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Don’t Look Away, Dixieland

Stone Mountain is a geological wonder that carries a social significance as profound as its granite heart.

Untold numbers of American soldiers have trained at bases named for treasonous leaders. A legion of Nathan Bedford Forrests gaze across the South from squares, courthouses and public parks, perhaps puzzled by the recent stirrings and troubled by the rumble of heavy machinery. Discussions on re-naming buildings and removing commemorative statues that celebrate heroes of the Confederacy achieved new momentum as America re-inspected its past in light of its present, for a moment at least. The stirrings introduced great unease in many citizens, whatever their physical distance to the South. Still, a logical elegance about re-evaluating our symbols, their connection to identity, and the poison they present to our democracy should be able to guide us toward better role models and more equitable public allegory.

But the options for what to do about the massive carving into the eastern face of Stone Mountain celebrating that past sparks a different kind of negotiation. The question elicits a category error, a kind of nostalgia for a monument that would better serve us as the marker for a tomb, the final resting place for a reign of terror.

The vast crimes we perpetrated on our own people still loom large today – unequal schools, segregated neighborhoods, glass ceilings as far as the eye can see. While calls for diversity harkened the great benefits of inclusion, the remnants of Jim Crow and abandoned commitments to Reconstruction still haunt our communities. The many millions living under the duress of poverty somehow continue to threaten those struggling within their well-tended fear of others. We cling to prejudices – and violence – and succeed in continuing to avoid reckoning with the facts. Violence privileges as much as it destroys.

Impossible to relocate to a museum with other relics, we could blast Lee, Jackson, Davis and their mounts off their perch, replacing them with and/or even adding more worthy images to the composition. But we should not – and hardly only because of the anachronism it would create by adding a kitsch element to what has such a serious and devastating effects we also misunderstand.

The carving at Stone Mountain should remain permanently ensconced as exactly what it is: a dark guarantee of second-class citizenship for the vast majority of the descendants of Black slaves, 12 generations at Emancipation. That it could succeed only in anchoring the entire country to the fulfillment of false prophets from time immemorial is its own testament.

Irreverence might call this an opportunity, one instance where we might not politely look away, as the tune went, from who we are and how we arrived here. The monument represents a fraught reality in a difficult time that stretches across an open wound. A monument to a defiantly un-Reconstructed South, the three horsemen have ridden roughshod into our moment as a deliberate expression of what brought us exactly to here: a genteel façade that required decades of brutal viciousness to maintain. Overwhelming wealth mixed ever so precisely with extraordinary poverty presents as just one result of a systematic effort to elevate some and exclude others. But the power of the “Lost Cause” mythology that clouded the real outcome of the peace has kept the American Civil War alive in the imaginations of too many. Manifested through police violence, white supremacist ideology does a lot more than echo today.

When plans were initially finalized for a commemorative sculpture at Stone Mountain, there was no coincidence about the timing. In 1915, the KKK announced its modern rebirth by burning a cross on the mountaintop. Admittedly, it was not even an original gesture but one borrowed from the film, “Birth of a Nation.” Myth melting into reality was and remains one of the constant themes of celebrating the “Lost Cause.” And yet the implications of these social expressions remain as tangible as Stone Mountain itself.

After financial problems caused stops and starts on a Stone Mountain monument, an unfinished version sat untouched until the 1960’s. The project was reprised under state sanction when segregationist governor Marvin Griffin had Georgia purchase the mountain and fundraising began in earnest.

Why complete the monument then? Was the state government trying to make something clear? Is it possible to attend a laser light show at Stone Mountain Park and understand what it was? Deliberate and extensive efforts backed by unmistakable intentions on the part of the state and local governments sought to maintain segregation despite Supreme Court decisions about schools, despite federal laws and programs. It is folly to try and think of any other reason why the monument was completed then or why it should be destroyed now. The white majority decided and made itself clear with a statement visible for miles and in fact years, writ across inadequate housing projects and failing schools from the coast across the Piedmont.

White segregationists used the mountain to signal that they would turn the terror of white supremacist violence into a kitchen sink of socially acceptable but no less violent restrictions, from real estate redlining to voting barriers to gerrymandered districts, to assure the continued dominance of the white supremacist state.

The gargantuan efforts required to skirt the spirit of new laws, to soften your language but not your heart, merited a gargantuan symbol. And we can see the symbol and fruits of those efforts through today, from every vantage point. People mired in poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth; Georgia itself with the highest rates of felony convictions in the nation; voters still responding to dog whistles and scare tactics that hurt people, devastating families and local economies, attacking the very notion of a national commonwealth.

Let the carving stay and let it remind us that we still have work to do, that there will always be work to do while we have to convince ourselves that there is no they.

Stone Mountain should remain a permanent marker to who we are, to the deliberate cruelty and injustice that has so marred our society until the descendants of white supremacists rise up and plead for its removal. And then we should still say no. We need something to remind us: never again.

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

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The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.

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What does C L R James mean?

The West Indian Intellectual C L R James (born in 1901, Trinidad) provided an insightful assessment of democracy in the U.S., ‘Notes on American Civilization’ (1950). ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ he explained.

Carefully or not, the explanation has apparently been grossly, and repeatedly mischaracterized and misunderstood ever since, as unpacked in this essay:

At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross over from popular culture to political rule. ‘By carefully observing the trends in modern popular art, and the responses of the people, we can see the tendencies which explode into the monstrous caricatures of human existence which appear under totalitarianism.’ Completed in early 1950, James’s proposal remained underground for decades until it found publication under the abbreviated title American Civilization in 1993. Four years earlier, the author had passed on into history as one of the finest minds of the 20th century.

At the base of this ignorance is a 30-year-old tale of radical misreading. Beginning in the 1990s, commentaries on American Civilization have erased its concern with the dark cultural politics of totalitarianism, dismissing the manuscript as quixotic and optimistic, even embarrassingly romantic. James, according to reviewers, fell for the US with the naive zeal of what Trinidadians would call a never-see-come-see. This radical was so dazzled by the North American republic that his radicalism disappeared once he sat down to write about its history and culture. In American Civilization, James was ‘enthusing with the greatest passion about the democratic capacity of the civilization with which he had fallen in love,’ the UK-based historian Bill Schwarz wrote. In a review for The New Yorker, Paul Berman concurred, describing the work as proof that ‘James basically loved the United States’. Yet, far from love and happiness, the manuscript was inspired, we will see, by a concern with the despair and hopelessness of US citizens and by a worry about the political portent of these mass feelings.

James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.’ This popular disenchantment with liberalism and the accompanying vulnerability to totalitarian leadership manifested in the entertainment industry, according to James. In films, novels, magazines and comics, he identified a contemporary archive of the cultural politics of totalitarianism – not a source of special affection for the modern republic (James actually trashed much of US popular culture as ‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’). For him, moreover, the dire US situation was not exceptional but simply a richer symptomatic case of a modern derangement. The conceit that James was seduced by the achievements of ‘American civilisation’ is one of those strange North Atlantic fictions; one that reveals more about those who study James than about James himself.

Read the entire essay, which is really terrific and uncomfortably on the nose concerning how ‘we’ might conveniently misunderstand polemical, and any, language:

Finally, and maybe most originally, James identified resources for totalitarianism not only in the industry’s projections of fictional protagonists but also in its production of ‘stars’ in reality. Since the Great Depression, he noted, a vital development in popular culture involved the professional packaging of celebrities (Hollywood actors, especially) into ‘synthetic characters’, produced by a ‘vast army of journalists, magazine writers, publicity men, etc’. The rise of these stars concerned James because he believed that through them the masses ‘live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which is the dominant need of the vast mass today.’ Celebrities, he wrote, ‘fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited lives.’ In this regard, James saw an intrinsic connection between the industrial fabrication of these real-life heroes to be consumed by the admiring masses and the conditioning of the public for totalitarian rule: ‘We have seen how, deprived of individuality, millions of modern citizens live vicariously, through identification with brilliant notably effective, famous or glamorous individuals. The totalitarian state, having crushed all freedom, carries this substitution to its last ultimate.’ The entertainment industry’s heavy investment in the production of stars readied the republic for an antidemocratic regime.

Image: CLR James on New Year’s Eve in 1975 © Val Wilmer

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Opportunity Costs

I had a note to write a post about ‘Why the ______ industries collapse’ inspired by a WaPo news story about emus, but this is difficult to ignore and maybe that’s a bigger point:

Trump’s golden façade has been crumbling for years. Since he was elected president, units in his buildings have sold for less than those in their luxury competitors and struggled with vacancies. Condo boards across Manhattan have voted to remove his name from their buildings; in 2019, even the flagship Trump International Hotel and Tower agreed to reduce the size of his name. But Trump’s grift came into sharper focus after New York attorney general Letitia James’s civil lawsuit in late September, which alleges that Trump and his family fraudulently inflated the value of their properties in order to receive favorable loans and, in the process, hundreds of millions of dollars. In mid-February, Justice Arthur Engoron found the Trump Organization guilty, and the judgment, tallied on February 23, totals $454 million with interest. Engoran’s ruling doesn’t permanently bar Trump and his eldest children from running the Trump Organization, but Trump is barred from running any corporation in the state for three years, while his sons Donald Jr. and Eric are barred for two.

How much time and energy has been wasted over the previous nine years on this trash person? You can find these stories practically anywhere these days but he has never been anything but a bullshit con. It’s a reminder that the U.S. is still a very young country,  a creaky constitutional republic that we’re too afraid to tinker with. Maybe in a country that has always been dominated by religious crazies, criminals, and tax cheats, it’s a miracle it took this long to produce its perfect avatar. But there he is.

And we need to move on. There are many, many issues that require urgent attention and from serious people. Be one. Start now.

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Roiling the Newness

Recent NYRB piece on the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki—of Uruguay and Poland, respectively, is deserving of elevation and you, dear reader, deserving of its riches:

“Poetry,” Ida Vitale remarks in the essay included in her new collection, “like death, perhaps, is surrounded by explanations.” Now living again in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she was born in 1923, Vitale can take poetry’s prestige for granted. Over the past century or more Latin America has commanded a world stage: the writings of César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda, among others, hardly require explanation or defense. Her own cohort, the Generation of 1945 (the “Generación Crítica”), was instrumental in keeping Montevideo abreast of cosmopolitan developments in literature, theater, and critical theory. Vitale has received numerous prizes in Uruguay, Mexico, Spain, and France, as well as the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2021. Yet her first selection of poems in English translation (over seventy years’ worth of work, presented in reverse chronological order) contains just one brief manifesto, “Poems in Search of the Initiated,” registering a delicate protest against the diminished readership for poetry:

The challenges awaiting a less confident reader may include unusual verbal constructions, not worn out by use, and a richer vocabulary. These are not impossible to face. The pleasure of enthusiastic decipherment releases a mysterious energy that moves not only the pages of poetry, but also the world’s great prose.

Mystery, Vitale notes, is “that which is reserved for the mystai, the initiated,” and “on the other hand…leads us to the idea of ministry.” But in a democratic age—or, more accurately, an age when democracy is teetering toward authoritarianism—“the initiated” evokes the specter of an elite despised on all sides: “rarefied poetry for the few, almost for specialists.”

Speak, dear authors. Everyone needs to be intrepid about everything, and that definitely includes reading and writing, but also looking at sculpture and paintings, watching dance performance. Hearing poetry.

If we are what we pretend to be, as Uncle Kurt, it’s past time to get serious about that.

Image: Author photo with Mrs. G in the old part of an old city.

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What intelligence?

How we have prioritized as’ artificial’ as ‘improved’ or superior hearkens back to nothing so much as the advent of sugar substitutes. As we have come to understand artificial sweeteners, so should we think about, as in consider, so-called A.I. The emphasis on artificial has us reeling but in its best light it seems inadvertent – innocently derived from ‘simulated’ – and, whatever the case may be, is not new:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

You always want it to be more difficult to find an example from Orwell than it actually is.

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Almost as If

Dr. K brings the medium, sensible heat today regarding Russian failures in Ukraine. It’s a good explainer without the jingoism, importantly including the economic offensives alongside the military ones that have been less than dispositive, or perhaps more so depending on your rooting interest.

But the kudos to Europe for not only resisting energy blackmail but in so doing, also for revealing that the planning and execution of the energy transition are well under way:

So what can we learn from the failure of Russia’s energy offensive?

First, Russia looks more than ever like a Potemkin superpower, with little behind its impressive facade. Its much vaunted military is far less effective than advertised; now its role as an energy supplier is proving much harder to weaponize than many imagined.

Second, democracies are showing, as they have many times in the past, that they are much tougher, much harder to intimidate, than they look.

Finally, modern economies are far more flexible, far more able to cope with change, than some vested interests would have us believe.

For as long as I can remember, fossil-fuel lobbyists and their political supporters have insisted that any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be disastrous for jobs and economic growth. But what we’re seeing now is Europe making an energy transition under the worst possible circumstances — sudden, unexpected and drastic — and handling it pretty well. This suggests that a gradual, planned green energy transition would be far easier than pessimists imagine.

Read or listen to (not recommended!) the business news any day of the week and everything any normal person would consider good news – strong jobs report, tight labor market, increased consumer protections, penalizing reckless banking and investment behavior – is all cast in terms of doom and gloom. The sky is always falling and we can’t do this or have that and so stop wanting it and vote for more oppression of the powerless. Kick down, pull up the ladders, that’s all we can do.

What if – and yes, caution, slight optimism ahead – all of that is itself just a form of corruption? The fossil fuel industry, just as an obvious example, has been assuring us since the 1970s that it just can’t be done, there is no way to replace coal as our primary energy source, so stop trying. Wind stops blowing. Solar? Have you heard of nighttime? It’s too expensive, too impractical, is itself bad for the environment. Birds! Plus, people hate to see windmills. They don’t want electric cars. Meanwhile what has happened? What is happening?

What if we decided to get even more bold, rather than cowering in fear about what we’re afraid to do, that we are reminded we can’t do? What other issues out there might not be so inviolate?

Guns?

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How fast is a fast train?

Faster than you think. Literally faster than you remember if you’ve ever taken one. But before we get to that, some figurative and also quite speedy trains.

Like the parade to ban books, or move on from horrifically disgusting violence in schools. These, too, move much faster than we imagine, even as we wait for something or someone else to slow them down or stop them. But it’s a tightly constructed set of deliberate steps that brings the fast trains, whether as transport or societal degradation. In the case of the latter, the stage has been set by the Republican party through decades of vicious stinginess for infrastructure and social programs, proffering the glories of low taxes and toothless regulation of everything from the stock market to the water table. The forms of efficient and affordable transportation enjoyed by people in our so-called peer nations around the world are as unknown in the U.S. as a public toilet and it’s much better if we stop being coy about all of this.

The need to acknowledge where society is falling short, who it is catering to and why is a matter of great urgency.

Image: B line trams in Grenoble, France, last week. Author photo.