Shadow Glory (an old paper on The Public Burning and American fascism)

Below is a paper I wrote about three or four years ago as an undergrad.  Warts and all, I thought it would be nice to share what functions as a long book review of Robert Coover's "Public Burning" as well as a way of participating in a discourse about American fascism.  Comments, suggestions, criticisms welcome.    Cheers.

                                                                                                                                                                           December 19, 2005    

 

Shadow Glory:

A Politics of Selfhood and Statecraft in

Robert Coover’s The Public Burning

           

Shortly after the brutal terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City claimed the lives of some 3,000 civilians, a sea change in national politics seemed immanent to many American thinkers, if not inherently indicated by the tragedy itself.  Roger Rosenblatt, writing for the time-honored national publication which Robert Coover coincidentally characterizes in The Public Burning as “America’s Poet Laureate” put forth at the time, perhaps, “one good thing could come from this horror: …the end of the age of irony” (79).  Sketching out his vision for a new America, and left ultimately as a yet vague and promising potentiality on the horizon of resurrected patriotism, the article continued:

For some 30 years - roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright [and coincidentally since the Rosenbergs had been executed] - the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real…The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything. The consequence of thinking that nothing is real - apart from prancing around in an air of vain stupidity - is that one will not know the difference between a joke and a menace (Rosenblatt 79).

 

Sadly, to this day, the people of the United States of America seems largely split on this very question of difference, heedless to Time’s sanctimonious appeal to the national conscience of, “No more. The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens - real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets - all real” (79).

Well, darned if the journalistic prognostication could not have been further from the truth, yet anyone proposing such redemptive victory over irony as “Mission Accomplished,” deserves a sobering – but otherwise enjoyably hysterical – review of The Public Burning.  The ferocity and brilliance of its prose alone contain the capacity of illumining a political “atmosphere” of sickness and slumber, and possess an intensity uniquely capable of burning from the public, veils of nationalist rhetoric and extremist propaganda.

Time has been telling us, time and time again, that “The Phantom” of Terror is also as Rosenblatt said of our “pain: too real” (Rosenblatt 79).  Given the seriousness accorded the “threat of terror” and its advance into the hearts and minds of Americans, its institutions, media, indeed the very core of the nation, a consideration of the nature of “otherness,” of foreignness and of enemy, as concepts around which national defense is organized, political rhetoric is performed and human lives are destroyed seems a fitting undertaking for the times.  The linking, then of Coover’s acclaimed fictionalization of the events surrounding the arrest, sentencing and murder of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of atomic espionage, affords a refreshingly insightful if not essentially disquieting approach to the current polemic of America’s war on terror.

In the initial momentum of Coover’s uproarious comedy, the steely shrapnel of a violent American birth is conjured in the satirical and horrific, if not absurd, ravings of “Uncle Sam, ne Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who…popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment – ‘slick,’ as the Evangels put it, ‘as a snake out of a black skin!’” (Coover 6).  Uncontested within the text, the reader is left to navigate, and hopefully eschew the impetuous doctrines of, “America has not arisen: it has been called forth!” (Coover 9). 

However outlandish the language with which the Maximum Leader of the American nation speaks in his text, the nature of Sam Slick’s wily pronouncements contrast less starkly than desirable with contemporary rhetoric employed in the discussion of America and the politics of enemy creation.  The fears storming the nation at the time of the Rosenberg trials bring sentiments reminiscent of public debate of the threat of terrorism:  “The Phantom’s dark gospel has spread through the world, he has acquired dozens of new disguises and devices, Uncle Sam’s most private councils have been infiltrated.” (14).

Popular culture today recognizes the archetypal ways unconstitutional and unethical behavior became routinely employed, tacitly sanctioned and officially rationalized to the public in its use of terms like McCarthyism, and in the public knowledge of FBI malefaction.  Yet substitution of terminology can be a tricky, necessary, but frightening game for most.  “A bit irregular maybe, but when you’re dealing with the Phantom, the rulebook goes out the window.” (20).  Consider it a code, and it’s less appaulling.  Simply exchange “terrorism” with “Phantom” in the sentence above, and replace “rulebook” – what rulebook is that anyway? – with “Constitution,” and you’re done!    

And real or not, the War on Terror in which America is embroiled is as closely tied to the real criminals of the September 11^thattack, as the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was a stab at the forces of Communism:  “Of course, [the Rosenbergs] had had congress with the Phantom, I truly believed this, they had touched the demonic and so were invaded: and their deaths, I knew it, would kill a part of the Phantom” (144).  The scapegoating of the Rosenbergs, executed on the accusation of being “atomic spies,” were ultimately punished for the psychic trauma of America’s cold war paranoia, which through Jungian perspectives on the human shadow, comes to mean an indictment of the nation by itself in the sense “that inasmuch as one is oneself one is also the other” (Jung 237).  In a short film interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, these paradoxes of relationship of the self with the other come to light in a way germane to the Public Burning’s commentary thereon.

            As per the question of foreigners and foreignness, “whenever there’s an intrusion,” Nancy explains, “there’s disorder – there’s turmoil and there’s threat.  An intruder is always threatening.  The very word intruder reflects a form of threat” (Nancy).  The reputed scholar and philosopher continues with an observation that “the word ‘intrusion’ is often used by psychoanalysts in relation to phenomena that arise in the conscious, in someone’s mind in a violent, menacing and even hallucinatory manner…” (Nancy). 

Very much akin to concepts involved in the modern study of Jungian “soul psychology,” this concept of perceived “otherness,” or of the “foreign” can apply itself to the individual as much as the social psyche.  The “intrusion of the other into the self,” therefore presents to the individual, the society, the nation, an opportunity at the point of pathos, of trauma, invasion, of encounter with the shadow: “pathos opens the doors of our sensibility to a reality which remains closed to a normal point of view.  When we feel our minds and our hearts breaking, this sometimes pushes us into a different topography, a different extension of reality” (Huston 75). 

This detection of intrusion upon “reality,” or “different extension” thereof, presents the opportunity for self-development, greater awareness, self-awareness in the encounter the otherness entertained.  There is no question that “Democracy’s” encounter with “Communism,” as with America’s reception and perception of the Islamic world is, and has long been, an encounter of foreign entities, disparate identities.  Yet, inasmuch as heterogeneity is a natural and inescapable reality of human beings and social existence, the embrace not only diversity, but of otherness, signalizes the basis of maturity in the individual, and sustainability of the social sphere.

Yet difference is inherently difficult.  On this too often painful process of

“extension of reality,” Nancy continues: “…what occurs then in a pathological manner is also the same thing as something that can be perceived as a strangeness within the [self].  Not necessarily the presence of the other but its existence” (Nancy).  It should be noted that pathology arises in the manner of response to the pathogen, or the intrusion, at the boundary or “limit of the identity - but identity can only be found by accepting some elements of this intrusion.  Because an identify that is complete and well-founded and incapable of accepting an intrusion is as stupid…closed, sealed… [as] a stone” (Nancy) 

Perhaps this is the stone of which the Rosenberg’s lawyer speaks in Coover’s narrative when he cries: “These people [supporting the execution] have stones for hearts…They have the souls of murderers!” (481) (italics in original).  Nixon, however, is more given to complexity throughout the text than the majority of his brethren in political office are depicted.  Even if only to the extent to which he vacillates in his ability to carry out the draconian rigors of his charge.  On many occasions, he flirts - quite licentiously - with lewd fantasies of consortium with Ethel Rosenberg, and his musing on the notion of the shadow in general, which his hubristic government finds itself less enigmatically embattled with: “What did it feel like, I wondered to be possessed by the Phantom?” (144).

On the other hand, acting president Eisenhower’s words to the nation, in stony refusal of clemency for the accused, attributes to the Rosenbergs the superhuman power of the Unknown, an insidious evil unparalleled in recorded history: 

The execution of two human beings is a grave matter.  But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.  The nature of the crime for which they have been found guilty and sentenced far exceeds that of the taking of the life of another citizen; it involves the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation and could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocents (250).

 

America’s fear of a perceived, and largely fantastical communist threat, when depicted in the fictional context of Coover’s novel - every bit as atrociously ridiculous as its proponents morally corrupt - is itself a terrible irony insofar as the consummation of their death sentence was real.  As real as is the war in which some one hundred-thousand lives have been lost, fought in the name of American post-9/11 security, on spurious charges based on little more than exploitation of a state-crafted xenophobia, and the capricious accusations of mob-justice appeals.  A crime against humanity. But, “everything human,” Uncle Sam offers in rejoinder, “is pathetic”(Coover 74).

If the Rosenbergs, termed by Eisenhower “democracy’s enemies,” proclaimed themselves as the “first victims of American Fascism,” Iraq may qualify as the national precedent of the same (Coover 339).  Barks the no-bull Laureate in Time’s September 2001 issue:  “History occurs twice, crack the wise guys quoting Marx: first as tragedy, then as farce. Who would believe such a thing except someone who has never experienced tragedy?” (79).  One ventures a guess:  Those merely experiencing the ironic tragedy of its recurrence in the appropriation of tragedy…in the farce of history?  In what sense did not all of America experience the tragedy of 9/11?  In what lesser sense the whole world? 

One expects Rosenblatt’s answer to lie in the dead, and in their families, and in firemen, and of those who survived the molten ashes of the toppling towers.  Veneration of the dead, while an integral part of the time-honored religious practices of various ancient cultures throughout the world, has in modernity disquietingly familiar links to fascism.  Umberto Eco’s Jeff Foxworthy-esque Ur-Fascism presents a fourteen-point symptomology which, if exhibited, one might be a…fascist!  Rosenblatt, or is it Time, seems to have beaten us to number 11 on Eco’s.  For one can almost hear one or both of them screaming indignantly, “’Viva la Muerte’ (in English… ‘Long Live Death!’)” (Eco, 7) .  For death and destruction had brought us, finally –“people may at last be ready” – reality, meaning (79).  Eco elaborates:

In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity…By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death (Eco 7).

 

And yet, the dead cannot speak for themselves.  Our president, however, has seen that he be allowed to, and does so in a way which might make Public Burning’s Uncle Sam mighty proud.  Still, Time’s contributing-writer is relentless:  “Are you looking for something to take seriously? Begin with evil” (Rosenblatt 79).  The Phantom?  Oh no, not again!  How ironic.  How sad, and unoriginal.  I thought we’d gotten all that business out of our system with the Rosenbergs!  Was theirs merely a trifle, a momentary tribute, quick fix? 

But there’s more where that came from more, so much more: “Freedom? That real enough for you? Everything we cling to in our free and sauntering country was imperiled by the terrorists. Destruction was real; no hedging about that”  (79).  Boy, hedging aside, this guy is good!  It’s as if he were actually practicing for the Incarnation, who exclaimed once, in response to such oratorio as delivered by a character in The Public Burning, “Sweet Genevieve …that’s pretty highfalutin’ sesquipedalian advice!” (421).  But Rosenblatt’s advice is more akin to what Eco described as Newspeak:

All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show (8).

 

Such sesquipedalian, or otherwise “impoverished…elementary” advice we may follow, as it appears many of us do, to our peril.  In his recent Harper’s article, Lewis H. Lapham remarks, “It does no good to ask the weakling’s pointless question, ‘Is America a fascist state?’  We must ask, in a major rather than a minor key, ‘Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen?’” (Lapham, 8).  Rosenblatt’s Newspeak intends to address all the “real” issues with words of moral ambiguity:  “The kindness of people toward others in distress is real. There is nothing to see through in that. Honor and fair play? Real.” (79). 

And here only another selection of Coover’s Uncle Sam may do justice a reply: “Aha!  A lofty big of talknophical assumancy there,” Rosenblatt (420).  And where might we find that “honor and fair play,” pray tell?  Surely not in America’s foreign policy, pre-or post-9/11.  But this aggressive address to a backdated magazine article is not only unfair, it exemplifies futility – did the article’s author possess the reader’s currently prized advantage of hindsight?  Or could he have?  When is history not always at our disposal?  When left un-reviewed and unremembered, the chronicles of human struggle, the historic narrative of human civilization, “to people who don’t know how to read or think, …do as little harm [to fascism] as snowflakes falling on a pond” (Lapham 8).

Perhaps the survival of Coover’s prose as grounded in vitriolic polemics as it is, testifies to an artistic safe-house, a political haven in literature.  Coover, instead of valorizing communism in his criticism of the mentality of the “Red Scare”, without deifying the Left or the East, examines the poisonous obsession with anti-communism by the West, and the mortal terror with which this Evil effigy is regarded and communicated by its witch-hunting accusers.  In a recent article on “dissident artists after soviet communism,” of which Coover seems an unlikely, yet cardinal sort, Nick Owchar writes: 

Stanislaw Baranczak, a former dissident and now a Harvard professor…says, the dissident writer’s ‘mastery lies precisely in how he handles the [censor’s] rules, complying with them yet managing to slip his message through, remaining within the limits of a standardized model of utterance yet imbuing it with the urgency of his individual voice.’…To appear to conform while slipping the message through, as Baranczak says, is to bring irony to a new state of perfection in an exercise that risked real punishment (Owchar, 262) (italics added). 

 

Coover seems to manage a commensurate vituperation of American legal and ideological politics without raising a question of risk on his part, if indeed there can be said to have existed a measure of caution in the free-expression of first-amendment rights either at the time of the book’s publication, or at this late stage in the game of U.S. censored-patriotism.  If it can be said that the pressures of living under the legendary weight of Communist oppression might have drawn parallels with the many victims of McCarthy Era anti-communist paranoia, on some levels, the elusive voice of Coover’s political drama mirrors what has been observed of the clandestine act of subversion in the dissident writers of Eastern Europe’s now toppled empire.  Coover’s, then is the ultimate shadow act, offering between the lines of a seamy tabloid scandal his eruditely cloaked “experimental fiction.”  

Perhaps the main ingredient in his experiment then is the subtle venturing of his own abiding moral sobriety off-stage, while tantalizing the audience front and center with, in the words of his anti-heroic Nixon describing the rhetorical device of the author’s rhetorical disguise:

much [of] the same thing that everybody laughs at everywhere: sex, danger, death, the enemy, the inevitable, all the things that hurt about growing up, something that Americans especially, suddenly caught with the whole world in their hands, are loath to do.  [Laughing the] hardest, though, [at] jokes about sexual inadequacy – a failure of power… (450). 

 

This failure of power to which the masses were particularly sensitized to seems to be hinted at by a few of the dissident characters in Coover’s own book, galvanized by the Rosenbergs themselves.  Perhaps somewhat indulging in the authorial prerogative of incarnating himself in his text, Cooverian among the crowd tells it like it is:

‘You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb!’ cries a French voice above the rest.  It’s Jean-Paul Sartre!  ‘Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fe, sacrifices: your country is sick with fear!  Do not be astonished if we cry out from one end of Europe to the other: Watch out!  America has the rabies!’ (466). 

 

If only Sartre had been present at the roundtable discussions at the Pentagon before the invasion of Iraq – not that it would have made a difference.  The world stage was dominated by such derisive jargon before the occupation commenced.  But one might argue that Coover’s forward-thinking takes on prophetic properties in analysis of, especially, the French rebuke of America’s proposed war.

            He also seems to have been ahead of the game in anticipating the 21^st century anthropomorphization of the corporation as well, beating the makers of the recent documentary the Corporation to the chase.  The central epiphany of the film involves evidence for a prescriptive diagnosis of “the Corporation” as a psychopath – applying psychoanalysis of individual behavior to that of multinational conglomerates which under U.S. law with many of the rights of an individual. 

Much of what the film takes hours to accomplish, Coover suggests exhaustively in his personification of household names.  The New York Times, Betty Crocker, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum among others, in their obsequious loyalty to capital interests, their puppetry and patronage by the state, and their homogeneous insularity, appear brazenly apathetic to human life and the affairs of its preservation:  “The Paramount Building has spread an all-electric United States flag across its broad façade, incorporating its starry-digited clock in the blue field,” keep official count of the remaining minutes of the Rosenberg’s lives like a New Year’s Eve festivity.  And “on Forty-sixth Street, a gigantic flashlight, powered with Evereadies – ‘the battery with Nine Lives’ – shines on a Kodak ad that says: ‘You press the button, we do the rest!’” (399).

            Furthermore, Coover, in his intensive literary acumen, painstakingly fills out the entire body politic of the crazed capitalist contraption, detailing its diverse membership, its broad demographic constituency, accounting for major segments of the entire national populace.  The corporate vultures that flock to the feeding grounds of the Rosenberg executions are themselves buoyed about the swarming crowds only by sheer mass and size, as the multitudes – some “hundred million mouths open wide”  - thronged around the Times Square regalia are themselves swallowed in the spotlight of American Celebrity (450). 

A shortlist of “celebrities, preachers, warriors, and millionaires… popping up all over…and…greeted with tumultuous democratic cheers,” read as endless rosters of

Americana including “Dale Carnegie!  Ty Cobb!  Gordon Dean!  Admiral Bill Halsey and Hank DuPont!  Ezio Pinza, Connie Mack, Cole Porter – and America’s answer to Michelangelo, James Montgomery Flagg!”  (401).  Neither Jack Rockefeller, nor William Faulkner, America’s “Nobel Prize-winning mythomaniac” can keep away from the “Sam Slick Show” – a warm-up phase of the executions, much like a Superbowl pre-game show, only comprehensively national in scope.  After all, as Uncle Sam blusters to the careening, frenetic, huddled masses, “upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization!” (422).      

Though Coover’s commentaries here may be intriguing enough of themselves to merit lengthy discussion, these humorous and compelling machinations of wit and wisdom ostensibly combine to serve a larger purpose yet to emerge from the text.  Perhaps the author is stating in the idiosyncratic manner perfected in The Public Burning what was elucidated by previous Incarnation Calvin Coolidge when he pronounced, phrased in a lyrical truism worthy of Coover’s poet laureate Time: “Business is America’s business” (qtd in Robinson 239).

Or perhaps the varied effusions of an All-American “statecraft” emerge conjoined here in the ceremonial execution, this metonymic auto-da-fe, in such a way to return to an earlier theme, or perhaps more “emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, “everything in the state.  Nothing outside the state.  Nothing against the state’” (Lapham, 7).  But, if for authoritative reasons alone, Eco must have a word in:

Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People (Eco, 8).

 

Coover seems to suggest in his incisive critique the inevitability of America’s exploration, exposition, and contact with its own long shadow.  This seems both implied by and explained in Coover’s elaboration, early on in the text and throughout, of an underlying American imperative of mimetic extension of Uncle-Samism to the performative dimensions of manifest destiny, the cosmology of American birthright in “the area of statecraft” and the imperialist rostrum of the national creation myth. 

It is thus easy to view The Public Burning as a commentary, a diatribe of this impetuous psychology of the American ideal, oiling the clockwork of “statehood” with the viscous lifeblood of the proverbial savage other, the true race toiling under the infinite weight of the white man’s burden.  But this leaves volumes left unsaid about other equally intriguing and masterful aspects of the book, not to mention, its stand-alone literary quality.  Yet, it is the sense of urgency and reality which this literary form contains, a sobriety jarringly juxtaposed to the deluge of dizzying archetypes it animates, that remains perhaps Coover’s most cunning gift – both embedded within the text and astonishingly absent therefrom, speaking, as if a phantom, in an inaudible clarion call. 

Though what Coover intends in The Public Burning may be a moot point, one can assert with certainty that this magnum opus is not to be read as an antiquated token of the so-called age of irony, but must continue to be regarded as a seminal work of literature in consideration of politics, ideology and myth as lived out in America, lived as America, in relation to the reality of its history, the imperatives of true democracy, and how America represent these in the phantasmal and fantastic threats posed an identify struggling through time to justify and sustain itself. 

If at this juncture, Jung again reminds us “that inasmuch as one is oneself one is also the other,” and the reader must bear this in mind as much as the writer, in such analysis.  America is foreign to Americans.  Yet, America is, in a sense, foreign to itself.  This foreignness is also, however, an embodiment of the familiar, a unique and changing characteristic of her own diverse constituency and many-storied history.  Familiar as well in the sense that the immigrant is both the common man and the outsider, that anyone laying claim to an American birthright also must recognize the eternal nature of their emigrant entry. 

For, with the realization that even the indigenous peoples of the Americas, were themselves at one time settlers of the land we now inhabit – albeit with strikingly different responses to that land, and the otherness that came to inhabit it, largely in their stead.  Ultimately, no claim on the territory – absent the might-makes-right belligerence and pathological ethnocentrism of Sam Slick’s “manifest dust-in-yer-eye [conquering] the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin’ millions…” (Coover 8). 

  That the American cycle of pathos will repeat itself appears inevitable, as current circumstances conveniently conspire to demonstrate.  But as Coover’s narrative, centered around the actions of one “great man” perhaps most importantly demonstrates is that the manner in which America and Americans will respond to the future, infinite stores and manifestations of otherness, projected and reflected back from a perpetually distinct, evolving and diverse nation-state-selfhood, remains largely a matter of personal choice.  And it doesn’t get any realer than that.

 

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto.  “Ur-Fascism” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995

Coover, Robert.  The Public Burning.  New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Huston, Jean “Pathos and Soul Making” Carl Jung and Soul Psychology

Hawthorn Press: New York, 1986

Lapham, Lewis H.  “On Message” Harper’s October 2005

Nancy, Jean-Luc.  “Vers Nancy”  Ten Minutes Older: The Cello. Road Moves

FilmProduktion: London, 2002.

Owchar, Nick “What Was Lost” AGNI v37  Boston University, 2005.

Robinson, Randall.  Quitting America.  Penguin Group: New York, New York,

2005. 

Rosenblatt, Roger  “The Age Of Irony Comes To An End.”  Time 2001 v158 i13 

Specters of Haiti: Reflections on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press

Our freedoms are meaningless if we do not exercise them. Perhaps more importantly, without action, our "freedoms" and "rights" become emblematic only of our unfreedom, and our bondage.


Do citizens of the United States truly live in a free country? A free state of being? of doing? of acting in the world?


Today I am inspired by the example of journalists such as Jean Dominique whose indefatigable spirit triumphed for years during his lifetime over the oppressive regimes of power-politics in Haiti, and promises to bear witness, with us, to the true calling of all people to be free from censorship, state and corporate aggression and surveillance in articulating their desires, their complaints, fears, and destinies. I could not recommend more highly the documentary The Agronomist which portrays the vivacious and steadfast character of Dominique and his struggle with the Haitian people for justice and equity.


As Brazilian poet, musician, activist and historian extraordinaire Caetano Veloso urges:

Pensa no Haiti, reza pelo Haiti. O Haiti é aqui, O Haiti não é aqui.
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti. Haiti is here, Haiti is not here.


What does Caetano mean by singing "Haiti is here"? It seems we get a clue even in “Haiti is not here,” as we are reminded that “we” are all sorts of various collectives. We can refer to the us that is "our" country, "our" foreign policy. "We" also, is each of those, including ourselves, who stand in relation to Haiti. Certainly, Caetano's maxim is equally true for Haitians. Haiti is there, and not there, is here and not here for Aristide, or Dominique - this is the entire point of their lives and struggle. The Haiti that is vs the Haiti they want to be. The Haiti we pray for, and the Haiti we pray to (see). Yet, in the less mystical variation of the "we" as outsiders, witnessing the strife of Haiti's beleagered nation, the over“there”-ness of Haiti is penetrated by the influence of our lives, our thoughts, our foreign policy, our apathy, our care IS there in Haiti, just as Haiti’s strength, life, hope, pain, destitution is here; in our hearts, our greed, our flagging confidence in the possibility of our own freedoms.

It has been fun to follow the news stories about China's preparation for the Olympic games as it ambles up to welcome the world so to speak. I'm interested in the auxiliary effects on the status of Chinese people's access to information and freedoms of expression.

In the last few days websites that were previously blocked in China - some websites - are now currently available in Beijing, Shanghai and perhaps other parts of the country.


Or, check out this headline:
Reporters Without Borders website accessible in China for first time since 2003


Port au Prince to Beijing, Portland to wherever you are reading this, there is a liberty at stake, one worth dying for, itself dying to be exercised. I write, today, to remember that right, and to grow closer, if this can be done, to understanding what, recently, Edwidge Danticat concluded in her Toni Morrison Lecture at Princeton University, that we have a responsibility to history to "write dangerously." I have been thinking about this, and more to come (perhaps on the speech, but certainly on the proposition of writing dangerously). For me, the premise is somewhat tricky. It may very well be dangerous to write, but this does not require that one write dangerously. It seems all the more likely that to truly write, under dangerous conditions, would be to write well. To write dangerously well - this is my motto, my aim for today. That I am writing at all, is, in fact, a marked improvement over the alternative which it seems, for some reason, I've practiced so long, and so well. And so fitfully, yet safely. I write in peace, today, knowing the storm is coming tonight to the homes of those whose freedoms have come at the price paid by Dominique, and X, and King, and so many other special friends.


Free Mumia! Yes. And, further, "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery..." and, further,

free our tongues to speak this freedom - or, better yet, to sing!....

Specters of Berlin: "The World That Stands As One" Speech

President(ial hopeful) Barack Obama has decentered the West. Now the world comes into view. It is a world in which can be seen in the words of Dr. King, an “inescapable network of mutuality.” Senator/President Barak Obama expressed today, to the world what Baha'u'llah suggested mid-nineteenth century that the problems facing global society could not be effictively addressed so long as nations and their peoples remain ensconced behind barriers of prejudice, fear and intolerance:

“The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. This unity can never be achieved,” Baha’u’lah moreover asserts, “so long as the counsels which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed are suffered to pass unheeded."

Imagine: all the people listening today in Tiergarten park to Obama's speech entitled "The World that Stands as One," addressing Berlin, Germany, Europe, the people of the world as "a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world."

One thing that I must say about this black man - aside from the fact that from the podium today his words resounded not far from the mark hit by that X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz whose own journey had taken him to speak before the peoples of the world on the need to unite in solidarity against oppression and tyrrany - is that this man's understanding of history is such that it allows him to proceed along the guidelines of Marx's maxim in Theses on Feurbach that the point is not just to understand history, but to change it.

So, it was in recognition of this auspicious calling that with candorous wit and stately levity, Mr. Obama referred to an unofficial precedent in his greeting the people of Berlin: "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." Neither did Obama speak through the mouthpieces of history's fragments in a bold and broken German, nor did he appear in spirit or in deed as an extension of the Bush legacy - though rumors circulate about Obama being George W's 11th cousin. Maybe the proof is on youtube.

But with regard to the question of genealogy and family relations, Obama had much spirited insight to offer. Troping on that city's emblematic significance in the history of world politics and reining in late President Regan's words to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," Obama pled before a crowd of over 200,000 to to the people of the world to eliminate the barriers between national, ethnic, racial, class, gender, and all such identities.

The entire speech is available online in numerous places, but here I cite a quotation from an online news source:

"We cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats or escape responsibility in meeting them," he said. The greatest danger, Obama said, "is to allow new walls to divide us from one another."

Obama decentered the west from its own vision of the world today by suggesting that of vital importance to the survival of each, is the survival of all. Our interconnectedness has not been emphasized this brilliantly since the days in which Martin Luther King, Jr breathed and spoke and marched and opened mail and encountered would-be enemies as promised friends amongst us. I, as "a proud citizen of the United states and fellow citizen of the world" am able to be such, today, because of the bravery, intelligence, and, I believe humility that it takes to raise one's head above the morass of competing political identities and agendas and speak the truth - whether obvious and welcome or, simultaneously, onerous and strange - that, as in the words of Baha'u'llah "the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."

"That is why America cannot afford to turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward." Though, together they can be the best of friends, yet, the allegiance to mutual benefit that Obama envisions and proposes across the Atlantic, he clearly identifies as the primary exigency of global security, prosperity and equality. Such a fraternity as can be experience between the United States and Europe must also be realized between Europe and 'the rest of the world' as it were.

This is truly, I believe, the crux of his message today, and its most salient truth, which was only reinforced, for me, at the moment when robust tears of astonishment, gratitude and joy streamed down my face. I was not witnessing simply the moving and timely, if not overdue perspectives brought to the worldstage by Obama plain eloquence, but more so by the facial of an invigorated and adoring audience who rushed to greet Mr. Obama at his exit. These countenances expressed such belief and recognition in the principles expounded, told of such deep and dear spiritual relief; with thirsts so quenched, eyes so grateful, eager and joyous to embrace the call to reason and altruism, hope and deliberateness, to participate in the praxis of principles that alone can hasten a new day for the people of this world, and change the course of human history from one of destruction, division and discord to one of peace, harmony and communion.

It was, as if, America had birthed a new spiritual leader for the world, and many a hearer was found, and spoken to today, and, i hope in the case of this listener, transformed if not, brought a little closer to that day, once visible only from a lofty mountain top. Have the seas truly risen? Or has the horizon drawn some brighter tomorrow nearer, raised some restless dream anew?

At last world events have conspired reminded me of one my favorite sentiments in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who penned in the blazing introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth where he writes:


"And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs."

This is, to be sure, a critical juncture at which human history has arrived to pause and evaluate, which our friend Obama helps us to herald. "The well-being of mankind, its peace and security," are greatly in question today, but are they not also in view?

How do we heed those counsels that will firmly establish unity? How do we reach that mountain top? Or descend that city to earth? How do we transfer the lofty dream to the plains of reality?

I'm glad somebody is contemplating these questions.