"Our Addressability": Claudia Rankine's Intervention @ AWP

One event that continues to reverberate now that the 2011 AWP Conference has ended is author and critic Claudia Rankine's "performance of sorts," as she called it, or intervention, as I and others have chosen to call it, concerning Tony Hoagland's racist poem "Change," at the Academy of American Poets' reading (with Charles Wright) on Thursday, January 5, 2011. I was unable to attend, but almost immediately afterward I read Tisa Bryant's short but moving report on it. Several days later, Rankine posted her remarks on her website, and so I will link to them here, and then post Tisa's report. Let me begin by saying I am a huge fan of Rankine's work, but have never had the opportunity to meet her. I hope to someday soon. I also should add that before this I had never read Hoagland's poem, and in general know little about his work, though I have seen his book of essays.

Rankine's powerful, cogent remarks and intervention (click on AWP).  The final two paragraphs:

Let me just say, Claudia Rankine, thank you.

Tisa's original report of the event, which originally appeared on Facebook. I won't excerpt it, since it ought to be read in full, and has been reposted, so I think it's okay to post it here. (I have not included Hoagland's poem, which you can reach via the link above.) Tisa, thank you.

Claudia Rankine at AWP: Afterthoughts on an Emotional Experience

by Tisa Bryant on Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 9:59pm

At the start of her reading at the Omni Hotel, Claudia Rankine said she would have writer Nick Flynn read the following poem by Tony Hoagland, respond herself to the poem, then read Mr. Hoagland's response to her, then end with a closing poem.  And that's what happened.

Context & Notes:
I am not able to fully reproduce Ms. Rankine's response to the poem, or his response to that, so those who were there, or who spoke to Ms. Rankine afterward (I didn't), please add your voices to this.

Mr. Hoagland was Ms. Rankine's colleague at the time "The Change," was published.  Ms. Rankine's response deftly asked questions about what this poem said and meant, to her, to others, said about her, or others.  She began by saying something like, "I don't like to use the word 'racist'..."  but went on to unpack the images of big, black, girl, monstrosity, wrongness, whiteness, paleness, tribalness, Americanness, womanness, collegiality, and more, with the big question, "What the fuck," in trying to make sense of Hoagland's imagery.  She asked repeatedly, "Am I that Black girl?" At some point, she asked Mr. Hoagland what he meant by the poem, and he said that "the poem is for white people."  Then Ms. Rankine began questioning what that meant, or could mean, but was clear that this was her speaking for him in her imagination.  That she could not know for sure.  So she did what perhaps we don't do as often as we should (because we are often shamed for it, somehow.): she asked him what he meant.  I felt it, because it so mirrored my thought process in trying to figure out, "Is that person a racist, or am I...being emotional? Not thinking right?"

For some reason, Mr. Hoagland only had two days, prior to this event Friday, February 4, to respond to the poem, though it was clear to me (though I'm not totally sure now) that Mr. Hoagland was fully aware of and consented to his role in this dialectic in absentia.  He responded that Ms. Rankine was naive in her thinking about race and racism, that it's much worse than she seems to believe or know, that it's a problem how interrogations of race in poetry are often from a brown POV, it's a problem how readers of poems assume the speaker of the poem to be that of the poet, and it's a problem that liberal white guilty people's poems are ineffectual, dishonest and boring.  He said he'd rather get dirty up to his elbows in the muck of humanity (or racism, can't remember) than try to keep himself polite, neat and clean.  He called himself a racist and a misogynist, as well as a single mother, and a string of other identity markers I can't recall now, but were provocative in their complex contradictions.  He also said, "Is this poem for white people?  Perhaps."

Ms. Rankine ended with a poem that centered on the unfulfilled promise of America, and, it seemed to me, our current administration under President Obama, using the same phrase to start each line.  The poem, as did her initial response to Mr. Hoagland, made explicit reference to genocide of indigenous peoples in North America.

Charles Wright followed Ms. Rankine, he being the headliner of the evening, apparently.  In reading his second or third poem, he named a Chinese poet from a particular dynasty.  He said, "I took a line from this Chinese poet's work, then I laundered it.  Then I scalped it."

Ms. Rankine's presentation was bold, inspiring, very calculated, artful.  I was upset, shaken on many levels, by the entire evening, including Charles Wright's reading, but also heartened.  And confused.  As I read back, I find it disturbing how inexact my recounting of Ms. Rankine's words are, in comparison to my recall of Mr. Hoagland's.  The elegance of Ms. Rankine's interrogation of the poem, the context in which she read it, and trying to make meaning of it all, is something I felt as much as heard.  I'm reminded of one of my favorite sayings, about how nothing erases a Black woman's righteous anger faster than a white woman's tears, and here, I can replace tears with "cold, hard logic" or "objectivity," as Mr. Hoagland's response was short, terse, declarative, inelegant.  Or, I'm just a bad listener and can't remember specifics of Ms. Rankine's first response to the poem.  Still, in the construction of her presentation, her response and his, I think, I feel, that there's something quite intentional being performed here, about race and racism, authorship and authority.  I am struck by how quickly the people I was there with dispersed, also in silence, or to a safety.  In hindsight, for myself, silence was safest.  Perhaps still safe.  I hazard here to speak.  Therefore, please note that I am still processing.  So.

Should I, as in Ms. Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, take the "I" to be a fiction, a construction, the speaking voice of a creative piece, not the author herself?  Are Ms. Rankine and Mr. Hoagland in fact in agreement, that Mr. Hoagland is not a racist, but that the poem should be understood not as his voice, but as a simple act of mimesis, the amplifying mirror of white people's racism?  Does his saying "I did it on purpose, it's all intentional," absolve him of responsibility, or free him from any charge of racism, because he calls himself a racist?  Or was he, in my emotional first estimation, responding to Ms. Rankine in a patronizing way, as if she was being an emotional little girl who just wasn't thinking right, seeing right?  Ms. Rankine's presentation certainly made these questions clear, and totally subverted the down home western pastoral romance (my view) of Charles Wright's poems.  Or, I just couldn't listen to them without populating his landscape with Chinese launderers, bloody scalps and hanging trees.

Here is Sarah Jaffe's response, "The Condition of Being Addressable: A Response to Claudia Rankine at AWP." Thank you, Sarah Jaffe. A quote:

Hoagland may be aware of the legacy of racism in this country, but he is unaccountable to the power that that legacy has bequeathed to him. And one aspect of that power is the power to name (“We suffer from the condition of being addressable”). In “The Change,” when Hoagland employed an array of racist, exoticizing stereotypes to describe the black tennis player, he flaunted that power. He used language irresponsibly and stridently, without regard for where it fell. If there is another language, an alternate discourse, that can possibly ever serve as a challenge to the dominant mode of careless naming, it is one that illuminates, at every step how connected we all are to each other, and to the institutions in which we live with, in, and in spite of. That is the language that Claudia Rankine practices and one that I was so grateful and moved to hear.

Here is Laura Hartmark's response, "How Tony Hoagland Renames Hate as Change." Thank you, Laura Hartmark.  A quote:

A poem that addresses race and racism by accurately depicting a reality and asking what can be done to repair what has gone wrong may appropriately be entitled, “Change.” Hoagland’s poem is more appropriately entitled, “Hate.” But to call it what it is, there would have to be an admission of racist hatred, and said admission is sadly absent from the poem.

Lastly, there are some readers who defend the poem by stating that it exposes how things are. To that, I can only quote Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

I am still thinking about all of this, though I think the core of Rankine's response, and Hartmark's critique, offer valuable ways of approaching a work like Hoagland's poem. Claudia Rankine has since posted this open call for responses on her site, so this might be a way of responding:

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want.  But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings.  We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.  

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.


In peace,
Claudia
openletter@claudiarankine.com

Racist Cupcakes? Really?

Today's story about a company caving into complaints about nothing (instead of standing their ground because they did nothing wrong) involves...*spins wheel*...Duncan Hines amid complaints that allege that their commercial for what appeas to be some sort of cupcake frosting is...*spins wheel*...racist.

Before I even get into the ridiculous incident which sparked these ridiculous cries of racism, I have to bring up the point that I always bring up when this happens (and it happens far too frequently). That point being do these people making these claims actually think that Duncan Hines and the makers of this commercial are racist? Do they actually think that Duncan Hines and the makers of this commercial decided this would be a good idea because it was racist? Do they actually think that the makers of this commercial and Duncan Hines thought that the best way to express their racist views was under the guise of trying to sell cupcake frosting? Really? Because if you do think that this commercial is racist and if you do think that any of these things that I just listed are true, then you need to wear a helmet at all times. And not just one of those skull cap helmets, either. I'm talking full noggin, full facial covering helmet. And possibly a suit of armor as well. You are a soft, soft individual. So soft.

Since Duncan Hines was cowardly and, instead of standing up to these morons shouting "Racist cupcake makers!", they have pulled their ad from YouTube. I wanted to include the ad first, have you watch it and then tell you what the problem is that some people wanted to have with it. (Naturally, there's no telling just how many people saw this as a problem. These days, it could have been one. Who knows?) But since the ad isn't there anymore, I'm just going to past the link to it here. So, do me a favor. Watch the video, but don't read anything in the article that accompanies it just yet. Just watch the video and then continue reading. Fair enough? (Come on. I rarely ask anything of you other than to just read my drivel on a daily basis and pass the link along to everyone you know and random strangers. You can do this for me just this once, right?

::: waiting ::: ::: waiting :::

You're back! Nice to see you again! OK, so now you've seen the video. Did you see how it was just oozing and dripping with racism? Did you see how all of those cupcakes were calling each other the N-word? Did you see how the black cupcakes had to sit at the back of the bus? Of course you didn't! Partly because there wasn't a bus, but mostly because there WAS NO RACISM!

I turned to the good folks over there at the New York Daily News to find out what the dealio was. Turns out, there are people out there that think that those cupcakes actually resemble (wait for it) people in blackface. ::: blink ::: ::: blink ::: Wait. I thought that they looked kind of like the claymation California Raisins dudes. Were those racist? They weren't, were they? Nah. I'm pretty sure they weren't. Almost positive. OK, soooo...what now?

Correct. Blackface. I was seriously confused. I still am. They really don't look like they're in blackface to me. Let's look again. Here's a cupcake from the commercial:

And here's "World's Greatest Entertainer" (as he was dubbed back in his heyday) Al Jolson in blackface:

Yeah, I still don't get it. I decided to check other sites to see if there could be any rational light shed on this and sadly, there was not. I did learn of a blog called Racialicious which delved into the subject lightly. And by 'delved' I mean that there were more comments than there were words in the article itself. And those people need my helmets! Holy canoli, I was stunned. Sadly, sadly stunned. The only legitimate point that someone over there made was that the title of this ad was "Hip Hop Cupcakes". There wasn't really any hip-hop involved in the thing, though. I guess if you mention hip-hop, it automatically means that you must be talking about black people? I wonder if there would have been all of this to-do about it if they had simply called it by a different name?

It's chocolate frosting or chocolate glaze or something chocolate on white cake cupcakes! If anything, wouldn't that be a harmony of black and white, coming together in harmony for the sake of all that is delicious? Why is it racist? That's right. It's NOT! Oh, but one person opined "Clearly there are no minorities in the board room where they work on advertising at Duncan Hines." Hmmm. Interesting assumption. And not surprising since you also assume that it's clearly a concerted work of shouting racism across the baked good airwaves. What if there ARE minorities in the board room where they work on advertising at Duncan Hines? Then what?? Is it still racist in your mind, oh-wee-little-commenter? What's your race? It's almost as if it would make you feel better if people actually were racist. It's such an odd thing to want, especially considering how against it you claim to be.

I cannot tell you how angry made-up racism accusations make me. Just because I am white, that doesn't make me a racist. I am tired of defending my non-racism. I am tired of mentioning that I have plenty of friends who are not white. I am tired of hearing the black vs. white argument, as I don't see that there is one within my circle of existence. Yes, I realize that it does exist out there, but how much of that is a continuation of the apparent desire to make SURE that it exists with asinine claims of blatant racism against entities such as the makers of freaking cupcake frosting?!

Screw you, Duncan Hines. You know it's not racist, so why didn't you just say so and let the commercial keep running up on YouTube? Why aren't you releasing statement that declares how angry and incensed you are at any accusation that your company ran a racist commercial? Why aren't you standing up for yourself for what you know is true? I've said it before (and unfortunately, I'm still waiting for it to happen), but I guarantee you that the first company to respond to accusations like this in the manner that I've suggested will be hailed as the retail messiah from sea to shining sea. If Duncan Hines had stood up to these accusations, I would have bought Duncan Hines products for the rest of whatever and I would have recommended them to everyone I know at any given opportunity. Now? Well, now I'm buying Betty Crocker. She hasn't proven herself to be a corporate wussy yet.

A Black Hole Is Not Racist

What's it going to take for the NAACP to completely go away? I'm getting really tired of their completely idiotic accusation of racism this and racism that. For cryin' out loud, they call themselves the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Isn't their name alone kind of racist? Or demeaning? Or something completely against what they always claim that they're for? I was hoping with their latest "Cry racism" moment it would perpetuate their downfall or, at the very least, completely remove any last shred of credibility that they might have actually had. But, unfortunately, that's not going to be the case. No, they're just going to be able to claim that a greeting card about graduation and the solar system is racist and it's going to be removed from all stores. Wait. What?

Welcome to Culver City, California where we learn from Channel 7 that a "...graduation card sold at local stores has been pulled from shelves after a civil rights group...claims the card's micro-speaker plays a greeting that's racist." Huh. It's a Hallmark card, too. I'm not really seeing Hallmark as a "racist" company that would produce "racist" greeting cards. But let's just see what all of the fuss is over, shall we? Then let's all beat our collective heads against a wall as we chant in unison, "We're doomed."

The card features greeting card regulars Hoops and Yoyo. I don't know which one is which, but I don't think that it matters. What matters is what the little critters say to the new graduate. Hoops and Yoyo are on the card and inside, there are references to the planets amongst them. It's a space-planetary sort of theme (with kind of bunny-like-ish caricatures as well). The front of the card states harmlessly (to those who are not morons) "You're graduating? Well, then, it's time to let the world know what's coming." Seems harmless enough, right? Not so fast. It gets stupider worse.

You open up the card (which appears to be the size of a billboard, as the thing is massive) and it states, "But not only the world, NOOOO! We're talking the entire solar system!" Then underneath that it says, "The world is yours, grad." And it also says, "Watch out, Saturn, this grad is going to run rings around you!" Get it? Rings? 'Cause Saturn has rings? See? How it's funny? Yeah, OK. Moving right along.

It's clearly a space theme. It's about the graduate being able to take over the world with all of their new found (and extremely expensive) knowledge that they've just been acknowledged as having appropriately completed. Remember that. A space theme. So when the card's annoying little microchip plays the greeting, either Hoops or Yoyo (it's unclear as to who is responsible for this atrocity) says, "Hey world, we are officially putting you on notice." And the other one responds with a childish, "Yeaaahhhh!" Then the first one says, "And you black holes, you are soooo ominous." Meanwhile, the other one, who appears to have inhaled a great deal of helium, cackles, "Hahahaha!" Then the first one pipes up again with, "And you planets? Watch your back." See? Racist.

Wait. What now? Racist? Correct. Racist. See, the dimwits over there at the Los Angeles division of the NAACP claim that the card "...was very demeaning to African American women." It was. Um...de...demeaning? To African American women? Are you sure? Oh, they're sure! It's right there where "...it made reference to African American women as whores". It did?? When? When it said "black holes", that is correct.

Wait a minute. Are you dry shaving me? Yes, they are claiming that the card says "black whores". One woman, a one Minnie Hatley of the aforementioned Los Angeles NAACP, claims, "You hear the 'r' in there. 'Whores,' not, 'holes.' The 'r' is in there." Um, no, you don't and no, it's not. Another moron claimed, "It sounds like a group of children laughing and joking about blackness, again." Again?! When were they doing it before? You folks don't seem to understand something. It's not that we don't like you because you're black. It's that we don't like you because you're ridiculous. I couldn't care less what color you are, but I certainly care if you're a moron. Good Lord, people....

Now, Hallmark sent the news station a transcript of what the card said. That wasn't enough. No, they were still adamant that it said "whores" and not "holes". Even though both you and I and everyone else with half of a brain can hear that it says "holes". Never the less, what do you think Hallmark is going to do about it? If you guessed the answer that I most wanted to hear, that being absolutely nothing, then you'd be sadly mistaken. Hallmark is a weak and cowardly company and has bowed to the NAACP and their ludicrous claim that this card is racist. Hallmark is "...now notifying all of its stores to pull the card. Walgreens and CVS are doing the same." Oh, and did I mention that the card has been out for three years? Yeah, it has. But NOW they're going to pull it because it is suddenly racist? Doomed, I tell you. Doomed.

Well, those are three companies that I have no need to purchase goods from in the future. I'm so sick of any one person or any one group coming up with the most outrageous claims about something and having the company cave in to their ridiculous outrage. Seriously now. Because it would make perfect sense that a graduation card would mention black whores, right? That seems like a reasonable message to have in a graduation card that's been sold for the past three years. "Hey, black whores! You're not so ominous!" Sure, that makes perfect sense that it would say that. Oh, wait. No, it wouldn't! Because it didn't. UN-believable. The link to this ridiculousness is here. Good luck not wanting your life to immediately end after viewing it.

October Equality March + Carter's Comments + Sports Roundup

A while back I believed I'd mentioned that I'd heard there'd be a march in Washington for Marriage Equality this fall. One of my former students, sailor and author Miriam (of the bread recipes, who also introduced me to "fan fic"!), asked that I post a more definitive link to the event, Equality Across America, which is set to take place on October 10-11. I don't think I'll be able to attend, because I'll be returning from a black LGBTQ lit conference in Austin, but everyone who supports true and real equality should attend if they can.

As you also may know, earlier this week Congressman Jerrold Nadler proposed repealing the abominable Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). If this is an issue that matters to you, please do call or email your Congressperson to urge her or him to consider cosponsoring and supporting this bill (along with the public option, investigations into the Bush-Cheney torture regime, repeal of the Patriot Act and Big Oil subsidies, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and anything else you believe is pertinent).

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The right-wing and mainstream corporate media's (MCM) hyperventilating reactions to President Jimmy Carter's statement that racism underlines a great deal of the conservative outrage towards President Barack Obama and his policies do not surprise me at all. Any thoughtful or considered discussion of race, let alone racism, in the wider media always dissipates like iron steam. What frustrates me, however, is the MCM's continual conflation of "race" with "racism," and their focus on the former, rather than the latter. The MCM cannot seem to untangle the two, willfully I often think, because speaking about the former allows them a way out of addressing the pervasiveness of the latter. Speaking about the latter might also force them to register several premises, which include that those in the MCM also belong to certain races and have experiences shaped by this fact, and that in regular social and political discourse, some people are raced and some are not, and that doing so often occurs through the prism of racism. What's I also find frustrating is the way that the MCM reduces every issue to numbing simplicity, especially when "race" is broached, and in doing so attempts to attribute it to a single cause, as if truly complex economic, political and social phenomena were as easily diagnosed as the mumps.

Bob Somerby, for many years now, and Glenn Greenwald and others more recently have been pointing out that the right wing, with tremendous MCM help, fomented extreme hatred against our last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. (One could go further back, of course; shortly before Kennedy's assassination, "Wanted" posters went up in parts of Dallas.) Almost immediately upon Clinton's election, the nutcases, often funded by extremely wealthy individual and corporate interests, some of the same ones behind the Teabaggers, did everything they could to ruin Clinton's presidency, often in conjunction with the Republican opposition. If anyone thinks it's possible to minimize the craziness Clinton faced, culminating the multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, aided eagerly by The New York Times, and for which both President Clinton and Hillary Clinton were exonerated, just recall the ultimate GOP-led act, the attempted impeachment in 1998. I can vividly remember when the uproar among Democrats from that insane spectacle seemed so great as to ever prevent anyone from the GOP ever winning the presidency again, and yet a year later, the GOP and MCM (reporters and columnists at the NY Times and Washington Post, figures from NBC, Fox, etc.) began their "War on Gore," and we ended up with the Supreme Court coup that installed the disaster known as George W. Bush on us.

I mention this history because while I am--as are, I'm sure, quite a few people around the US--quite aware that racism and white supremacy are always in operation in this society, I do believe that attributing the current derangements of the right solely or even primarily to racism denies this prior history, which was still firmly in place when Clinton left office. Racism, while a major source, is still only one of many behind the behavior on display at the town hall rallies, the recent Teabagger rally in Washington, and above all, on the right-wing/corporate propaganda headquarters-channel, Fox News. Had Hillary Clinton won, we wouldn't be seeing the same sort of direct racist and racialist animus (the Curious George T-shirts, the "birther" push, the signs of Obama as a witch doctor, etc.), though racism would be in the mix, as it was during the Clinton years (remember the obsessive push to end welfare, even though corporate welfare reached insane heights under Bush, and affirmative action, which, studies in the late 1990s showed, primarily benefited white women?). With a President Hillary in office, we probably would be seing even more and outlandish displays of sexism and misogyny, and not just from the right, but from the MCM, whose members (Chris Matthews is notorious) have long been among the worst offenders. But attacks on undocumented immigrants and "producerist" arguments, prettified by the likes of David Brooks, wouldn't be unthinkable.

Let me be clear: my aim is not to minimize the particular foci of some of the worst attacks on Obama, but to note that we had the militias, the anti-government nuts, the millenialists, and so on in full force from 1992-2000, alongside a GOP Congressional caucus that took political and personal destruction of the sitting president and complete repeal of the New Deal legacy as its organizing principle. Newt Gingrich did not simply want to stop Clinton's presidency in its tracks, he wanted to shred Clinton personally. Think of some of the most outspoken figures on the right during the impeachment drama and the revelation of Clinton's affair. When their efforts failed repeatedly, this led, as we now see, to even more thuggish tactics, such as installing a president and Congress, by hook or crook (or voting machine) who could just dynamite the government entirely. According to a recent Census report, according to almost every economic indicator the vast majority of Americans finished the 8 years of Bush's presidency worse off than before. The wealthiest .1 percent and many corporate interests--or at least the people running them, if not the shareholders--were the economic losers.

To quote The Atlantic on this topic:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

I'm hardly saying anything that most J's Theater readers don't already know, but I mention this record, all but buried by the MCM (tell me, when have you seen any of the major "liberal" or "progressive" MCM reporters or columnists discuss this record at any length, to inform the majority of people out there what's going on) to say that one of the great sources of the rage on display at last weekend's rally, is ignorance, which the MCM have only helped to deepen rather than dispel.

The reasons behind this are numerous, but one central one is that corporate interests (just like our Congress, which willingly works hand in glove with them) benefit by keeping people as misinformed as possible. There is also, as this telling clip of CNBC's scandal-plagued anchor Maria Bartiromo demonstrates, the fact of media personalities' own gross ignorance (again, cf. Chris Matthews). But rather than go on, I'll post the clip below, which has been making its rounds on the Net. It illustrates perhaps more powerfully than anything I might say here what I'm talking about. Please watch it till the end, because it shows, for a rare change, a reporter breaking the supposedly objective, journalistic frame and politely stating and clarifying facts for some of these people. Unfortunately, this happens so very rarely that it's hard not to be cynical. Whatever the source of the MCM's ongoing silence, it's a major problem and will continue to be for the rest of Obama's (or any Democrat's) terms. What's even more unfortunate is that I don't get the sense that he or many in his team, like many in Congress, have any clue or, worse, care at all about this. The results, however, could be something worse than the Bush administration. Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, Rick Santorum, and any number of other very dangerous characters are lurking out there, and with a heavily corporated-funded campaign with pseudo-populist aspects, we'd all be in very serious trouble. 2001-2008 might end up looking like the Coolidge years.

(Please watch to the end to see the reporter challenge the protesters' ignorance.)


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On the sports tip, the New York Jets have started the NFL season 2-0, defeating their nemeses, the New England Patriots 16-9 today, preventing a comeback by the media darling Tom Brady. The Big Green have a sharp new coach, Rex Ryan, and one of the most talented young quarterbacks in the league, rookie Mark Sanchez (at right, Nick Laham/Getty Images) of USC. The Jets don't have the toughest schedule this season, so they could conceivably go 12-4 or 13-3. That is, if they can keep playing like they are now, or even improve. Then the playoffs will be more than a mirage.

The Saint Louis Rams, however, are 0-2, losing 9-7 to a shaky Washington squad, and look no better than their 2-14 predecessors of last season. In fact, they look worse. 10 years ago they were known as the league's highest scoring teams, with iffy defense. Now they have middling defense and no scoring capability at all. Their quarterback is sacked at will, they cannot convert drives into runs, and they make countless mistakes game after game. I am starting to think the new ownership may be trying to once again ship a team out of St. Louis towards more financially beneficial (southern California?) climes. Looking at their schedule, they face both pushover and tough teams (though no AFC East teams, nor the Giants or Eagles, thankfully), but they still could conceivably go 0-16. They do meet the Detroit Lions at midseason, so a 1-15 outcome isn't impossible.

In the MLB, the Yankees have the best record in the AL, at 95-55. Perennial All Star Derek Jeter has broken Lou Gehrig's team hit record, CC Sabathia (at right, AP) is powering his way to a Cy Young Award at 18-7, and the team overall, like the finely tuned machine it has been for long stretches over its history, is humming along under manager Joe Girardi. The other top teams in the AL are the Boston Red Sox, who lead the Wild Card race (again), the Detroit Tigers, and the mouthful but ever talented Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The Yankees and the Angels are the teams to beat, but the Red Sox are always dangerous.

In the NL, the Saint Louis Cardinals are again atop the NL West, though they don't have the league's best record. That honor goes to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cardinals do, however, have the league's best pitching--two starters, Adam Wainwright (18-8, 2.59 ERA), and Chris Carpenter (16-4, 2.43 ERA), are leading contenders for the NL Cy Young--and its best overall hitter in Albert Pujols (47 home runs, 119 runs scored, 127 runs batted in, .328 average), a latter day Stan Musial. He and the pitching have kept the team afloat; the last week the Cardinals have staggered more than swaggered. The Dodgers, however, have more balance across their lineup, and could be dangerous in the playoffs. The other top teams are the East leaders, the Philadelphia Phillies, last year's World Series champions, who look powerful enough to go all the way, and the current Wild Card leading Colorado Rockies, who always have a strong home-field advantage and great batters. I'm rooting for the Cardinals, but this quartet is a toss-up.

The Cardinals vs. the Yankees (which last occurred in 1964, with the Cardinals winning four games to three) would be my preferred World Series matchup. Will it happen? Let's see.

Bloomberg Will Win + Gates Arrest

Was it really 20 years ago that David Dinkins was elected New York's first, and so far only, black mayor? I listened to him chatting with Brian Lehrer on WNYC this morning, talking about his election and that era, when New York was shifting from the often dangerous and gritty but also very culturally exciting city it had been for more than a decade and a half into the increasingly prosperous, safe, museum-like, rich people-friendly (but economically teetering) metropolis it is today. (And to make it even more rich-people friendly, the city is currently shipping homeless families down South, to Paris, to Puerto Rico, to Johannesburg, anywhere but here. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has articulated it as simply as possible: "We love rich people.")

According to at least one poll that's been touted over the last few days, Mayor Bloomberg's 22-point lead has slipped to 10 points over Comptroller Bill Thompson. Were Thompson able to gain any traction and assemble anything close to Dinkins's original coalition, or to counter the cynicism that Bloomberg's imperial mayoralty has generated, he might squeak by. Yet nearly everyone I speak with assumes Thompson doesn't have a chance of winning, especially given Bloomberg's financial dominance and the lukewarm support from the White House (at this point should we be surprised that Barack Obama is backing a neoliberal over someone who is truly liberal?). As a result, I predict Bloomberg will probably get his third term, which he finagled from the appalling supine City Council, and many New Yorkers will just shrug and not blink an eye. The devil you know is better than...? And when you have vastly more money than anyone else around, you can usually get your way. Just ask Goldman Sachs.

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I had been refraining from publicly commenting on the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. incident or arrest for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I figured there'd be a lot more swift and penetrating online commentaries--from bloggers, not the legacy media, that is--than anything I might offer. I did respond to a few private queries to say that I immediately read it as another awful racist spectacle. (I mean, can anyone name any other Harvard professor--full professor, holding a chair, internationally known, etc.--who has been arrested after identifying himself or herself, in his home, in the over 350+ years of that university's existence?)

I added that the situation really did defied explanation and reconfirmed yet again that racism, even in one of the most liberal cities in the United States, is alive and well. Others have said as much, and have pointed out that racial profiling goes on 24/7/365; that countless men of color are arrested and jailed disproportionately; that we have a prison-industrial situation that is awry; that we do not live in a police state and no one should internalize authoritarianism nor be arrested for exercising her or his First Amendment rights; and, as Stanley Fish beautifully put it in a July New York Times blog post, this isn't the first time that Professor Gates has had to endure racist nonsense. Of course this prior history will be lost or ignored by the broader media. Whether we're talking about college professors or former National Security Advisors, he isn't the only one and, unfortunately, he won't be the last.

I also suggested to C that President Obama's response to Chicago Tribune reporter Lynn Sweet's question about the Gates imbroglio would be all the legacy media focused on over the next few days. Unfortunately they proved me right.

Gates's arrest reminded me a situation that a very dear friend of mine, no longer in academe, experienced shortly after he got his first teaching job. A young black man with a Ph.D. from one of the most prestigious universities, he took a job at a major urban research university that is known, as academic institutions go, for being pretty progressive. Yet within his first year of being hired, he was stopped several times by security guards who did not believe that he was a faculty member. Not that it matters, but he always carried himself professionally and found it very hard to accept that this occurred; when he asked colleagues if they had had similar experiences, they told him they hadn't. What made the situation really upsetting for him, and what we discussed more than once, was that he worried if he complained (he did, I believe) about this treatment that it might adversely affect him, particularly with the dean of his division, his senior colleagues, and perhaps the institution itself. The fear of being labeled a troublemaker, a whiner and complainer, too sensitive, "uppity" (as some called Obama before the election, and as many an outspoken person of color or woman has been called in the past), a "racist" (as Gates himself has now been labeled by people on the net and anonymous Net posters), and so on, were all things he feared, not because because he invested any of them with truth, but because he knew that others might, and that people experiencing the kind of profiling he was encountering had been so tagged, and saw their careers derailed, in the past. If I recall correctly, he received sympathetic responses from all quarters, and as it turned it, he left the institution before his tenure case came up. But I did think of this situation almost as soon as I'd heard about what Gates experienced.

It also made me think of that horrible joke about Colin Powell (or any famous black person) walking down a darkened DC street: "What do you call him when he steps into the shadows?" Well, you know the answer. And the violence that could easily be enacted upon his body also knows none of the boundaries erected, however tenuously, by the social, political or economic capital he possesses.

I predict this incident and its aftermath will all be forgotten about soon enough, after the moment of spectacle passes, and the many issues raised by will be subsumed, as so many things are these days at the speed of light (or a new scandal or brouhaha), into anecdote.

"I was myself within in the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see or hear." -- Frederick Douglass, quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (Oxford, 1989), p. xxiv, p. 97.

(Associate) Justice Sotomayor + Michael Moreci + Twitteration

On the Cave Canem listserve, one of the poets asked about impressions of the US Senate hearings to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor (right, Charles Dharapak / Associated Press) as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, and here's my response:

Based on the little of her testimony I've heard or seen, I've found Justice Sotomayor very impressive. She's incredibly smart, knowledgeable, cool under fire, and charming. I want her on the nation's highest court. Unfortunately during the hearings she's had to deal with lots of nonsense and some outright racist crap from several Republicans (Tom Coburn quoting Desi Arnaz's Ricky Ricardo character in dialect today; Jeff Sessions, a well known racist, asking her why she didn't vote the same way as a conservative Puerto Rican judge because they were both Puerto Rican; John Kyl ranting at her for 10 minutes before she could get a word in at all; etc.). It's disgraceful. I really do hope Latinos and everyone else is taking note of this stuff. On top of this, GOP-related entities are running ads calling the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund a "terrorist" organization, and various high profile Republicans have trashed Sotomayor in a way they'd never do even for a white liberal judge they disliked.

Why on earth is Frank Ricci being brought in at all? Why not bring in all the winning and losing plaintiffs in cases she's adjudicated? It's just more nonsense.

One thing I wish someone in the media would just articulate concerning her "Wise Latina" comment is that most people in this country--i.e., the vast majority of us--who are not straight upper-middle-class and rich white males--the people who still run and control the majority of everything in this society (and many others)--must learn to see the world as they do, at some point, to advance in the society while also developing our own perspectives. As a working-class woman of Latino heritage who has risen all the way to an appellate court judge now on the cusp of joining the Supreme Court of the United States, she would have had to learn to see the world, and apply many of those lessons, in ways that many of the people currently on the courts do and cannot not. I don't see her statement as controversial at all, but I also don't understand why more people don't break it down, perhaps even more simply than I have.

It is a form of bad Kabuki theater, of course. The GOP knows she will be confirmed. They know they are turning off latinos, other people of color, women, Obama supporters, anyone with any sense of decency. But the point is to create a spectacle that warms their base, roughs up Obama and the ever timorous Democrats a bit, and wounds her if possible. It's also catnip for the media, who live for this sort of thing, as it gives them an opportunity to pontificate ad nauseam using whatever talking points, shreds of cocktail party chatter, and vaguely digested commentariat and blog postings they've come across. And they also get to justify trotting out real nuts like Pat "Putzi" Buchanan, an avowed white supremacist who should have been retired a long time ago.

This is what I wrote on the CC listserve about Putzi, who is once again at its highest pitch. I'm going to ask this, though I already know the answer: could any black person, any latino, any asian american, even any woman, go on like this man does year after year and still be given a public platform as MSNBC does with him?

Randall H., I don't know if you recall when Pat Buchanan ran for the presidency, but he was basically running a Nazi-esque annex for the GOP. Years ago he propagandized for J. Edgar Hoover and circulated smears against Martin Luther King Jr. The man wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and has always been a notorious race baiter, anti-Semite, and white supremacist. Over the years his comments about black folks, latinos, Jews, feminists and women in general, and LGBTQ folks have gone beyond hateful. He has often spewed his racist crap to major journalists and media outlets, without penalty. It never ceases to astonish me that someone who is such an outright, virulent white supremacist is given carte-blanche to appear at will on a major cable TV station, but he is, and the hosts just smile and wink and act like he's not so horrendous. At this point I can't imagine what he might do that would lead to his banning, but then again, whatever that is, it would have to be beyond the pale. Literally.

I look forward to the day, very soon, when Justice Sotomayor is confirmed. Perhaps Buchanan will do us all a favor and spontaneously combust before, if not then.

+++

On another note, I wanted to give props to one of my former graduate students, Michael Moreci. I know Michael primarily as a fiction writer and journalist, but it turns out that he's also a talent of considerable note in the comics/graphic writing world, especially, as he says on his blog, in the UK. His forthcoming graphic novel, with art by Monty Borror, is entitled Quarantine, and will be published by Insomnia Publications in the UK. Insomnia's website describes the book like this:

Quarantine follows a group of survivors trapped in a small town in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan shortly after a biological plague is released into the water supply. This plague turns a person into a homicidal war machine, which forces the borders to close, leaving our band of survivors to fight for their lives.

If you go to his blog, you can see some of the work itself. Congratulations to him.

+++

I remarked about Twitter about a week ago, but I can say that I got the fastest response ever based on a recent tweet. I noted that the PATH system usually reserves the cleaner, less crowded trains for Hoboken-bound travelers during rush hour, sending two for every one of the dirtier, more sardine-packed trains to Journal Square and Newark (of course). This is nothing new, and I've complained about it for years now. It was especially maddening during the years I commuted daily into New York City. But all it took was one tweet stating this, out into the vast and ever growing upper canopy of twittersong out there (and mind you, I had exactly 5 followers at the time, 3 of whom are marketing Twitterbots), and the PATH folks responded. Not of course by promising to improve service or doing so, but with a tweet urging me to sign up for their tweet feeds.

Perhaps if I complain a bit more or organize a mass tweet, they might take note? I hear it is working for airline travelers, so why not public transportation corporations or public utilities?

Vile Bellow + Roiling Rhetoric/Obamaphobia + Manchester United Wins

I actually had to laugh at this dithyramb to one of the most overtly reactionary, yet critically praised US novels of the 20th century. Do you know which one I'm talking about? If not, it's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow's relentlessly grim, culturally pessimistic rant, a toxic abyss of fear, anxiety, loathing and hate whose discourse wouldn't be out of place in a volume by Spengler or Weininger, a cobbled-together brew of skewed Platonism and Niezschism, whose objects of hatred and disgust are women (naturally) and Negroes (ibid.), and whose climax involves a scene that has few peers in American literature: a tall, smartly dressed, anarchic and diabolical black thief, or, as Bellow describes him, an "African prince or great black beast . . . seeking whom he might devour," whom the helpless Mr. Sammler has been observing manipulating and robbing poor white bus riders, many of them elderly, over a series of weeks. This embodiment of the racist and sexist unrepressed corners poor Sammler and, in an apotheosis of countless repellant fantasies and nightmares, doesn't stab or shoot or bludgeon him; he flashes him with a large, black, uncut penis, before tucking it away and fleeing.

The novel, a transcript of racist, misgonyistic and classist panic and social declinism, has to be read to be believed--for a copy go to the library, please, don't patronize the Bellow estate on this one--and you may draw your own conclusions, but really, it's so over the top that whenever I read someone lauding--and this reviewer goes so far as to claim that the "black" crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, attributable to the Enlightenment (I kid you not!), liberalism, etc., and not the particular socioeconomic and political conditions of that era, approximated the terror of the Nazi Holocaust!-- it for any reason other than the felicities of Bellow's prose and his materialist prescience, alarm bells go off concerning the reviewer. In this case, I consider the source. But I also say, if someone suggests to you that racism ended long ago or, despite the many cases studies available even in just the current presidential campaign, do point them in the direction of Magnet's review. I can think of several German publications from the late 1930s in which it would fit without much trouble, just as there are a number of "mainstream" news organs today where it wouldn't be out of place. I'm just surprised it hasn't been elevated to canonical status by the far and neocon right, but then again, I guess there's always time, especially when Obama is elected President. I doubt Magnet and his clique will worry about carrying it around in brown paper covers then.

===

Speaking of similar rants, this is another gem that you might almost think was an Onion piece, though it's clearly in keeping with the widespread rhetoric on display these days. (In addition to being a homophobe, she also doesn't have a high opinion of...women!) But then, Pat Buchanan (whom I used to call "Putzi" when he was running for office some years ago and giving his Enoch Powell-esque speeches, which, as some wag once noted, were "better in the original German") is a regular "mainstream" commenter on multiple MSNBC shows, so what do I know? I mean, this is a man who, as a colleague noted, uttered the other night without shame or irony hat voters chose Hillary Clinton because she was one of "us," rather than Obama, who was one of "them." Does it get any more volkisch than that?

OBAMAPHOBIA 3.0 (Obama as "Apostate"--Again)
And we ignore this sort of smear at our peril. This is attempt no. 2. The first was in the New York Times, while this one is in the Christian Science Monitor. (This article is now linked all over the web, to blogs, right-wing sites, you name it. That's the point. Is it psy ops or white ops?) Not Fox News, not the Washington Times, not some right-wing rag. That's the point. By printing trash like this in "mainstream," "establishment" publications, no matter how utterly trash it is, the trash gets legitimated.

When the swiftboating begins in earnest, please don't say it took you by surprise. They have been laying the groundwork for over a year.

===

Au revoir, Florent!

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Manchester United defeated Chelsea 1-1 on penalty kicks in this year's European Championships. I didn't have a favorite in this contest, being an Arsenal fan. Here are some photos. From the London Times Online:


Christiano Ronaldo heads the opening goal for Manchester United (Graham Hughes/The Times)

The effort from Frank Lampard hits the back of the Manchester United net (Marc Aspland/The Times)

Manchester United players mob goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar after his save wins them the Champions League (Graham Hughes/The Times)

Amerikkka, the Beautiful

Plus ça change, SAMO ™.

The chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas called Wednesday for state Sen. Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, to apologize for e-mail comments attributed to the Senate GOP leader by a television station.

[...]

In the e-mail on the television station’s Web site, the message attributed to Altes states that he’s for “sending the illegals back but we know that is impossible.

“ We are where we were with the black folks after the revolutionary war [sic]. We can’t send them back and the more we p *** them off the worse it will be in the future. So what do we do,” the e-mail states. “I say the governor needs to try to enforce the law and sign the letter of understanding... and at least we can send the troublemakers back. Sure we are being overrun but we are being outpopulated by the blacks also. What is the answer, only time will tell.”