Underground Airlines‘ alternate history (see First‘s review above) calls to mind Sydney Nathans’ actual history, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012). That journey began when Mary Walker ran away from bondage, leaving three children behind (along with her mother) after her master announced he planned to send his “impudent” slave to a plantation in Alabama, far removed from her family in North Carolina. Once Mary Walker got settled in the North, she spent years trying to free her family and Nathan provides a gripping chronicle of her efforts. (Struck by the drama of the book and its cast of characters, more than one reader has invoked Dickens.)
Nation
Trump and the Media
“Let Trump be Trump his aides has always insisted. And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona. ‘I want,’ the candidate has often said, ‘to be myself.’” (“In Trump’s Voice, It’s a New Nixon,” Michael Barbaro and Alexander Burns NY Times, July 19.) But who is that myself? If one looks to his political identity in the views that he has expressed over the years, one is baffled by their contradictions, incoherence and vacuous expression, unless, that is, one sees them as symptoms of a mental condition.
Like, A Prayer
“To the victor belong the spoils!” That was Camille Paglia’s reaction, reported in a May Salon article, to what she referred to as “the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years”—a photo showing a besuited Donald Trump looming possessively over his seated date at a banquet in the early 90s, his pendulous necktie practically tracing the word “phallus” in the air for the benefit of all easily impressed onlookers. Paglia apparently being one of them, although she wasn’t invited to the banquet—for her, the tie is a “phallic tongue” and Trump resembles “a triumphant dragon,” his “spoils” worthy of Rita Hayworth comparisons.
Gabby Douglas (Fifth Goddess from the Sun)
More than a hand
not pressed obediently to a heart.
More even than my muscled ass
still seated when my teammates soared.
My purple-lipsticked pout
My messy (read “Black”) hair.
My face
honest with disappointment.
Democracy in the Streets
Chauncey DeVega first posted this piecce about a Chicago Black Lives Matter demonstration last month. But his report has gained resonance since the Republican and Democratic Conventions instantiated opposing visions of the American condition.
The Art of Dealing
You and me better spend some time wondering what to choose—“Deal” (Hunter, Garcia)
I once read a bit of one of Trump’s books off a display table in a bookstore. If it was Art of the Deal, I would have been in my mid-twenties. The story I read stuck with me.
Sexual Politics
I don’t know what to make of the Trump thing. I don’t think anybody does—not even Trump. Its agenda is as yet unformed, but the model of a racist strongman is already there. Economic anguish, racial distress, status anxieties, terrorism—all play a part. Some of the anger is real, and some of it is a fantasy projection. Taking this apart will take some time, at which point it may be too late.
But let’s begin with sexual politics, not just because it’s such a powerful force to begin with, but because it’s clearly a motivating factor in this election.
His Blood-stained Hands
In the moments before Donald Trump announced his choice of running mate, Vox’s Ezra Klein told us, reporters found themselves staring at “an empty podium and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers.” What was the song chosen for this momentous occasion? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The song has been background noise for Trump’s rallies for months, even though the Stones asked the candidate to cease and desist back in February. What is it doing there?
Late for the Sky
The photo below belongs in the DNC’s image bank in Philly. In my dreams, Hillary Clinton’s effort to break the glass ceiling converges with Alfred Yaghobzadeh’s picture of Djila climbing up to a lookout post in the Sinjar region of Iraq where her all-female brigade participated in a successful campaign against ISIS last fall.
Borderline
Donald Trump and his (then) 15 year old daughter, Ivanka. From a 1996 Vanity Fair photo shoot.
What Is Sanders Waiting For?
Sanders entered the Democratic primaries as an outsider presumably with an understanding of the rules. When they worked for him, he didn’t complain; when they didn’t work for him, he cried foul (the system, he claimed was rigged).
A Walk with Bob Moses
It’s not often that people return to the scene of betrayal.
2016 is Taking No Prisoners, Part 37: Twelve Rounds on Ali
Round 1: Having acknowledged the futile challenge of having to write an original introductory sentence for an essay about a man who is literally the most exhaustively written-about figure of our lifetimes, I refuse to step forward and take it on.
Something Happened to Us
This has to stop. It can’t continue to happen like this. Never again. But it never stops…
Trump and the “Mexican”
First off, it’s, no surprise, an ad-hominem attack. Before you tell me why the other guy’s wrong, you should show me that he’s wrong. Is Curiel ese making bum calls? Who knows? I wouldn’t take Trump’s word for it. But let’s say he is. Where does “Mexican” come into it? He is an American, certainly, whatever Trump says. But he is connected to some Chicano law associations. If his connections are pro forma, just social niceties, they’re all irrelevant. But if he’s very active, holds high positions, or has an interesting paper trail, it starts to matter.
Why the Verizon Strike Matters
I’m a 1946 baby boomer. As a birthday present a friend once gave me a copy of LIFE magazine published the week I was born, a peek into the new world of post-war prosperity I would grow up in. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby dance across the cover, while inside Winston Churchill ponders and Rita Hayworth lounges amidst the ads for whiskey, toothpaste, gas stoves and a full page promise from the Bell Telephone System: “We are short of Long Distance telephone circuits now but we plan to add 2,100,000 miles of them to the Bell System in the next twelve months.”
And one surprise: a seven page section titled The Great Steel Strike Begins with a full page profiling the strikers, including the president of Local 1397 and his retired steelworker immigrant father across from a full page photo of a surviving participant in the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike at “the monument to his old friends who lost their lives.” No pictures of frustrated managers, no pictures of angry consumers, no pictures of resolute right-wing politicians. All this in LIFE magazine, the network news of ‘46.
Sixties Trips II
Part two of an essay that begins here.
Richard Goldstein’s approach to the sixties was shaped by his sense “race was at the core of nearly everything.” But his lucidity about race matters is most evident when he’s writing about “revolution.” As rock ‘n’ roll turned into rock, Goldstein’s pop life got whiter.
The Message
Some months ago, the way others take up double-crossticks, I decided to figure out who killed Kennedy. My approach was to take the arguments in two books which believed his murder resulted from a vast, insidious conspiracy and compare them with the arguments in two books which believed a solitary madman responsible.
Connections: America’s First Mass Killer
The horror in the Orlando night club brought to mind when I was 11 years old in the leafy Camden suburb of Collingswood, New Jersey. It was September 6, 1949, and in the Cramer Hill section of Camden a World War Two vet, Howard Unruh, 28, left his house at 9:20 in the morning for what became known as “The Walk of Death,” a stroll of 12 minutes during which he killed 13 people – three of them children – with a souvenir Luger.