A Website of the Radical Imagination
“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).
Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.
Framing the battle
The long narrative core of Martin Scorsese’s 166-minute epic Gangs of New York (2002) is bracketed by two highly stylized sequences — the first, a dystopian “once upon a time” inside a huge ill-lighted building, and the second, a cinematic dissolution of time in a Brooklyn cemetery.
Joan Didion’s death last week was followed by an outpouring of praise stretching over a week in The New York Times. This raises a critical question. Was Didion really a great writer, or merely the vector of attitudes held by the commenting class? The answer lies not just in her most famous books and essays, but in a piece she wrote that has been overlooked by those who present her as a seer into the enduring meaning of the past.
Didion has been cast as a prophet of the present who “told the truth about America,” as one Times writer gushed. Well, she did tell a kind of truth, one that many sophisticated readers wanted to hear after the traumas of the 60s. Apparently, they still want to hear it. Her images of crazed violence resonate, for her admirers, with the current threat posed by the violent right. But this selective view of Didion’s work ignores the evidence that her dystopian gaze was usually a reactionary one.
This essay on Robert Silvers–first posted here in 2017–ends with an invocation of Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Five. For that reason and others your editor has lifted it out of the archives to pair with Richard Goldstein’s No-in-Thunder to hagiographic responses to Didion’s passing…
Toni Cade Bambara’s “Working At It in Five Parts” is a hidden gem of prismatic self-reflection that we were surprised to find collecting dust in the Spelman College Archives along her voluminous letters, story drafts, teaching lesson plans, and much more.
There is no unhappiness quite like that of a Legacy Media Family. Such is the premise of HBO’s Succession. At the heart of the show is Logan Roy (a very leonine Brian Cox) and his four children, the most viable candidates to take over leadership of the publicly-owned but family-run company called Waystar Royco, a conglomerate of business ranging from cruise lines to motion picture production to cable news. The Roys are miserable, especially when they are all together, and they are always together—insulting, undermining, and threatening each other with little reserve or discretion. They find the savage fun in dysfunctional, and many of us could not wait for the show to return after a long Covid-19 hiatus.
Martín Espada’s Floaters has won a National Book Award. What follows are poems from the book — along with an intro and a few echoes — originally posted here last spring.
Teacher back home, maid in America.
He sold tusks and jade in America.
As though, for the first time I saw my country
And, with a pang of recognition, knew
It is all mine and nothing can divide us
It is my soul, it is my body, too
Iris Dement, “From An Airplane”
Everyone’s lost their damn minds. Americans stalk their local chain stores or Arby’s—once thought neutral ground—with an insatiable need to talk politics. Usually in the most asinine and conspiratorial ways.
People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Wesley C. Hogan and Paul Ortiz (University Press of Florida, 2021).
The history business is a curious gig. In my lifetime at least, it always seems that there’s more at stake in it than ever. It’s increasingly politicized because it is relevant; it’s increasingly relevant because it’s politicized. Fewer practitioners or pundits, these days, idealize a scientific pursuit that is separate from politics: it’s just too obvious how much good and lasting (as well as bad and cringy and forgettable) historical writing comes out of political commitments as well as from sheer curiosity. One of the first lessons they teach undergraduate history majors – in advanced classes – is that even though it’s all about evidence and original sources, history is always shaped by the battles of the present, whether it speaks to those battles explicitly or not. What that means for the ethics and politics of historians, as a guild, is the stuff of grad school – the smoky bar-retreats more than the seminars. What historical knowledge means for progressive politics, too, has remained up for debate.
When I entered graduate school, there were a few books and a few historians who seemed to have, and even to be, the answer. It had been ten years since Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment (1978), the slimmed down version of Democratic Promise, and the word we heard was that he had arrived at graduate school with a copy of the manuscript and was told by some august professor, okay… but you have to take some courses before we give you the Ph.D.
“Do you need a cup of coffee, comrade?” The offer was generous, the home welcoming. “Open up that thermos,” Larry would say to the visitor, tapping his pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table, with its littered ashtray and open books. “Nell just made a fresh pot,” he’d announce, gesturing with a Styrofoam cup. “Clear off that chair. Have a seat.”
Years later, the cigarettes would disappear, a personal victory over the cancerous southern-based tobacco industry, a win that added decades to his life, before his lungs gave out. It was not his only battle with the insanity of his beloved South—far from it. “We have lots of snakes to kill,” he’d say, ever the Texan, even on Tobacco Road.
“Larry Goodwyn has a book out there that nobody talks about.” I was struck by Donnel Baird’s nod in People Power to Goodwyn’s Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. Keep in mind Baird is a young black organizer-turned-entrepreneur who runs a venture capital backed startup focused on bringing clean energy and economic development to places like Harlem, where his business is based. (“We are building solar-powered microgrids in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods.”) Now take a look at the first few pages in the portrait gallery of presidents of the organization, TIPRO, that Goodwyn lauded in Texas Oil, American Dreams.
David Waldstreicher’s invocation of Larry Goodwyn’s — and Faulkner Fox’s — role in Durham for Obama reminded your editor to re-up on Goodwyn’s essential First piece on the 2008 campaign…
The harsh restriction on abortion rights just adopted by the Texas state legislature has a curious feature: the ban on abortions after six weeks cannot be enforced by state officials; the police are barred from acting. Enforcement is put into the hands of ordinary citizens—the Texas equivalent of you and me. If any citizen learns of someone involved in or complicit in an illegal abortion, he or she can sue that person. Or, more likely, they can report the offender to one of the civil society organizations that oppose abortion, and its officers will collect the reports and file the suits. The state isn’t involved, and that supposedly means that the law does not violate Roe v. Wade—which, Texans claim, only prohibits state action against abortion, not private action. I doubt that the subterfuge will stand, despite the Supreme Court’s initial refusal to call it out. But there is more to say.
They can’t stop asking, what do we have to do to get everyone vaccinated? Here is the current chart in California by county, comparing number of recent cases (blue bars) to percent vaccinated (green bars), as printed in the East Bay Times on September 25th. It’s pretty obvious that the longer the green bar, the shorter the blue bar, and vice-versa. Vaccination works.
I am pushing 85 as I write this and take you back to a sleepy Sunday in 1943 when I am six years old and my father has brought me to the Five-Ten-Hall. While a small clutch of men, including my father, speak animatedly about things that buzz above me, my eyes are locked on one man in that group. I follow him wherever he steps, at a certain distance, too shy to approach. I am engrossed in the light that reflects purple and dark blue off his forehead and cheeks and by the contrast of his totally black skin and the whites of his eyes. No doubt such interest is not new to him. When our eyes meet, he smiles at me in a kindly way. The name of this blackest of men was Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. He was among the greatest of IWW organizers and one of the pioneer civil rights leaders of the early twentieth century: unsung and forgotten today.
The following takedown of The 9/11 Commission Report by the late Benjamin DeMott first appeared in 2004 in Harper’s Magazine. DeMott’s essay remains vital because it’s an act of imagination as well as an act of protest.
First published this essay—a transcript of a talk on 9/11 and American intellectuals that Marcus gave at a synagogue in California—in the spring of 2002. Marcus wasn’t in First’s corner in the magazine’s early years. (He was put off by the harsh review in our second issue of his book on The Basement Tapes.) But Charles O’Brien’s rage at the “Vichy Left” in his post-9/11 essay “The War” spoke to Marcus. He bows to O’Brien’s polemic in “Nothing New Under the Sun” (and takes in a post-9/11 point made by First‘s Fredric Smoler as well), yet his own piece isn’t delimited by 9/11’s aftermath. It’s a kind of case statement for anyone who wants to know what distinguishes intellectuals from typical academics, hacks or other purveyors of the given. There’s been a link to “Nothing New Under the Sun” on the right column of First‘s homepage for years. It won’t be coming down any time soon. B.D.
First’s original editors, longtime New Yorkers, were fully alive to experiences of love and death on 9/11. We printed a set of responses to the attacks that implicitly contradicted those who assumed “anti-Americanism is a necessity” (without imposing a patriotic litmus test). Our post-9/11 issue featured red, white and blue colors above the fold, though that wasn’t a simple flag-waving gesture. The exemplary citizens (and New Yorkers) invoked on our cover were Latin Americans and an Afro-American: La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Jay-Z.
I’m reminded of how our colors seemed out of time to the all-knowing Left when I listen to commentary by pundits like Mehdi Hasan who link the post-9/11 “War on Terror” with l/6. That tendentious timeline all but erases the threat once posed by radical Islamists. It assumes American Islamophobia/xenophobia was always a scarier thing than Islamofascism. (I wonder if Mehdi Hasan noticed what happened to Samuel Paty—the French middle school teacher who was decapitated last October after he dared to teach his students about the Charlie Hebdo murders.) While it’s probably true the threat to Americans and Europeans from Islamist terrorists has diminished in recent years, that’s due largely to those Kurdish fighters who turned the tide against ISIS at the battle of Kobani. Future historians may come to see the Kurds’ victory there in January 2015 as the true culmination of the war that blew up in America on 9/11. The Kurds certainly grasped the meaning of their victory: “The battle for Kobani was not only a fight between the YPG and Daesh [ISIS], it was a battle between humanity and barbarity, a battle between freedom and tyranny, it was a battle between all human values and the enemies of humanity.” The clarity of these (mainly Muslim) soldiers who beat an international army of Islamists underscores the not-knowingness of Mehdi Hasan et al.
The following set of posts—by Donna Gaines, George Held, Hans Koning, Wendy Oxenhorn, Fredric Smoler, Laurie Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Lamborn Wilson—mixes pieces from First‘s back pages with writing by authors who published their first thoughts on 9/11 in other places. B.D.
Hopefully final covid update:
I realized earlier this week that I’m nothing but grief these days. I think some of my loved ones already knew and that’s why it seemed like they were looking at me funny. There’s the grief of doing everything I was told for eighteen months and getting covid anyway. There’s the grief of so many people’s first question being not “how are you?” but “how did you get it?” (Licking doorknobs and vents at an orgy, of course—there, now do you feel safe that it can never happen to you?)
The late Bob Moses’ last word on overcoming caste in the classroom was posthumously published here by “The Imprint” online news magazine on August 24th. His comrades at the Algebra Project have asked everyone who has kept up with the AP and Moses’ post-SNCC work to help them expand the readership for his final testament.
They are encouraging the use of the following hashtags to help circulate Moses’ Call to the nation:
#bobmoses
#algebraproject
#qualityeducationasacivilright
#mathliteracyforall
#SNCClegacyproject
#youngpeoplesproject
#southerninitiativealgebraproject
#OSUMathLiteracyInitiative
#BaltimoreAlgebraProject
#FloridaLocalAllianceForMathLiteracyAndEquity
#WeThePeopleMathLiteracyForAllAlliance
Here are online coordinates for the Algebra Project:
http://www.algebra.org
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Algebra-Project/154755754558564
Click HERE to watch the Zoom tribute to Bob Moses hosted by Florida International University, with the participation of the Moses family. (There will be another homegoing ceremony in Cambridge in September.)
The presence of figures from FIU and Broward County’s public school system spoke to the Moses family’s will to keep on pushing the Algebra Project’s program in Southeast Florida. The AP has been integrated into FIU and Broward schools for over a decade and the Moses memorial became another occasion to strengthen institutional connections. (The AP/Broward County link is one more sign of Moses’s instinct to go where America Dilemmas are right in your face. The Broward County School Board is currently resisting Governor DeSantis’s threat to withhold salaries from administrators and teachers who enforce mask mandates.)
Bob Moses’s daughter, Maisha (who Zoomed in at 10:30), and his wife, Janet (who joined around 1:14:45), gave clear-eyed (if sometimes tearful) testimony, fusing kin-folk truths and the book of Curtis Mayfield with The Autobiography of a Yogi and musings of Movement elders. Informed by organizers’ imperatives, their tales of Moses’ life in struggle steered listeners out of doomy darkness. The way forward came into focus for me when another speaker, Whitney Brakefield, made the Moses family’s sense of what’s possible real. Ms. Brakefield instantiated an American future that might seem unimaginable, until you hear her. (She zoomed at 52:25.)