The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)

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This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…

Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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Barbarism and Culture

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The author responded to recent poems in First and then went further with his thoughts…

“I’m on the side   . . .
[of] the ones used as messages . . .
of those whose deaths are part of an estimated number . . . ”

Oh my, oh my — what to do with (lines from) poems such as this, and those by Alison Stone…Such good lines/poems — are we allowed to admire them, as well as being moved, being led to reflect, to sympathize, to cry? Might there not be something just a bit off in such admiration? But if so, then why have poems at all?  Which, inevitably (for some) leads to . . . Adorno:

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The Day After (Who Rules Gaza If Israel “Wins”?)

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“We can’t have a reversion to the status quo with Hamas running Gaza,” Blinken…told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We also can’t have — and the Israelis start with this proposition themselves — Israel running or controlling Gaza.”

The following piece, published last week in Foreign Affairs magazine, speaks to the future of Gaza. Its author once served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and as finance minister. Before his dismissal by the P.A.’s President Abbas in 2013, Salam Fayyad was known for being a modernizer committed to reforming the political economy and security structures of the West Bank.

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Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)

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Intifada

“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”

..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…

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Better than “Heaven”

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Songs on the new Stones album might rev me up down the line, but I was put off by early hosannahs for the faux-gospel “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” which features Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Compare “Heaven” with live collabs between Stevie and the Stones from 1972, when they’d mash up “Uptight” and “Satisfaction.” (You can watch here — check Mick and Stevie’s dance — now that’s a throwback!)

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Two Formicating Junkies

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Joey, a guy I knew, used to call every month or so. He hardly ever had an agenda. No, “Can we…” or “What do you think about….” or anything like that. It was just to talk for a while, checking in, letting me and maybe himself know that he was still around.

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And now for something a bit lighter: The great Garfinkel’s caper

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If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 18-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway.  I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.

It was the early winter of 1964 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. when I and three friends, who were all long on energy and short on some essential brain cells, decided it would be a fantastic idea to pull off the greatest shoplifting caper in our young lives.

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Amen Corner

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I want to thank C. Liegh McInnis for commending The Burial — the new movie streaming now that’s based on true events in the 90s. The film tells how Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) — a white Mississippian with a legal team led by a black lawyer, Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) — sued Loewen funeral company, a Northern corporation looking to establish monopoly control over the death-industry in parts of the American South. Along the way, one of O’Keefe’s lawyers, Halbert Dockins Jr. (Mamadou Athie), amped up his client’s case by zeroing in on the full ugly of Loewen’s deals with clergy who sold overpriced funeral packages to black churchgoers.

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Come and See*

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From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”

“How long…

Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

***

***

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Hatikvah

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Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”

Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.

Failing Upward (Two Poems)

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Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel

Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.

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In Country

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There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza.  A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store.  Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day.   From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.

But I won’t be seeing him for a while.  The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters. 

The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.

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The mainstream media completely missed the story when reporting on Trump’s visit to the South Carolina gun store

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Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August.

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