Published during his early, pro-communist period, Hughes’ “Let America Be America” may be the black communist poem most likely to be found in an American literature high school textbook.

You might recognize it from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, where King quotes Hughes forcefully:

Oh, I say it plain,
America never was America to me
But this I swear:
America shall be!

The poem is not from 1963, however, but from 1936, a year when the Communist Party of the United States (which Hughes then supported) was similarly running a socialist Presidential ticket, even while pledging in advance to support the liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Sound familiar?)  It was a moment when the then-growing CPUSA turned towards the patriotic rhetoric of the ‘Popular Front,’ attempting to reach a broader American audience in the face of fascism, with decidedly mixed results.

From this moment of crisis, Hughes poem famously offered a remarkably redemptive arc.  “Let America Be America Again” sketches a call to actualize America’s most utopian aspirations, in ways its official “founders” never dreamed: to expand social and economic freedom and equality to all.

Less obvious than the rousing call to redeem “America,” though—and particularly relevant to the BLM/Sanders controversy—is the way that Hughes’ arc towards the redemption of “America” is far from seamless or smooth.  Hughes’ hope here ain’t some red white and blue rainbow that smoothly and inevitably ends in a pot o’ gold and freedom for all.  Rather the redemptive arc is only made possible in Hughes’ account by disruption—by the annoyance, the interruption, and the ultimately the outright displacement of one well-meaning “American” speaker by another voice, more precisely a collective, multi-racial, working-class voice, a voice that represents all the excluded, oppressed, and exploited people who have sweated or sacrificed (willingly or not) to construct the wealth and power that rules over them.

It is interesting to re-read this poem today, imagining Sanders—or the Democratic Party more generally— as the opening speaker, and the #BLM disrupters as the second speaker, who emerges from the “dark.”  This shadow speaker appears first in parenthesis, but quickly claims center stage, taking over the poem.  

[As this was being posted, I became aware of this footage which includes the actual speech that #BlackLivesMatter activist Marissa Janae Johnson gave (over hecklers) after interrupting the Sanders rally, and being permitted by organizers to address the crowd. A very sophisticated and insightful radio discussion of political tactics and philosophy follows. I encourage people to check it out.]

We open with patriotic nostalgia:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Contradicted from the margins, the nostalgic dreamer pushes on, hearkening back to the original “dreamers” and invoking the notion of America as a land of freedom and equality.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

Yet the contradicting voice returns:

(It never was America to me.)

The lead speaker at first tries to talk over the interruption, calling for the realization of the American myth—he is not saying that things are ok in the present, he is critical of them— yet the parenthetic shadow refuses to be silent:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

The shadow speaker here calls into question the very sincerity of the "progressive" aspirations that the first speaker offers as the proper horizon of progress.  The “homeland of the free” appears in quotes, suggesting irony; the second speaker does not take this progressive patriotic rhetoric at face value; it is a sham, mere hot air.

The sarcasm gets the first speaker’s attention.  By this third interruption, he is clearly annoyed:

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

From the standpoint of the patriotic progressive on the stage, the parenthetical shadow speaker appears as a distraction from the main event, or worse, a disruptive blockage that threatens to obscure the “stars” of hope that the lead speaker wants to make visible. (Sound familiar?)

Again, the shadow speaker responds, no longer “mumbling in the dark,” freed from parentheses. From here on out the formerly shadow speaker dominates. (We might imagine this second speaker storming the stage, seizing the microphone; the lead speaker forced to be silent, the crowd forced to listen.)  The rest of the poem reads as a collective monologue of the marginalized.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

It is notable that Hughes imagines the interruptive speaker not in narrow identity terms, though Black oppression is foregrounded, but as a kind of proletarian coalition of the exploited, oppressed, and expropriated: the Negro, the red man, the poor white, the immigrant. It is a collective, hybrid speaker that has been in various ways “tangled” in the chains of “dog eat dog” capitalism.

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

The reference to “Pioneers” mocks the opening speaker’s nostalgic reference to the “pioneer on the plain” an image that Hughes suggests is doubly false.  First, because most would be “pioneers” end up as “sold” workers, “bonded” farmers, poor servants, etc.  And second, because the process of “westward expansion” itself depends on driving the “red man” from the land.  Considerations of race and class alike make a mockery of the such American nostalgia, and of the American optimism that would base itself in returns to idealized pioneer days.

Here though Hughes’ collective speaker, and his poem, takes a distinct turn, recuperating a new kind of radical optimism even as it reveals the dominant strain of hope to be based on lies.  Key to this vision is the relocating of the “dream” as the property of the propertyless. In what can be read as a patriotic adoption of a marxist dialectic of alienated labor, the “dream” here is reimagined as present in the material work that has been performed by those who have labored and yet never born the fruits of that labor.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The built environment of “America” (“land of the free”) has been produced by unfree labor.  And thus if a kind of “freedom” is to be found there, it is to be found not in the produced wealth itself, nor in the lives of the majority of people, but in the gap between this wealth and its expropriated producers, European and African descended workers alike. In the suffering of those who labor and yet hunger.

The poem sharpens its sarcasm, offering a litany of the ways in which freedom has been denied to working people.

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

"Almost dead,” yet not completely gone.  For here the poem turns, from the brink of death, to a declared will to rise again.  Or more precisely, to bring into existence that which has never existed: to make truly universal the dream that has up until now spoken in universalistic terms, but forever been the property of the wealthy few.  Indeed it is from this wealthy few that the people in Hughes’ poem must “take back” the land and the products of labor alike:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Wary that such calls for taking back the commonwealth are likely to be denounced as “communists” or “radicals” the speaker adds:

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

In truth, Hughes’ shadow speaker ends up sounding a lot like the populist socialism of the Sanders campaign, sketching out a kind of a worker-farmer multi-racial coalition vs. the “1%” of his day.  And so Hughes reaches his optimistic climax, offering us the phrase that Martin Luther King invoked in late August, 1963, and more:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

What makes Hughes’ poem feel rather old fashioned at this late date—aside from the nationalism—may be the way the poem makes it all sound too easy.  The process of displacing of one figure of "progressive" thought by another, the achievement of a radical new notion of collective freedom…it all seems like a rather miraculous, instantaneous, and even unanimous shift: the monologue of the marginalized rolls on without opposition, commanding immediate respect. One wonders where the original speaker (Bernie Sanders or his supporters in our re-imagining) has gone while the emergent collective speaker has taken to the stage. Does he stand listening patiently while the shadow speaker? How does he respond? Is he bound and gagged?  Does the crowd cheer or does it boo and heckle?

The fantasy here—which lurked in much of the Popular Front imaginary—is that the historically oppressed, the long silenced, can “speak” in the same form—and in the same forum—as the historically dominant and officially authorized.  And that they will speak without any ‘excess’ of emotion or rage that may obscure the truth of the message, “drawing a veil across the stars.”  (As if such a shadow speaker could emerge and take the stage without having to fight off the cops, without hecklers from an impatient, confused, or hostile crowd, with plenty of time to make the elaborate the revolutionary point.)  

Not only that, the poem rather hopefully imagines that it is still possible to rebel against the original patriotic speaker in terms that the speakers’ followers might understand, in a form that redeems rather than the negates the notion of an “American dream.”

Also key to the power and the optimism of the shadow speaker is that he speaks in the name not just of one oppressed community but of all the oppressed and exploited whose voices have not been heard. (Alas, expressing the sexist limitations of his times, Hughes’ speaker is not as inclusive as we might hope when it comes to gender; the subject here is male throughout.  We could thus imagine another parenthetical voice emerging to interrupt him as well.)

We cannot return to the 1930s of course, nor would we want to.  And yet still Langston Hughes poem offers us an optimistic vision to think with and against, imagining the fusion of a critique of racial oppression and class inequality in such a way as to allow a powerful collective subject of the “people” to emerge. “Let America Be America Again” suggests that particular exclusions can give rise to new universal visions of freedom and equality for all, lifting old dreams to new heights. At the same time, it reminds us that the process of the people’s militant erupting into speech is not a seamless or smooth one; eruption requires interruption and disruption, talking back to established voices, displacing powerful leaders now at center stage. (Even some well-intentioned ones.)

The question then for today may be: How to hold together a vision of a powerful people’s unity opposed to “those who lives like leeches on the people’s lives” even as we recognize and embrace the need for struggles that can bring a truly inclusive, popular subject into existence?

Reflections on Bowling for Columbine

Excerpted from the full essay, "Reflections on Bowling for Columbine in the wake of Charleston and Chattanooga," available here. 

When news of the latest white racist gun horror came up from Charleston, South Carolina last month, I was teaching Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling for Columbine. Once again, it seemed, Moore’s apocalyptic vision of an America armed-to-the-teeth and pushed-to-the-edge had proven prophetic. Once more, contrary to war-mongering media and ‘counter-terrorist’ propaganda, we were reminded: America’s terror is mostly home-grown. Draped in the insignia of white supremacy, Dylann Storm Roof shot to death nine African Americans in a historic Black church, restoring to view once more the racist character of that American terror.

Having taught Moore’s movie at least a dozen times over the past thirteen years, it struck me that it was about time I wrote up my thoughts about why this work is one I keep coming back to, and why I think that it remains a vital (if imperfect) resource for radical educators or activists today (despite the liberal limits of its creator).

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Liberal hubs like Daily Kos have brought Michael Moore into the current fray, citing his “anti-gun violence” documentary to support the case for greater gun control. (Moore has also interjected himself.) But instrumentalizing Bowling for Columbine in this way threatens to suppress what it was that made it such a vital intervention in the first place. At its best, the film insists on broadening and radicalizing the gun violence ‘debate,’ in ways that push well beyond Moore’s own liberal affiliations...The film powerfully reintroduces key context for grasping violence in the USA, context that too often falls out of the mainstream ‘liberal-conservative’ back and forth about gun laws and gun lobbies. Elements that Barack Obama—and maybe even Michael Moore himself—would prefer we not dwell upon.

Bowling does not simply fixate on bad US gun laws or the tragedy of lives taken too soon. It pushes further to link US gun violence to underlying legacies and systemic problems: from the history of white supremacy, to the racialized post-911 paranoia inflamed by corporate media and politicians, to the long-standing normalization—indeed the sanctification— of American violence in the form of US militarism and empire. Just as powerfully, the film refuses to engage in demonizing or pathologizing the killers it considers, instead tying their violence to the pressures put on young people today and to the despair affecting so many US ‘post-industrialized’ working-class communities in the age of predatory capital’s devastating abandonment.

You can read the full essay here, at Counterpunch.

“Who Will Rule the Webbing of the World?”

E.L. Doctorow, one of our important left novelists—and for a long time one of my favorite American authors—died this past week. He was 84.

Over the course of his career, Doctorow accomplished a rare feat, not only weaving pronounced radical and historical themes into innovative contemporary fiction, but managing to win both popular success and mainstream critical accolades in the process.

Doctorow published twelve novels, including Book of Daniel (1971), the widely acclaimed Ragtime (1975), World’s Fair (1985), and the best-selling Billy Bathgate (1989), in addition to several books of short stories and essays. More recently Doctorow produced City of God (2000), Homer and Langley (2009), and The March (2005), about Sherman’s infamous march to the sea during the US Civil War, a book which won Doctorow his third National Book Critics Circle Award. [1] In what may have been a first for a living writer of the left, Doctorow’s Ragtime was transformed not only into a film but also a major Broadway musical, garnering four Tony Awards (thirteen nominations) in 1998, though it "lost" Best Musical to Disney’s The Lion King. [2]

Such mainstream success can blunt a writer’s radical edge, even as it buoys book sales and gets one’s picture in the paper. More than most, Doctorow was aware that what gets plastered on the front page, or passed down as Truth in textbooks, is determined not just by what actually happened, but by who the tellers are and what their interests are. His work was attentive to the history of American political repression, to the way it is the "winners" who get to tell the tale, as well as to the fact that, whether we are dealing with the victors or with the victims, the histories we inherit are often a far cry from the messy reality of the matter.

While Doctorow consistently and publicly rejected the label “political novelist”—or even “historical novelist”—preferring just the term “novelist,” political and historical themes figure prominently in all his books. [3] His collected work represents a prolonged attempt—itself spanning a half century—to explore the undersides of modern US history and its relationship to the present, from a generally radical perspective, one attentive to class, race, and the violence and corruption of both state and unchecked private power. His was a project committed to humanizing and demythologizing both the victors and the victims of American history.

His debut novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), was a dark send-up of the type of cliched Westerns which he spent several years reading in Hollywood, while his final short novel Andrew’s Brain (2014) brought Doctorow’s survey of the long 20th century up to the present, offering us the self-reflexive musings of a contemporary neuroscientist. The March (2005), a collective novel following a diverse mix of characters, extended his view back to the Civil War and into the US South, while Waterworks (1994) explored the poverty and corruption of 1870s New York City, unravelling the story of a secret medical research clinic that depends on abducted poor street urchins for its lab rats.

Ragtime (1975), his popular mainstream breakthrough, explores the milieu of early 20th century American celebrity and radicalism, weaving fictionalized accounts of actual historical figures, from Sigmund Freud to Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan to Emma Goldman, alongside the stories of three paralleled archetypal families: a well-to-do Anglo-American family, which has prospered by selling fireworks to satisfy the market for patriotic explosions, a family of working-class Latvian immigrants, and a Black family, centered around the proud militant musician, Coalhouse Walker. Ragtime playfully and irreverently weaves together webs of historical events (actual and invented), from the Lawrence textile "Bread and Roses" strike to Houdini’s escape acts, and further explores the emergence of modern mass culture, from Hollywood film to ragtime music, forms which, in Doctorow’s account, often emerge from the crucible of social struggles that have been long forgotten. In a way, Ragtime suggests that even an American radicalism which has been defeated has left an indelible mark on this society at the level of culture. (The immigrant father and protagonist, Tateh, for instance, picks up the pieces of defeated labor struggles to help found motion pictures in Hollywood.)

Perhaps it is this arc of Ragtime that enables The New Yorker’s George Saunders to write that Doctorow “role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world,” adding that his “awareness of darkness vibrated alongside a deep optimism, a fascination with the beauty and genius of the American experiment” (emphasis added). [4]  Such a glib and "hopeful" reading of Doctorow’s work is to be resisted, despite its moorings in some of the lighter, Broadway-esque moments.

Consider one of Doctorow’s last major public speeches, delivered at the 2013 National Book Festival, upon receipt of that organization’s lifetime achievement award. In keeping with his half-century meditation on shifts in media and their effects on human experience, Doctorow focused his remarks on the Internet, cautioning against nostalgic lament for any lost good old days of the typewriter, but closing with an unmistakable rally call. Citing a recent Penn study [5] that shows how many writers today are engaging in self-censorship in fear of government surveillance or reprisal, Doctorow declared that “The struggle has begun as to who will rule the webbing of the world. Government data-miners and the corporations in league with them? Or everyone else? We’ll have to take a deep breath, gather ourselves, and, reluctantly or not, join that struggle.” [6] Not much hopeful optimism here.

During the Reagan 1980s, Doctorow turned his attention to the period of the Great Depression. His 1980 novel Loon Lake—a book whose devastating final page alone sets fire to the idea of Doctorow as "hopeful optimist"—not only explores social class divisions and criminality in the Adirondacks, but provocatively suggests how this prior moment lays roots for later US imperialist barbarism. The Depression era shapes also two of Doctorow’s New York City classics, World’s Fair (1985) and Billy Bathgate (1989), both richly textured, vividly voiced coming-of-age stories. Winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, the 1990 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and runner-up for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the 1989 National Book Award, Billy Bathgate explores the Prohibition-era underworld through the eyes of a talented fifteen-year-old recruit to the criminal syndicate of gangster Dutch Schultz. In public comments, Doctorow mused that in some ways the book was nostalgic, returning to an era when you knew who the criminals were—as opposed to current days, when criminality infused the ‘mainstream’ of business and government alike.

In my view, however, it is The Book of Daniel (1971) that stands out as Doctorow’s most remarkable achievement—the most innovative aesthetically, the most convincing historically, the most radical politically. (If you read only one book by Doctorow, don’t read Ragtime, read this.) Set at the cusp of the erupting New Left moment, the novel powerfully reimagines the rise and fall of a prior moment of American radicalism, retelling the story of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Thoroughly fictionalizing the characters involved—it is the story of the Isaacsons, not the Rosenbergs, and Doctorow imagines their orphaned children as a brother and a sister, rather than two brothers [7]— the book nonetheless richly and convincingly brings into vivid focus the social, cultural, and political milieux of the 1930 through the 1960s, placing Old Left and New in provocative relief.

Of particular interest is the way that Doctorow juxtaposes snapshots of Old Left and New Left attitudes towards popular culture. Doctorow pays homage to the political passion of the red-led movement—the moment of Paul Robeson—while at the same time exploring the contradictions of Communism as “Twentieth Century Americanism.” He then contrasts such views sharply with the cultural insurrectionary attitudes of Artie Sternlicht, an Abby Hoffman-esque character in 1967. [8] How many American novelists sympathetically but unsentimentally set before us both the Popular Front aesthetics of the CPUSA and the guerrilla anarchism of the Yippies?

Told through the vulgar, irreverent, brilliant, yet disturbed self-conscious narration of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson’s surviving son, Daniel—a struggling graduate student and a self-described “criminal of perception”— the book is an electric experiment with narrative technique, a serious exploration of American political repression, a critique of the standard history of the Cold War, as well as an edgy and unsentimental exploration of children struggling to cope with the traumatic legacies that an older generation has left to them. It is a book that shockingly insists that we accept the complications of personal, sexual, and family life, even as we construct a shared structural understanding of social injustice and the imperative to struggle collectively against it. It is a book that suggests one need not be a “sympathetic character” to contribute to that struggle, a book that shows it is possible to keep fidelity to our predecessors’ struggles for emancipation without sentimentalizing their humanity into cold, compensatory myth. Daniel confronts us with the vulgarity and obscenity of growing up un-American in America, suggesting that is only by embracing ugly truths about both self and society that a kind of redemption—individual or collective—becomes possible.

In the penultimate scene of Book of Daniel, Daniel flies out to California to have a meeting with Selig Mindish, the family dentist who cooperated with the US government’s prosecution of his parents, fingering them in atomic conspiracy and thus helping to send them to the electric chair. Jarringly, their daytime meeting takes place in Disneyland, a site that allows Daniel (and Doctorow himself) to display his considerable skill of radical cultural critique, while suggesting the cultural forces that the Left is up against to this day. Reflecting on the literary and historical adaptations represented by Disney cartoons and Disney theme-park rides, Daniel muses that “it is possible to understand the aesthetics of cartoon adaptation as totalitarian in nature”:

It is clear that few of the children who ride in the Mad Hatter’s Teacup have read or even will read Alice, let alone the works of Mark Twain. Most of them will only know Alice’s story through the Disney film, if at all. And that suggests a separation of two ontological degrees between the Disneyland customer and the cultural artifacts he is presumed upon to treasure in his visit…what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work, but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie.

We find this radical process of reduction occurring too with regard to the nature of historical reality. The life and life-style of slave-trading America on the Mississippi River in the 19th century is compressed into a technologically faithful steamboat ride of five or ten minutes…The intermediary between us and this historical experience, the writer Mark Twain, author of Life on the Mississippi, is now no more than the name of the boat (Book of Daniel, 287-190).

In offering us both such meta-critical reflection on the obliterative force of compounded cultural commodification, but also by leaving us vividly imagined counter-narratives that radically demystify the pretty pictures of the American past, Doctorow has left us better armed to contend with the forces of Disneyfication, which continue their creep to this day.

If there is a basis for hope expressed in the work of Doctorow, we can hardly call it American optimism. The hope here is in the call to refuse and resist the polished paving over of the past, the way Doctorow makes delicious mince meat of facile optimism. The hope is in the way, after reading him, Disneyland and American History alike will never look the same.

* * *

In his book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Marxist critic Fredric Jameson described E.L. Doctorow as “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition.” As he put it, “No one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present” (24-25).

It is thus with vigilance as well as sadness that we must mourn the passing of a writer who kept that sense of distress—that concrete awareness of a subversive gap between actual and alleged history—alive in a way that reached millions.

Alongside Mark Twain we must now add the name E.L. Doctorow to the list to be defended from the Disneyfiers.

Footnotes

1. Ragtime and Billy Bathgate also snagged the prize. World’s Fair won the National Book Award in 1986.
2. The musical won for both Best Score and Best Book.  Doctorow was intimately involved with the production, offering hundreds of pages of notes.
3. Indeed, it is tempting to see his apolitical statements as a kind of a adaptation from a career built mostly during the Cold War.
4. George Saunders, “The Bravery of E.L. Doctorow.” The New Yorker. July 23, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-bravery-of-e-l-doctorow
5. You can read the study online. “Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor” https://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PEN%20American.pdf
6. You can find the speech online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lwQ2aYY_BA
7. The actual sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Michael and Robert Meeropol have expressed complex and evolving thoughts about Doctorow’s fictionalizing of their life story, ranging from anger and public criticisms, to a growing sense of appreciation and even admiration for Book of Daniel and Doctorow’s work as a whole.  See for instance the brothers’ responses to this recent showing of Daniel—the under-appreciated and quite faithful—film based on Doctorow’s novel: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/80910/rosenberg-boys-appear-at-‘daniel’-screening 
8. “So how do you bring change to something this powerful [as American corporate liberalism]?  the same way a skinny little judo freak throws a cat three times his size. You don’t preach.  You don’t talk about poverty and injustice and imperialism and racism.  That’s like trying to make people read Shakespeare, it can’t be done. Look there, what do you see?  Little blue squares in every window. Everyone digging the commercials. That is today’s school, man.  In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime.  It tells the story from the date to the wedding. It shows you the baby, the home, the car, the graduation…Commercials are learning units.  So like when the brothers walk into the draft board down in Baltimore and pour blood all over the induction records—that’s the lesson….You dig?  Society is a put-on so we put on the put-on.  Authority is momentum. Break the momentum.  Legitimacy is illegitimate  Make it show its ass.  Hit and run. You got forty seconds, man.  The media need material?  Give them material…Do something and be a celebrity….Were gonna overthrow the United States with images!” (139-140).

On Blood-Tags and White-Washing

Up here in Boston, just days ahead of July 4th, someone hit Christopher Columbus with a big bucket of blood.

Or what looked like blood.

Local media stations were all over the story. But no one on TV would say the word.

Paint, said reporter after reporter, Paint.

Not paint made to look like blood. Not blood-colored paint. Just paint. Someone had poured paint on the "historic" marble statue of Christopher Columbus. A senseless act of vandalism.

Why would anyone do such a thing? What sort of hoodlums would show such disregard for public property?

The tagging of the statue may not have made TV at all if not for the signature that anchored the act: “Black Lives Matter,” spray painted in black across the base of the monument. Thus our stunned and incredulous local TV coverage had to ask:

What on earth could this random paint-smearing of a statue of Columbus have to do with the #BlackLivesMatter movement?

The selected Boston passersby stopped for interview (all apparently white) hadn’t a clue. Seeing only paint and not blood, the live-action reporters only added to the confusion.

Why couldn’t the TV reporters say “blood”? How, in the year 2015, is even the briefest media mention of this widely known history still taboo?

Here, for review, is how Bartolome de las Casas depicted the practices that Columbus and company helped to establish in the so-called “New World”:

There are two main ways in which those who have travelled to this part of the world pretending to be Christians have uprooted these pitiful peoples and wiped them from the face of the earth. First, they have waged war on them: unjust, cruel, bloody and tyrannical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance, or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have  subjected him.

This latter policy has been instrumental in suppressing the native leaders, and, indeed, given that the Spaniards normally spare only women and children, it has led to the annihilation of all adult males, whom they habitually subject to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for his fellow-men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals. All the many and infinitely varied ways that have been devised for oppressing these peoples can be seen to flow from one or other of these two diabolical and tyrannical policies.

And here is how Boston’s late great people’s historian Howard Zinn summarized Columbus’ own role in the process:

…from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. (Zinn, Chapter 1, A People’s History of the United States)

Such is the history one must engage, once one admits that there is history here at all.

Once one does, it becomes all too clear what the guerrilla graffiti act was attacking…namely the racist, genocidal character of a culture that can continue to maintain statues and name parks for notorious enslavers, conquerors, and butchers of (non-white) human beings. A culture that continues to justify and even cerebrate state authorities that subjugate human beings and kill them brutally when they resist.

Taking the cue from incredulous reporters, many online comments evaded the political message of the blood-paint completely, focusing on form to avoid content, focusing on the of paint to avoid the blood. “I don’t care what your views are,” says this view, “hold a demonstration, fine. But it’s never ok to deface public property.”

Such an ostensibly “non-political” argument is in fact deeply political, and deeply problematic.

For one, it misses the fact that, increasingly, peaceful protests—even sizable ones—are systematically ignored by the mass media, unless they disrupt or disturb the normal flow and appearance of public space. When dominant media ignore even massive protests, prohibitions on public disruption become effectively prohibitions on sparking public debate altogether.

Similarly ignored is the fact that erecting and maintaining such public monuments to slave-takers and indian-killers in the first place consumes many times the public resources any lone act of graffiti ever could. Like those who blamed Occupy activists for costing tax-payers extra hours of police overtime, such ‘critics’ strain at the gnat of resistance only to swallow a camel of ruling class domination.

More crucially, however, such indignant responses ignore the possibility that certain forms of public property themselves amount to a kind of defacement… of our collective humanity.

In his opening chapter of A People’s History of the United States, Zinn wrote that “To emphasize, the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done.” Nor are such matters merely a matter of historical accuracy or respecting past. As Zinn continued, “My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress [that celebrations of Columbus express]…that is still with us.”

What is #BlackLivesMatter but a massive and evolving challenge to just such “easy acceptance of atrocities,” from police violence to mass incarceration to other forms of racist oppression and super-exploitation?

What does a statue glorifying Columbus have to do with #BLM?

Everything.

Thankfully, many other Bostonians, despite the inept and complicit mass media, were able to read the guerrilla graffiti action loud and clear.

* * *

In recent weeks, in the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina church massacre, it has suddenly become a mainstream demand to remove the Confederate flag from government buildings and other public places in the South. Perhaps it’s now time to raise the demand that public monuments to Christopher Columbus and other colonizer-enslavers should similarly be removed?

How many streets, parks, paths, city squares, government buildings, or public landmarks today implicitly condone, whitewash, or glorify one or another form or figure or slave-taking, land-stealing, colonialism, or genocide? How many of those historic figures who suffered and struggled against conquest and slavery still go without the slightest monument at all?

On second thought, perhaps the more effective radical demand would not be to remove the current monuments to Columbus and company, but merely to remove the whitewash from them. That is, to force into view the history—the social effects, the interests served, the suffering caused—that such public monuments work to hide.

Too often the PC “solution” to the history of oppression is to suppress the external signs and expressions associated with it, in a kind of liberal version of the corporate media’s suppression of the word blood from public discourse. Perhaps it would be better to keep the signs and symbols of oppression visible, right where they are, but radically reframed—and repainted!—to make it impossible to think of them shorn of the stain of suffering.

The point after all is not merely to end oppressive speech, but the oppressive (and exploitative) system itself, which is a matter of existing social conditions and institutions, of power, policies, and practices. The goal would be not to purify our public space of the taint of racism, colonialism, or genocide, but to provoke people to see and to discuss this taint, and its meaning for us today. For the bloodstains of course are not just on the statues, but all around us, built into the beams of the buildings and the billionaire bank accounts that rule this society.

Or perhaps it is time that we knocked down that Christopher Columbus statue altogether, and replaced it with one for Boston historian Howard Zinn himself. We could transform Columbus Park into a People’s History Park, one devoted to honoring the struggles that this local activist and author did so much to uphold, and to popularize.

Short of that, these historic words from Columbus’ own log-book, words which open A People’s History, should be etched permanently to the foot of the monument:

They [the Arawak] brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned...They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features....They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword,  they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane...They would make fine servants....With fifty men we couldsubjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Until such a time as our public monuments reflect this critical history, it remains open season on Columbus Park and on white-washed history sites across America.