Monthly Archives: February 2017

Questions Raised

“While you’re on this legal tangent, why not refine what you’re doing here in the first place, Elie?” suggests the skeleton of my father helpfully, peeking out of the snow that today blankets his grave after yesterday’s heavy snowfall.   “You know, the old ‘questions raised’ from your legal writing days.”  

The question raised section of a legal argument frames the question you want the judge to answer the same way your persuasive argument, with its apt citations to precedent, will guide her to.  Raising the right question, and then providing all the reasons the judge should agree with your answer, is a large part of the litigator’s art.  Separates the winners from the losers, yo.  Worth a shot here, I suppose.

Question raised: what is the best use of your time?  

“Vague, but I like it.  Ideally, if you did not have to work for a living, were content to live as a monk, did not buy into society’s notions of status and achievement, how would you spend your precious, limited time?”

I start to think of that old commie saw ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  The most satisfying and productive-feeling way to spend my time nowadays, seeing that without a wealthy backer one can’t launch even an ingeniously designed and cost-effective program to help the children of poor people, is writing.  I love to play the guitar, and I love to draw, but writing is something most people can understand and something potentially useful.  Let me put it this way– no matter how well you play music or draw, many people do not get it.  Simply makes no sense to them.  Words– there you go.  We all basically agree on what they mean, everyone can follow them if they are set out in an order that makes sense.

“No offense, Elie, but who gives a shit?” said the skeleton.

Fair enough.  If you have a strong point of view about how viciously the status quo is proceeding, as I certainly do, as you did, and you have the means to express it, to persuade– maybe that is a kind of moral imperative.  

“Means relatively little if you express it to a handful of likeminded people who click on your blahg to read your latest expressions of the moral imperative,” said the skeleton.

No argument here, dad.  I’ve noticed that the more devotedly vicious weasels among us, guys like Grover Norquist and his buddy Jack Abramoff and people of that ilk, are tireless in the mass promotion of their beliefs, or what they say are their beliefs.  

“Well, you have to be careful about beliefs, people actually believe them.  Like the beliefs of the millions who cast their votes for an angry, spoiled brat who can’t get enough attention or power.  You can argue, present the facts, but you won’t get very far with reason.  As you yourself have noted many times, as borne out by the sad story of my life, only direct experience that smashes your belief hard enough in the face can have any impact on what we believe.  We are largely irrational creatures, much as it may pain us to admit this.”  

Yah, mon.  The beauty part is, we are geniuses at setting up rational looking structures to support otherwise idiotic beliefs.  Think of libertarians– they believe in liberty for everybody to decide everything for themselves and that therefore the government should not intervene.  They call the fire department when their house is on fire, call the police when they’re robbed, they drive on roads built by the government, and so forth, but the government has no right to charge them any kind of tax to maintain these things.  The theory sounds reasonable if put abstractly enough: personal liberty is so important that we put it at the top of the list of what a human needs.  

“Anatole France’s great line comes to mind, the one your friend the mad judge was fond of quoting: ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.'”  

Just so.  Think of the liberty of somebody born in a tenth generation of inherited poverty, at the mercy of everyone else’s more fortunate liberty.   There’s your living refutation of Libertarianism.  

“No Libertarian will ever see one of those living refutations, except maybe on giant screen TV, being led away in handcuffs by a militarized police unit,” said the skeleton.  

Question raised:  how to get these writings presented to a larger audience?

“Next question, please.”    

Question raised: how to present the story of my father’s largely tragic life as an uplifting tale publishers and readers will clamor to pay for?  

“Now you’re starting to make a little sense.  You know, if you type for hours every day, and make a certain amount of sense — even if you pretend you’re talking to a skeleton who can talk back to you —  but you have no plan to market and sell what you write– what do you call that?”  

Libertarianism?  

“I’m glad you find this funny.  Blessed is the man who amuseth himself, Elie.”  

Amen to that, padre.

Standing on a Phantom Leg — and Ag Gag Laws

The law gives and the law takes away.  Thank God for the laws we have that protect the vulnerable.  These laws are not the rule, but they are something to be very thankful for, to fight to protect.  Between the rule of law and the rule of violence, there is nothing to choose.

One of the most difficult things, as an idealistic young lawyer trying to make a living, was hearing a prospective client’s long, painful recitation of a brutal screwing that raised no legal issue a court could address.   One of the most useful, and terrible, parts of law school is the “issue spotting”  exercise.  You listen to a long detailed complaint looking for issues that may be legally remediable among the many equally, sometimes more horrific, parts of the story that is regarded, in its entirety, as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  

“You got royally screwed, no question, and I sympathize 100% with your anger at the sickening ordeal you were put through, I would feel exactly as you do,” I would begin, seeking the words to let the poor sodomized fucker down gently on his tender sphincter.  

“What they did to you was unconscionable, sickening and offensively typical.”  The words do not come easily, you have to give your professional opinion of the person’s odds of getting a case into court, having a meaningful hearing, achieving some victory with the law.   Those odds are zero. 

“This is the worst part of my job, explaining to someone who’s been brutally, deliberately screwed, against his will, that the law regards his screwing as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  De minimis non curat lex, as the judges say.   It’s Latin for ‘your client is shit out of luck, asshole.  Next!'” 

The issue spotting exercise is the law student’s training for hearing a layman’s complaint and finding a viable legal theory for bringing the complaint to court.  Often there is no remedy at law.   People who are severely screwed often have a hard time understanding this.

 “You agree that they fucked me up the ass sideways,” the prospective client will protest.  

“I do,” the empathetic young lawyer will say.  

“You agree that it was unconscionable, your own word,” says the prospective client.  

“I do, absolutely,” the lawyer will say.  And so on.  The lawyer knows what the prospective client cannot understand in his particular case yet–  the laws are made by powerful forces that like the idea of non-consensual sex, they like it very, very much.   Unless there is a provision in the law to enforce the rights of those who do not give consent to those powerful people, and other non-human entities, who love a little spontaneous dalliance, consensual or not, well, you have a trifle that the law does not need to concern itself with.

It is very troubling to see a rightfully aggrieved person standing on a phantom leg. There ought to be a law…  well, I agree very much.  Unfortunately the billionaire class, in conjunction with those psychopathic legal fictions called ‘persons’, with their army of well-paid  lobbyists representing the tiny, powerful group whose interests they tirelessly protect, have the most persuasive voice for lawmakers.  

Still, there is the human reflex, felt by many, to stand on a right they strongly believe they SHOULD have.  Brings us, in an odd way, to the narrow electoral college election of this unreasonable fellow we have in office now.  Millions voted for his unconvincing promise to help the little man and cut through law and everything else to get him what he SHOULD have.   A promise ridiculous on its face, as we used to say at law,  but there you have it.  His type essentially says, pretty much irrefutably:

You have no legal right unless you can enforce it in court, asshole.   Even if you have a legal right that a court will enforce, find a lawyer who will work for free or we will bankrupt you.  We will bury you in legal bills!  You really want to fight the power, motherfucker?  We will destroy you!

In this context there is a controversy, sadly non-controversial to most Americans, that is like a fiber of celery caught uncomfortably between my molars.  No floss can remove it, my tongue is constantly playing with the irritating strand every time I’m reminded of it.   I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki went all the way over to becoming an active al Q’aeda recruiter, as his accusers claimed when they put him on the secret presidential kill list, and after they turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched by a Predator drone.  I doubt it, but I don’t absolutely know for sure.  Neither did Jeremy Scahill, who researched the issue in depth, but he also strongly doubted that Awlaki was affiliated with terrorists and presented a good case that no evidence whatsoever of terrorist ties was produced before his extrajudicial execution.

I know, at least in the first part of his railing against the American worldwide war against Islam, that Awlaki probably felt he had a right to free speech under the First Amendment.   It’s an argument his lawyer could have made in court, Awlaki’s right to dissent, if he’d been tried, even in absentia.   As an American, Awlaki believed he had an absolute right to express his opinions, to argue against the murderous policies of his government, to appeal in the strongest possible terms to the sense of justice in those he addressed.  

The American president had a different idea and, being a brilliant Constitutional law professor brushed aside all the legal issues raised by the targeted murder of an American citizen for giving speeches the president deemed the dangerous incitement of a deadly enemy combatant.  Brushed aside all legal arguments and zapped the American citizen with a drone-launched missile.  The story forever after would be that Obama wisely and decisively took out a dangerous terrorist leader, the number two man in al Q’aeda and heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden himself, if you believe Obama’s representations about  Awlaki.

I don’t begrudge Obama his accomplishments.  The elimination of the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ loophole in health insurance was long overdue and something every American should applaud.  At the same time, Obama handed expanded executive prerogatives to the volatile, angry man who succeeded him as president.  

Included in these prerogatives was the absolute right to say who is an enemy combatant and, based on that unappealable status determination, to take any steps necessary to make sure the dangerous terrorist is neutralized.

“Your classic slippery slope, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You heard about those ALEC introduced Ag Gag laws which call for complete opacity when it it comes to the systematic industry-wide torture of animals raised for slaughter.  In the states where these laws have been passed it is illegal to take unauthorized videotape of violence against farm animals.  

“Violence seems like a ridiculous thing to talk about in connection with animals raised to be meat.  And it is.  The standard for what is acceptable in the animals-for-food-industry, of course, is determined by industry standards.  If ten chickens per square yard of cage means you have to cut the beaks off them to keep them from pecking each other to death, so be it and there’s nothing cruel or unusual about it.  Cruel it might arguably be, but unusual?  I’m afraid not, we all do it, sir.  Industry standard.  Nothing to see here.

“Animals being raised for slaughter and sale as meat certainly have no rights a white man is bound to respect.  But here’s the kicker, Elie.  As you know, these laws allow the State to prosecute vegan activists as ‘terrorists’.  Try that ass hat on for size.   If you’re a PETA activist and you take a video of factory workers beating a cow or pig to death, you are a terrorist under these Ag Gag laws.  What can you do to a terrorist?  Some believe torture is too good for those motherfuckers, you dig?”

“But see, Elie, torture is nothing to worry about either.  That’s because our Constitution protects us against a psychopathic element of the government deciding that, in spite of treaties we’ve signed and prosecutions we’ve successfully waged against torturers from other nations, Americans can legally torture people — if we secretly redefine it and call it something else.  

“We all know Americans don’t torture unless the country’s most powerful skillfully play to the terror of the populace, which will allow such formerly hideous practices to become ‘normalized’.  You know, like if we’re facing an enemy so terrible that all measures must be employed to destroy that enemy.  You know, an enemy that has no hesitation to slaughter as many children as it takes to rid the world of what they perceive as evil.”

OK, dad.  Calm down now.  Life goes on.  

“Not for me it doesn’t,” said the skeleton.  

Not for me either, really, not all the time.

Follow up on Raid in Yemen Story

NBC reports, January 31, 2017 4:15 ET:

Contrary to earlier reporting, the senior military official said, the raid was Trump’s first clandestine strike — not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved “boots on the ground” at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, the official said.

source

Expect to hear no more about this story, but make a note of it.

Kudos to the New York Times

The Grey Lady, America’s newspaper of record, reports on the recent accidental killing, by Navy SEALs, of eight year-old Nora al-Awlaki, daughter of the previously executed Anwar al-Awlaki.   Awlaki’s father, Nora’s grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, is quoted in the piece:

Nasser al-Awlaki, the girl’s grandfather, gave NBC News a different version of events of what took place. “My granddaughter was staying for a while with her mother, so when the attack came, they were sitting in the house, and a bullet struck her in her neck at 2:30 past midnight. Other children in the same house were killed,” he said. Nora died from her injuries two hours after suffering the gunshot wound, he said. The grandfather went on to say that the SEALs burned the home after raiding it, and that Nora’s mother escaped the raid with only a minor injury. The U.S. has also killed Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and son in previous drone strikes.    source

I know I’m a nitpicky, mean-spirited motherfucker, but the Times concludes the paragraph above by reporting that the man who spoke to NBC news about the recent killing of his granddaughter had been himself killed in the drone strikes of 2011.  

We presume the Times will print a correction, if a reader writes in to point it out.  Who has the time?  Who really cares about such a seemingly insignificant detail?  There are larger issues of accuracy and credibility to concern their editors.

In a larger sense, the Grey Lady may have had it right.  It might very well feel true for Nasser al-Awlaki, that he was already killed by American drones several times over.  His petition to save his son Anwar from Obama’s kill list was thrown out of court.  His son was soon thereafter killed by a drone strike. Two weeks later his 16 year-old grandson Abdulrahim was killed by another American missile strike, also remotely launched from a Predator drone.  

Those two killings may have, metaphorically, killed Nasser al-Awlaki.  One can only imagine how troubling to his dead body the gunshot mutilated little corpse of his eight-year old grand-daughter must be.

But in fairness, and truly, America, who really gives a fuck about some family’s tragedy in far away Yemen?  Anwar al-Awlaki (you will read everywhere but in Scahill’s Dirty Wars) wasn’t a dissenting American citizen forcefully exercising his First Amendment right to oppose government actions he found hateful.   He was a dangerous terrorist, pure and simple, a powerful recruiter for hateful, murdering fanatics, the President said so.   He was very highly placed in al Q’eada when he was put on the Presidential Kill List, you can confirm that with the New York Times and NPR as well as on Fox, CNN, MSNBC.  

Chances are they all hate our freedom over there anyway, isn’t that right?   As for the beautiful little girl bystander left to die slowly in that raid, an American bullet in her spine, without medical treatment, remember that every terrorist was once an adorable eight year-old.  

Move along now, America, nothing to see here.  USA!  USA!!!!

 

 

They will kill you, Elie

“You may see this new era, with its sudden desperation, the army of full-throated angry Americans whipped up by a cynical and clever Minister of Public Enlightenment advising an impulsive, emotionally unbalanced Chief Executive, as an opportunity for you, Elie, but you should also beware,” said the skeleton of my father.  “They will have not a second’s hesitation to take any and all steps, including launching a Hellfire missile, to take your smart ass out of the game if you ever pose the slightest threat to anybody.”  

You know, this is something I’ve not been able to convey to anyone during the long, mostly fruitless eight year rule by the well-liked and well-hated Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mr. Obama.  They used to warn Cheney that the powers he was grabbing for the Unitary Executive might feel good when you had Bush in office, but that President Hillary Clinton with all that power might not feel so good to Cheney.  Cheney, Mr. Darkside, the personification of evil, told those people to go fuck themselves.  The rest, as they say, is history.  

“The American president, thanks to Obama’s courageous innovation, no longer need concern himself with the quaint and antiquated notion of ‘due process’ when your on target nerve-probing comes to his attention.   Say you achieve a modest degree of success in creating a voracious twelve mouthed funnel bringing masses of people to your platform, your, until now, little read work product here on this blahg.  The NSA can easily access everything you’ve ever written now, like a time machine, they’ve already gathered all your emails, phone records, the works, they just have to pull it up.  Reading it over they will easily see a long pattern of griping and many direct insults to powerful people who now have the absolute right to put you on a secret kill list and, literally, blow you into a thousand bloody shards.”  

I doubt very much I’ll be targeted for anything until after people like Jeremy Scahill, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and many, many thousands of others, perhaps millions, get whacked.  Obviously, I take your point, though, especially since, once again, it is, coincidentally, exactly my point.  

Look up Anwar al-Awlaki now and every mention of him connects him to Al Q’eada, intimating that his extra-judicial execution was well-deserved as the dangerous number two or three man to Osama bin Laden himself.  The New York Times, of course, identifies Awlaki this way.  Wikipedia remains uncorrected in this too.  I’m no friend of murderous fanatics, but, for fuck’s sake, when you look at the fucking facts of this case you will not applaud, as Bill Maher gloatingly did, the execution of this fellow American and, quite a few days later, his 16 year-old American born son, and today, we learn, his eight year-0ld daughter, shot to death by SEALs yesterday.    

Awlaki was one of America’s go-to imams after the 9/11 attacks. American born, telegenic, well-spoken, reasonable, he was on TV many times, sought for interviews by many major media sources.   The FBI found out a couple of the Washington DC based 9/11 killers had attended services at the large Virginia mosque where Awlaki conducted services.  They probed for connections, found nothing very promising but began surveillance and— whoa! Awlaki was having regular sessions with prostitutes!   The fucking hypocrite!

The whores interviewed liked him, he was apparently a decent guy who just wanted sex.  The FBI grabbed him, warned him that if he kept up his increasingly critical comments about the Bush administration’s wars against multiple Muslim countries, his wife and family might not be so happy to watch the videos of what he did in his spare time, if you take my fucking meaning, my friend.  

He eventually left the U.S. with his family and went back to live in his father’s country, Yemen.  He was increasingly vocal in his criticism of America’s worldwide jihad against Muslims.   The Yemenis grabbed him at one point, and, at the request of the Americans, kept him locked up, without charges or trial, for about a year and a half.  Much of this time he was in solitary confinement.

 “Well, let’s be accurate here, he wasn’t locked up without charges.  He was locked up for some kind of alleged conspiracy with Al Q’eada supporters, he was accused of planning to kidnap somebody, or something, but they never followed up on the charges, outside of tossing him into a hole for more than a year to meditate on American justice,” said the skeleton.  

When he comes out of prison he’s not convinced, oddly enough, that America is conducting a righteous search for a discrete group of murderous fanatics.  The Muslim still seems to believe that America has declared worldwide war on Islam.

“You get this detailed story from Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 NY Times best seller Dirty Wars and his documentary of the same name.  The book was read by a lot of people, not all of whom buy his premise about Awlaki and how he was killed, not only without trial, but without being charged with any specific crime.  ‘Enemy combatant’ suffices to land one on the kill list, and that designating is done at the sole discretion of the sitting president.  NPR, to take but one prominent example,  voiced some skepticism, they tell their large audience:

But Scahill goes on to argue, far more controversially, that the late cleric’s militancy was a direct result of American overkill and hostility toward Islam. Indeed, as we watch footage of Scahill and surviving relatives gazing sadly at home movies of the family, Awlaki comes close to being portrayed as an innocent victim.

“It is, without question, very controversial to try to increase public knowledge of secret wars, and secret kill lists, and secret programs that violate civil liberties up to and including depriving American citizens of their fundamental, but apparently not inalienable, right not to be deprived of life without due process of law,” said the skeleton.  “If you think the current president’s Muslim ban is bad, what do you think about the secret killing of many Muslim children by drones that first drive them insane, and then reduce them to bloody streaks on the rocks?”

You’re still a fucking commie, dad, even there in your eternal rest.  

“There’s not a shred of proof linking me to the Communists,” said the skeleton.  

The thing that chills me to the bone, and it apparently chills Jimmy Dore, who identifies himself as a night club comedian who tells dick jokes to drunks,  as much as it does me, is that no critical conversation of certain things is allowed in public discourse today.    Obama good, Bush bad.  Bush secret kill list bad, Obama secret kill list good.  As Dore points out, Obama is NICE.  He’s nice!  If he kills a 16 year-old American with a missile launched from a drone, turns the American kid into chopped meat, the little asshole must have done something to deserve it, no?  You don’t want to come close to portraying someone a good man, a thoughtful man, ordered a hit on as an innocent victim.

“The U.S. didn’t even try to refute the fact that Awlaki’s kid had nothing to do with anything.  The smug press secretary just said the little asshole should have been more careful about who he ‘chose’ for his father.  Which echoes the famous good advice to slum dwellers, pick your parents better, assholes, and don’t complain about your own poor choices,” said the skeleton.  

You’re a godless goddamned commie, dad.  

“Takes one to know one,” said the skeleton, “drone you later, asshole.”

I leave you with this, from today’s fucking news, discovered when I went to verify the proper spelling of al-Awlaki’s name:

The (dead) child’s mother, Anwar al-Awlaki’s widow, survived the raid with a minor wound, according to Nasser al-Awlaki. However, Anwar al-Awlaki’s brother-in-law was killed in the raid. The death toll varies according to the sourcing, with the Pentagon saying 14 militants died, along with “numerous” civilians. Nasser al-Awlaki said Yemenis were circulating a body count of combatants and civilians as high as 59.     source

fair and balanced coverage of the same story

 

Finding Inspiration in the Sickening Tragedy of History

I must take a moment off from trying to put all of my hard-earned insights about life into the mouth of the skeleton of my difficult, at times impossible, father.

To be more accurate:  I need to take a break from trying to put these insights into our ‘conversations’ by way of giving you, gentle reader, these hopefully tantalizing crusts to chew on.   I generously give the fucking skeleton most of the good lines because I am that kind of son.  But I’m afraid my dear old father can add nothing at the moment to what I need to say.  

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you completely underestimated me, would it, Elie?” said the familiar pain in the ass from his bed inside the earth.  

Most people I know are very upset at the recent political turns of fortune here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.    They have little faith that a vain, thin-skinned, attention and adulation-seeking man, born filthy rich, to a self-made millionaire father, Frederick Christ “Fred” Trump (I shit thee not), who sent the troubled boy to a military academy to make him less of a vain, thin-skinned, attention-seeker, and later battled government charges of systematic racism with this same son, aided by the evil Roy Cohn, the son by then the young president of his imperious, embattled father’s real estate empire, can lead our troubled and divided nation to better times.  They look at his Harvard-trained, Goldman Sachs exec turned successful profiteer of hate and innuendo, his Chief Strategist, and see Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment, the man with the intellectual fire power to sell his passionate master’s vision of National Greatness to the persuadable, and they shudder with horror.    

Sekhnet is more upset than most.   She suffers from PTSD, is more susceptible than many to loud rumblings of the worst case scenario.   She can’t hear much on any subject related to any of this without becoming tearful.   She told me tonight that I’m incapable of talking about anything else (though, in fairness to me, I spend plenty of time doling out Obama’s share of blame for the current state of affairs).  I must therefore take a few moments from trying to craft a salable manuscript about my father and history, written with a slavish devotion to the tastes of the razor-toothed corporate cocksuckers I hope will embrace it, promote it, and pay me for it, to speak bluntly and honestly about something that quickly reduces Sekhnet to tears.   History.  

She had terrible history teachers in school who made studying the subject a boring, meaningless chore.  As a consequence she never read history once she graduated.   She much preferred the intellectual rigors of philosophy and science, though she no longer reads much of the former and doesn’t have as much time as she’d like to keep up with most aspects of the latter.   History, she says, is like the politics and ‘alternative facts’ that divide us now, a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, or propaganda, dull and/or dangerous, the stuff of which the horror we live in today is actually crafted.    

“She’s not entirely wrong about that,” said the skeleton wryly.  

I tried to explain to her that uncovering the pertinent facts and learning useful lessons from history is, indeed, an ongoing battle.  It’s like the battle I must constantly wage against anger.  There are plenty of reasons to rage, always, no shit.   The struggle not to become angry must be ongoing if it is to have any hope of success.  You might learn to eliminate the reflexive tensing of your arms, the clenching of your fists, even the snarl that might feel irresistible — but the look on your face will still betray your feelings most of the time.  

The best history is a nuanced telling of what happened in the past in the context of how this past affects things going forward.  No professional historian can actually present this story in all its nuance, though some come much closer than others.  History, at its best, is an earnest search for deeper truth about our world that inspires us to make the best choices for the future.  

It’s true that most historians write for their masters, serve a powerful force of one kind or another.  It is said that history is written by the victors, often in the blood of those they defeat and vilify.  Much of what we call history is written to justify one set of beliefs or another.   The historian, we’re told, must start with a thesis, in the manner of a scientist, and demonstrate the truth of the theory by presenting and interpreting the known and uncovered facts.  

“Sounds a lot like a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, when you put it like that,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, maybe so.   History is slippery, I’ll give it that.  Certain things, however, happened, they objectively happened and they cannot unhappen.  There were a few hundred years of chattel slavery here, for example, from the earliest colonial days through almost the entire first century of our great democracy.   That part is beyond dispute, even if you refer to it as The Peculiar Institution and the rich people who owned slaves, raped the ones they liked, had the ones whipped that they didn’t like, as Planters.  Then the Civil War.  Then things get slippery.  

Woodrow Wilson was a great fan of D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece of early cinema, the innovative ‘The Birth of A Nation.’  He had the movie screened at the White House, the first movie ever screened there.  

“The aptly named White House, in that instance,” said the skeleton.  

Some feminist professor at CCNY made us watch most of the infernal movie with her, in a darkened room on the City College campus in Harlem.  I watched the thing and said to myself “I’ll be damned.”   I had no idea the freed slaves had created such a massive and intolerable wave of terror, preying on white women, raping them, and that the Ku Klux Klan, far from being the brutal, hate-filled lynching, terrorist murderers I’d always supposed, were actually modern day knights, living out a code of chivalry as impressively heroic as any from storied antiquity.  

“Sekhnet will tell you to tone down the irony,” said the skeleton.  

Fine, but I give it as an example.  The version of history that was in ascendance in 1915, when the hateful “Birth of A Nation” was made, and Klan membership was soaring, was that American blacks were out of control and needed the harsh penal laws of the southern states and brutal methods, including occasionally teaching them a collective lesson by torturing and killing the most uppity of them, to keep them in line.  It was better for everybody, these historians argued, to leave the treatment of blacks to the localities that knew them best.   Any black people who could get out of those localities migrated, en masse, to urban centers far from the former Confederacy.  Life wasn’t no crystal stair for them where they went, but it was arguably better than casting your eyes down wherever you went to avoid being strung up. [1]

The history of these things is fascinating to me, even if also maddening and grotesque.  I read historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn and nod my head.  These historians are speaking my language, presenting the past in a way that makes perfect sense to me, in light of the present.  Other people may not be moved by these histories at all, some might hate them, still others might never open any of these books in the first place.   I don’t say one way is necessarily better than another, but for me, as it was for my father, this shit is endlessly fascinating.  

“Well, not everybody is cut out for it, Elie.  You can see the long recitation of the horrors of history as an unbearable ordeal to put yourself through.  History is also alive.  You remember when you and your sister were little and I told you not to buy Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies?  They were Welch candies, made by a company owned by Robert Welch, the man who started the John Birch Society– in the year your sister was born, as a matter of fact.  

“The John Birch Society were rabid right wing fanatics who believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.  The infamous billionaire Koch brothers, who have done so much to bring about a more just world — for themselves– , sprung from the syphlitic gonads of one of the founders of the John Birch Society.   Here’s what Welch published about Eisenhower, courtesy of your friend Jeeves:

  • On page 278 of The Politician, Welch summarized, from his perspective, the only two possible interpretations of President Eisenhower’s motives: “The role he has played, as described in all the pages above, would fit just as well into one theory as the other; that he is a mere stooge or that he is a Communist assigned the specific job of being a political front man.”

“Anyway, true enough, any jackass can write history.  You recall Henry Ford’s masterwork about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, meticulously researched and based largely on the infamous Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  

Yeah, look, you and I don’t have much squeamishness about history, but I recognize that many people do.   I will end with Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

 

[1] I have a vivid memory of my mother reading me this wonderful poem by Langston Hughes  (read the poem, but whatever you do, don’t click on the play video button above it)