The latest issue of Counterpunch quotes a Nashville Tennessean article that documents how much-publicized “anti-terrorism expert” Steven Emerson has never shown any evidence that he knows anything at all about terrorism, but that he has made a great deal of money by smearing and persecuting certain law-abiding Muslims.
The same issue cites another Tennessee newspaper article much less favorably. In September, the Memphis Commercial Appeal recently ran a story labeling photographer Ernest Withers (1922-2007) as an “FBI mole” inside the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That piece went so far as to insinuate that Withers may have been complicit in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Junior. Other news outlets picked the story up, claiming that Withers had been exposed as a “closely supervised, paid informant.” Counterpunch‘s Daniel Wolff read the documents on which the Commercial Appeal based its story, finding that none of them supports any of the inflammatory charges against Withers. For example, the articles claim that Withers gave the FBI a list of names of organizers of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis; that charge is technically true, in the sense that Withers helped put together the press release in which those organizers announced their names to the public. The rest of the charges are even less well-founded. It’s a shame that so distinguished a figure as Dick Gregory took the Commercial Appeal‘s story at face value and called Withers a “thug,” a “Judas,” and “a guy hired by the FBI to destroy us.”
Withers’ photos played a crucial role in raising public awareness of the civil rights movement; the Panopticon Gallery has a fine collection of them, viewable here. This one shows Dr. King’s funeral procession:
Funeral Procession for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior; photograph by Ernest C. Withers (courtesy of Panopticon Gallery)
This article by Shikha Dalmia makes some of the points I tried to express in the notes I posted here a few weeks ago under the title “The Economic Argument.” Two key passages are these: “Markets don’t reward merit; they reward value—two very different things.” And “The idea that there is no god (or some secular version of him) meting out cosmic justice through the market’s invisible hand is unsettling, even to market advocates, but it shouldn’t be. It opens up the possibility of a defense of markets that is, as it were, more marketable.” In other words, when economists say that market competition tends toward rationality they are not saying the same thing Plato says when he imagines a form of learning that culminates in a vision of absolute truth. Efficient social structures may emerge from market competition, but there is no guarantee that these structures will exemplify justice or reveal the secrets of the cosmos.
The French… long ago recognised their defeat by Germany in 1940 as permanent, and resolved to live with it in return for prosperity and the outward appearance of grandeur. That, enshrined in the Elysee Treaty of 1963, is the unspoken pact at the heart of the EU.
It may be easy to dismiss anything published in the Mail, especially when it is harsh toward the French and the Germans. But is this not in fact a very plausible description of the last 70 years of French policy?
This reference by Tsaurah Litzky prompted me to look up Tuli Kupferberg‘s song “Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb.” There was something startling about all the popup windows inviting me to download “Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb” as a ringtone. The youtube post below is a radio conversation with still photos. I found a transcript of the conversation here.
It’s interesting to me that the caller tries to use the same psychologizing explanations to dismiss Tuli’s anti-militarism that Tuli uses to jeer at militarism.
Several articles and columns analyze the results of the 2010 US national election. The common theme of all these pieces is that the Democratic Party’s losses were due, not to any excess of ambition in its leaders’ programs, but to their timidity. I think the best writing on the magazine’s site is an item not in the print issue, JoAnn Wypijewski’s column about the Delaware Senate race in which anti-sex crusader Christine O’Donnell met with a crushing defeat. Opening with the observation that victorious Democrat Chris Coons didn’t bother to appear with any unionized workers or other progressive mainstays at his victory celebration. For Wypijewski, the resulting images of the senator-elect with his fellow millionaires go a long way towards explaining why so many working people could rally to the support of rightists like O’Donnell. Wypijewski’s closing paragraph is forceful:
Before it was the toast of the Tea Party, O’Donnell’s campaign was the revenge of the discarded and ignored, the people who fell by the side of the road while the economy was busy making bankers and call center clerks and IT specialists; while it was battering organized labor and with it a sense of class consciousness and direction, sorting out the winners and letting the losers fend for themselves. Christine O’Donnell was their avatar and heroine, and if she goes on to TV celebrity and wealth, those who identified with her most fervently will probably view her rise the way one would a success in the family. They will no more disappear because of her defeat than the conditions that produced them.
Elsewhere in the issue, Stuart Klawans’ reviews several recent movies. I would mention his harshly negative review of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. I am generally opposed to movies by Clint Eastwood, and this one sounds as bad as the rest. But I was intrigued by Klawans’ description of the ghosts whom Eastwood depicts as haunting his characters:
Clint Eastwood has long been interested in ghosts and revenants of the avenging kind, as you may see from Pale Rider, Hang ‘Em High and even Unforgiven. From certain broad hints in Mystic River and Gran Torino, you may also guess that Eastwood is not much interested in the consolations of religion. So it’s not surprising that when he set himself to make Hereafter, a movie about intimations of a nondenominational, do-gooder ghost world, the only parts that turned out to be convincing were the eruptions of violence and the sly dirty jokes.
The opening eruption, which leaves the rest of the movie limp in its wake, is a special-effects extravaganza, in which a tsunami roars across a tropical resort island, sweeping a visiting French journalist (Cécile de France) to her temporary death. The flood is vivid, detailed, tactile and unforgettable. So too is the journalist’s recovery, which involves vomiting perhaps a quart of water. So much the worse, then, for her brief intervening glimpse of the Beyond: a cloudy, color-drained nonplace streaked with dark, out-of-focus figures.
It sounds like Eastwood is pushing a conception of the afterlife rather like those I have recently noted in Ambrose Bierce, Lila Burns, and David Malki.
On Halloween, I posted about Ambrose Bierce’s idea of ghosts as beings who come from nowhere, go nowhere, and are powerless to play a direct role in human life. I suggested that Bierce might have been expected to come up with an idea like this, given that his religious background was a self-conscious Protestantism that made a point of renouncing notions like Purgatory and intercessory prayer. Bierce grew up hearing that at the moment of death, a soul passes either to Heaven or to Hell. With that belief as the starting-point for his thoughts about the afterlife, how could Bierce have crafted a drama of any substance for the dead to enact? How could he have attributed to them the power to influence our lives?
Similar thoughts seem to have been working lately in the mind of cartoonist David Malki. The four most recent installments of his Wondermark have dealt with ghosts. Here’s one from earlier this week:
Bierce has his ghost explain that the spirits of the dead are “invisible even to ourselves, and to one another”; on rare occasions, she says, “we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.” Perhaps the ghost in this comic is under the impression that she is communicating with the medium, who does not really hear her at all but is deceiving her and his clients; or perhaps the medium does hear her and is faithfully reporting what he hears, which is distorted in the way that Bierce’s ghost had complained her attempts to communicate with the living had been distorted.
You don’t often hear the names of Susie Bright and Steve Sailer linked (though apparently they both commented on the same article once, Sailer here and Bright here) but the two have each written insightful pieces on the 2010 US national election. Here is Bright’s piece; here is Sailer’s.
The differences are obvious; while Bright’s dire prediction #4 is that “Racist appeals to quarantine, imprison, deport, and execute will become unrelenting. Look forward to pronouncements like, ‘I’m not a bigot, but brown and bearded people have GOT to be go!’ Four talking heads will then agree on every media channel,” Sailer argues that population growth resulting from high levels of immigration has raised the average cost of living in the US, then predicts that the newly elected Republican politicians will move to raise those levels still higher.
Nonetheless, there’s actually a good deal of overlap in their views. Both see politicians as spokespersons for powerbrokers behind the scenes; Bright says that “Female GOP candidates are the sign of one thing: The Shitty PR Job that girls always get, while patriarchs elsewhere pull the strings. It’s a sign of how little candidates are worth,” while Sailer explains the reelection of Nevada’s unpopular but well-connected Senator Harry Reid by asking “Could it be possible that some residents of Las Vegas are less motivated by principle than by money? I know it sounds crazy. But I think we have consider that disillusioning possibility about Vegasites.” Both dread a future in which whites will vote as an ethnic bloc; in her dire prediction #14, Bright declares that whites who see the Republicans as the white party are deluded, since it is controlled by people who care only about the color of money. Sailer wouldn’t disagree, but he predicts that whites will vote as an ethnic bloc as they move toward minority status in the USA. “You’d prefer not to live in a country where whites vote like a minority bloc? Me too! But maybe we should have thought about that before putting whites on the long path to minority status through mass immigration.”
1. Al Wood, proprietor of the magnificent Ukulele Hunt, disclaims any interest in politics, but he has a post up about copyright law that everyone should read. He calls for a scrapping of the 95-year term of protection that is now standard in the developed world, and a return to the once-standard renewable 14 year term.
People began getting worried about all these tests. In order to pacify the people, the Atomic Energy Commission issued a statement- this was the beginning of 1955- saying you didn’t need to worry at all about the fallout because the dose which people in the United States received from the tests was not more than from a chest X-ray.
Most people didn’t know how much radiation you get from a chest X-ray. I knew… [A]fter this statement, I thought this was terribly dangerous.
3. A new article about T S Eliot in Commentary asks “But might it be allowed that one can write or say anti-Semitic things without being an anti-Semite? Eliot is guilty of the former, but does not, I think, stand guilty of the latter.” The major theme of the piece is the great difficulty his Calvinist heritage left the Tse-Tse in his attempts to enjoy life. Certainly a man who made several well-publicized anti-Semitic remarks, then earnestly declared anti-Semitism to be a sin, would seem to be an example of someone not having fun.
4. Seats in the US Senate are not apportioned by population, with the result that a candidate can lose by a landslide in one state, while candidates in other states can receive fewer votes and win elections.
One of Ambrose Bierce’s most famous stories is “The Moonlit Road.” Three narrators describe the same killing. The third narrator is the victim, speaking through a medium. Two of the victim’s remarks suggests that Bierce had worked out some sort of a theory about what it’s like to be a ghost:
Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know this well, we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to ourselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we break the spell — we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.
A bit later, she elaborates on this:
You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair.
While I’m at it, I should mention John Zmirak’s recent Halloween essay. Who likes Halloween? Radical traditionalist Catholics, that’s who likes Halloween. Zmirak expresses a measure of sympathy for anti-Halloween Protestants:
Some homeschooling friends of mine confessed to me that they felt torn over whether or not to let their son dress up and go trick-or-treating; their Protestant friends kept telling them that this holiday was pagan or even Satanic. And given their theology, you can see their point: The souls of the dead are either in Heaven — in which case they’re not walking the earth and need not be appeased, represented, mocked, or even commemorated, depending on which reading you give to the way we Catholics appropriated old pagan customs that marked this time of year– or else they’re in Hell, and not worth remembering.
Only if you believe in Purgatory, Zmirak argues, can you fit earth-haunting ghosts into the world of Christian imagination. Zmirak gladly claims the Addams family as rad-trad Catholics. “Indeed, I think I may have spotted several Addamses at the indult parish in New York City…” He urges devout parents not to dress their little trick-or-treaters as saints, but to give them costumes that display the eerie and frightening parts of life that Halloween is meant to confront. He does draw the line somewhere, though:
Now, I’m very much in agreement that two-year-old children should not be dressed as Satan. For one thing, it’s a little bit too realistic. Indeed, the fallenness of children, which Augustine bemoaned in his Confessions, is so evident to everyone that garbing the little tykes in the robes of absolute evil seems to overstress the point. Nor do we wish to trivialize the serious, deadly purpose of our infernal enemy — dragging each of us screaming to Hell. If you’re feeling puckish, it’s in much better taste to dress up your kids as Osama bin Laden, Annibale Bugnini, or some other of the Evil One’s lesser minions. If you must dress your boys as saints, choose military martyrs, canonized crusaders, or patriarchs from the Old Testament. One suggestion I made as editor of the Feasts and Seasons section of Faith & Family magazine was this: Dress up your daughters as early Roman martyrs, like Agnes and Agatha, and your sons as the Roman soldiers, gladiators, and lions that sent them to heaven. Stock up on lots of fake blood for the girls’ machine-washable tunics, and let the games begin! (Alas, this idea never saw print.)
Bierce grew up in Ohio in the 1840s and 1850s; his family and neighbors were staunch Calvinists. One of his sisters was so committed to that faith that she went to Africa as a missionary. She was never heard from again; many Ohioans thought that she had been eaten by cannibals. Perhaps she was an inspiration for the cartoons magazines used to run showing pith-helmeted figures in great pots of boiling water. Bierce himself was alienated from religion; at times he made a show of atheism, at other times he cultivated a reputation for the Satanic. The God in whom Bierce did not believe was the God of Calvin. When he turned his imagination to the supernatural, Calvinism would have been his starting point. Perhaps the isolated, helpless, misunderstood ghosts of Ambrose Bierce and Lila Burns represent a stage in the decay of Calvinist theology, even as the Addams family and other products Zmirak endorses represent the current stage of rad-trad Catholicism.
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