Grassroots Nuances
By Benj DeMott
Getting harder and harder to recognize the trapsToo much information about nothin’
Too much educated wrath...
What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big
Bob Dylan, Infidelity (Bootleg from Infidels sessions)
Listening to Shirley Sherrod’s post-apology interviews, I was struck by her knack for recognzing traps. Informed by family history – her father was martyred in the segregated South – and Movement experience – her heroic husband Charles was one of SNNC’s lead organizers – Sherrod displayed a deep understanding of fear, power and lies that bind. On The View, she handled the house conservative (who’d parroted Fox riffs about her supposed violations of the Hatch Act). Through with this little hassle, Sherrod nailed the G.O.P.’s niggardly non-response to the plight of the uninsured during the national debate over healthcare. Yet here and elsewhere she avoided coming on as a born-again Dem partisan. While she allowed she was “pleased” to have Obama’s ear (and e-mail address for messages down the line), she wasn’t about to let her President slide for signing off on top-down blunders of his administration. Her smile on CNN when Gibbs apologized at the press conference was unforgettable but it didn’t mean she’d stopped seeing through Gibbs’ shifty eyes or his glasses grabs when the subject of White House involvement in her firing came up. Still, her unillusioned movements of mind seem distant from the sort of disdain that regularly drips from the lips of Obama’s progressive critics.
Notice how Ms. Sherrod made her disappointment with Obama into an occasion for grassrootsy affirmation (and solidarity) during her interview on Today:
I don’t want [Obama] to apologize to me. I’d love to have a conversation though…I’d like to talk to him about the experiences of people like me, people at the grassroots level, people in rural America, people in the South. I know he doesn’t have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit to understand how we think, how we live and the things that are happening.….We are people who struggle every day, who do the best we can in our communities, who love this country, who love him. We want him to be successful because we feel he thinks, in some ways, like we do. And we think that’s good for the country. Yes there are issues out there – issues of poverty, issues I worked so hard on these last 11 months at Rural Development. – mainly because that’s me but also I want a…good reflection for him as the first black president.
Sherrod’s nuanced mix of emotional identification –“We are people… who love him – and critical distance – “we feel he thinks, in some ways, like we do” enabled her to speak social truth (to power). Contrast her litany of we’s with the self-enrapt tone of a recent letter to the Times by a New Yorker whose educated wrath is typical among a certain class of reflexive, wannabe morally superior “progressives.” He begins by putting his own spin on the categorical imperative: “The failure of President Obama to use the powers of his office and his personality to make good on his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay is despicable.” Without getting all up in the issue of Gitmo (it’s not my subject here), our exemplary hater doesn’t care that Obama has had a nearly intractable logistical/political problem on his hands (and in the House) due to an outbreak of NIMBYISM among Democrats as well as Republicans. Then again, maybe it all would’ve been over quick if Obama had just used “his personality” as per the letter writer whose prose schools us all on this score. This is how he do it:
I voted for Mr. Obama on the basis of his promise of real change. With respect to Guantánamo, there has been none. For this reason he has lost my vote. On some things, like undoing a legacy of extrajudicial detention and torture, there can be no compromise.
This guy is full of his own...vote. Like many of Obama’s harsher critics on the left. Check how NYRB’s Gary Wills showed off his feeling for himself (and his franchise) in a 2009 goodbye-to-all-that blog post on Obama: “I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president.” But no more! This white liberal is done with this black president (unlike Shirley Sherrod who knows forbearance is no sin to a true fighter). By the way, the straw that broke Wills' will-to-be-black-baby was Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. But, on the real side, Wills' policy objections are already dated. What endures is his majority-of-one presumption that democracy’s just another word for groups of me.
That’s an a priori among a strain of self-involved progressives. There’s often a racial dimension to their sense of enfranchisement. Paul Berman picked up on that at the start of the millennium when he noted how Naderites were fine with going back to the 19th century.
During the 20th Century the American Left has achieved wonders in regards to racial integration. The great protest and reform movements of the 19th Century left were, with the exception of Abolition, almost totally white, overwhelmingly white. The 20th Century Left – the socialists, the Wobblies and on to the Communists, who in spite of everything, had some very real achievements on this front – managed very slowly but with the force of inevitability to bring in black participation and to create finally a racially mixed – if not always integrated – reform, protest or radical movement in America. Which has had a revolutionary impact on the society. The Nader movement is not a 20th Century movement. It’s a complete and total throwback to the 19th Century – an all-white, or virtually all-white protest movement which describes itself as the Left.
The implicit conflict between dueling key-note speakers Van Jones and Ed Schultz at the Netroots Nation convention last week highlighted differences between black and white historical imaginations. The African American Jones (who himself resigned last year from his job in the Obama administration after being targeted by Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers) counseled leftish bloggers to avoid trashing Obama and their own fledgling “pro-democracy movement.” Born the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Jones noted it took 40 years before Obama could help the country shake off its grief and make “hope a mass phenomenon again.”
Hope may be a renewable resource, but it sure takes a long time to replenish. We finally got the hope back. The candle is flickering now. And so you cannot allow yourselves and your own heartbreak or your issue or cause to let you be a part of blowing that candle out. You can’t do that to America.
Yes I can was Ed Schultz’s message to Netroots. This ex-right-winger and forever blowhard wanted the world to know he was spitting mad at Obama: “They must have a war room at the White House. I think they’ve got a sissy room too.” He took a macho stance that may always have an appeal to a certain sort of willful lemming: “You're either with us, or you're against us in the progressive movement in America.” Schultz’s Bush-league jargon hints his roots in that “movement” are pretty shallow. His tantrum not only made (young activist) Van Jones seem like an elder statesman but it’s a reminder Schultz’s short career in political tit-for-tat theater pales in comparison with, say, Shirley Sherrod’s lifetime of engaged advocacy for everyday people. Schultz is a former Reaganite who began to turn left around 2000. Despite his decades of complicity with GOP meanness, he’s remarkably guilt-free. His shameless plaint against Obama boiled down to his bottom line: instead of going on The Ed Show, Obama went on Bret Baier’s show on Fox: “in my time slot. What’s that all about.” While Van Jones advised Netroots to keep hope alive by struggling with Obama toward a common future, Schultz was content to vent: “I busted my ass for Obama!” Contrast his whining with Shirley Sherrod’s calm testimony: “I worked so hard on [issues of poverty] these last 11 months at Rural Development. – mainly because that’s me but also I want a…good reflection for him as the first black president “ Seems like we’re confronted here with a choice not an echo.
II
While the gulf between Sherrod’s (and Jones’) side and hardcore venters testifies to the salience of race on the left, their differences don’t always come down to black and white. It’s about class too – “haves and have-nots,” as Shirley Sherrod would say. Her line, though, is a little out of time now. In a culture of narcissism where megalomaniacs (always) threaten to become standard bearers for progressive ed, we need to dig deeper to measure the distance between grassroots Sherrodniks and mad captains of punditry.
On this score, it’s instructive to glance at Ed Schultz’s new ghosted tome, Killer Politics, in tandem with the recent as-told-to memoir, Living and Loving Out Loud, of a prominent black proponent of disillusion with Obama, Cornel West. The personas in these products – Heartland Ed vs. Brotherman West – are racially constructed. But that’s all in the game for these jokermen. Both Schultz and West belong to a media class that uses the real to cover the deal.
Ed Schultz often invokes “the journey I’m on.” He hustles there by melding Deepak Chopra, populist shtick, Tora Bora talking points, and locker room lingo. A former college quarterback, Schultz played pro ball in Canada before becoming a sportscaster in Fargo, North Dakota. He then got into talk radio. Killer Politics’ opening autobiographical chapter, “From Fargo to 30 Rock,” offers a “Norman Rockwell” snapshot of his (blended) family – both he and his wife are on their second marriages – celebrating Thanksgiving in the heartland. But it hints his own heart’s in tv. Big Ed’s big aspirational moment comes after he takes a meeting that led to The Ed Show on MSNBC.
Wendy was waiting patiently outside for me in the hotel lobby when I finally emerged. She knew the length of the meeting was a good sign. I’ll never forget that we both had tears in our eyes. The first thing I said to Wendy was “I think this guy is going to hire me,” and we hugged each other like we were never going to let go. This was it. I was going to get a chance at tv…Can you imagine? You’re talking about a guy who has a lake home in Minnesota so he can fish at a moment’s notice. Now we would be living just a few blocks from 30 Rock, one of the most famous showbiz addresses in the world. I could not believe all this was happening...Sometimes hopes and prayers can be pretty powerful.
Ed’s prime-time spirit is hard to square with his assertion: “I have a blue collar soul.” There are other revelations that don’t add up as well. By his own account, Schultz’s father was an aeronautical engineer and his mother an English teacher. He’s something other than a single-minded son of the working class. But taking his cues from the life and lies of Bill O’Reilly, Schultz distances himself from “stereotypical geeky academic vegans with pocket protectors, bad hair, and Earth Shoes.” On Killer Politics' cover, he wears a suit, tie and boxing gloves. Six-two, 250 pounds of ham and main chance, Schultz means to be the heavyweight champ of illiberal liberalism.
Big Ed issued a challenge to the Netroots audience: “"I've got the balls to say it, you better have the balls to write it.” He also has the...temerity to put his name on Killer Politics, which was clearly a team effort. Schultz thanks one Tony Bender, “the best writer I know, for helping to shape my thoughts into chapters.” Ed doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Like sentences. He was, no doubt, content to provide Killer Politics’ building blocks such as its “four pillars” of wisdom: “1 Defend the Nation 2 Establish a Sound Fiscal Policy 3 Feed the Country 4 Educate the people.” I’m guessing the rest was up to the hot air Bender and the rest of Ed’s team who managed to push the page count above 200 (thanks to the index). You can feel their strain; three graphs and a cloud of methane.
Schultz’s deadly pieties – “It’s too easy to become numb or oblivious to the heartbreak of war, and that isn’t good.” – make him a brother of platitudinous Brother West. While they play very different characters, they have anti-intellectual angles in common. West is also out to remove himself from (Schultz’s) “stereotypical geeky academic.” While Living and Loving Out Loud promotes the con that West is a world-class mind, it presents him as a raw bluesy scholar gypsy and pumps up his jock cred too. It clocks his old times as a high-school cross-country runner and calls on his older brother to talk up West’s youthful skills as a pitcher – “That’s a mean curve you got bro…just falls off the table” – and shortstop – “No one’s got eye-hand coordination like you Corn…You can make it to the majors if you wanna.”
But how to choose? Young Mr. West had so many options. He recalls being a Renaissance child who won state-wide classical violin prizes and R&B dance-offs (“quiet as it’s kept [Can you spot the tell?] I made a little money winning dance contests”). West, of course, is still a dancing fool. (See him all up on Mo'nique on YouTube.) But what moves him most now is his own voice. Like Big Ed, he’s way proud of being able to talk on his feet without notes. He’d allow, no doubt, the flattering phrase he saves for imitator/colleague/competitor Michael Eric Dyson– “unadulterated rhetorical genius” – is on point for him too. Though there’s a more apt and pungent alternative for the word that comes third.
West’s amanuensis David Ritz – known for his as-told-to bios of numberless black pop musicians – tries harder than Big Ed’s collaborators to do the bloviation. He looks for the melody – “I loved me some Beethoven. I loved me some Mozart.” – but West’s blather is, indeed, enough to give the blues the blues: “The Great blues artists: Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, B.B. King...Lil’ Wayne...Giacomo Leopardi...Bruce Springsteen...Muriel Rukyser...Savion Glover...Federico Garcia Lorca...Thomas Hardy...” The blues had a baby and they called it bull...
Sometimes Ritz gives up trying to “sculpt” clunky into funky and just lets his co-faux-homie go solo as when West places himself (when speaking of his fam) as "the proudest uncle in late modernity.” Or when he recalls without shame lines from a short story he wrote as a young man after discovering Russian writers (“Forget Proust and Joyce. Later for Cervantes and Victor Hugo…I just didn’t want to read them or reread them [Can you spot the tell?] in 1975.”) Here’s the passage generated by West’s encounters with Russian models:
People of all size and shapes of the Negroid spectrum filled the misty sweltering room. Flashing fluorescent lights shone just bright enough to see who was wearing what and who was with whom. The floor was filled with banana skin females dancing with jet black men and chocolate colored women dancing with paper-bag brown males.
Much of West’s baggy monster of a memoir details his own slipping around (and slip-ups) with “banana skin” females of all colors in the “Negroid spectrum.” A reader learns that on a second date with the Ethiopian woman who would become his third wife, West proposed: “Eleni, marry me and become the first lady of Black America.” A breathtaking conceit that coughs up the truth behind West’s long history of carping about Obama.
West is a proud player (though he notes, sadly, women “deserve inordinate attention”). But, like Big Ed , lover man wants everyone to know he came up hard. “Rage came early” he recalls. “Little Romeo…was a little gangsta.” According to West, he was a sort of toddler Robin Hood who took on bigger Trouble Boys, before morphing into an elementary school militant who was once expelled for fighting back when a principal tried to paddle him into saying the pledge of allegiance.
West’s aim to add a gangsta wing to his house of self-worship is a stretch goal since he’s presented himself as “one grateful negro” for decades. And that’s still on. The gift words keep coming in Living and Loving (along with the incessant name-dropping). It’s not a full Tom because West kisses many black asses. His sucking up seems to be calibrated not by race but by what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. Thus, his BFF right now is Tavis Smiley, who happens to be his publisher. He also broadcasts his tight connection with former and current Ivy League college presidents (like his “dear and courageous [!] brother Neil Rudenstine”); the crew that must pay the cost for him to live the fantasy that he's Black America’s PhD.-in-chief. He’s much cooler toward ex-BFF Rabbi Michael Lerner though he’ll “never forget” Lerner for introducing him to “the most brilliant and compassionate literary agent in the world.” An encomium that suggests West is a pure product of the Left Coast. West images himself as black-to-the-bone, but he’s really Cali-at-the-core.
One segue in Living and Loving gets to the heart of the...matrix. West recalls how he broke up his first marriage and walked out on his young son: “Cliff clung to me like his life depended on it. He kept crying, ‘Daddy! Don’t go, Daddy!’ I went, crying along with my son.” The tracks of his tears fade fast in Living and Loving. Two pages later, West has moved on to the realm of Michelle Wallace:
I knew Michelle had come out of the heavy-duty intellectual climate of New York City’s City College. I wanted to meet Michelle, so I invited her to my class at Union…I remember the moment when she walked through the room. The instant I saw her, I said to myself. “Lord have a–mercy! It’s gonna be a thang!” And Lord knows it was. Michelle was magnificent; a different kind of woman than any I had encountered before. She’d been shaped by the kind of rich but existentially ambiguous subculture of the Jewish intelligentsia. After college, she had gone to the Village Voice where that same sort of heavyweight cultural environment continued to sharpen her mind. I had met few black women who had emerged from this background. As a writer, thinker, and social critic, Michelle was spectacular.
Baby got background! West ended up in bed/on tour with Wallace who was selling “one of the big books of 1979, Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman.” He was off on the first of many adventures in the society of spectacle, while his first wife went back down to Georgia where she would raise their son.
Which brings us close to where Shirley Sherrod’s soul grew deep. A good place to pause.
To Be Continued.
From July, 2010
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