September 8, 2011: My Bad, Piano Man

I feel like I semi-insulted Billy Joel in yesterday’s post; the truth is that however you feel about the Piano Man—and I run a bit hot and cold, maybe because I find all of the music he wrote about Christie Brinkley (and man there was a lot of it) pretty thoroughly unappealing, not to mention bitterly ironic of course—the guy has written some of the most interesting AmericanStudying songs of the last few decades. To make amends, here are five of the best, in ascending order of impressive AmericanStudiousness:

1)      “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989): Joel apparently wanted to be a history teacher at some point in his life, and this song certainly can be read as an attempt to teach four decades of American history (or at least to inspire an interested listener to research the many, many references to those decades contained within it). I don’t know that it ultimately adds up to much, other than an impressive ability to rhyme various historical figures and events, but it’s definitely a lot of fun to try to figure out all the references, and their variety certainly reveal an AmericanStudies-like mixture of disciplines, genres, texts, levels of culture, and more.

2)      “Captain Jack” (1973): The least explicitly or overtly historical of these five by far, yet I can’t help but feel that the song’s second-person protagonist represents a kind of bastard child of the drug and counter-cultures of the 60s and the self-centered amoralities of the 70s, a young man trying to figure out what core ideas like identity and family mean at the intersection of those worlds. If that’s true, then without question his story reflects a tragic and cynical take on its moment—but that too could be seen as a post-60s afterburn, contributing perhaps to the malaise that would soon characterize the 70s in America.

3)       “The Downeaster Alexa” (1989): It’s true that Alexa is the same of Joel and Brinkley’s daughter, but I can let that slide in this case, since Joel gives her name to the fishing boat of his fictional and very nicely-captured fisherman speaker. Having seen first-hand, over the course of many summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the significant decline of the fishing industry in America (or at least of independent/small fisherman in that region), I can testify to the accuracy of Joel’s depiction of this complex late 20^th-century trend. John Mellencamp gets justifiable props for his portrayals of the collapse of independent farming in songs like “Blood on the Scarecrow,” but Joel’s right there with him.

4)      “Allentown” (1982): As this and the next song illustrate, 1982’s The Nylon Curtain marked the pinnacle of Joel’s AmericanStudiousness. “Allentown” is probably the more famous of the two, both because it’s a lot shorter and more radio-friendly and (I imagine) because of the horrifically cheesy 80s video (to which I will not link below; search at your own peril). But while I slightly prefer the next song, “Allentown” has much to recommend it, especially its second-generation blue collar speaker’s righteous indignation at what has happened—or, to put it more actively, what has been done—to his city and family’s livelihood, at who has done it, and at what they’ve asked of these factory families in return.

1)      “Goodnight Saigon” (1982): I don’t think there’s a better song about the Vietnam War. And yes, I’m even including Bruce and “Born in the U.S.A.” in that conversation. Maybe I’m just a sucker for epics, and man does this song qualify—seven minutes, starts and ends with the sounds of a peaceful summer day being overtaken by helicopter rotors, has a full chorus supporting the key lines, etc. But those epic qualities are matched by lines that capture, both in the tiniest details and in the more crucial and terrifying moments, the life for a Vietnam serviceman better than any other song I know.

In short, if and when we’re all in the mood for a melody about America, we won’t go wrong asking the Piano Man to sing us one. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Six links to start with:

1)      “Fire,” with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-y1-eXjJ_g

2)      “Jack”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxugNQUtpE&feature=related

3)      “Alexa,” with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6qBaaEMlRA

4)      “Allentown,” with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV2jvngnvqg

5)      “Saigon,” with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZiVhVC5My8&feature=related

6)      OPEN: Any great AmericanStudies pop songs you’d highlight?

September 7, 2011: All the Rage

Maybe it’s just because the phrase “angry young man” flows so smoothly off the tongue of, well, more mellow older men, but I think that our cultural images of angry and aggressive protest music pigeonhole it very definitely as a feature of youth. Billy Joel might not be the go-to authority for discussions of protest music, but I think his song “Shades of Grey” (1993) captures perfectly an older man’s inability and unwillingness to embrace the angrier and more righteous attitudes of his youth; see for example the second verse: “Once there were trenches and walls / And one point of every view / Fight ‘til the other man falls / Kill him before he kills you / These days the edges are blurred / I’m old and tired of war / I hear the other man’s words / I’m not that sure anymore.” Given the explicitly warlike or at least violent metaphors adopted by many emblematic angry young bands—The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Rage Against the Machine—Joel’s maturing rejection of war seems particularly salient.

Any long-time reader of this blog will know that I agree with Joel, not only in his rejection of militancy and desire to hear the words of others, but also with his song’s overarching embrace of complexity over certainty, shades of grey over black and white, simplified narratives. Yet I believe that to equate anger with militancy or even certainty, and thus to dismiss it as a function of overconfident and overaggressive youth, is both to patronize protest music and to miss much of what makes it meaningful and appealing for any demographic. Certainly there are angry protest songs that bury the value and effectiveness of their ideas in their extreme and over-the-top emotions and rhetoric; The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” with its definitions of that monarch as a “fascist regime” who “ain’t no human being,” would to my mind illustrative that kind of hyperbolic rhetoric. But it could be argued that the Pistols and punk music in general were in any case less interested in protesting than in shocking, less in challenging social or cultural narratives than in pissing off everybody over a certain age, making them and their genre indeed a music of youth—and leaving open the possibility that angry protest music can still transcend such hyperbolic youthful rhetoric and appeals.

I’ve come to that perspective more fully over the last couple of years, and have done so at least in part through a (belated but still relevant) discovery of none other than Rage Against the Machine. For whatever reason—the extremely aggressive music, the martial imagery of their videos and of a record title like The Battle of Los Angeles (1999), the band name itself—I had always thought of them as angry young men par excellence. Lead singer and main lyricist Zack de la Rocha was indeed only 22 when the band released their self-titled first album (1992), but guitarist Tom Morello was 27, and it seems to me that their music from the outset combined youthful passion with a more experienced worldview, a combination that only deepened over their subsequent two albums (Evil Empire [1996] and Battle). When the band broke up in 2000 to pursue separate projects, it might have seemed that they were in fact moving on from more youthful pursuits—but their 2007 reunion, and a series of concerts over the next few years, have proven that, even if the band never records new music together (and to this point they have not announced any plans to record), the songs from those earlier albums (including the three at the links below) both sound entirely appropriate coming from older men and continue to speak to American and world realities just as fully as they ever did (if not even more so—much of Rage’s 1990s music uncannily foreshadows the worst excesses of the Bush administration).

I’m still more likely to turn to Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (1995) or Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963) than to Rage when I’m in the mood for a protest song; what can I say, the harmonic will always say “protest” to me, and it’s pretty hard to make a harmonica sound really angry. But I won’t ever again dismiss Rage or their ilk as angry young men—angry yes, and justifiably so, but angry with all the complexity and maturity that Billy Joel could hope for. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Four links to start with:

1)      “Know Your Enemy” (1992), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hJiE8CpgJg

2)      “Bulls on Parade” (1996), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZdXe-1NQo

3)      “Wake Up” (1999), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkp7tkeu22I&feature=related

4)      OPEN: Any protest artists or songs you’d recommend?

September 6, 2011: The Great War and Modern Bloggers

Due in part to the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War (and in part to great work that’s been ongoing for many years and is just being aired more widely because of blogs), there are a wide and rich variety of online conversations about the war happening these days. Many of those conversations, such as the ones featured at the New York Times’ hugely engrossing Disunion blog, are grounded very fully and impressively in the historical details and sources; some, such as those about whether the war’s principal cause was indeed slavery (a question that is answered demonstrably and unquestionably in every major primary source related to the war), are instead entirely about contemporary political perspectives and debates (to my mind, anyone arguing that the Civil War was principally about something other than slavery, particularly states’ rights, is doing so entirely because of contemporary political issues). But a few, and for me often the most complex and interesting, of the conversations straddle that line, extending both back into the historical contexts and forward into some of our most divisive and important present debates.

Two of the most interesting, and two very much interconnected, such conversations have, not surprisingly, taken place at two of the best blogs (historically engaged or otherwise) I know. At his Atlantic.com blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates has led and linked to an evolving series of discussions and debates over the question of whether the Civil War was or was not tragic. Coates, focusing on the war as a final, necessary, and ultimately uplifting stage in the multi-century fight for the emancipation of African American slaves, has argued that the war was in no way tragic; many of his respondents and fellow bloggers have taken more mixed positions similar to what I would say is my own, positions perhaps best summed up by a (probably apocryphal but very effective) line delivered about the battle of Antietam by Massachusetts Governor John Andrew in the film Glory: “a great and a terrible day.” But no matter what position one takes on this question, it seems to me that it’s impossible to separate it entirely from subsequent historical and national issues, from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement up to the Obama Presidency and the (at times) overtly Neo-Confederate responses it has provoked. That doesn’t mean that the debates are necessarily a-historical, though—quite the opposite in fact, as Coates in particular has proved time and again (here as elsewhere) that the more historically grounded arguments contextualize and enrich the present debates in every case.

In recent days Coates has linked quite a bit to another blogger, Kevin Levin, an AmericanStudier and Civil War historian whose CWMemory blog hosts (in the posts and in the comment threads) some of the very best of these ongoing Civil War debates. The specific subject of these links has been a second and, again, very much interconnected conversation: the question of whether African Americans fought for the Confederacy in any significant numbers, along with parallel questions such as whether they did so entirely as slaves or were ever acknowledged as soldiers. While (as Levin’s recent posts note) hugely prominent AmericanStudiers such as Henry Louis Gates and John Stauffer have begun to argue for the affirmative positions, Levin, Coates, and many other historians (and, based on much less archival research to be sure, I as well) continue to believe that the vast majority of the individuals and organizations making this case are (like the Sons of Confederate Veterans) explicitly interested at least as much in contemporary narratives about race and region as they are in revising Civil War historiography. As Levin and Coates have noted, it is far from coincidental that many of those arguing for the existence of black Confederates use that argument to further their claims that the war was not and could not have been about slavery—for, these arguments go, why would African Americans fight for such a cause? Yet in this case the historical contexts and the present debates do often part ways, for a historically grounded argument would have to note that, even if African Americans did occasionally fight for the Confederacy, they did so explicitly as slaves rather than soldiers, making their service much, much more likely to be coerced than volunteered.

I have only touched the tip of the iceberg for any of these questions, and can’t recommend strongly enough the Disunion, Coates, and Levin blogs (and the many similarly rich scholars and perspectives that appear in their links and comments). Yet even if we leave aside the complex Civil War-specific questions, I believe that all of these debates illustrate one of my most overarching and central points and purposes here—that narratives about our history are necessarily and crucially also and always narratives about our identity and thus our present and future, and that the more we include knowledgeable and scholarly (in the broadest and best sense) voices in those conversations, the better served we’ll all be. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Four links to start with:

1)      The Disunion blog: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/

2)      One of many great Coates posts on the tragedy question: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/08/tragic/244044/

3)      Ditto for Levin on black Confederates: http://cwmemory.com/2011/09/04/dear-professor-gates/

4)      OPEN: Any Civil War histories, questions, or conversations of especial interest to you?

September 5, 2011: Labor Day Special

In honor of Labor Day I’m taking the day off from blogging—but in the spirit of what this holiday should entail, a genuine effort to remember and engage with the complex and crucial histories of work and the labor movement in this country, here are a handful of posts where I’ve tried to provide such engagement:

December 21: What It’s Like: On work, art, and empathy in Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron-Mills (1861).

December 24: A Human and Yet Holy Day: On Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

January 6: Workers Write: On the images of young female mill workers in two very different but interestingly complementary 19^th century texts, Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855) and The Lowell Offering (1840-1845).

January 10: Anarchy in the USA: On the presence and absence of anarchists and revolutionaries in American history in general and social movements like labor in particular.

June 7: Public Art: Diego Rivera’s controversial, partially Marxist Rockefeller Center mural was one of the inspirations for this post on the complexities of public art.

More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any texts or histories related to work or the labor movement that you’d highlight?

September 3-4, 2011 [Tribute Post 22]: New Colleagues

There are lots of reasons why I like the start of a new semester, most of them connected to the sense of possibility that comes with those first days of class, with meeting a group of students for the first time and looking at the schedule as an entirely open shared future and entering all the names in the grade book and cracking the course books for the first time and etc. But the start of a fall semester also comes with a parallel but broader sense of new possibilities for a department and a university, for the communities to which we’re all returning and from which we’ve had those few months (mostly) away to forget the petty annoyances of May and remember their strengths and why we’re lucky to be a part of them.

 There are many such strengths, but in my seven years at Fitchburg State I have found that one of the strongest is the constant infusion of impressive new colleagues into our community. I certainly felt that way already about the group with whom I entered, a group that included my English colleague Ian Williams, about whom I blogged here. The following year saw the arrival of a new American historian, Christine Dee, with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work at length on the creation of and first courses in a new AmericanStudies program at FSU. A couple years later we were able to bring three great new folks into the English department: Frank Mabee, Carl Martin (now of Norwich University in Vermont, but not before he brought a ton to the department and FSU during his two years with us), and Joe Moser. Last year we added another wonderful English colleague, Kisha Tracy, and another American historian and AmerianStudies buddy, Kate Jewell. And this past week I had the chance to meet, and once again be instantly impressed by and excited to work with, our three newest English colleagues: Anna Consalvo, Layne Craig, and Steve Edwards.

It’s difficult for me, when I think about the incredible diversity and yet thoroughly consistent quality of this group of recent additions—to say nothing of the even more substantial diversity and yet still superlative quality of the community to which they, and six years ago I, came—not to get frustrated at both the many ways (including but not limited to financial) in which our society doesn’t support public higher education as well as it should and the concurrent many narratives about the weaknesses or poor traits of academics. But of course I can think of one group of people who absolutely know better, who know full well just how impressive the community of FSU faculty is: the students who are fortunate enough to work with all of these folks. And this isn’t a time of year for frustrations, it’s a time to imagine just how much great work that community can do in the coming semester and year, in and out of the classrooms .Thanks to those newest additions, the horizon got a bit further and higher still.

More next week,

Ben

PS. Plenty of links in the post itself this time. But what (or who) are you excited about right now?

September 2, 2011: Not Tortured Enough

In the bridge of Bruce Springsteen’s “Long Walk Home” (2007), a beautiful if bleak assessment of American identity at the end of the Bush era, the speaker remembers what his father used to tell him about their home town and nation, an idealistic perspective that culminates in the lines, “You know that flag flying over the courthouse / Means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.” Any in-depth familiarity with the darker side of American history, a side about which of course I’ve written plenty in this space, reveals that many of the things we have always said we “won’t do” have in fact been done, often frequently and with institutional sanction or even support. Yet even if our actions have thus often belied our beliefs and ideals, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still significant value to professing the ideals, to having a broadly shared and agreed-upon set of goals for what our country should be at its best.

There’s plenty of room for debate about what those ideals have included, both overall or in particular historical periods, but to my mind near the top of the list has to be the belief that our government and authorities do not utilize the kinds of tactics seen in brutal dictatorships or police states (or even in the kinds of authoritarian monarchies that were contemporary to the founding era). So, for example, our authorities (both military and domestic) do not torture prisoners, neither as a matter of official policy nor as a matter of unofficial practice. On a broad level, that fundamental ideal helps explain why the Reagan administration signed on to the 1987 UN Convention Against Torture, illustrating what Reagan called in his message to the Senate the US’s “clear opposition to torture”; and on a more specific level, this ideal similarly led the US to aggressively pursue war crimes prosecutions against Japanese military interrogators who had tortured American prisoners of war during World War II. As the two articles linked below document at length, the most common torture method utilized by those Japanese torturers was a form of simulated drowning that had been around since at least the Inquisition, and was typically called the “water cure”; it has since come to be known principally, and in recent years here in America infamously, as waterboarding.

The fact that American interrogators at Guantanamo (and likely if less admittedly at other prisons and CIA black sites around the world) waterboarded captives in the years after 9/11 is not in dispute; while at times Bush administration officials sought to deny such practices, the published memoirs by both Bush himself and (most recently) his vice president Dick Cheney have not only confirmed but also actively defended them, claiming (against all historical and international precedent) that they do not constitute torture, as well as arguing (against all available general and specific evidence) for their overall utility and their specific informational value in these cases. And those claims and arguments have been echoed and extended by numerous other commentators and politicians. It’s difficult to overstate just how fully, then, the conversation on this particular issue and American ideal has changed in the last decade—from a general opposition to torture and a specific willingness to classify waterboarding as a war crime within that category; to debates over whether waterboarding is really so bad and concurrent arguments that perhaps it is worth making it official US practice in any case. Those changes would seem to illustrate Springsteen’s point very precisely, but a more cynical take might be that they prove false the idealism at the heart of his lines and song—that, if it’s so easy for us to abandon this ideal in favor of pragmatic debates about the utility and efficacy of torture, perhaps the ideal was never really held with any sincerity, was never truly our home.

The biggest problem here, that is, might not be that Americans tortured prisoners, nor even that those tortures were authorized and supported at the highest levels of our government. It is, after all, possible if not likely that such horrors have been part of our darker and too often hidden histories for decades if not centuries. The biggest problem might be that, when the histories this time came out into the light, our national debates over them have, far too often, been just plain not tortured enough. More this weekend,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      A professional interrogator details the history of waterboarding, including the post-World War II war crimes trials: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

2)      A more politically charged, but still powerful and informative, history of the practice: http://waterboarding.org/water-based_torture_history_with_pictures

3)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 1, 2011: First Questions

It probably seems like the most casual and unimportant aspect of a professor’s responsibilities on the first day of class—well behind talking about the course’s focal points, beginning the process of learning students’ names, going over the syllabus and other materials, and more—but truthfully I have probably put the most consistent thought over the years into coming up with the question that each student can answer briefly when he or she introduces him or herself; such questions, if done right, can both provide engaging and fun moments and yet allow us to get a first, preliminary but important sense of a person’s personality and voice. I have found that such questions are generally not as successful if they are too clichéd (something you did over the summer [“work” is too easy of an answer]; a current favorite musical artist or song [ditto with “I listen to everything”]), but that a slightly more unusual question can be really effective, provided I give folks time to think of their answers (by, for example, giving and elaborating a bit on my own sample answers at the start).

While one of my most effective first-day questions—name a favorite character from literature, film, TV, cartoons, comics, anime, porn, you name it, and tell us a bit about why you like this character—is not quite relevant enough to this space, two of the others that have worked very well are certainly right up an AmericanStudies alley. In some of my American Lit surveys I have asked students to imagine that an alien has landed and asks them what this “America” place is all about, and then ask them to think of one text—whether something written (in any genre), a work of visual art (painting, sculpture, photo, statue, etc), something in another medium (movie, song, TV show, etc), or another kind of work (building, monument, etc)—that they’d highlight to answer that question (and a bit on why). And in some AmericanStudies courses I’ve asked students to think about one event or issue or the like that they’d point to as representing an aspect of our time period, the early 2000s (since our intro course focuses on a historical moment, the 1980s). Besides giving us some interesting glimpses into folks’ perspectives and interests, these questions can also lead into a bit of informal first-day writing, where the students can elaborate a bit more on their choices and reasons.

As I hope I’ve made very clear many times over, you readers are no more my students than I am your teacher, which is to say not at all—this is a different kind of space, not only because of the absence of requirements and grading and the like but also and more importantly because as I see it we’re all absolutely in conversation here, with no hierarchies of knowledge or power or anything else. (I aim for that feel in classes too, but some hierarchies are inevitable in any classroom setting, at least any one where grades are involved.) But with that said, I think both of those questions remain a great way for me to hear a bit about your perspective and interests, about where you’re coming from as AmericanStudiers. So if you don’t mind, and with anonymous answers entirely fine of course, can you respond to either question (which I’ll reiterate momentarily) in comments? I’d sure appreciate it, and it can help get a new semester and set of conversations here off to as great a start as I hope my courses will today.

The questions, again: 1) Name a text (in any genre or medium) that you’d highlight as representing “America” in some form or other; or 2) Name an event or issue or the like (again of any type) that you’d highlight as representing our time period (the early 2000s) in any way. Thanks in advance for your thoughts, which I promise will mean just as much to me as those student responses always do. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. And since all is fair in love, war, and blogging, any other questions you’d direct back at me? (If I had to answer my two, or rather to choose one out of the roughly one zillion possible answers that come to mind for each, I’d say: 1) Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), about which I blogged here; and 2) The post-Palin revisions of Paul Revere’s Wikipedia page, about which I blogged here.)