September 15, 2011: Speaking of Hypocrisy

I can’t speak with specific authority about the GOP legislators who now control the Pennsylvania State Legislature, but unless their campaigns differed from virtually every other GOP candidate in this past election cycle, they emphasized at the very top of their list of priorities “restoring” and “respecting” the Constitution. Various work for courses and the NEASA conference doesn’t leave me with time at the moment to remark on the Constitutional origins and American histories related to the Electoral College, but I’ll try to provide a couple links below as always, and will leave it up to you to determine whether those Pennsylvania Republicans are indeed restoring and respecting the Constitution here:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/changing-rules-by-david-atkins.html

More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      A great starting point for those origins and histories: http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_elec.html

2)      Some further historical contexts, as well as arguments in favor of maintaining the electoral college: http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa102200a.htm

3)      OPEN: What do you think?

PPS. Just found out that the Most Valuable Blogger award winners have been announced. I wasn't one of the winners, but that doesn't make me any less grateful for all the support and votes that I got. Thanks so much, and please keep reading and commenting!

September 14, 2011: The Transnational Turn

Of the many trends and developments that have taken place in the broad and diffuse field of AmericanStudies over the last couple decades, none has been more prominent than the turn to the transnational: to emphases of 21^st century international interconnectedness and interdependence, certainly, but also and more strikingly to arguments and ideas and narratives that connect American history and culture and literature and identity to other nations and communities at more or less each and every moment of our existence. Rejecting wholesale the still present and often still prominent arguments for American exceptionalism, these transnational scholarly frames seek instead to make plain just how much America has always been part of, and often in these perspectives defined by, broader circuits and links, from the web of the burgeoning 17^th century slave trade to migrant labor in the early 21^st century, the fad for authentic Chinese dishware in 18^th century homes to the influence of Eastern spiritualities and philosophies on the Transcendentalists, and countless more.

All of those specific connections are really interesting and compelling to me, and I find worries about what’s lost if we move away from an America-specific scholarly focus to be almost exactly opposite to what I’d say is a particularly salient contribution of such scholarship: to make plain just how much America has always included such transnational presences and influences. But in this post I want to make the case as well for a different, and admittedly much more potentially troubling or false, kind of transnational AmericanStudies: transnational comparisons, engagements with histories or voices or texts from other nations that can interestingly inform American narratives and identities.  As I say, I understand the limits and even dangers of such comparisons, which are roughly like cross-historical comparisons (ie, “The Abolitionists are just like Pro-Lifers!”; “The Clinton impeachment really echoes what happened with Andrew Johnson!”) but with probably even more need for contextual specifics and distinctions. Yet if we don’t try to argue for equivalencies, but rather simply look closely at the other history or text in question and then consider how it might speak to our American narratives, I think we allow our range of possible AmericanStudies texts and focal points to expand very helpfully.

My case in point today is the late 20^th century Australian rock band Midnight Oil, and specifically the band’s best and (to my mind) most America-illuminating album, Diesel and Dust (1987). Like all of Oil’s music—and like its frontman and creative genius Peter Garrett’s whole life for that matter, as he left the band in order to run successfully for Parliament—Diesel is grounded very clearly in specific Australian issues and images, in this case the intertwined stories of the land itself and of the Aboriginal peoples who have inhabited it for many thousands of years. Since, as the album also captures on many levels, the arrival of British settlers (many of them convicts) and colonialists profoundly and often destructively impacted and has continued to impact those Aborigines, it’s easy enough to make the direct comparisons to the experiences and identities of Native Americans. But in the album’s best songs, and especially in the singular, beautiful, and haunting “The Dead Heart,” it’s the multi-level combination of content and form that is most powerful and most potentially illuminating, as Garrett writes (with great sensitivity and success) and the band sings harmonies in the first-person voices of the Aborigines themselves. I wrote in a long-ago post about the striking 19^th century novel Ploughed Under, a text in which a European-American author (William Justin Harsha) created a fictional first-person Native American voice; despite its many flaws, the novel remains significant as one of the only American works (in any medium) to take that bold and empathetic step. Which is to say, we could stand to learn a good deal from the power that the narrative choice of a song like “The Dead Heart” conveys and captures.

Diesel and Midnight Oil are well worth our time on their own terms, and I’m certainly not arguing that American connections make non-American artists or works better or more important than they’d otherwise be. But if an album is great and can also add to our AmericanStudies narratives and ideas, well, listening to it is a transnational turn that everybody can get behind. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      Three complex and important takes—by three very prominent scholars—on the transnational turn in AmericanStudies: http://www.theasa.net/project_eas_online/page/project_eas_online_eas_featured_article/

2)      “The Dead Heart”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHNR3y9www

3)      OPEN: Any non-American works or artists with interesting AmericanStudies connections you’d highlight?

4) UPDATE: My colleague Irene pointed me to this amazing speech of Garrett's, which very much speaks to all these issues too: http://www.petergarrett.com.au/182.aspx.

September 13, 2011: Great American Hypocrites

My post’s title echoes the title of one of Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald’s recent books, a work that focuses explicitly on hypocrisies at the core of the contemporary Republican Party. But while I certainly agree with Greenwald’s premise and his specific examples, and similarly feel that hypocrisy has become a core ingredient of an entire political platform in a way that it has perhaps never before been (see the current GOP presidential frontrunner, Rick Perry, a man who, among numerous other such hypocrisies, threatened to secede from America and now accuses Obama of lacking sufficient patriotism, has attacked the stimulus vociferously at every stage while making sure to get and use every cent of its allocated money for Texas, and so on), I would also emphasize just how strong a role hypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout our existence. That argument could go back, for example, to the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American begging prospective arrivals to “Come over and help us”: the seal reveals not only a core hypocrisy in the Puritans’ perspectives, since (as William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and many others documents demonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well before this seal’s creation) and thoroughly became the Puritans’ greatest perceived obstacle to overcome on the path to building their city on a hill; but also another and more subtle hypocrisy in their experiences, since without the early aid of local Native Americans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) the Plymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it) would almost certainly have failed.

I could probably maintain a daily blog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon, but since this is more of a one-off I wanted to focus on a figure whose public and personal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) these national hypocrisies: Roy Cohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life as one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived on ferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious at best) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targets and helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally the case in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directly linking homosexuality and other forms of “deviant” behavior to Communist leanings, since, in this perspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. It was only decades later, when Cohn was publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade’s newest and most threatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn’s own very secret (he had been famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity was similarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossible to speak with any authority about any other individual’s sexual and intimate experiences and life, it’s perhaps least unfair to do so when that individual has made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part and parcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he and McCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual should disqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his own identity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well as personally hypocritical.

The truths of both individual identity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated than that, and while it’s tempting simply to point out Cohn’s hypocrisy, and more saliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimate roots of McCarthyism more broadly, there’s significant value in trying to imagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representative American’s life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohn produced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created by playwright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative and brilliant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner’s play has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerful depictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without question one of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar, violent, petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also manages to be funny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as he struggles with both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the ghosts of those (especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he contributed so centrally. In a play full of interesting characters and show-stopping moments, Cohn is perhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero and villain and star, and I can’t think of a better description of national hypocrisies more generally.

While I earnestly hope we can find our way back to a politics that isn’t quite so dominated by hypocritical positions and narratives, it’s hard to imagine an America devoid entirely of Roy Cohns. And perhaps, Kushner’s play intimates—despite the destructiveness that comes with such figures—we wouldn’t want to. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Four links to start with:

1)      Brief piece on, and image of, the Mass Bay seal: http://www.irwinator.com/126/wdoc36.htm

2)      Pretty amazing 1988 Life story on Cohn’s death and legacy: http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/life/905W-000-035.html

3)      Great, great moment from Al Pacino’s performance as Cohn in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Kushner’s play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98fBiOVEcyI

4)      OPEN: Any especially hypocritical figures or moments or narratives you’d highlight?

September 12, 2011: The Neverending Story?

I’ve already written in this space about the firebombing of Dresden, and through that horrific and largely forgotten (here in America at least) event about the ways in which event the most “good” of wars can bring out the worst in us, as a nation and as humans. The same can of course be said for another, more extended, more explicitly chosen and intended, and perhaps even more horrific home front policy during World War II: the internment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. And if we go further back, to the war about which I wrote last week—the Civil War—we can find plenty of equally troubling and terrifying such wartime excesses, none more so than Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus for the duration of the war: a policy that applied not only in Confederate states, but throughout the nation; that targeted not only Confederate soldiers or those citizens actively fighting against the Union, but also those who “discouraged volunteer enlistments,” among other activities.

Compared to most of the other excesses and horrors in American history, though, those wartime ones were consistently ameliorated by one key fact: when the wars in question ended, so too did nearly all of the excesses. Habeas corpus was restored after the Civil War; the US stopped bombing European and Japanese cities after peace treaties were signed with those nations; the interned Japanese Americans were freed and allowed to return home; and so on. Such definite endpoints don’t of course make up for or erase the horrors that have come before, nor do they mean that the aftermaths and effects of the excesses don’t linger for decades or longer still (as any visitor to 21^st century Dresden can attest), but nonetheless, a horrible and brutal past policy or action beats the heck out of a horrible and brutal continuing one. Moreover, these briefer wartime excesses are at least somewhat easier to recognize as the horrors they are than long-term and so more ingrained policies—as evidenced by the US government’s formal apology and reparations for the internment, only forty years after the war’s end, compared by the complete official silence on the century of institutional and legal support for segregation (in a wide variety of arenas) that followed the end of slavery.

I have plenty of problems with the way the US government specifically and Americans more broadly have responded to 9/11—with what has sometimes come to be called the 9/12 mindset—but certainly at the very top of the list would be the concept of the “war on terror.” Such a war would seem to be a parallel to other non-declared government wars—the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime—but in fact, both as the Bush administration intended the phrase and as it has been deployed and hardened over the last decade, the war on terror has been treated quite exactly like a full-blown, declared, shooting war. That means, again not surprisingly to anyone with a knowledge of American and human history, a whole range of excesses and horrors, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretapping and the darker corners of the Patriot Act to torture and extraordinary rendition to CIA black sites, and much else besides. But in this case, because the war is one that may well never end, so too is it difficult to imagine an end to the wartime excesses—if anything, the last few years seem simply to have added new and just as horrifying ones to the mix, including drone strikes and the idea that the president has the authority to assassinate American citizens with alleged terrorist affiliations.

To put it another way: Roosevelt responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by terming December 7^th, 1941 a “day that will live in infamy,” but when the war with Japan ended three and a half years later, much of that antipathy was forgiven; but when Americans say about 9/11 that “everything changed” and that we will “never forget,” the phrases seem more darkly and troublingly prophetic than we could ever have realized. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      The text of Lincoln’s suspension: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/historicdocuments/a/lincolnhabeas.htm

2)      An eloquent op-ed on the war on terror by former Carter cabinet officer Zbigniew Brzezinski: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301613.html

3)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 10-11, 2011: Rising to the Occasion

There are the obvious high-pressure professions, the surgeons and pilots, the cops and firefighters, the bomb defusers and Formula One drivers, the work worlds where the slightest split-second error is entirely unacceptable and quite possibly fatal. Then there are the less obvious but to my mind just as high-pressure gigs, a list at the top of which I’d have to put school bus drivers—seriously, would you want to drive a bunch of non-seat-belted and likely chaotic and distracting kids around in a giant unwieldy monstrosity, knowing that an error might well result in the worst possible thing that could happen for dozens of families? And at the very opposite end of the pressure spectrum, by all appearances and certainly in many genuine ways, are those of us who work with words, whose greatest error might be to settle for (to reference Twain’s famous distinction) the lightning bug rather than the lightning.

Writers don’t face split-second or life-altering pressure, and I’d be a jackass—any time, but doubly so in a September 11^th memorial post—to suggest otherwise. But there are other kinds of pressure, of course, and one that intersects with the idea of tragic events is the pressure to rise to such an occasion, to produce words that somehow do justice to, adequately capture and remember and mourn and celebrate, all of what the event is and means. It’s for this precise reason, to go back to something that my colleague Irene referenced in her very insightful comment on Tuesday’s Civil War post, that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has lasted as fully and centrally as it has in our collective national memory: tasked with responding not only to the Civil War’s most pivotal and in many ways most extended and destructive battle, but also to the horrors and yet the necessity of the war itself, all while not eliding in the slightest the roughly fifty thousand Americans who had lost their lives in the battle, Lincoln delivered, and then some. That he did so with the utmost brevity, while not a requirement for rising to an occasion, certainly demonstrates just how fully Lincoln found each and every perfect word, and not one more than he needed.

Lincoln wasn’t President on September 11^th, 2001—which might be the most significant understatement I’ll ever write, but this isn’t the post for politics so I’ll leave it at that—so it has been left up to others, among them writers and artists across many genres and media, to try to rise to that tragic and terrible day’s occasion. It will likely come as a surprise to precisely no one—at least no one already familiar with this blog or me—that to my mind Bruce Springsteen has come the closest to rising to the challenge. His 2002 album The Rising comprises nothing short of fifteen separate yet interwoven, distinct yet cumulative, contradictory yet complementary, and all necessary and so damn right responses to the attacks, and more exactly to their personal and familial, emotional and psychological, individual and communal resonances and effects. It’s entirely possible to listen to and get a lot out of any of the songs by themselves—and I’ve linked my personal favorite below—but it was with the album as a whole that I believe Bruce most explicitly rose to the occasion. I know there are plenty of other possible nominees—Salon.com has featured a series of articles on works of art responding to or inspired by the attacks—and there’s likely much to be said for a diverse and complex 21^st century America’s need for many such risings. But Bruce is a great place to start.

I thought for a good while about what I might include in this post; certainly there would be darker and just as vital potential themes, including those I highlighted in this post. You could even say I felt some serious pressure, although neither my purpose nor of course my role here comes anywhere close to Lincoln’s or Bruce’s. But ultimately, this blog is about not one American occasion but all of them, and my goal not to meet one challenge but to pose a continual series of them, to my own understandings and narratives and histories, and to all of ours. After all, it’s precisely through such challenges that we just might, as a nation, rise to our most ideal identity and future. More next week,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      Info on the great Library of Congress exhibition on Lincoln’s Address: http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/gettysburgaddress/Pages/default.aspx

2)      Probably my favorite Rising song, “Mary’s Place”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qA1RDvo9LY&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL4372E0A6723B860A

3)      OPEN: Any texts or words that have you’d say have risen to the occasion (any occasion)?

September 9, 2011: Triple Play

I realized yesterday that I had the perfect way to follow the last two posts and round out this trio on AmericanStudies and rock music: “Galveston Bay” (1995), a Bruce Springsteen song from the same album as “The Ghost of Tom Joad” that also happens to be my second favorite song about (if in a very different way from Joel’s) the Vietnam War. “Galveston” has spoken deeply to me since the first time I heard it, sitting in my freshman year dorm room listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad album, but I’ll freely admit that I wasn’t nearly ready then to appreciate two of its most perfect elements: its quiet but crucial portrayal of how its dual protagonists, two incredibly different men in many ways, are linked by their defining love for their children; and its (spoiler alert) surprising and optimistic and hugely powerful ending, one that (to reference my third book in progress) is entirely earned by the song’s thorough willingness to engage with the darker American histories and realities from which that endpoint departs.

Also doesn’t hurt that this is perhaps the most fully AmericanStudies of all of Bruce’s songs, at least in its ability to touch on pretty much every significant disciplinary question of the last few decades: race and ethnicity; transnational and international and comparative national identities; region and place; multigenerational family heritage; work and class; domestic terror and the reactionary backlash against post-1960s social and demographic shifts; America’s foundational passion for violence and its connections to masculine ideals; the role of the legal system in aiding and furthering social progress on many of these issues; and of course the lingering effects and impacts of Vietnam (among others!). And in case that makes it sound like a textbook or something, it’s also a deeply moving dual narrative of two men’s stories, of lives that tragically but then much more hopefully interweave and intersect in an America that has long been seen as defined by only one of them but that, the song and this AmericanStudier argue, is finally being recognized as constituted very fully out of both, and even more so out of the worst and the best of their intersections.

Okay, that’s enough from me, just go listen to it if you would, and please feel free to share your thoughts (even if you don’t love it quite as much as me) in the comments. More this weekend, a September 11^th-inspired post,

Ben

PS. Two links to start with:

1)      “Galveston Bay”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEFYVaobZM

2)      OPEN: Responses? And any suggestions for future musical AmericanStudies posts?

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?