A Tribute to the Life and Work of Amiri Baraka on his 75th Birthday

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. "

--Amiri Baraka

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2009/10/amiri_baraka_turns_75.html

All,

Today, October 7, 2009, marks the 75th birthday of one of the most important, influential, and creatively innovative writers and critics in U.S. history and one of the most significant African American artists and intellectuals of the past century. Highly gifted and creatively proficient in many different genres of literature--poetry, playwriting, cultural criticism, the essay, fiction, music and literary theory, history, and criticism, as well as journalism Baraka is also a consummate community organizer and political/cultural activist, theoretician, and strategist who has founded and/or been an integral part of many different social, cultural, and political organizations and is widely considered the leading force behind the legendary Black Arts Movement (BAM), a national cultural phenomenon that revolutionized American writing and cultural expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Amiri is the legendary and prolific author of over 30 books (!), an esteemed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past winner of the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Baraka also taught literature, music history, cultural history, politics, and African American Studies for over 30 years at State University of New York--Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities. His voluminous body of work consists of many essays, short fiction, a novel, cultural criticism, political analysis, an acclaimed editor of numerous literary and cultural anthologies, and music history and criticism as well as twenty five plays, and literally hundreds of extraordinary poems. After nearly five decades of intense and committed work Amiri Baraka is a modern literary giant with a global following and a living icon of the various Black Liberation Movements of the past half century.

In celebration of a life and career that has had (and continues to have) a tremendous impact and influence on many writers, artists, and politically engaged intellectuals throughout the world the following articles, essays, poems, fiction, excerpts from plays, and social commentary by Baraka and other writers and activists are offered in tribute to a great artist and compassionate, dedicated human being who has always made a concrete difference in terms of not only living in the world but most importantly changing it. These offerings are shared as an expression of our deep and heartfelt appreciation for Baraka's ongoing effort and stunning contributions. Enjoy...

Kofi

As Amiri Baraka turns 75, Newarkers celebrate
By Carrie Stetler
October 1, 2009
Newark Star-Ledger

Amiri Baraka hasn’t mellowed with age.

One of the last surviving authors of the Beat Generation, and an enduring symbol of Newark’s political turmoil four decades ago, Baraka turns 75 next week.

Poet Amiri Baraka reads a poem at Skippers

Poet Amiri Baraka reads a poem about Sarah Vaughan

While his native Newark has changed dramatically since the late 1960s, Baraka has not. For more than four decades, the controversial artist has continued his role as the city’s most famous gadfly and remains unrepentant about his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," which cost him the title of New Jersey poet laureate in 2002 after it was denounced as anti-Semitic. (It is a charge Baraka still refutes.)

"I’m just about the same," says Baraka, whose birthday is Wednesday, although he admits that, in recent years, he’s had to slow down a little. "You have to cut back on your schedule. I used to pop up early in the morning, stay up late and work through the night, and now I don’t do that quite as much. You have to make do with what you can do."

He does, however, plan on attending the five-day birthday celebration that Newark residents are planning in his honor, starting Saturday with jazz vespers at Bethany Baptist Church, which Baraka attended as a child. It continues with readings of his poetry, a Baraka art exhibit and a symposium on his political activism.

"Seventy-five years is quite a milestone," said Sandra West, curator of the African-American room at the Newark Library, who helped organize the event. She’s known Baraka since she was a teen in the late 1960s, when he encouraged her poetry writing as a founder of the Black Arts movement, which urged African-American artists to explore their own culture.

Although Baraka shifted from black nationalism to communism more than 40 years ago — just one in a series of personal and political transformations from the Beat era through the 1970s — he’s clung to the same revolutionary ideals.

He still denounces adversaries with terms like "neocolonial" and "petit bourgeois." And although he is a fan of President Obama — "To forget the enormous step forward he represents is destructive,’’ he says — black leaders who disappoint Baraka are derisively branded "negroes." That’s what he has called every Newark mayor from Kenneth Gibson--one of the nation’s first black mayors whose 1970 election owed a large debt to Baraka’s support--to former mayor Sharpe James and present-day mayor Cory Booker.

But Newark politicians seem to understand that this is part of the deal with Baraka. And despite his invective and ceaseless interrogations ("Why is the head of police white? ...Why can’t Symphony Hall be restored?... Why is there no museum dedicated to local history?"), they speak of him with respect and even affection.

Says Booker, "I have a problem with people who criticize but do nothing to change things, but that’s not Amiri Baraka. He’s always been a dedicated servant of the city. He’s utterly sincere in his desire to make Newark a better place. He comes from a noble American tradition of fighting for change, which includes pamphleteers like Thomas Paine to civil rights leaders. I will have nothing but love for Mr. Baraka."

Some of that love is undoubtedly due to Baraka’s charisma and virtuosity as an orator, which haven’t flagged since his post-riot heyday.

"He has a deep capacity to be charming, and in certain settings, when he doesn’t have to be the Amiri Baraka of public notoriety, he’s enormously funny," says friend Clement Price, who teaches New Jersey history at Rutgers University and is head of its Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience. "It’s hard to love a one-dimensional activist. But someone like him, who can make you laugh, it’s hard not to love them."

Baraka is still deeply entrenched in the cultural and civic life of the city, an eloquent booster who loves to recount Newark's bygone days. He can tell you, for instance, that 60 or 70 years ago jazz pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith lived on the same street as Ed Koch, who went on to become one of New York’s most famous mayors.

Despite critics who call Baraka a crackpot and a holdover, he’s maintained his international reputation as a writer. And his significance to Newark is indisputable, says Price. "He is a central figure in the demographic shift that transformed Newark from a predominantly white city to a predominately black city."

Born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark to a social worker and postal employee, he was in college when he changed the spelling of his middle name to Leroi. He later moved to New York and quickly drew notice as a poet, befriending Beat Generation luminaries like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who remained a close friend until his death in 1997.

Baraka gained fame with his 1964 play, "Dutchman," a metaphor for the racial tensions of the era and the anger of African-Americans.

But Baraka left the limelight and returned to Newark, changing his first name to Imamu Amiri Baraka after he converted to Islam. Later, he dropped the "Imamu,’’ transforming from black nationalist to a communist in the 1970s.

Since, Baraka has weathered political and professional turmoil — sometimes self-created — as well as personal tragedy. In 2003, his daughter Shani, a Newark schoolteacher and basketball coach, was murdered in Piscataway by the estranged husband of her half-sister. She was one of the five children of Baraka and his wife, Amina, also a writer and activist. His son, Ras, now a principal at Central High School, was Newark deputy mayor in 2002. He also has a daughter, Lisa Jones, from a previous marriage to Hettie Jones; they divorced in the 1960s.

"It was a deadly kind of blow," he says of Shani’s death. "That was something that not only stunned this family, but the whole town."

Through it all, Baraka has continued to write poems, fiction, plays and essays, particularly on one of his favorite topics — black music in America. He’s authored more than 50 books, so many he’s lost count. His latest is "Digging: The Afro-American Soul of Classical Music," published in May. He’s still asked to speak — everywhere from Georgetown to Croatia — but he says demand has slackened since he lost the poet laureate title.

Although some regard his post-1960s work as little more than polemic, others say he remains one of the most important African-American authors in the nation. "I don’t think there’ll ever be another like him," says Cornel West, Princeton University’s renowned African-American studies scholar and a friend. "He’s a Renaissance man, a genius who has always been true to himself. He looks at the world through the lens of poor people and working people. He’s a man who has always been on intellectual and moral fire."

His influence continues to be felt by young authors in the city and beyond. Pulitzer-prize winning author Junot Diaz, who grew up in the Parlin section of Old Bridge, says Baraka was an inspiration to him when he was a student at Rutgers University. In 1990, Diaz and other students participated in demonstrations that included a demand to get Baraka tenure in the all-white English department, in which he was a professor. His tenure was denied that same year.

"He was a controversial figure, still is. But my God, what a poet," says Diaz. "How he fired up all of us young writers of color."

Baraka is thankful for the Newark tribute in his honor, but hopes much of its focus will be on Newark’s past and its hopes for the future. "It’s worth it if it helps educate people about the history of the city, about the struggle we’ve gone through and it’s potential," he says.

"What can I say? If people want to do it, I can’t be opposed to it."

"But apparently, there’s some kind of insistence on letting everyone know that now I’m 75," he adds drily. "I’m not as happy about that."

Amiri Baraka's 75th birthday events Tomorrow: Jazz vespers at 6 p.m. at Bethany Baptist Church, 275 West Market St., featuring piano player and composer Randy Weston. Admission is free.

Tuesday: Opening for exhibit of Baraka’s drawings from 6 to 8 p.m. at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, 591 Broad St. Admission is free.

Wednesday: Birthday jam at the WISOMMM Cultural Center, 15 James St., featuring several jazz artists. Tickets are $50, which includes a light buffet, live entertainment and complimentary wine.

Thursday: “Baraka Book and Birthday Bash,” hosted by the Newark Public Library at 5 Washington St. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. There will be readings by young poets, a short film screening and a Baraka book signing.

Oct. 9: A symposium on “The Political Evolution of Amiri Baraka” will be held at 6 p.m. at Central High School Auditorium, 246 18th Ave. Admission is free. For more information, visit http://www.amirib75.com/



http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/rich.php

Boston Review
MARCH/APRIL 2009
What Country Is This?
Rereading LeRoi Jones’s The Dead Lecturer (1964)
by Adrienne Rich

A splinter of language flares into mind before sleep, in crawling traffic or some waiting room of defunct magazines. So a few years ago a phrase began stalking me: A political art, let it be / tenderness . . . words of a poem from The Dead Lecturer by LeRoi Jones (afterward to become Amiri Baraka). I found the book, the poem (“Short Speech to My Friends”), then pored through the pages, as after some long or lesser interval one reads poetry as if for the first time. I’d been taken, unsettled, by these poems in the late 1960s; read some of them with basic writing students at City College of New York and graduate students at Columbia. My Grove Press paperback, with the young poet’s photograph on the cover, has titles and pages scribbled inside the back and front covers, faint pencil lines along margins. A traveled book, like a creased and marked-up map.

I read The Dead Lecturer again partly for the feeling of a time and place, personal and historical: New York in the late 1960s, surges of public expectation and anger, war news, assassination news, political meetings, demonstrations, posters and leaflets; a time lived in the streets, in community centers, lecture halls and student cafeterias, storefronts and walk-ups, coffeehouses and jazz clubs; living room and open-air poetry readings from the East Village to the Upper West Side to Harlem. A time when factions might clash but there was motive and hope in social participation. I read it again realizing, forty years later, how Jones’s poetics had furthered my sense of possibilities when I was writing the poems of The Will to Change and Diving into the Wreck. But I return to The Dead Lecturer here for reasons beyond the personal.

Amiri Baraka’s distinguished, embattled history as poet, small-press editor, essayist, playwright, political activist, autobiographer, and public figure is not what I want to write about here—even if I thought I could do it justice. Paul Vangelisti, in his foreword to Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961—1995, and Robert Creeley, in a December 1996/January 1997 Boston Review essay, provide valuable perspectives on a major poetic career. But I would urge any serious student of the human scene, certainly any poet, who has not recently, or ever, read The Dead Lecturer: borrow a copy from the public library, from a friend’s bookshelf, or get hold of it secondhand. (“Used,” “As New,” “Slightly Worn,” say the mail-order book catalogues. The copy in my hands, both used and new, in different senses.) Many of the poems are included in Transbluesency, but The Dead Lecturer itself is out of print.

And it is a book, not an assemblage of occasional poems: a soul-journey borne in conflictual music, faultless phrasing. Music, phrasing of human flesh longing for touch, mind fiercely working to decipher its predicament. Titles of poems are set sometimes in bold, sometimes italics, implying structures within the larger structure. Drawing both on black music and the technical innovations of American Modernism, Jones moves deeper into a new poetics, what the poet June Jordan would name “the intimate face of universal struggle.”

But intimacy is never simple, least of all in poems like these where “inept tenderness” (“A Poem for Neutrals”) searches for an ever-escaping mutuality. Or, in “Footnote to a Pretentious Book”:

Who am I to love
so deeply? As against
a heavy darkness, pressed
against my eyes. Wetting
my face, a constant trembling
rain.

A long life, to you. My friend. I
tell that to myself, slowly, sucking
my lip. A silence of motives / empties
the day of meaning.
What is intimate
enough? What is
beautiful?

It is slow unto meaning for
any life. If I am an animal, there
is proof of my living. The fawns
and calves
of my age. But it is steel that falls
as a thin mist into my consciousness. As a fine
ugly spray, I have made
some futile ethic
with.

“Changed my life?” As the dead man
pacing at the edge of the sea. As
the lips, closed
for so long, at the sight
of motionless
birds.
There is no one to entrust with
meaning. (These sails go by, these small
deadly animals.)
And meaning? These words?
Were there some blue expanse
of world. Some other
flesh, resting
at the roof
of the world
you could say of me,
that I was truly
simpleminded.

No lyric of romantic loneliness and melancholy here. The title suggests an addendum to some literary classic presumed to have changed a life, but the mode is largely interrogative: “It is slow unto meaning for / any life. . . . Who am I to love / so deeply? . . . What is intimate / enough? What is / beautiful? . . . And meaning? These words?” Images bind these questions, render them sensuous: darkness and rain, the sucked lip, the young animals, steel “that falls / as a thin mist . . . . a fine / ugly spray,” the immobility of “the dead man / pacing,” “the lips, closed / for so long,” “motionless / birds.” Together they conjure a landscape of withholding, longing and mistrust. The speaker is not, cannot be, “simpleminded.”

In “An Agony. As Now.” (possibly one of Jones’s most-quoted poems—at least the first few lines) contactlessness and self-barricading are evoked but cannot utter themselves. Nor can “love” decipher them from the outside. But this is not simply one person’s crisis. Robert Creeley rightly saw in it “life . . . in a literal body which the surrounding ‘body’ of the society defines as hateful”—an unacceptable condition. It can be read as common existential anguish, but to ignore that surround of social hatred is to mistake the poem’s diagnostic power:

I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women.

Slits in the metal, for sun. Where
my eyes sit turning, at the cool air
the glance of light, or hard flesh
rubbed against me, a woman, a man,
without shadow, or voice, or meaning.

This is the enclosure (flesh,
where innocence is a weapon. An
abstraction. Touch. (Not mine.
Or yours, if you are the soul I had
and abandoned when I was blind and had
my enemies carry me as a dead man
(if he is beautiful, or pitied.

It can be pain. (As now, as all his
flesh hurts me.) It can be that. Or
pain. As when she ran from me into
that forest.
Or pain, the mind
silver spiraled whirled against the
sun, higher than even old men thought
God would be. Or pain. And the other.
The
yes. (Inside his books, his fingers. They
are withered yellow flowers and were
never
beautiful.) The yes. You will, lost soul, say
’beauty.’ Beauty, practiced, as the tree.
The
slow river. A white sun in its wet
sentences.

Or, the cold men in their gale. Ecstasy.
Flesh
or soul. The yes. (Their robes blown.
Their bowls
empty. They chant at my heels, not at
yours.) Flesh
or soul, as corrupt. Where the answer
moves too quickly.
Where the God is a self, after all.)

Cold air blown through narrow blind
eyes. Flesh,
white hot metal. Glows as the day with
its sun.
It is a human love, I live inside. A bony
skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.

But it has no feeling. As the metal, is
hot, it is not,
given to love.

It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.


“Self-hatred” is too shallow a diagnosis for this condition. Here is self-wrestling of a politicized human being, an artist/intellectual, writing among the white majority avant-garde at a moment when African revolutions and black American militance seemed to be converging in the electric field of possible liberations. Experiencing the American color line—that deceptively, murderously, ever-shifting, ever-intransigent construct—as neither “theme” nor abstraction, but as disfiguring all life, and in a time when “revolution” was still a political, not a merchandising term, Jones’s poems both compress and stretch the boundaries of the case. “A Poem for Willie Best” (a well-known black character actor) scathingly quotes the dominant cultural “line” on “the Negro”: “Lazy / Frightened / Thieving / Very potent sexually / Scars / Generally inferior / (but natural / rhythms.” (Such terms may have gone underground but still inhabit popular imaginations, via television and film, African-American political and celebrity figures notwithstanding.) In addition to Best, the poetry’s geography includes Billie Holiday (as “Crow Jane,” after Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems), the civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, the poets Edward Dorn (to whom the book is dedicated) and Robert Duncan (cited in two poems), Sartre, Paul Valéry (“as Dictator”), Marx. Lyrically tough as deepest blues, they do not romanticize the black populace as some revolutionary vanguard:

It cannot come
except you make it
from materials
it is not
caught from. (The philosophers
of need, of which
I am lately
one,
will tell you. “The People,”
(and not think themselves
liable
to the same
trembling flesh). I say now, “The People,
as some lesson repeated, now,
the lights are off, to myself,
as a lover, or at the cold wind.

Let my poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line, where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.
But
die soon, Love. If
what you have for
yourself, does not
stretch to your body’s
end.
(Where, without
preface,
music trails, or your fingers
slip
from my arm

(“Balboa, The Entertainer”)

Out of the verse experiments of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, Jones had come into association with younger white contemporaries like Edward Dorn, Diane Wakoski, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, Carol Berg. (All of these and others were published in chapbooks under Jones’s editorship through his imprint, Totem Press, along with his first collection, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note.) In The Dead Lecturer he takes what he needs for breath and measure, committed to the break with anglicized formalism he calls for in “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” his 1962 address to the American Society for African Culture:

No poetry has come out of England of major importance for forty years, yet there are would-be Negro poets who reject the gaudy excellence of 20th century American poetry in favor of disemboweled Academic models of second-rate English poetry . . . . It would be better if such a poet listened to Bessie Smith sing Gimme a Pigfoot, or listened to the tragic verse of a Billie Holiday, than be content to imperfectly imitate the bad poetry of the ruined minds of Europe.

Yet the poems in The Dead Lecturer cannot be called derivative or said to belong to any single school, so imprinted are they with the intensity of Jones’s own personality, intellect, and location. It is the book of an artist contending first of all with himself, his sense of emotional dead ends, the limits of poetic community, the contradictions of his assimilation by that community, his embrace and rejection of it: searching what possible listening, what possible love or solidarity might exist out beyond those contradictions. It is the book of a young artist doing what some few manage or dare to do: question the foundations of the neighborhood in which he or she has come of age and received affirmation. Because Jones himself is implicated, this questioning is double-sided, and sides will be chosen.

“Short Speech to My Friends” moves to the crux of the matter. The voice in the first section of the poem rehearses utopian desire and opposes it against actual disjuncture:

A political art, let it be
tenderness, low strings the fingers
touch, or the width of autumn
climbing wider avenues, among the
virtue
and dignity of knowing what city
you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes
—even what buttons—to wear. I address

/ the society
the image, of
common utopia.
/ The perversity
of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter
their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others,
saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less
than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The
black. The thoroughly
ignorant.

Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

“Inhumanity”: dehumanization in the eyes of others, entrenched power that inflicts suffering without compunction, and the violence (mostly horizontal) embraced by those who feel no stake in the social compact. A “political art” cannot claim to imagine a “common utopia,” or evoke “tenderness” while enduring this dual inhumanity. But it must somehow bear tenderness for those who “after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms, / now . . . suffer in tears.” (Or, in “Balboa, the Entertainer”: “But / die soon, Love. If / what you have for / yourself, does not / stretch to your body’s / end.”) The last three lines in this section of “Short Speech to My Friends” flash a signal toward The Wretched of the Earth (1961, translated in 1963), Frantz Fanon’s great study of colonialist violence, pathology, culture, and national consciousness. The poem’s structure spirals like a staircase, where “the society / the image, of / common utopia” turns sharply into “The perversity / of separation, isolation,” this turn signified by a full-stop and capital letter. And, since the poet is located between worlds, there is a necessary ambiguity to the pronouns, the “they” and the “our.”
The poem from which the book’s title is taken, “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer,” carries Jones’s predicament to the edge:

What is most precious, because
it is lost. What is lost,
because it is most
precious.

They have turned, and say that I am
dying. That
I have thrown
my life
away. They
have left me alone, where
there is no one, nothing
save who I am. Not a note
nor a word.

Cold air batters
the poor (and their minds
turn open
like sores). What kindness
What wealth
can I offer? Except
what is, for me,
ugliest. What is
for me, shadows, shrieking
phantoms. Except
they have need
of life. Flesh
at least,
should be theirs.

The Lord has saved me
to do this. The Lord
has made me strong. I
am as I must have
myself. Against all
thought, all music, all
my soft loves.

For all these wan roads
I am pushed to follow, are
my own conceit. A simple muttering
elegance, slipped in my head
pressed on my soul, is my heart’s
worth. And I am frightened
that the flame of my sickness
will burn off my face. And leave
the bones, my stewed black skull,
an empty cage of failure.

What can the practice of the middle-class, avant-garde artist offer to a downpressed and (formally) uneducated people who need poetry, beauty, as much as, or more than, any? To a people who possess elaborate cultural traditions of language and music—of which Jones is well aware, even if they are disdained by his middle-class professors at Howard University—yet from whom, in his present life, he feels ruptured? Fellow artists, unable to feel or hear Jones’s shrieking phantoms, have left him alone with it all: “They have turned, and say that I am dying. That / I have thrown / my life / away.” The voices are internal also: how to give flesh to shadows? This is the beset, conflicted art of one experiencing—allowing himself to experience—a split at the core: Who and what do I work for? What can I offer? What city am I living in? Who am I talking to?

There is no “universal” city but that defined by those who think they rightfully own the cities.
Such questions have engaged many other poets, in cultures outside North America, who believed that art must be a human resource in any genuine seismic shift, that it should belong to those who need it most. But rarely in North America has appeared so morally problematized, artistically self-critical a poetic document. Jones’s fusion of craft and emotional volatility can possess a furious eloquence reminiscent at times of Aimé Césaire.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl broke expressive limits in 1955, beginning with the wreckage of intelligence (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) through the desperation beneath numbed, Freudianized, complacent postwar America. Howl transposed despair and alienation from individual pathology onto that society itself. In this it is one of our great public poems. But much of Beat-influenced poetry, catching on to the expressive open-form Whitmanic model and the un-Whitmanic machismo, minus Howl’s social insights, easily devolved into self-indulgence, penile narcissism, and tantrum.

In The Dead Lecturer there is neither rant (unless strategically placed) nor self-aggrandizing neurotic angst. There are, however, many sliding screens. “Black Dada Nihilismus” I read as bitter verbal extremism, a send-up of “Dadaist” and nihilist jabber, turned against Eurocentrism. Here it is said of Sartre, “a white man” who had strenuously opposed the French presence in North Africa: “we beg him die / before he is killed.” The injunction to “Rape the white girls” hurls back the deadly lie of white lynching tradition; to “Rape their fathers” an expression of sheer political impotence. Masks and voice-overs are strategic to the poem.

In the poem “The politics of rich painters” Jones mocks the discourse of an art clique he perceives as inhabited by “faggots.” Gay men are made to stand in for the capitalist art world, its class entitlement and hypocrisy. They become the target for rank homophobia, which the poet has failed to disentangle from class (and racial) rage; the language wobbles unsteadily between the two. Minus the homophobic stereotyping this could have been a brilliant satirical poem on the posturing of rich aesthetes:

Whose death
will be Malraux’s? Or the names
Senghor, Price, Baldwin
whispered across the same dramatic
pancakes, to let each eyelash flutter
at the news of their horrible deaths. It is
a cheap game
to patronize the dead, unless their
deaths be accountable
to your own understanding. Which be
nothing nothing
if not bank statements and serene trips
to our ominous countryside . . .

The source of their art crumbles into
legitimate history.
The whimpering pigment of a decadent
economy

Published in 1964, The Dead Lecturer is not just a transitional book in a long, controversial career. It is a landmark in itself. After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones broke with his former affiliations (including his wife and daughters); moved to Harlem, then Newark; identified for a time as a Black Nationalist, then turned away from Nationalism to international socialism and Third World Marxism; and became Amiri Baraka. In these readings I have wished not to biographize the poems except as Jones gives leave within them; “Let my poems be a graph / of me.” Rather, I am drawn and held by the poet as social being, trying to pierce layers of inhumanity and bad faith, including his own, with language.

For me, perhaps for others, the legacy of LeRoi Jones from this early book is to have made a poetry so personally exposed yet so wide-lensed, asking questions at the crossroads of experimentalism and political upheaval—questions about art, community, poverty, audience, skin, self. His torquing of language is organic to the work; he does not assume that either self-revelation or experiments in language can suffice. The reflexive, un-self-critical use of “jews” and “fags” as familiar, still-poisonous code names for class enemies certainly disfigures the poet’s achievement, along with misogyny and its images craving the woman victim. Jones was writing within conditions that continue to disfigure the American—and human—scene of which he was, and is, though oppositionally, a part. Even the erratics of his art continue to be instructive on that society.

And still there is this painful, visionary music:
What comes, closest, is closest. Moving, there
is a wreck of spirit,
a heap of broken feeling. What
was only love
or in those cold rooms,
opinion. Still, it made
color. And filled me
as no one will. As, even
I cannot fill
myself . . .

And which one
is truly to rule here? And
what country is this?

(“Duncan spoke of a process”)



http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA168239

Amiri Baraka: Fierce Fictions, Radical Truths
by Calvin Reid
May 1, 2000
Publishers weekly
Interview with Amiri Baraka

"You take your life and talk about it any way that you can get into it."
--Amiri Baraka



As the car carrying PW's interviewer proceeds through Newark, N.J.'s black neighborhoods, one recognizes many of the street names--Hillside, Central Avenue, Newark Street--that crop up in Amiri Baraka's fiction. It's not surprising; Baraka's writing has always been characterized by the habitual retelling of his life's story--his intellectual and emotional development; his conflicts and his strident, impassioned political transformations.

Born and raised in Newark, Baraka (or LeRoi Jones, as he was known until 1967) still lives in a black middle-class neighborhood not very far from where he grew up. The house where the car stops is large and old and thoroughly lived in. The ground floor is a comfortable warren of light-drenched rooms filled with wood furniture and hung with paintings and prints. Baraka rakes back his long and graying hair as we talk in a small room lined with books. Just as in the photographs of LeRoi Jones from the late '50s and early '60s, Baraka's eyes--wide open, animated and sly--command attention. The writer is short, perhaps five feet, six inches. He's a bit stooped in posture and, as a result of diabetes, rail thin. His dark green pullover and darker slacks hang loose on his frame, but his movements are quick and energetic. His conversation is informally erudite, mildly but comically profane and inflected in the colloquial, hip manner of the black jazz musicians he has written about for decades.

The publication of The Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka this month (Lawrence Hill Books; Forecasts, March 6, 2000) will introduce Baraka's fiction to a new generation of readers. The book includes the two published works that established his reputation as a fiction writer: Tales, a collection of short stories that includes the surreal masterpiece "The Screamers," and The System of Dante's Hell, a Joycean autobiographical work of idiosyncratic linguistic invention. The volume also includes 6 Persons, an unpublished novella that assembles all the clashing phases of his life into a pointillistic, grumbling, literary self-examination. 6 Persons chronicles Baraka's life up to Malcolm X's murder in 1965, the point at which he broke with the white downtown literary scene (and left his white wife and their two children) and moved to Harlem to found the Black Arts Repertory Company and later the Black Arts Movement.

An uncompromising, albeit cultish and mercurial black political activist, Baraka has radically shifted political ideology in ways that have often left both his admirers and detractors incredulous. After years as an aggressive black nationalist and black arts aesthetician, he became an extreme left-wing Marxist in the 1970s.

Yet despite these political makeovers, his fiction has remained formally inventive, vividly p tic and deeply emotional. Baraka is a seminal American poet, an Obie award-winning playwright (The Dutchman, 1964), a pioneering black jazz critic and a deft literary essayist. His work draws both from African-American vernacular culture (particularly the improvisational legacy of the blues, jazz and black music in general) and the black American literary tradition, with its demands for social justice. He has combined these influences with the experimental techniques and forms associated with the American and European 20th-century literary avant-garde. Baraka's fiction, probably his least known body of work, manages to be both formally difficult and relatively accessible and synthesizes these seemingly antithetical traditions into vibrant works of the American literary imagination.



From Newark to the Air Force

Baraka was born in 1934. His mother was a housewife and his father was a postal worker and an elevator operator. His family emphasized the arts, and at family gatherings, "you had to sing or dance or tell stories or something," he remembers. "You couldn't just sit there, the old folks would think something was wrong with you. 'You can't sing, boy?'" He remembers piano, drum and trumpet lessons, drama class and art school. "My sister and I sang duets."

Small but intense, he was an all-around high school athlete. He won medals in track, played second base, point guard in basketball and was a halfback on the football team. "I love sports. If I had been a little bigger, I would never have been a writer." Baraka also remembers the games of the old Negro Baseball League champions, the Newark Eagles. "We used to go to see them all the time. I knew all the players."

After attending Rutgers ("there was about three black people there") briefly, in 1952 he enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C., the pinnacle of black scholarship for upwardly mobile African-Americans of the period. He remembers Howard with a mixture of pride and irritation. His time there is fictionalized in The System of Dante's Hell, in the story "The Alternative" from Tales and in 6 Persons. But he also flinches at memories of the school's stifling propriety and "the whole caste-color-system" that rewarded light-skinned blacks at the expense of the dark. "Petty little bourgeois, middle-class Negro madness," says Baraka.

Baraka tells PW he got thrown out of Howard "a couple of times"; "I was more interested in reading and hanging out," than attending classes. "There were always people jammed up in my room. We thought we were intellectuals and we tried to embarrass the Negr s whenever we could."

Originally a premed student, he switched to literature, studying Dante, the 17th-century English p ts and the moderns Stein and Joyce. He praises "some good teachers," like the late p t Sterling Brown, who grounded him in both European classics and in black American culture, particularly "the importance of the blues; that it was first a verse form and then the music flowed from that."

Kicked out of school (he never graduated), he headed back to Newark and joined the air force in 1954. And although he calls it "the worst thing I could have done," he also admits that the air force was "where I really got most of my education." A weatherman and a B-36 gunner, he was stationed in Puerto Rico and ended up the base librarian. Soon, the library became an informal classroom for "about eight, nine of us, black, white, Mexican. I would order TheHistory of Western Music and each night there would be something else we would listen to, say, 'Well, what do they mean by counterpoint? Oh, that's what it is.'"

And books. "All kinds of books, man--we read Proust in there, all kinds of wild shit that I would never have read--Thomas Hardy, whatever. We'd read the whole New York Times bestseller list, which was BS like it is now, though I think it was a higher level of bull then. I remember this fellow saying, 'What's a Kafka?' I said I don't know what a Kafka is. Order it. Then we'd spend a week reading Kafka. We actually taught ourselves a great deal."

He was also writing poems and sending them to the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review. "I would send them all out and they would come back quick. I should have saved those rejections."

In the end, though, Baraka was kicked out of the air force, too. He had too many books in his room--airmen were allowed to have only the Bible and one book--and among them was TheCommunist Manifesto. "Someone said I was a Communist. As it turned out, 40 years later, now it's true," says Baraka laughing.

Discharged from the service, he returned to Newark in 1957, "determined to go to New York." He got a job at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street and moved into an apartment on East 3rd Street in the East Village, "$28 a month for three rooms, no heat. I remember my mother wept when she dropped me there because the place was so shabby." He married the writer and p t Hettie Cohen in 1958, and they began publishing Yugen, an underground literary magazine devoted to the work of other p t luminaries of the beat generation. (Baraka remarried after leaving that marriage; he now has seven children with the p t Amina Baraka).

By the early 1960s, he was reading at different places in the Village, and had published his first volume of p try, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and his first works of jazz criticism (including Blues People and Black Music, two noted critical histories of blues and jazz). He knew the beat scene and other notable writers of the period: "I met [p t] Jack Micheline down in the Village. Allen [Ginsberg] was in Paris. I sent him a letter on toilet paper asking was he for real. He sent me a letter back on better toilet paper saying that he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. Allen and I were friends after that."

At the time, he was trying to free his p try from the influence of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. "I decided I would consciously write another way. So I decided to put what I was writing about in my mind as a visible focus, but just write spontaneously off that image." He also let the line of his p try extend across the page. "Other p ts had a tendency to write a short, terse, well-defined kind of line," Baraka explains. "Once I let go of that preconception about the line, I found that the ideas that I wanted to talk about but couldn't, would come out, just flow out. I don't know if I consciously wanted to write fiction. It became that." The result was an extended, prosaic line of verse that prefigured the style of Dante's Hell and 6 Persons, which was written in 1973-1974.

While his work is admittedly autobiographical, Baraka says the books are not an extended memoir. "You take your life and talk about it any way that you can get into it. Some of it's fiction, some of it's like illusion, some of it's would-be, never-be and added-on-to. Some of it's literal. But it's fiction in the sense that it ain't happen like that. It's not linear. It's all kind of ways. Back and forth and up and down; reflections. The mind works like that if it's not put into the straitjacket of trying to recall literally what happened. Ultimately, what you try to get is what was the feeling of that period, what was the emotional charge of that period."

The language in these works is complex, allusive and fragmentary, like thought, but it is also emotional, capturing the raw vernacular of those times, and Baraka's characterizations of whites, homosexuals and Jews will no doubt offend all three groups. "People will jump on me about it," Baraka says. "I was going to make it politically correct, but looking at it, I thought, 'Well, that was then.' I certainly would not have described certain things that way now. In my wild mind that was the way I saw those things. I know some of it is very abrasive."

"I never wanted my fiction to be formal American literature because that's boring to me," Baraka says. "While this stuff might be more difficult, it's much more interesting to write." Surprisingly for such a pivotal literary figure, he has three unpublished novels, written since the 1970s, all in the same streaming, hallucinatory, machine-gun-paced syntax. Baraka shrugs. "The editor of 6 Persons said, 'I can't read that. Why don't you write something clear like Dante?' I said, 'What? A few years ago you told me Dante was unreadable.'"

Baraka has had a long and idiosyncratic publishing career. "My relationships with publishers haven't been great," he says. He declines to talk about his editors. His longest publishing relationship was with William Morrow, but he has also been published by Grove Press, Third World Press, Doubleday, Bantam and Thunder's Mouth Press. The Italian publisher Marsilio is currently publishing his p try and will publish a collection of essays on music later this year. He is represented by Sterling Lord Literistic.

"I'm going to try and get some books published by major publishers and continue to do my own publishing," Baraka says. "I've published a lot of my own works." The unpublished novels include Burning Mirror ("It will give you the mood of the late '70s and the political shenanigans going on"); Why Are You Saying This ("a book about the rise of the buppie, the Negro academic"); and Negrocity ("an overview of all the backwards Negr s I've ever known"). There is also a book of short stories called Tales of the Out and the Gone. And Third World Press is publishing a nonfiction work, Jesse Jackson and Black People, sometime this year.

"Wherever I speak," says Baraka, "I always urge that writers publish their own writing. Don't wait for these people [corporate publishers] to discover you, they're only going to try and turn you into them. Get your own galleries, get your own venues. You've got to have an alternative superstructure to this one, an alternative to this commercial culture."



http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2-3_37/ai_110531670/?tag=content;col1

The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman
African American Review
Summer-Fall, 2003
by Nita N. Kumar

Pages: 12345678910Next


The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African essentialism for what was identified as Western essentialism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is among those who have critiqued the Black Arts Movement for promoting a "poetics rooted in a social realism, indeed, in a sort of mimeticism," in which the "relation between black art and black life was a direct one" (102). In place of the sociopolitical and empirical binarism of black and white, Gates advocates understanding "race" in the postmodernist terms of a "trope" in which the categories of black and white are not preconstituted. Amiri Baraka's work has been seen, from this postmodernist position, as advocating an essentialist and unproblematic conception of black identity.

This essay attempts to rethink the question of Baraka's binarism. The argument is that, while Baraka's retributive logic is focused on the need for assertion of ethnic and racial identity, his work also reveals complex negotiations with such binary categories as black/white and art/activism. In his essays and theoretical pronouncements Baraka sets up a fixed, non-dialectic opposition between black and white, and the categories have the double load of racial and metaphysical meaning. The white Western usage of black as a signifier of evil, death, and darkness is directly reversed, and white is made to carry the suggestions of sickness, death, and absence. When we analyze blackness in Baraka, we realize that it is both the goal to be passionately struggled for, and the innate being of the African American. The impassioned rhetoric that is built up in Baraka's essays around the terms black and white often projects the two worlds as mutually and self-evidently exclusive. Below the level of passionate rhetoric, however, the categories remain tenuously defined and shifting. Quite often the terms beg the question. "The Black Man must aspire to Blackness," says Baraka in "The Legacy of Malcolm X" (Home 248). If blackness is both the natural and the ideal state, then the term black evidently is not definitive, and needs to be defined. The charge of Baraka's propounding "black essentialism" also needs further examination, since the polarization of white and black in his work may be more apparent and strategic than real.


Rejection of the White World

What was the significance of Baraka's move from downtown New York to Harlem in 1965 and his resolute severing of ties with the white world? His essays written around this time are aggressively anti-white, and in them Baraka dwells on the necessity of destroying white culture in order to build black culture and consciousness. The white world is repeatedly described as evil, sick, and dying, and the creation of a positive black consciousness is crucially linked to the declaration of white culture as evil and insane. "In a time of chaos, in a time of trouble, we're asking for unity, black unity as defense against these mad white people who continue to run the world" (Baraka, Home 234). In a similar key, Baraka's compatriot Larry Neal, in "The Black Arts Movement," declares that the "motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world" (30). "Hate whitey" was the rallying point around which much of the black nationalist activity was being organized. "It was our intention," Baraka writes in his Autobiography, "to be hard and unyielding in our hatred because we felt that's what was needed, to hate these devils with all our hearts, that that would help in their defeat and our own liberation" (216).

This aggressive and unyielding anti-white position, which was a cornerstone of black nationalism in the middle and late 1960s, needs to be seen against the background of the integrationist Civil Rights Movement of the preceding decades. Martin Luther King's scheme of race relations proposed integration as a spiritual ideal that would engender acceptance and love between the two races. But Harold Cruse, in his influential book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, struck out at liberal Civil Rights leaders chasing the mirage of social integration, as if there existed "a great body of homogenized, inter-assimilated white Americans" with whom blacks could integrate (9). He rejected the notion of the melting pot and claimed that, while other ethno-religious groups had no desire to integrate with each other, American blacks alone had been mesmerized by this ideal. Black nationalism, he concluded, was the only viable course for blacks trying to forge their individual and collective identities.

These rejections of the white world, however, cannot simply be understood as realistic and attainable goals. In some cases they were inspired by the various struggles of independence being waged across Africa and Asia. There is, however, a crucial difference, since the African American could aspire to nationhood only in spirit, not material control of land. Therefore these gestures of rejection have to be seen primarily as ideological and rhetorical strategies for the empowerment of the community.

A gesture is capable of sustaining a goal only up to a point, beyond which it turns into its own caricature. Thus the real gains made by the rhetoric of difference can be appreciated only after its limitations have been acknowledged and put aside. An essential corollary to the goal of black consciousness is that it is often defined in terms of its rejection of, and independence from, the white world. One cannot help noticing the irony in the persistence of the concern with the white world in Baraka's essays, even as he obsessively rejects it. Of course, he did give material form to the gesture by severing ties with the white world in the downtown Village and moving to Harlem.


Dutchman (Theater review)

My argument here is that in his emphatic gesture of rejection of the white world and ostensible establishment of a black community Baraka, at least in spirit, seems to accomplish a dual task. While he sets out the objectives of independence and self-determination for African Americans in strong, bold terms, he simultaneously moves the debate about the nature and definition of blackness, and also that of whiteness, to a more abstract level. The change of the "trope of blackness," to borrow Gates's terms, into a "trope of presence" is not accompanied by a closure of meaning but by opening up possibilities. "Blackness" and "whiteness" become internalized categories. The enemy is not only the white person, who is easily identifiable, but the whiteness hidden in shades of blackness, where it can be more difficult to detect. Hence we find his retributive rhetoric turning not only against whites but also sometimes against blacks as well.

Blackness, for Baraka, is a value that the black person has to learn. "The Black Man must idealize himself as Black. And idealize and aspire to that" (Baraka, Home 248). While the attainment of "a united Black Consciousness" remains the goal, the possibility of its definition and attainment remains problematic. In his plays, Baraka engages with the issue of racial dialectic at the level of identity construction and representation even as he attempts explicitly to align the power of art with the larger political and social agenda of the African American community.

"We want 'poems that kill'": Baraka's Dutchman

A tendency see Baraka's plays as the apotheosis of the message of the Black Arts Movement can sometimes blind us to the innumerable complexities of his work. One perspective from which we can view his work is to see it not as the simple, straight-forward embodiment of the ideas of "nationalism" and "revolution," or as an expression of a "true black identity," but as an attempt to dislodge the received opposition between various binary categories such as aesthetic/politics, black/white, individual/community, mask/face, and Europe/Africa by simultaneously occupying a radically altered perspective and privileging marginalized positions.

Dutchman has been one of the most popular of Jones/Baraka's plays and hence one that has received abundant critical attention. In an influential and then-comprehensive study of Baraka's work, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, Kimberly W. Benston traces in the action of the play a typical tragic pattern: "the fall from innocence through hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe" (158). Through tracing the classic tragic pattern in Clay's fall, Benston places him historically as a pre-revolutionary victim who is also the harbinger of eventual black triumph. In a later essay, "Performing Blackness," Benston outlines two distinct theories of black selfhood and the formation of that selfhood by and in the "play" of language. He contrasts Ralph Ellison's vision of blackness as an endlessly mediated sign with what he suggests is Baraka's more "essential" figuration of blackness. "For Baraka," Benston says, the expressions of language and the body of blackness are diametrically opposed; discourse and being are not,as for Ellison, inextricable, and the possibility of "knowing" begins with anemphatic refusal of eloquence's prestige. Blackness, far from being inextricable from the paradoxes of its articulation, finally transcends representation.
("Performing" 172)

Benston's excellent analysis of blackness based on Clay's "pumping black heart" speech in Dutchman is, however, a little misleading about the play, since it allocates to Baraka a position on blackness that belongs really to Clay, and not to the play as a whole. In the play, this essentialist view of blackness that lies beyond the representational realm is shown ultimately to be self-defeating and self-destructive, since it presumes an impossibility of communication.

Several other studies have also projected the play's concern with black "manhood" and identity, finding in Clay either a fulfillment or a failure of selfhood. C. W. E. Bigsby reads in this play a direct opposition between language and action, and he sees Clay as trapped in his articulateness. At the climactic moment, Bigsby says, Clay "relapses into language ... and discards the brutal sanity of action." He sees Clay, and Jones/Baraka too, as a black intellectual who recognizes "the simple logic of revolt" but "wishes to lapse back into the safety of words and the indirections of art." Drawing on the experience of Clay, Bigsby concludes, rather unproblematically, that the play "constitutes a temptation to substitute aesthetics for action" (398). George Piggford, in "Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race," makes a similar argument by pointing to the divide between action and language and suggesting that the play posits the primacy of action but falls short of achieving black "manhood" because of Clay's inability to murder Lula. Piggford says that Baraka's text does not provide a curefor the "color problem" through an understanding of it. Though Fanon's"single answer" to the "color problem"is articulated by Clay--and thatanswer is "murder"--the problem isnot eliminated. For Baraka, a publicexpression of this answer is a necessaryfirst step but it is not--as Fanon wrongly assumed--the revolution itself. (78)

Piggford concludes his essay by contending that in Dutchman "Baraka both diagnoses the problem in American society--white dominance--and prescribes his cure: race revolution and murder" (82). Both Bigsby's and Piggford's readings seem to suggest that the play has thematically arrived at an unambiguous solution to the color problem--murder and revolution-which, however, it fails to achieve within its own plot.

My disagreement with these readings lies in their rather unproblematic assumptions that the play offers a definitive statement on blackness, suggests a binary division between art and action, then argues for the simple primacy of action over language and art. These assumptions rest largely on Clay's passionate speech, in which he scathingly argues for rage and murder as the solution to the neurosis of black people and says to Lula, "You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart" (Baraka, Dutchman 34). This statement does suggest an existing, formed black sense of identity, perhaps even an essentialist and inaccessible one. To extend, however, these perceptions of murderous rage and a lived sense of reality from Clay to the play as a whole, and to interpret these as the central meaning and the monologic message of the play, is certainly not justified. My argument is that the play itself, as distinguished from Clay's perceptions, does not offer any simple duality, either between white and black or between art and action. Dutchman is not a definitive statement on, or an embodiment of, "blackness," but is rather an exploration of the various strategies of representation of black identity and the possibility of unraveling these. The play does not so much posit an authentic black sense of selfhood as explore the processes and modes of misrepresentation concerning it. It engages dialectically with racial domination in terms of representation and attempts to invest art and language with the power and immediacy of action.
The plot of Dutchman is bare and stark. Other than the background cast of Riders of Coach, and the brief appearances of Young Negro and Conductor, the play has only two characters, Clay, a twenty-year-old Negro, and Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman. The entire action of the play takes place in "the flying underbelly of the city. Steaming hot, and summer on top, outside. Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth" (3). Clay and Lula engage in flirtatious repartee that becomes increasingly sharp and terse. To Clay Lula is a white bohemian; to Lula, Clay is a typical middle-class young black, eager to achieve success on the terms laid down by white America. Lula becomes aggressive and insulting, calling him a "liver-lipped white man ... just a dirty white man" (31). Finally Clay slaps her and bursts into a long, uncontrollable, and dramatically powerful speech that begins to wrench away the middle-class fake-white-man facade and offer a glimpse into the tortured and conflicted psyche of a black man in America. He gains the upper hand but decides not to kill Lula. She, however, calmly stabs Clay while other subway riders look on passively, which suggests their complicity. She orders them to throw his body off the train. The train stops, and another young black man enters and sits near Lula. She follows his movements, hinting that the drama is going to be played out all over again.

Dutchman (Theater review)

To examine the issue of reality and representation, it would be instrumental to approach the play through Lula and her many faces. Lula is described in the play as "a tall, slender, beautiful woman with long red hair hanging straight down her back wearing only loud lipstick in somebody's good taste." Dressed in bright, skimpy summer clothes, she enters the subway "eating an apple, very daintily" (5). So far the details represent a realistic character not very difficult to comprehend and locate in a social context. As soon as she begins to talk, however, she breaks the rules of the game, or rather dictates both the game and the rules. Very deliberately she begins to invest herself with elusiveness, unpredictability, and mysteriousness, eventually acquiring an extremely powerful and threatening dimension. Lula is a strategist whose every word and move, in retrospect, are loaded with significance and deliberateness. Her strategies are concerned with, and belong to, the realm of looking, appearance, and representation of self and others.


Significantly, the opening action of the play revolves around looking and being looked at. After Lula enters the car, she stops beside Clay's seat, and the stage direction reads: "It is apparent that she is going to sit in the seat next to CLAY, and that she is only waiting for him to notice her before she sits." Clay sees the woman and "looks up into her face, smiling quizzically" (5; italics mine). She opens the dialogue by commenting on the weight she is carrying, to which he replies, "Doesn't look like much to me." Her retort, "It's so anyway," begins to hint, very unobtrusively, at the hiatus between "being" and "looking." After this bit of small talk, however, she confronts him head-on. "Weren't you staring at me through the window?" she says, and follows it with the more startling charge that he was staring through the window "down in the vicinity of my ass and legs" (8; italics mine). The talk soon shifts to what Clay looks like and Lula's delineation of his character. "Looking," both in its active sense of 'seeing' and 'perceiving' and in its passive sense of 'appearing,' forms a central preoccupation of this play. Lula invests this activity with deliberateness, consciousness, and motive. We can analyze Lula and her strategies of perception by considering her in the following ways.

Lula as a Postmodernist

The emergence of post-structuralism in the 1960s had radical implications for humanist thinking and the ideas of personhood. Instead of being a stable and determinate locus of meaning, the human being became a field of indeterminacy and interpretive freedom that pervaded every arena in postmodernist theory. In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida, talking about interpretation and meaning, says:


There are two interpretations of interpretation.
The one seeks to decipher,
dreams of deciphering a truth or an
origin which escapes play and the
order of the sign and which lives the
necessity of interpretation as an exile.
The other, which is no longer turned
toward the origin, affirms play and
tries to pass beyond man and humanism,
the name of man being the name
of that being who, throughout the history
of metaphysics and of onto-theology--in
other words, throughout his
entire history--has dreamed of full
presence, of reassuring foundation, of
the origin and the end of play. (121-22)

Added to the idea of interpretation as play, rather than an activity sustained by an end or an origin, is the further problem that language itself is indeterminate, with endless possibilities of meaning open in it. As Jonathan Culler observes in On Deconstruction, "A Derridean would agree that the language game is played but might go on to point out that one can never be quite certain who is playing, or playing 'seriously,' what the rules are, or which game is being played" (130-31).

Derrida's book Writing and Difference, in which "Structure, Sign and Play" appears, was published in English in 1978, but in 1964, in Dutchman, Lula is already a Derridean in her interpretation of "self." She is, or rather represents herself as being, an indeterminate creature for whom being is a form of game playing. Soon after confronting Clay, she begins building up his persona through a series of conjectures that have no verifiable source. She informs Clay that he looks like he has been trying to grow a beard, that he lives in New Jersey with his parents, that he has been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea, and that he looks "like death eating a soda cracker" (8). These details have a certain amount of validity and reliability as conjecture and stereotyping, and the fact that most of this accords with Clay's life baffles him and puts him on the track of further expectation of referentiality. Because most of what Lula has said is true about his life, he insists that she must know his friend, Warren Enright, or be a friend of his sister, Georgia. Lula, however, pulls the rug from under his feet when she says, "I told you I lie a lot. I don't know your sister. I don't know Warren Enright." Lula is not only unconcerned with the verifiability of her conjectures, but is also not interested in their validity. To Clay's puzzled response, "I look like all that?" she replies nonchalantly, "Not all of it.... I lie a lot. It helps me control the world" (10). Lula certainly controls her interaction with Clay through whatever construction and direction she puts upon her language. The dialogue between the two is not so much an interaction, as a series of self-conscious inanities initiated and concluded autonomously by Lula, to which Clay responds as best he can. She talks about going to a party with Clay, about going to her house, about Clay's history and sociology--all, however, as self-conscious play on words and ideas. Lula entices, rebuffs, analyzes, and insults Clay with very little provocation from him.

Lula's stereotyping of Clay contrasts pointedly with her representation of herself as indeterminate, changeable, and unpredictable. Clay's efforts to locate and fix her image are rebuffed in a weary kind of manner. She meets his searching comments with the dismissive "I told you I wasn't an actress ... but I also told you I lie all the time. Draw your own conclusions" (27). Whatever information she does give about herself is supposed to come as a surprise to Clay. The reference to her age in her comment, "My hair is turning gray. A gray hair for each year and type I've come through," and the information that she lives in a tenement because it reminds her "specifically of my novel form of insanity," are unexpected bits of news to Clay (13, 24). Even her generalization about "life" as "change"--"Our whole story ... nothing but change"--is undercut immediately by the cryptic comment, "Except I do go on as I do" (28). Her changeableness and "playfulness," initially innocuous, turn menacing and finally destructive when she kills Clay after he has harangued her about himself and his tortured and hidden psyche. She becomes hard and businesslike as she says, "I've heard enough," and plunges her small knife twice into Clay's chest (37). Lula's apparent randomness takes on a sinister, premeditated aspect as she orders the other subway riders to throw Clay's body out, starts straightening her things and getting everything in order. It is as if she has timed and controlled the entry of the next young Negro who walks into the coach, completely oblivious of the preceding action. The suggestion of premeditatedness of Lula's plan is there in the play at the beginning, when the direction reads that she "begins very premeditatedly to smile," as well as at the play's end, and thus frames the main action of the play (4). Within the play, however, even her premeditatedness remains an element of her unpredictability.


Lula as the Dominant "Self"/The "Other" as the "Fake Self"

In marked contrast Lula's sense of her own identity, her perception of Clay is a series of stereotyped images hurled at him without any pretense or apology. She tells him disarmingly, "You are a well-known type" (12). She evokes every stereotype that has historically defined the African American, from the escaped slave to Uncle Tom to a "middle-class fake white man" (34). Stereotyping is the most efficient form of lying that helps Lula control Clay. The strategy by which she transforms stereotypes into structures of power and control is by working into the images an element of culpability, which can then become the reason for destroying the black man. "Everything you say [and do] is wrong," Lula tells Clay, and this works as the premise on which perceptions are built. As a nigger, he is an "escaped nigger"; as a non-nigger; he is "just a dirty white man." Not fitting the image of a real "nigger," he becomes a "liver-lipped white man" (31). Ridiculing Clay for wearing a jacket and tie, Lula tells him the brutal truth that these things belong to the tradition he ought to feel oppressed by. She characterizes him as either guilty or fake, with little possibility of an authentic existence.

The most condemning dimension of the stereotyped images in the play involves black sexuality. Although the sexual overtures here belong to Lula, they are made on the assumption of wayward sexual energy in Clay. Lula is undeterred by Clay's attempts to deviate from the image, and plays out the game of seduction, provocation, and castration determinedly. At the end, when she impales him, it is not clear whether the reason lies in the culpable sexuality she imagines in him, or in his refusal to conform to that image. When she begins to dance in "a rhythmical shudder and twist like wiggle," and calls on him to "rub bellies," he reacts with fury telling her, "You want to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how" (30, 34).

Historically the white woman was used to castrate the black man with the accusation of rape. Here, however, a refusal to rape is an equally good reason for the sentence of death. Lula is aggressive and menacing and emerges as the face of an orchestrated, destructive white power. Lula deals with Clay's long outburst near the end of the play, beginning with, "Shit, you don't have any sense, Lula, nor feelings either," in an extremely crisp and businesslike manner (33). "I've heard enough," she says, and proceeds to plunge her knife into his chest. In the subway, in the world of the play, Lula's authority is supreme and unchallenged. Clay's act of assertion is an offense, a sin for which the only retribution is death. Lula, and all that she represents, becomes the reason as well as the agent of the destruction of Clay and his world.


Clay's long, accusatory harangue talks about his "pure heart, the pumping black heart," and traces the connection between black rage and black art that has been the focus of much critical attention. It has assured life and hearing to the play as surely as it means death for Clay. The force and conviction of this climactic speech are palpable. Its interpretation and the question of its framing, however--precisely because Clay's words are so raw and direct--remain open to difference. The speech has often been interpreted as a definitive statement by Baraka on certain key issues faced by the African American artist. Seen this way, the statement has been assumed to be a retributive, hard-hitting one which preaches that only a reversal of the binary position, which would put the "black man" in the position of assault, would offer a possibility of change. While there is no denying that the speech raises important issues, to treat it as the meaning of the play and to lay the weight of the play on it is to judge the whole by its part. There seems to be very little justification--in spite of the fact that Clay, like Baraka, is a poet--for treating Clay's voice as that of the playwright, without framing the speech within the structure of the play.

Clay's monologue is structured as a series of reversals and revelations. Assuming the control of speech, Clay for a while reverses the power relationship with Lula and the rest of the people in the subway car. This sense of power is perceived and expressed as the power to kill: "I could murder you ... and all these weak-faced ofays," Clay proclaims (33). This perception of his power, however, gives way to a revelation of the dilemmas and the inherent conflict at the root of this sense of power. Art, rage, and reason are represented as painfully locked together in the psyche of the black man in America. Clay projects African American art as a form of misplaced and transmuted rage in his oft-quoted references to Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker: "Bird would have played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw." The disjunction between the mask and the self creates a neurosis with which the black man deals through its oblique expression in art. Through her music, Clay contends, Bessie Smith says, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass" (35). Clay's solution to this neurosis is murder, which however, even in the process of its exposition, becomes rhetorical and metaphorical: "They will cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation" (36). This rhetoric of murder is instantly contrasted in the play with Lula's act of conducting a swift and real murder. This dialectic of speech and action is also an undercutting of one by the other. Lula's power of speech is undercut by Clay's discourse about the power of action, which is further undercut by Lula's demonstration of real power through action.

Lest this interplay of language, art, and action be interpreted at individual levels, the play takes care to make visible a car full of people who are the supporting agents whose role in the power game cannot be discounted. Thus the passionate but rather simplistic message of Clay's speech linking art with rage and valorizing rage over art is allowed to retain its urgency, even as the play puts it back in its more complex perspective by bringing in the larger context. The play also demonstrates the power of Clay's speech, which can reach the audience even though it is summarily dismissed by Lula. In a complex interworking, the play thus affirms as well as denies the validity of art in the process of self-liberation.

Clay's message of rage cannot be equated with Baraka's valorizing of an activist and committed art. When Baraka proclaims in his poem "Black Art" that "We want 'poems that kill'/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns," he is not displacing art by rage, but is rather struggling to invest art with more power (219). Nor can the play be seen as advocating an essentialist perception of black identity encapsulated in Clay's "pumping black heart" image. On the contrary, Baraka is here combating the forms of representation/ perception that become forms of persecution by denying blackness any possibility of viable existence. The source of this persecution, the play suggests, lies in a severing of modes of representation and discourse from any authentic context. Thus, in the dialectical, penetrative understanding embodied in the play, the retributive logic remains, but not merely in the form of physical violence. White violence is seen to be operating at the level of the construction of black identity, and it is at this level that the play seeks to contend with the oppressive structures of the binary, racial logic.


Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich, 1984.

--. "Black Art." The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991. 219.

--. Dutchman. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow, 1964. 3-38.

--. Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966.


--. Raise Race Rays Raze. New York: Vintage, 1969. Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

--. "Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry." Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 164-93.

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3: Beyond Broadway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967.

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." 1978. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longmans, 1988. 107-23.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." Drama Review 12.4 (1968): 29-39.

Piggford, George. "Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race." Modern Drama 40.1 (1997): 74-85.


Nita N. Kumar, Professor of English at Shyama Prasad Mukherji College, University of Delhi, has a Ph.D. in African American drama. Her recent publications Include "Black Arts Movement and Ntozake Shange's Choreopoem" (Black Arts Quarterly, 2001) and "Invisible Women in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" (Indo-American Review, 1999).

COPYRIGHT 2003 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning


An Excerpt From:
Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America and the Music That Developed From It
William Morrow, 1963
by Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka)

Chapter One:
The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds

When black people got to this country, they were Africans, a foreign people. Their customs, attitudes, desires, were shaped to a different place, a radically different life. What a weird and unbelievably cruel destiny for those people who were first brought here. Not just the mere fact of being sold into slavery--that in itself was common practice among the tribes of West Africa, and the economic system in which these new slaves were to form so integral a part was not so strange either. In fact, Melville Herskovits points out, "Slavery [had] long existed in the entire region [of West Africa], and in at least one of its kingdoms, Dahomey, a kind of plantation system was found under which an absentee ownership, with the ruler as principal, demanded the utmost return from the estates, and thus created conditions of labor resembling the regime the slaves were to encounter in the New World."' But to be brought to a country, a culture, a society, that was, and is, in terms of purely philosophical correlatives, the complete antithesis of one's own version of man's life on earth--that is the cruelest aspect of this particular enslavement.

An African who was enslaved by Africans, or for that mattter, a Western white man who was, or is, enslaved by another Western white man can still function as a kind of human being. An economic cipher perhaps, even subject to unmentionable cruelties--but that man, even as the lowest and most despised member of the community, remains an essential part and member of whatever community he is enslaved in; the idea being, even if an African from the GuineaCoast is sold or beaten into slavery by an African from the Gold Coast, there continues to exist, at the very least, some understanding that what the victor has reduced into whatever cruel bondage is a man--another human being. There remains some condition of communication on strictly human terms between Babylonian and Israelite or Assyrian and Chaldean that allows finally for acceptance of the slave caste as merely an economically oppressed group. To the Romans, slaves were merely vulgar and conquered peoples who had not the rights of Roman citizenship. The Greeks thought of their slaves as unfortunate people who had failed to cultivate their minds and wills, and were thus reduced to that lowly but necessary state. But these slaves were still human beings. However, the African who was unfortunate enough to find himself on some fast clipper ship to the New World was not even accorded membership in the human race.

From the actress Frances Anne Kemble's, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation: "The only exception that I have met with yet among our boat voices to the high tenor which they seem all to possess is in the person of an individual named Isaac, a basso profundo of the deepest dye, who nevertheless never attempts to produce with his different register any different effects in the chorus by venturing a second, but sings like the rest in unison, perfect unison, of both time and tune. By-the-by, this individual does speak, and therefore I presume he is not an ape, orangoutang, chimpanzee, or gorilla; but I could not, I confess, have conceived it possible that the presence of articulate sounds, and the absense of an articulate tail, should make, externally at least, so completely the only appreciable difference between a man and a monkey, as they appear to do in this individual `black brother.' Such stupendous long thin hands, and long flat feet, I did never see off a large quadruped of the ape species. But, as I said before, Isaac speaks, and I am much comforted thereby."

There was no communication between master and slave on any strictly human level, but only the relation one might have to a piece of property--if you twist the knob on your radio you expect it to play. It was this essential condition of nonhumanity that characterized the African slave's lot in this country of his captivity, a country which was later and ironically to become his land also.
Perhaps more weight will be added to the idea of the foreignness of the African in the New World if we consider that not only were the Africans completely different in appearance from their captors, but there was not even a semblance of similarity between the various dialects those Africans spoke and colonial English. In Greece, there were slaves who taught Greek children their grammar and conducted classes in botany, as well as performing more menial tasks. The Romans employed slaves in the theater, in gladiatorial combats, and utilized the highly-educated foreign slaves as instructors. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were slaves. But the black slave in America had no chance for such intelligent diversion based on his skills or prominence in his own country. The African's sole purpose in America was, for the most part, to provide the cheapest agricultural labor possible to procure. Any deviation from this purpose was either accidental or extremely rare. (Even such a normal phenomenon as the "house nigra" was nonexistent on the smaller farms; on the larger plantation there were only one or two. Sometimes the house slave was merely the oldest or most infirm member of the owner's retinue; even after the advent of the African slave, for some time house servants on the larger plantations were indentured white persons.)

It is certain that it was this foreignness and the reluctance of the white American to think of the African as another man that helped early to fix the African's, and later the AfroAmerican's, place in American society--just as the color of the African's skin set him apart from the rest of the society blatantly and permanently. A freed serf, if he was lucky, could hope at least to matriculate into the lower rungs of the general society and perhaps find some genuine niche in the mainstream of that society in which to function as a citizen, a man. But the African, and later even the freed black, was always apart. A freed Negro, and there were quite a few of them even before the so-called Emancipation, would always remain an ex-slave. Otherwise, what was he doing in this country?



Poets.org
from the Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/445


Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film.

In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated his former life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The company, which produced plays that were often anti-white and intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself.

In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his play Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his epic historical play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans.

In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.

Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He has also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. Since 1985 he has been a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space. Amiri and Amina Baraka live in Newark, New Jersey.


Amiri Baraka: Selected Poems

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands



In Memory of Radio

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)

What can I say?
It is better to haved loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?

Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake's hypnotic gesture of the week?
(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts...
I cannot, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I cannot even order you to the gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goddy Knight)

& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?
I certainly wouldn't like to go out on that kind of limb.

Saturday mornings we listened to the Red Lantern & his undersea folk.
At 11, Let's Pretend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do. Thank God!

What was it he used to say (after the transformation when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn't throw stones?) "Heh, heh, heh.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."

O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.



Notes For a Speech

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am.

Strength

in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own. Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they. People. To concern

myself, ugly man. Who
you, to concern
the white flat stomachs
of maidens, inside houses
dying. Black. Peeled moon
light on my fingers
move under
her clothes. Where
is her husband. Black
words throw up sand
to eyes, fingers of
their private dead. Whose
soul, eyes, in sand. My color
is not theirs. Lighter, white man
talk. They shy away. My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.


Ka'Ba

"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be

the sacred word?



Monday in B-Flat

I can pray
all day
& God
wont come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here

in a minute!



Wise I

WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
Traditional

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!


SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA

(All thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other)

They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who/ Who / Who/

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who/ Who/ Who/

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who/Who/Who

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who/Who/Who ^^^

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who/ Who/ ???

Who fount Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane , Betty Shabazz, Princess Margaret, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia,Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
MedgarEvers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
WHO/WHO/ ^^

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New
Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten


Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away ?
/
Who,Who, Who/
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful


Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil


Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO (+) who who ^
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!


AMIRI B 10/01



In the Funk World

If Elvis Presley/ is
King
Who is James Brown,
God?



leroy

I wanted to know my mother when she sat

looking sad across the campus in the late 20's

into the future of the soul, there were black angels

straining above her head, carrying life from our ancesters,

and knowledge, and the strong nigger feeling. She sat

(in that photo in the yearbook I showed Vashti) getting into

new blues, from the old ones, the trips and passions

showered on her by her own. Hypnotizing me, from so far

ago, from that vantage of knowledge passed on to her

passed on to me and all the other black people of our time.

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to

black people. May they pick me apart and take the

useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave

the bitter bullshit rotten white parts

alone.

Works by Amiri Baraka: A Selected Bibliography

• Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
• Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
• The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)
• Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
• The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965
• Home: Social Essays, 1965
• A Black Mass, drama 1966
• Tales, short stories 1967
• The Baptism and The Toilet, drama, 1967
  
• Black Magic, poems, 1969
• Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
• In Our Terribleness, essays, 1970
  
• Slave Ship, drama 1970
• It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
• Jello, play, 1970
  
• Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971
• Spirit Reach, poems, 1972
• African Congress: A Documentary of the first Modern Pan-African Congress (editor), 1972
  
• Hard Facts, poems, 1975
• The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
• The Sidney Poet Heroical, drama, 1979
• Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
• reggae or not!, 1981
• Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
• The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; revised 2nd edition 1997
  
• The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
• Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961- 1995
• Wise, Why’s, Y’s, poems, 1995
• Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
• Somebody Blew Up America, poem 2001
• The Book of Monk, poems 2005
• Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
• Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, essay, 2008
• Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, essays, 2009
• The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)
• Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (editor with Larry Neal)
• Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, 1983 (editor with Amina Baraka)
  

Film Appearances

• Motherland (film) (2009)
• Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself
• The Black Candle (2008)
• Corso: The Last Beat (2008)
• Oscene (2007) .... Himself
• Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself
• Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself
• Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
• Retour à Gorée (2007) .... Himself
• The Pact (2006) .... Himself
• The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself
• 500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself
• Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself
• Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself
• Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself
• Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself
• Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself
• Piñero (2001) .... Himself
• Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman
• Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself
• Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself
• Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself
• One P.M. (1972)
• 
  

Selected Bibliography 1980-Present (Books on the work of Amiri Baraka)

Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. PS3552.A583 Z57

Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.

Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Grandt, Jürgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.

Johnson, Cedric. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

Joyce, Joyce A. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005.

Lacey, Henry C. To raise, destroy, and create: the poetry, drama, and fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Troy, NY: Whitston Pub. Co., 1988 PS3552 .A583 Z75

Reilly, Charlie. ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Watts, Jerry G. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. NY: New York UP, 2001.

LUNCH POEMS
AMIRI BARAKA
READING AND LECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
NOVEMBER 1, 2007

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11816

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968

LeRoi Jones
By Barney Rosset

To the Editors:

News of the maximum jail sentence of two-and-a-half years, for Negro poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, comes as a severe shock to every person concerned with freedom of artistic expression in our society.

Judge Leon W. Kapp, before pronouncing sentence, read one of Mr. Jones' poems aloud in court. As press reports noted, it was clear the judge applied the harsh sentence because the poem offended him. This, too, appeared to have been the issue when the judge refused to entertain a motion of appeal, or even to grant bail.

The conclusion, therefore, is inescapable that one of America's major young poets is in jail today not because he was found guilty of carrying arms as charged, but because his poems expressed ideas the judge found objectionable.

As publisher of several of LeRoi Jones' books, and specifically of the poem that incenses Judge Kapp, I find this outrageous sentence to be particularly odious. It is obviously out of all proportion to the charge. Morever, it flies in the face of all principles of free speech guaranteed to all citizens, whether white or black. It deprives LeRoi Jones of his freedom for the same reasons that Régis Debray was thrown into jail in Bolivia—the vengeful persecution of the writer for his beliefs. It makes a mockery of the concern we profess for the suppressed intellectuals in the Communist countries.

Every member of our community must feel this flagrant violation of the artist's freedom of expression as a threat directed at him. It calls for immediate and vigorous condemnation by all who believe in the even-handed application of justice, and who refuse to abandon intellectual liberty.

Barney Rosset

Grove Press

New York City

The Conservative Wing of the Democratic Party, the Obama Adminstration, and the Fight for Real Political Reform in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrat_Coalition

All,

The New Democrat Coalition (NDC) is a prominent and powerful caucus group within the national Democratic Party. Significantly, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel belongs to this "moderate" group (as does Bill & Hillary Clinton, and nearly ALL of the conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats in the Senate who are currently opposing the public option in national healthcare: Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, Max Baucus, and Dianne Feinstein, among others). These facts go a long way toward explaining just how politically compromised the President really is with respect to not only national healthcare reform but to all other forms of progressive domestic and foreign policy. In fact, real progressives and leftists within the Democratic Party have consistently critiqued and opposed the NDC (New Democrat Coalition) throughout its controversial 12 year history and are doing so now. This is what accounts for the deep ideological and political fissures and conflicts within the majority political party and is largely responsible for the refusal or inability of the Democratic Party to unite around a progressive agenda for real, substantive reform in the government and the general society.

Unfortunately it is these disturbing political realities-- which are made much worse of course by the brazenly racist and maniacally protofascist strategies of the Republican far right-- that together are making it increasingly difficult for progressive reform legislation to be properly advocated, supported, and passed in Congress. So given these indisputable facts it is still very much an open question whether the actions of the President and the Democratic Party current majority control of the House and Senate will actually result in any consistently progressive or even classically liberal reform. Which is why more than ever the organized political and ideological pressure of a nationally committed and unified left is absolutely necessary if any genuine change of any value and meaning is to happen now or in the future. No kidding. Stay tuned...

Kofi



New Democrat Coalition

The New Democrat Coalition is a Congressional Member Organization within the United States Congress made up of Democrats who support an agenda that the organization describes as moderate and pro-growth. A July 2009 Press release described the organization as "the largest moderate coalition in the U.S. House of Representatives", announced the election of Representative Joseph Crowley (New York) as the Coalition's Chair and counted 68 Members in the House of Representatives[1]. In January 2009, at the end of the 110th Congress, there were 59 members listed on Chair Representative Ellen Tauscher's roster. The Senate New Democrat Coalition counted 21 members in the Senate in August 2002, 15 of whom remain in the Senate as of the beginning of the 111th Congress.


Overview

The New Democrat Coalition was founded in 1997 by Representatives Cal Dooley (California), Jim Moran (Virginia) and Timothy J. Roemer (Indiana) as a congressional affiliate of the avowedly centrist Democratic Leadership Council, whose members, including former President Bill Clinton, call themselves "New Democrats." As of July 2009, the House New Democrats are chaired by Representative Joseph Crowley (New York), with Vice-Chairs Representatives Melissa Bean (Illinois), Ron Kind (Wisconsin), Allyson Schwartz (Pennsylvania) and Adam Smith (Washington), who also serves as chair of the group's political action committee.
The Senate New Democrat Coalition was founded in the spring of 2000 by Senators Evan Bayh (Indiana), Bob Graham (Florida), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Joe Lieberman (Connecticut), and Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas).[2]

The NDC has worked to craft and pass legislation, including Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) for the People's Republic of China, fast track Trade Promotion Authority, digital signatures, and H-1B visa reform and continues to work on matters such as privacy, broadband, expanding e-learning opportunities and making government more accessible and efficient through the use of technology. Many in the Democratic Party's left-wing criticize the group, however, accusing it of ignoring social justice and the poor.

The NDC is a member of the Alliance of Democrats international; the Democratic Party as a whole does not participate in any internationals on account of its political divisions, but does permit its affiliated organizations to do so.

New Democrat Coalition members (House)

The following 68 members of the House of Representatives currently belong to the New Democrat Coalition.[3]

Alabama
Bobby Bright (AL-2)
Parker Griffith (AL-5)
Artur Davis (AL-7)

Arizona
Harry Mitchell (AZ-5)
Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-8)

Arkansas
Vic Snyder (AR-2)

California
Lois Capps (CA-23)
Adam Schiff (CA-29)
Jane Harman (CA-36)
Laura Richardson (CA-37)
Loretta Sanchez (CA-47)
Susan Davis (CA-53)

Colorado
Diana DeGette (CO-1)
Jared Polis (CO-2)
Ed Perlmutter (CO-7)

Connecticut
John B. Larson (CT-1)
Joe Courtney (CT-2)
Jim Himes (CT-4)
Chris Murphy (CT-5)

Florida
Kendrick Meek (FL-17)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20)
Ron Klein (FL-22)
Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24)

Georgia
John Barrow (GA-12)
David Scott (GA-13)

Illinois
Melissa Bean (IL-8), Vice-Chair
Debbie Halvorson (IL-11)
Bill Foster (IL-14)

Indiana
André Carson (IN-7)

Kansas
Dennis Moore (KS-3)

Louisiana
Charlie Melancon (LA-3)

Maryland
Frank Kratovil (MD-1)

Michigan
Mark Schauer (MI-7)
Gary Peters (MI-9)

Missouri
Russ Carnahan (MO-3)

Nevada
Shelley Berkley (NV-1)

New Jersey
John Adler (NJ-3)
Rush D. Holt (NJ-12)

New Mexico
Martin Heinrich (NM-1)

New York
Steve Israel (NY-2)
Carolyn McCarthy (NY-4)
Gregory W. Meeks (NY-6)
Joseph Crowley (NY-7), Chair
Mike McMahon (NY-13)
Eliot L. Engel (NY-17)
Scott Murphy (NY-20)
Mike Arcuri (NY-24)
Dan Maffei (NY-13)
Brian Higgins (NY-25)

North Carolina
Bob Etheridge (NC-2), charter member
Mike McIntyre (NC-7), charter member

Ohio
Charlie Wilson (OH-6)
John Boccieri (OH-16)

Oregon
David Wu (OR-1)
Kurt Schrader (OR-5)

Pennsylvania
Jason Altmire (PA-4)
Joe Sestak (PA-7)
Patrick Murphy (PA-8)
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Allyson Schwartz (PA-13), Vice-Chair

Texas
Charlie Gonzalez (TX-20)

Virginia
Jim Moran (VA-8), charter member
Gerry Connolly (VA-11)

Washington
Jay Inslee (WA-1)
Rick Larsen (WA-2)
Brian Baird (WA-3)
Adam Smith (WA-9), Vice-Chair, charter member

Wisconsin
Ron Kind (WI-3), Vice-Chair, charter member

Former members

Former Representatives
Members who have left Congress:
Bob Matsui (CA-5), charter member, deceased
Juanita Millender-McDonald (CA-37), deceased
Jim Davis (FL-11), charter member, did not seek re-election
Peter Deutsch (FL-20), charter member, did not seek re-election
Denise Majette (GA-4), did not seek re-election
Ed Case (HI-2), did not seek re-election
James A. Barcia (MI-5), charter member, did not seek re-election
Bill Luther (MN-6), charter member, lost re-election following redistricting
John J. LaFalce (NY-29), charter member, did not seek re-election
Karen McCarthy (MO-5), charter member, did not seek re-election
Thomas C. Sawyer (OH-14), charter member, lost re-election following redistricting
Bob Clement (TN-5), charter member, did not seek re-election
Harold Ford (TN-9), did not seek re-election
Max Sandlin (TX-1), charter member, lost re-election following redistricting
Jim Turner (TX-2), charter member, did not seek re-election
Charles Stenholm (TX-17), charter member, lost re-election following redistricting
Ken Bentsen (TX-25), charter member, did not seek re-election
Chris Bell (TX-25), lost re-election following redistricting
Tim Mahoney (FL-16), lost re-election in 2008
Nick Lampson (TX-22), lost re-election in 2008
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-20), appointed to Hillary Clinton's vacant Senate seat
Ellen Tauscher (CA-10), appointed Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs

Disaffiliated members
Former members who remain in Congress, but who are no longer affiliated with the NDC:

Mike Thompson (CA-1)
Dennis Cardoza (CA-18)
Robert Wexler (FL-19), charter member
Pete Visclosky (IN-1), charter member
Mike Michaud (ME-2)
Bart Stupak (MI-1), charter member
Heath Shuler (NC-11) [1]
Brad Miller (NC-13)
Earl Pomeroy (ND), charter member
Bill Pascrell (NJ-8), charter member
Steve Rothman (NJ-9), charter member
Jim Clyburn (SC-6), charter member
Jim Cooper (TN-5)
Norman D. Dicks (WA-6), charter member

Senate New Democrat Coalition members

The following Senators belong or belonged to the Senate New Democrat Coalition.[4][5][6]

Current senators

Blanche Lincoln (AR, founder)
Dianne Feinstein (CA, by 2001)
Thomas R. Carper (DE, by 2001; co-chair from 2003)
Joe Lieberman (CT, founder)
Bill Nelson (FL, by 2001)
Evan Bayh (IN, founder)
Mary Landrieu (LA, founder, co-chair from 2003)
John Kerry (MA, from 2000[7])
Debbie Stabenow (MI, by 2001)
Kent Conrad (ND, from 2000)
Ben Nelson (NE, by 2001)
Tim Johnson (SD, from 2000)
Maria Cantwell (WA, by 2001)
Herb Kohl (WI, from 2000)

Former senators
Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY, from 2001; retired from Senate in 2009 [8])
Bob Graham (FL, founder, chair from 2000-2003; retired from Senate in 2003)
Max Cleland (GA, from 2000; defeated in 2002)
Zell Miller (GA, from 2001; retired from Senate in 2004)
John Breaux (LA, from 2000; retired from Senate in 2004)
Jean Carnahan (MO, from 2001; defeated in 2002)
John Edwards (NC, from 2000; retired from Senate in 2004)
Bob Kerrey (NE, from 2000; retired from Senate in 2000)
Richard Bryan (NV, from 2000; retired from Senate in 2000)
Chuck Robb (VA, from 2000; defeated in 2000)

See also

Congressional Progressive Caucus
Blue Dog Coalition
New Democrats
Democratic Leadership Council

References

General
Congressional New Democrats homepage
DLC New Democrat Coalition page
DLC: New Democrats Form House Coalition (March 11, 1997)
NDC: New Democrat Coalition Adds 10 Freshmen Members To Its Ranks (January 31, 2003)
House New Democrat Coalition Announces New Leaders, Membership for 109th (February 9, 2005)
NDC government page[dead link]
Specific
^ New Democrat Coalition (July 2009). "New Dems Announce New Coalition Leadership: Rep. Crowley Elected Coalition Chairman". Press Release. New Democrat Coalition. Retrieved August 11, 2009.
^ About the Senate New Democrat Coalition (DLC)
^ NDC Member List
^ NDN: Senate New Democrat Coalition Members (August 2000)
^ NDN: Senate New Democrat Coalition Members (July 2001)
^ NDN: Senate New Democrat Coalition Members (August 2002)
^ Milligan, Susan (December 16), "Party Moderates to be Key Players", Boston Globe
^ Harwood, John (July 16), "Democratic Centrists Declare Cease-Fire with Liberals to Establish United Front", Wall Street Journal

In Conversation with Michael Moore and Naomi Klein: A Working Critique of Capitalism

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/09/americas-teacher




Michael Moore: America's Teacher
By Naomi Klein
September 24th, 2009
Published in The Nation.

On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his new cinematic takedown of the capitalist order--Capitalism: A Love Story-- Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. To listen to a podcast of the full conversation, click here. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.--The Nation Editors

Below, you can listen to the full audio recording of their thirty-minute conversation. How is President Obama handling the economic crisis? Who is taking on Wall Street? And who is letting Wall Street take advantage of us? Find out in this exclusive podcast conversation between The Nation's Naomi Klein and documentarian Michael Moore.

Listen here:


Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is, as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.

Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street. Personally, I'm hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I'm just wondering how you're coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck.

Michael Moore: I don't know if they're so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas, one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven't come to grips with the fact that there's an African-American who is their leader. And I don't think they like that.

NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea parties?

MM: I think it's one of the forces--but I think there's a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The healthcare companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.

But the third part of this is--and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don't really see that kind of commitment.

When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August--those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, Wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?

NK: Wasn't part of it also, though, that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration--that most people favor universal healthcare, but they couldn't rally behind it because it wasn't on the table?

MM: Yes. And that's why Obama keeps turning around and looking for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there's nobody even standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure--true single-payer, universal healthcare--I think he'd have millions out there backing him up.

NK: Now that the Baucus plan is going down in flames, do you think there's another window to put universal healthcare on the table?

MM: Yes. And we need people to articulate the message and get out in front of this and lead it. You know, there's close to a hundred Democrats in Congress who had already signed on as co-signers to John Conyers's bill.

Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of anything he has stood for or was going to try and do. So if [New York Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out there. I am out there. I mean, I would use this time right now to really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants this.

NK: Coming back to Wall Street, I want to talk a little bit more about this strange moment that we're in, where the rage that was directed at Wall Street, what was being directed at AIG executives when people were showing up in their driveways--I don't know what happened to that.

My fear was always that this huge anger that you show in the film, the kind of uprising in the face of the bailout, which forced Congress to vote against it that first time, that if that anger wasn't continuously directed at the most powerful people in society, at the elites, at the people who had created the disaster, and channeled into a real project for changing the system, then it could easily be redirected at the most vulnerable people in society; I mean immigrants, or channeled into racist rage.

And what I'm trying to sort out now is, Is it the same rage or do you think these are totally different streams of American culture--have the people who were angry at AIG turned their rage on Obama and on the idea of health reform?

MM: I don't think that is what has happened. I'm not so sure they're the same people.

In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's simmering beneath the surface. You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point.

And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism.

Where has it gone since the crash? It's a year later. I think that people felt like they got it out of their system when they voted for Obama six weeks later and that he was going to ride into town and do the right thing. And he's kind of sauntered into town promising to do the right thing but not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.

Now, that's not to say that I'm not really happy with a number of things I've seen him do.

To hear a president of the United States admit that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran, that's one of the things on my list I thought I'd never hear in my lifetime. So there have been those moments.

And maybe I'm just a bit too optimistic here, but he was raised by a single mother and grandparents and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.

Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate--Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to become a politician. So he's shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.

And I think that those things that he believes in are still there. Now, it's kind of up to him. If he's going to listen to the Rubins and the Geithners and the Summerses, you and I lose. And a lot of people who have gotten involved, many of them for the first time, won't get involved again. He will have done more to destroy what needs to happen in this country in terms of people participating in their democracy. So I hope he understands the burden that he's carrying and does the right thing.

NK: Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, because I understand what you're saying about the way he's lived his life and certainly the character he appears to have. But he is the person who appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in the film.

And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser.

MM: And meets with him every morning.

NK: Exactly. So what I worry about is this idea that we're always psychoanalyzing Obama, and the feeling I often hear from people is that he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why not judge him on his actions and really say, "This is on him, not on them"?

MM: I agree. I don't think he is being duped by them; I think he's smarter than all of them.

When he first appointed them I had just finished interviewing a bank robber who didn't make it into the film, but he is a bank robber who is hired by the big banks to advise them on how to avoid bank robberies.

So in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to myself that night, That's what Obama's doing. Who better to fix the mess than the people who created it? He's bringing them in to clean up their own mess. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's it. Just keep repeating it: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home..."

NK: And now it turns out they were just being brought in to keep stealing.

MM: Right. So now it's on him.

NK: All right. Let's talk about the film some more. I saw you on Leno, and I was struck that one of his first questions to you was this objection--that it's greed that's evil, not capitalism. And this is something that I hear a lot--this idea that greed or corruption is somehow an aberration from the logic of capitalism rather than the engine and the centerpiece of capitalism. And I think that that's probably something you're already hearing about the terrific sequence in the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say, That's not capitalism, that's corruption.

Why is it so hard to see the connection, and how are you responding to this?

MM: Well, people want to believe that it's not the economic system that's at the core of all this. You know, it's just a few bad eggs. But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay [Leno], capitalism is the legalization of this greed.

Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.

I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they're like, "Well, what's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?"

And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don't really understand what any of it means.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall. But because there's been this big push in the past twenty or thirty years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.

NK: The thing that I found most exciting in the film is that you make a very convincing pitch for democratically run workplaces as the alternative to this kind of loot-and-leave capitalism.

So I'm just wondering, as you're traveling around, are you seeing any momentum out there for this idea?

MM: People love this part of the film. I've been kind of surprised because I thought people aren't maybe going to understand this or it seems too hippie-dippy--but it really has resonated in the audiences that I've seen it with.

But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.

We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred years ago you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her, and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots. And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.

Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was introduced to that relationship--that both people are equal and both people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.

But we spend eight to ten to twelve hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say. I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."

Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

NK: It is one of those ideas that keeps coming up. At various points in history it's been an enormously popular idea. It is actually what people wanted in the former Soviet Union instead of the Wild West sort of mafia capitalism that they ended up with. And what people wanted in Poland in 1989 when they voted for Solidarity was for their state-owned companies to be turned into democratically run workplaces, not to be privatized and looted.

But one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it but actually unions as well. Obviously there are exceptions, like the union in your film, United Electrical Workers, which was really open to the idea of the Republic Windows & Doors factory being turned into a cooperative, if that's what the workers wanted. But in most cases, particularly with larger unions, they have their script, and when a factory is being closed down their job is to get a big payout--as big a payout as they can, as big a severance package as they can for the workers. And they have a dynamic that is in place, which is that the powerful ones, the decision-makers, are the owners.

You had your US premiere at the AFL-CIO convention. How are you finding labor leadership in relation to this idea? Are they open to it, or are you hearing, "Well, this isn't really workable"? Because I know you've also written about the idea that some of the auto plant factories or auto parts factories that are being closed down could be turned into factories producing subway cars, for instance. The unions would need to champion that idea for it to work.

MM: I sat there in the theater the other night with about 1,500 delegates of the AFL-CIO convention, and I was a little nervous as we got near that part of the film, and I was worried that it was going to get a little quiet in there.

Just the opposite. They cheered it. A couple people shouted out, "Right on!" "Absolutely!" I think that unions at this point have been so beaten down, they're open to some new thinking and some new ideas. And I was very encouraged to see that.

The next day at the convention the AFL-CIO passed a resolution supporting single-payer healthcare. I thought, Wow, you know? Things are changing.

NK: Coming back to what we were talking about a little earlier, about people's inability to understand basic economic theory: in your film you have this great scene where you can't get anybody, no matter how educated they are, to explain what a derivative is.

So it isn't just about basic education. It's that complexity is being used as a weapon against democratic control over the economy. This was Greenspan's argument--that derivatives were so complicated that lawmakers couldn't regulate them.

It's almost as if there needs to be a movement toward simplicity in economics or in financial affairs, which is something that Elizabeth Warren, the chief bailout watchdog for Congress, has been talking about in terms of the need to simplify people's relationships with lenders.

So I'm wondering what you think about that. Also, this isn't really much of a question, but isn't Elizabeth Warren sort of incredible? She's kind of like the anti-Summers. It's enough to give you hope, that she exists.

MM: Absolutely. And can I suggest a presidential ticket for 2016 or 2012 if Obama fails us? [Ohio Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur and Elizabeth Warren.

NK: I love it. They really are the heroes of your film. I would vote for that.

I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to suggest to my editor is "America's Teacher," because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education. One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible. I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you also see yourself as a teacher?

MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.

Interview with Fernando Solanas on the Social Power of Film

by Chuleenan Svetvilas

Fernando Solanas has not only been a filmmaker but he has also served as a representative in Argentina’s national parliament. In 2002, the veteran director began filming A Social Genocide, which was released in 2004. The Dignity of the Nobodies, his second documentary about Argentina, screened in the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2006. Chuleenan Svetvilas interviewed Solanas in San Francisco. This interview originally appeared in the July 2006 issue of DOX the magazine of the European Documentary Network.

Nearly 40 years ago, you directed The Hour of the Furnaces and then you and Octavio Getino wrote your manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema.” In your manifesto, you say that documentary “is perhaps the main basis for revolutionary filmmaking.” What do you think is the role of the documentary filmmaker today?

He plays a great role, culturally, socially, and politically. The majority of our countries live in “mediated” democracies, where the media has an importance greater than universities or political parties in the formation of public opinion and in the public imagination. That is a society where the majority of public opinion is very strongly informed by the news media. And the media are responsible for some great tragedies. It is a very violent machinery of censorship. And the vast majority of the media are private firms financed by advertising.

In this country [the United States], like Argentina, the advertising is actually inside of the news stories, that is to say that they have financed the programs and they determine the content. In Europe, it’s not so much that way, there’s a stricter division between advertising and content. In Argentina, it’s really a tragedy, the media have made the public believe some enormous lies. To put it in a phrase, the public doesn’t have a good source of information from the news media. And that is why today there is a growing audience that goes to a movie theater to see a documentary. This was not the case ten years ago. Because they are finding information that they cannot find anywhere else. So, I think that good documentaries are treating issues that have been censored, social themes or historic social occurrences and stories that have essentially been censored out of existence, themes of social reality and of war.

In “Towards a Third Cinema,” you also mentioned that “revolutionary cinema is not passive,” but it “attempts to intervene in a situation providing thrust or rectification.” How involved were you with the people you filmed in The Dignity of the Nobodies?

This is an open film in that it helps those who intervene, but there is no end to the dignity of these people. There is no resolution of their situations. When you look at the end of the film, some have been resolved and some haven’t. In the characters of the Dignity of the Nobodies, there are people of all stripes. Some people belong to no political party, they are just social activists. There are some activists who belong to different leftist groups. For example, some were just social activists like the two women hospital workers are union activists and that’s about it.

As to the relationship that I have to the people in the film, people like me, everybody likes me. I’m a public figure. They all know me. “Ciao, Pino,” they say. So when I tell people I want to film them, they are very happy and they invite me to have mate (tea) at their house. It’s not so much because they are relating to me politically. They know that I defend their interests in a general way. And they know that I make films that represent what they think and feel.

The Dignity of the Nobodies is your second film about Argentina and you intend to do three more films about your country. What inspired you to do this ambitious project?

Fernando Solanas: As I got deeper into A Social Genocide, a film about the exceptional crisis that the country was experiencing, I saw it would be impossible to make one film with all that material. So the concept was born that the first one would be about the politics of power--how did we get into this situation? The second film was born out of the ending of the first one. The ending of the first film is a synthesis of ten years of a popular struggle against the situation. So but for the audience, what remains, what they see is the masses of people in activities like demonstrations. So what was lacking there was humanity. Who are all these people? How do they think? What do they feel?

So that’s where the idea was born of putting a magnifying glass on the people that formed the individual parts of this mass. And in this first film I got to know some people who were playing a huge influential role in these uprisings but were anonymous. I was tempted to make an advocacy film based on some of those stories. But then people would ask, “What am I seeing here, is this reality or is it fiction?”

So what this has actually turned into is a great testimony about the life of my country in this era. I did not invent the stories of “the nobodies.” This is a film made by someone as a historian, a chronicler of this struggle. I know that these films are going to stay around as references of a social reality. And now, because this is my profession as a filmmaker I have also attempted to make a good film. However, it could maybe not be a great film but still have the same value as a testimony. So working like this. five ideas came about. And that’s as far as I can say.

What is the audience response in Argentina to your documentaries?

Solanas: The audience is divided. The people who are in the film and the people who agree with the film, they love it. It is their expression; it’s their film. And the people who don’t agree with it, despise it, and they won’t go see it. This debate started even way back with The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) where some people were saying we should make a film to inform everyone, to inform the public but we knew that that was not what we were going to make. We were going to make a film of opinion. We were going to state our case and it would be signed. People would know that it was our opinion, just like an article in the newspaper is signed. Society is divided. There are a large number of people who are undecided. And they hear that a film like this is a good film, [The Dignity of the Nobodies] won prizes and so they overcome their prejudice against the film and they go see it.

How did you find the people in the stories in The Dignity of the Nobodies?

Solanas: I found them while I was filming A Social Genocide--in the neighborhoods. Everyday I get 10 or 15 invitations to show the film and talk about it in this or that neighborhood, which I could not possibly do or I couldn’t be making films. I have been getting to know these people and their wonderful stories. I had about 40 or 50 stories to choose from and there were probably another 100 that were just as good that were lying around. So I tried to choose stories that were a little different from one another. There are not only just picketers without work. Since I already have a story about unemployed picketers, I had to also get a story about workers that were employed and very well organized. But the whole story of my country is not just [about] the unemployed and the unionized but there are the workers in the public sector. You have the story of the teacher who lives in poverty and yet he’s a public school teacher or the middle class guy who writes and delivers packages on his motorcycle.

Then there are the women in the countryside who own small parcels of land – the typical rural petite bourgeoisie. They do not have a good education. They are not cultured. Women in a situation like this never get involved in social issues. But when their husbands got sick, and they realized their land was going to be sold out from under them, they defended what they had. So a woman like Lucy, back in ’94, she started to fight the auctions of the bankrupt farmers and I filmed her in 2004 and 2005. A person like that really emerged in that ten-year period. In the film you will see them singing the national anthem. But there’s something else you don’t see in the film. In the beginning, they tried to disrupt the auctions by praying out loud—“Our Father who art in Heaven”— but since they don’t really believe in God anyway, it wasn’t very effective, so they started singing the national anthem to disrupt the auctions. It was out of total naïveté. It’s not because they had such a well-formed political strategy.

Where did the footage of the farm auctions come from?

Most of the auctions are archival footage. The only auction I filmed is the one that’s at the very end of the film. Mid-April last year when the film was already edited and I was just getting into the final cut, somebody called me on the phone about another auction. I could never go to the auctions because they are in such remote areas. But on this occasion there was an auction 150 kilometers from where I lived. My first reaction was, “Well what do I need this for? The film’s already over.” But the women insisted, so I went and that is the final sequence 27 April 2005. I went into the auction just like any other TV station in the town. We filmed the whole thing. It was such a powerful scene that it ended up as the finale of the film.

Some of the stories in Dignity of the Nobodies are of people who are surviving everyday.

I observe them a lot and spend a lot of time with them. I taped them in preparation for filming and sometimes when I come back to film, it’s not as good as what I got when I was just observing. In something like this, things are never really prepared--that’s why you always have to take your camera. Sometimes you take your camera not because you are going to film but just because what you observe with your camera is so amazing.

For example, in the death of Darío Santillán, the unemployed man that the police shoot and kill. The beginning and the end [of that part of the film] are archival. And the images of him at the train station where he was dying, they were archival. There were probably 50 video cameras there for that event and probably another 200 still cameras. The police commissioner made an official statement that they had nothing to do with the death of Darío Santillán and it was other unemployed people who had shot him. But because we have freedom of the press, the following day, every daily newspaper showed a series of photographs that clearly showed that it was the police that shot him to death, not to mention the video footage. So in that particular chapter of the film, that was what was archival and everything else I shot myself.

The following day I went to the memorial observance in the neighborhood where Darío Santillán was from. I was the only person with a camera that they allowed to go inside and film the funeral. All the footage of him in the coffin is unique. I went around and filmed his friends and his girlfriend. His story was born with the event of his death. Starting with the enormity of that event is what made me go to the funeral. I went back to film another day to see him, not only through the eyes of his activist friends, but through the eyes of his girlfriend. And I got a little more and a little more and I kept going back day after day. I didn’t know those people before but they received me with great affection.

What’s happening with your other films on Argentina?

The third, fourth, and fifth films are pretty far along. And the third [Argentina Latente (Latent Argentina)] will be finished in September or October. The fourth one [La Tierra Sublevada (The Roused Land)] six or seven months later. The fifth one perhaps May or June next year.

Chuleenan Svetvilas is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. Her writings on film have appeared in Dox, Documentary, and Release Print magazines.

The Politics of Lying and the Culture of Deceit in Obama's America: The Rule of Damaged Politics

http://www.truthout.org/092109R?n

by Henry A. Giroux
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
21 September 2009


Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.
--Hannah Arendt[1]


In the current American political landscape, truth is not merely misrepresented or falsified; it is overtly mocked. As is well known, the Bush administration repeatedly lied to the American public, furthering a legacy of government mistrust while carrying the practice of distortion to new and almost unimaginable heights. Even now, almost a year after Bush left office, it is difficult to forgot the lies and government-sponsored deceits in which it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was making deals with al-Qaeda and, perhaps the most infamous of all, the United States did not engage in torture. Unlike many former administrations, the Bush administration was engaged in pure political theater,[2] giving new meaning to Hannah Arendt's claim that "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."[3] For instance, when the government wasn't lying to promote dangerous policies, it willfully produced and circulated fake news reports in order to provide the illusion that the lies and the policies that flowed from them were supported by selective members of the media and the larger public. The Bush deceits and lies were almost never challenged by right-wing media "patriots," who were too busy denouncing as un-American anyone who questioned Bush's official stream of deception and deceit. Ironically, some of these pundits were actually on the government payroll for spreading the intellectual equivalent of junk food. And some of them were actually being paid by the Bush government to make such claims.

In such circumstances, language loses any viable sense of referentiality, while lying, misrepresentation and the deliberate denial of truth become acceptable practices firmly entrenched in the wild West of talk radio, cable television and the dominant media. Fact finding, arguments bolstered by evidence and informed analysis have always been fragile entities, but they risk annihilation in a culture in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between an opinion and an argument. Knowledge is increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations and public relations firms and is systemically cleansed of any complexity. Lying and deceitfulness are all too often viewed as just another acceptable tactic in what has become most visibly the pathology of politics and a theater of cruelty dominated by a growing chorus of media hatemongers inflaming an authoritarian populist rage laced with a not too subtle bigotry.[4] Truth increasingly becomes the enemy of democracy because it does not support the spectacle and the reduction of citizens either to mere dupes of power or commodities. Ignorance is no longer a liability in a culture in which lying, deceit and misinformation blur the boundaries between informed judgments and the histrionics of a shouting individual or mob. Talk radio and television talk show screamers, in particular, seem to delight in repeating claims that have been discredited in the public arena, demonstrating a barely disguised contempt for both the truth and any viable vestige of journalism. These lies and deceits go beyond the classic political gambit, beyond the Watergate-style cover up, beyond the comic "I did not have sex with that woman." The lies and deceptions that are spewed out everyday from the right-wing teaching machines - from newspapers and radio shows to broadcast media and the Internet - capitalize on both the mobilizing power of the spectacle, the increasing impatience with reason and an obsession with what Susan J. Douglas describes as the use of the "provocative sound bites over investigative reporting, misinformation over fact."[5] Lying and deception have become so commonplace in the dominant press that such practices appear to have no moral significance and provoke few misgivings, even when they have important political consequences. In the age of public relations managers and talk show experts, we are witnessing the demise of public life. At a time when education is reduced to training workers and is stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the public to think critically. Rather than intelligence uniting us, a collective ignorance of politics, culture, the arts, history and important social issues, as Mark Slouka points out, "gives us a sense of community, it confers citizenship."[6] Our political passivity is underscored by a paucity of intellectual engagement, just as the need for discrete judgment and informed analysis fall prey to a culture of watching, a culture of illusion and circus tricks. Shame over the lying and ignorance that now shape our cultural politics has become a source of national pride - witness the pathetic response to Joe Wilson's outburst against President Obama. Or, for that matter, the celebrated and populist response to Sarah Palin's lies about death panels, which are seized upon not because they distort the truth and reveal the dishonesty and vileness of political opportunism - while also undermining a viable health care bill - but because they tap into a sea of growing anger and hyped-up ignorance and ratchet up poll ratings. Lying and deceit have become the stuff of spectacle and are on full display in a society where gossip and celebrity culture rule. In this instance, the consequences of lying are reduced to a matter of prurience rather than public concern, becoming a source of private injury on the part of a Hollywood star or producing the individual humiliation of public figure such as John Edwards.

The widespread acceptance of lying and deceit is not merely suggestive of a commodified and ubiquitous corporate-driven electronic culture that displays an utter contempt for morality and social needs: It is also registers the existence of a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization. Lying as common sense and deceit as politics-as-usual joins the embrace of provocation in a coupling that empties politics and agency of any substance and feeds into a corporate state and militarized culture in which matters of judgment, thoughtfulness, morality and compassion seem to disappear from public view. What is the social cost of such flight from reality, if not the death of democratic politics, critical thought and civic agency? When a society loses sight of the distinction between fact and fiction, truth-telling and lying, what happens is that truth, critical thought and fact finding as conditions of democracy are rendered trivial and reduced to a collection of mere platitudes, which in turn reinforces moral indifference and political impotence. Under such circumstances, language actually becomes the mechanism for promoting political powerlessness. Lying and deceit are no longer limited to merely substituting falsehoods for the truth; they now performatively constitute their own truth, promoting celebrity culture, right-wing paranoia and modes of government and corporate power freed from any sense of accountability.

While all governments resort to misrepresentations and lies, we appear to have entered a brave new world in which lies, distortions and exaggerations have become so commonplace that when something is said by a politician, it is often meant to suggest its opposite, and without either irony or apology. As lies and deceit become a matter of policy, language loses its grip on reality, and the resulting indeterminacy of meaning is often used by politicians and others to embrace positions that change from one moment to the next. Witness Dick Cheney, who once referred to torture as "enhanced interrogation" so as to sugarcoat its brutality, and then appeared on national television in 2009 only to defend torture by arguing that if such practices work, they are perfectly justified, even if they violate the law. This is the same Cheney who, appearing on the May 31, 2005, "Larry King Live" show, attempted to repudiate charges of government torture by claiming, without irony, that the detainees "have been well treated, treated humanely and decently." This type of discourse recalls George Orwell's dystopian world of "1984" in which the Ministry of Truth produces lies and the Ministry of Love tortures people. Remember when the Bush administration used the "Healthy Forest Initiative" to give loggers access to protected wilderness areas or the "Clear Skies Initiative" to enable greater industrial air pollution? President Obama also indulges in this kind of semantic dishonesty when he substitutes "prolonged detention" for the much maligned "preventive detention" policies he inherited from the Bush-Cheney regime. While Obama is not Bush, the use of this type of duplicitous language calls to mind the Orwellian nightmare in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities now mobilize angry mobs and gun-toting imbeciles, who are praised as "real" Americans. Fear bolstered by lies and manufactured deceptions makes us immune to even the most obvious moral indecencies, such as the use of taser guns on kids in schools. Nobody notices or cares - and one cause and casualty of all of this moral indifference is that language has been emptied of its critical content just as the public spaces that make it possible are disappearing into the arms of corporations, advertisers and other powerful institutions that show nothing but contempt for either the public sphere or the kind of critical literacy that gives it meaning.

Obama's presence on the national political scene gave literacy, language and critical thought a newfound sense of dignity, interlaced as they were with a vision of hope, justice and possibility - and reasonable arguments about the varied crises America faced and civilized. Such practices as Obama compromised, if not surrendered, some of his principles to those individuals and groups that live in the vocabulary of duplicity, the idealism that shaped his language began to look like just another falsehood when measured against his continuation of a number of Bush-like policies. In this case, the politics of distortions and misrepresentations that Obama's lack of integrity has produced may prove to be even more dangerous than what we got under Bush because it wraps itself in a moralism that seems uplifting and hopeful while it supports policies that reward the rich, reduce schools to testing centers and continue to waste lives and money on wars that should have ended when Obama assumed his presidency. Obama claims he is for peace, and yet the United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. He claims he wants to reduce the deficit, but spends billions on the defense industry and wars abroad. He says he wants everyone to have access to decent health care, but makes backroom deals with powerful pharmaceutical companies. Orwell's ghost haunts this new president and the country at large. Reducing the critical power of language has been crucial to this effort. Under such circumstances, democracy as either a moral referent or a political ideal appears to have lost any vestige of credibility. The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are inextricably related to a theater of cruelty and modes of corrupt power in which politics is reduced to a ritualized incantation, just as matters of governance are removed from real struggles over meaning and power.

Beyond disinformation and disguise, the politics of lying and the culture of deceit trade in and abet the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into a state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panic not only create a rhetorical umbrella to promote right-wing ideological agendas (increased military spending, tax relief for the financial and corporate elite, privatization, market-driven reforms and religious intolerance), but also contribute to a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. The collapse of any vestige of critical literacy, reason and sustained debate gives way to falsehoods and forms of ignorance that find expression in the often racist discourse of what Bob Herbert calls "the moronic maestros of right wing radio and TV,"[7] endlessly haranguing the public to resist any vestige of reason. How else to explain the actions of parents who refuse to let their children listen to a speech on education by - Should I say it? - an African-American President? How else to fathom the dominant media repeating uncritically the views of right-wing groups that portray Obama as Hitler or Lenin, or consistently making references that compare him to a gorilla or indulge in other crude racist references - in recent days, these groups have been given ample media attention, as if their opinions are not simply ventriloquizing the worst species of ignorance and racism.

The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are wrapped in the logic of absolute certainty, an ominous harbinger of a kind of illiteracy in which one no longer has to be accountable for justifying opinions, claims or alleged arguments. Stripped of accountability, language finds its final resting place in a culture of deceit in which lying either is accepted as a political strategy or is viewed as simply another normalized aspect of everyday life. The lack of criticism surrounding both government practices and corporations that now exercise unparalleled forms of power is more than shameful; it is an utter capitulation to an Orwellian rhetoric that only thinly veils an egregious form of authoritarianism and racism. In the face of such events, we must develop a critical discourse to address the gap between rhetoric and deeds of those who hold economic, political and social power. As Hannah Arendt has argued, debate is central to a democratic politics, along with the public space in which individuals can argue, exercise critical judgment and clarify their relationship to democratic values and public commitments. Critical consciousness and autonomy are, after all, not merely the stuff of political awareness, but what makes democratic accountability possible in the first place. They are also the foundation and precondition for individuals, parents, community groups and social movements to mobilize against such political and moral corruptions. Democracy is fragile, and its fate is always uncertain, but during the last decade we have witnessed those in commanding political and corporate positions exhibit an utter disregard for the truth, morality and critical debate. The Enron template of lying and deception has turned an ethos of dialogue and persuasion into its opposite: dogmatism and propaganda. In doing so, the American public has been bombarded by a discourse of fear, hate and racism, coupled with a politics of lying that undermines any viable vestige of a democratic ethos. We now find ourselves living in a society in which right-wing extremists not only wage a war against the truth, but also seek to render human beings less than fully human by taking away their desire for justice, spiritual meaning, freedom and individuality.

Politics must become more attentive to those everyday conditions that have allowed the American public to remain complicitous with such barbaric policies and practices. Exposing the underlying conditions and symptoms of a culture of lying and deceit is both a political and a pedagogical task that demands that people speak out and break through the haze of official discourse, media-induced amnesia and the fear-producing lies of corrupt politicians and the swelling ranks of hatemongers. The politics of lying and deceit at the current historical moment offers up the specter of not just government abuse, mob hysteria and potential violence, but also an incipient authoritarianism, one that avidly seeks to eliminate intelligent deliberation, informed public discussion, engaged criticism and the very possibility of freedom and a vital democratic politics. The spirit of critique is meaningless without literacy and an informed public. For such a public to flourish, it must be supported with public debate and informed agents capable of becoming both a witness to injustice and a force for transforming those political, economic and institutional conditions that impose silence and perpetuate human suffering. The distortions, misrepresentations and lies that have become an integral part of American culture present a serious threat to an aspiring democracy because they further what John Dewey called the "eclipse of the public," just as they empty politics of its democratic values, meanings and possibilities. The hate, extremism and pathology that have come to define our national political and popular landscapes - heard repeatedly in the prattle of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to name only two of the most popular examples - are legitimated by an appeal to absolute certainty, which becomes the backdrop against which a politics of lying and a culture of deceit, fear, cruelty and repression flourish. We are witnessing in the politics of lying and the culture of deceit a disconnection between language and social responsibility, politics and critical education, market interests and democratic values, and privately felt pain and joys and larger public considerations. And this undermining of the value of human dignity, truth, dialogue and critical thought is the offspring of a debate over much more than simply meaning and language, or even the widespread legitimacy of individual and institutional ignorance and corruption. At its core, it is a debate about power and those corporate and political interests that create the conditions in which lying becomes acceptable and deceit commonplace - those forces that have the power to frame in increasingly narrow ways the conventions, norms, language and relations through which we relate to ourselves and others. How we define ourselves as a nation cannot be separated from the language we value, inhabit and use to shape our understanding of others and the world in which we want to live. As the language of critique, civic responsibility, political courage and democracy disappears along with sustained investments in schools, media, and other elements of a formative culture that keeps an aspiring democracy alive, we lose the spaces and capacities to imagine a future in which language, literacy and hope are on the side of justice, rather than on the side of hate, willful ignorance and widespread injustice.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," in "Crisis of the Republic" (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1969), p. 6

2. Frank Rich, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (New York: Penguin, 2007).

3. Ibid., Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," p. 4.

4. See Bob Herbert's courageous article, "The Scourge Persists," New York Times (September 19, 2009), p. A17.

5. Susan J. Douglas, "Killing Granny with the Laziness Bias," In These Times (September 17, 2009). Online at: www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/4897.

6. Mark Slouka, "A Quibble," Harper's Magazine (February 2009), p. 9.

7. Ibid., Herbert, "The Scourge Persists," p. 17.
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Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan




THE REAL CRISIS FACING PRESIDENT OBAMA'S ADMINISTRATION

http://www.truthout.org/092109E?n

All,

An excellent, accurate, and fair analysis. I hope the President is listening for both his sake and ours. Otherwise we will all soon be in even deeper trouble than we already are...


Kofi


Obama's Presidency Isn't Too Big to Fail
by Robert Scheer
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
21 September 2009


A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt. He has blundered into a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan, has continued the Bush policy of buying off Wall Street hustlers instead of confronting them and is now on the cusp of bargaining away the so-called public option, the reform component of his health care program.

Those are not happy sentences to write for one who is still on the e-mail list of campaign supporters urged to back the president in the face of attacks that are stupidly small-minded. But to remain silent about his errors, just because most of his critics are so vile, is hardly an example of constructive concern for him or the country.

Yes, Obama was presented with a series of crises not of his making but for which he is now being held accountable. He is not a "socialist" who grew the federal budget to astronomical proportions. That is the legacy of George W. Bush, who raised the military budget to its highest level since World War II despite the end of the Cold War and the lack of a formidable military opponent — a legacy of debt compounded by Bush's decision to first ignore the banking meltdown and then to engage in a welfare-for-Wall-Street bailout. And it was Bush who gave the pharmaceutical companies the gift of a very expensive government subsidy for seniors' drugs.

But what is nerve-racking about Obama is that even though he campaigned against Bush's follies, he has now embraced them. He hasn't yet managed to significantly reduce the U.S. obligation in Iraq and has committed to making a potentially costlier error by ratcheting up America's "nation-building" role in Afghanistan.

Just as he was burdened with the Afghanistan situation, Obama was saddled with a banking crisis he didn't cause, and the worst that can be said of his attempted solutions to the financial mess is that they were inherited from Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. But Obama, who raised questions before his election about the propriety of a plan that would rescue the banks but ignore the plight of ordinary folks, has adopted that very approach as president. He elevated Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the two Democrats most closely aligned with Paulson's policy, to top positions in his government.

Obama's proposed new regulations, while containing some kind words about better informing consumers, do not portend any breakup of the "too big to fail companies" whose problems were permitted to fester by previous deregulatory measures. His answer is to increase the regulatory capacities of the Federal Reserve, which failed to use its already existing and considerable powers to avoid the debacle.

The promise is that next time the Fed will behave better. As Obama put it Monday, "So our plan would put the cost of a firm's failures on those who own its stock and loaned it money. And if taxpayers ever had to step in again to prevent a second Great Depression, the financial industry will have to pay the taxpayer back every cent."

Why not now? And why has he accepted the Wall Street line that all this represents a "collective failure," as if the con men and the conned had equal responsibility? According to Obama: "It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks that they couldn't afford to take. It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street and across America that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago."

Hogwash. The chicanery of the financial system, securitizing highly suspect mortgages, was codified into laws that made the hustle legal.

That insistence on equating the swindled with the swindlers is also what is wrong with the evolving health care reform plan. The assumption from the beginning, when Obama reached out to insurance companies to come up with a deal, was that they had the interest of their customers at heart. They don't, and it is the purpose of government regulation in the area of health as well as banking to even the scales between the powerful corporations and the consumers from whom they profit. That is the purpose of a public option worth its name.

Without a government program as a check on medical costs, Obama will end up with a variant of the Massachusetts program, one that forces consumers to sign up with private insurers and costs 33 percent more than the national average. He will have furthered the Bush legacy of cultivating an ever more expensive big government without improving how the people are served.


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