History Gets Lost in The Matrix
“Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation.”
– Cornel West making his Hollywood film debut in The Matrix Reloaded
Reality Bites
Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to wait for the punch line. No one will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South African novelist and homme de gauche, last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with the now-rote observation that when any criticism of Israeli policy is vilified as anti-Semitism, free speech is imperiled. You may be mildly surprised to learn that Breytenbach thinks the Israelis, a people with a notorious tin ear for the way they sound to foreigners, are nonetheless manipulating American public opinion with fantastic success. But read on in the Breytenbach letter, and you will be diverted to learn that the “used-car salesman doppelganger, Netanyahu, ploys this craft of crude propaganda more openly, as if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public opinion.” While this sort of language does evoke the bad old days, one can look on the bright side: Breytenbach’s trope arguably bolsters the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Even sixty years ago, few people implied that assimilationist Jewish fingers, however dirty they might be when probing and manipulating literal or metaphorical gentile women, were also prehensile. As for Zionists–uniquely blessed with the ability to tweak things with a single finger–well, who knew?
The Politics of Patience
Wesley Hogan’s “Many Minds, One Heart” (Duke University Dissertation, 2000) stands as the freshest work on the Civil Rights Movement since Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Hogan’s dissertation is both a painstaking piece of scholarship and an urgent message to the grassroots.
A Day in the Death
Tune: A Day in the Life (Beatles)
Genius—Not
A knowledgeable hiphop lover’s list of the best rap artists would not include Eminem
Inside the Whale
Kanan Makiya–author of “Republic of Fear” and “Cruelty and Silence”–spoke about the future of Iraq on a panel organized by NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program and the Center for War, Peace and the News Media on November 22, 2002. Arguing against other speakers at the forum, Makiya made a moral case for American intervention in the course of explaining recent developments in the relationship between the Bush administration and Iraqi dissidents. An edited version of his remarks follows along with an exchange between Makiya and Mansour Farhang (who was Iranian ambassador to the UN until he was forced to flee Iran after the fall of the Bani-Sadir government in 1981).
Rivers of Babylon
My text is from the Gospel of Matthew:
“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”
Safe American Home
Drive-By Truckers’ new double CD Southern Rock Opera is the most daring and developed expression of rock and roll attitude since the Clash’s Sandinista. The subject of the Truckers’ Opera is the “duality” – their word – of life in the land where blues began.
The Saddest Song Ever Sung
One of the greatest treasures in my memory is the night Billie Holiday introduced me to Miles Davis and I introduced Billie Holiday to the Beat Generation.
In My Lonely Room
The following thought experiment was inspired, or provoked, by this year’s art scandale, the “Mirroring Evil” exhibit that opened at the Jewish Museum in March; and in particular by Roee Rosen’s installation, which invites us to imagine that we are Eva Braun having a last night of sex with Adolf Hitler:
A Strange and Bitter Spectacle
The James Allen exhibit “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” which opened in New York in 2000 and is now touring the country, deserves more than the pious attention it has received to date.
A Palestinian Gandhi
We asked George Lakey – a longtime proponent of nonviolent direct action – to interview Mubarak Awad – a Palestinian Christian psychologist who organized a nonviolent resistance movement against occupation of Palestinian lands at the end of the 1980’s. Israel expelled him to the United States where he currently runs an NGO based in Washington D.C. – Nonviolence International.
Nothing New Under the Sun
I came here tonight to talk about the response of American intellectuals to the events of September 11—and I use the neutral, meaningless term “events” to start off right where any intellectual response begins, with an attempt to name what took place, or to avoid naming it.
A Child at the Oscars
Sidney Poitier won his Lilies of the Field Academy Award just before my 11th birthday. That event was part of the world opening up to me and changing for everyone.
Al Is Conscience and Tendre Hearte
A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. Maybe it helped to be able to smell the fires that were still consuming the dead – you could do this from Washington Square Park. At approximately the same time, at a college a bit over the city line, where the dead could neither be smelt nor, perhaps, fully imagined, white ribbons instead signaled solidarity with those “faculty and students of color” who felt unsafe in the face of American racist violence.