The Maudlin and the Mighty

The Allegory of War, c.1640s

(This is experiemental writing that combines poetic form and ideas into an illustrated essay of insights about living. Click the pictures to enlarge for full effect. Click the title to open the post in its on web page.)

Not politics, but painting makes me reflect upon our dilemma of decay. The best painters create an image of Life weaving the mauldin around its mightiest days. Life laughingly reminds us that what comes together rarely fits together.

The old
Dutch painters with their crowd scenes and outdoor panoramas, or
crowded shops were gifted with a magnificent vision and a hundred
inside jokes.

My favorites are Pieter Brueghel, the Elder and the Younger, from 15th and 16th century Flanders. Their peerless country sides are packed with people, processions, carnivals. They paint vibrant communities of people who bring their life, work, and engagement to the captured moment. Their landscapes stretch from the familiar square to a horizon place beyond our sight but curious to our heart. What’s there? Is the unseen edge a place of mystery whose margin is hope or fear?

The people in their paintings do not yet know they can not escape what is here. That makes what the artists are doing in the paintings less obvious: even as the people are going about every day living they are also trying to preserve or alter the world.

Hope, or fear? I want to reconcile twin,
conflicting odds. To embrace them both. Like the images in the paintings, I want the familiar to offer assurance and comfort. I want
the flow of time to accent what I know. I want fear to be far beyond the horizon, something considered at another time, but it creeps in. Fear has a hard eye.

In my reverie, how do I
find direction without being lost, move back and forth with ease?
Therein lies the beauty of the Brueghel paintings: their effortless back and forth, their blending of the comic with the cosmic, their bouncing the utter impossibility of no escape against the urge to
temporary freedom, to run away, over the hill, to a new tomorrow, a new day. To know in that day the path to hope or fear.

Amiri Baraka, the poet, puts the problem this way:

Who you know
ever Seen God

But everybody seen
The devil

Baraka probes deeper:

Who make  dough from lies and fear

Do
I captain a tragic flaw or am I my worse enemy or am I just following the herd?
Suppose my truth is your lie and my fear is the source of your courage?
Does the comfort of the herd lead to a foreign place dressed in the garlands of illusions I am unable to escape? Have I
purchased a strange freedom? What do I expect of others who journey
in the same sunshine and storm?

An Iranian poet cries in haunted celebration:
No one will introduce me to the sunlight

Perhaps I can double down; the Elder Pieter Brueghel
painted more than a hundred proverbs in a single scene.

The famous
Fleming Proverbs are mainly about folly, the foolish persistence of
foibles. That seed our vision and deeds. Observe our fear and hope.

Pieter the Younger painted skulls in front of
unbeaten drums next to lifeless body armor, piled in front of dogs
fighting for dominance and submission. What an amazing allegory of
grace! In desolation, we speculate and measure our hope and fear: How
many gone? How many still blind? How many will never see? How many
will be lost or saved?

A day of reckoning is coming and good
and evil have not changed sides or become allies.

While
laughter is living, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel, Elder and
Younger, speak to the bemused; the denied understanding that underscores
living: repentance requires reconciliation before the setting sun.
Every sin has a moral answer. That answer must be expressed as a
living deed, or it is scored. But few even consider the question, or lay the right stones to lead to the answer. The folk in the paintings of the Old Masters rely upon their own reasoning and reckoning. It’s easy to see in their reverie, they excuse or deny the
case hope makes plain before them.

Things are a drag
lately . .

Beyond your voice
is a place I know
that sings
and sings

(Cover image, The Seven Acts of Charity. Inside, top down: The Allegory of War, The Seven Acts, The Dutch Proverbs.)

Easter Sunday, at Shiloh Baptist Church. My daughter was baptised at Shiloh.

Master Works: Dorothea Lange and the Mississippi Photographs

4th of July, 1937. Hillhouse, Mississippi. (Click all pictures to enlarge.)
Two photographs taken in Mississippi in 1937 by one of America’s photography masters lay in the Library of Congress archives for half a century. Today, I am proud to present these two photographs. I am excited about the remarkable story these two pictures tell.

 Dorothea Lange, a woman trained as a portrait photographer in New York and who apprenticed with prominent society photographers, was the photographer for these two environmental portraits. Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in 1895, as a child she changed her name to her mother’s maiden name after her father left and her parents were divorced. Two of her five photos of a Mississippi woman are overlooked master works.

A Sharecropper’s Family that moved to Mississippi, 1937

Dorothea Lange took the long road to Mississippi. She traveled west to San Francisco in 1918, and opened a successful portrait studio, married a painter and gave birth to two boys. In 1935, she divorced. She married a economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and as the Great Depression drew near, she begin to make photographic images that documented the impact of the economy on daily lives of her subjects. Her photographs of human character find people on the edge of survival, working in poverty, standing in meal lines, alone, with their family,or in groups. Their faces are a deep study of the impact of these conditions.

A Sharecropper from Issaquena County, MS

In 1936, Dorothea Lange was hired by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration’s Office of War Information to travel across the South documenting a rural America. When she got to Mississippi, she photographed the sharecroppers and agriculture of the Delta. Her eye connected the relationships of work to living through the simple mechanism of image and composition. She raised these two photographic techniques to an art which at its best, is still surpassed.

Negro Children, Mississippi Delta, 1936

 As a photographer, she waited on each story to appear in the faces before her lens. For Dorothea Lange, sharing was a natural action, and she valued what was within. She was not interested in matching her images to variations of external social ideals. She waited untilher subjects’faces got past the apparent doom, relaxed from the usual cliches ,and finally opened a window to her and her camera that offered an inner glimpse into the expressions and emotions held dear in their inner heart. Working with spare back drops of natural settings, a porch or a field, her photos are careful documents of the hardships and hopes that lived and collided within her subjects. Her images somehow acquire and preservean inner strength and vulnerability. Her photos are a window to the inner grace of her subjects, presenting the dignity of their real selves as they face the camera for all to see.

 I think two of her best examples of image and composition are of a Mississippi women who was a field hand, working as a sharecropper in the Delta, that Lange photographed in 1937. This unnamed women has five images in the Library of Congress archives of Lange’s photographs. I was absolutely astounded when I found them. Together they tell a story heard but rarely seen. Photos of Negro sharecroppers , often idyllic and stereotyped, many times expressed the values of outside views of the people and their work.Lange soughtout the inner character of the persons photographed. But Lange also took herself out of the way. She knew how to look for the dignity and real vulnerability within everyone; she knew each person was a hero with a 1,000 faces, and she went beyond preconceptions to capture that moment in which the person emerged unique. She reveled in what she had not seen before. She abandoned formula or familiarity, sparked by the emerging difference that offered a look unseen before. She knew when she had this elusive quality: her photos are one with this transcendent moment.

Traveling Highway 1, 1938

 The Mississippi woman she photographs offers two extraordinary instances of Lange’s gifts.First is a picture of the woman sitting alone on her porch in a wooden ladder back chair. The woman, a farm worker and sharecropper, chops cotton; she uses a long handled hoe to weed and turn the soil in cotton fields. She is skille in “hoe culture.” She was born, by her own words, two years before the surrender, (the end of the Civil War in 1865). Photograph in 1937, she is likely 84 years old. Like other people Lange photographed, she is unnamed and no located is noted.

The wooden slated or cane-backed ladder chair in which she sits was the most common piece of furniture on rural porches. In the South, and in many rural locales, porches served as outdoor living rooms. From the porch, the sun cast its colors of pink and rose, leaves fell, dust rolled into the wind, wind played across the skin, and the changing light and its display of textures and signaled the swift, silent passage of time.

Master Work: A Portrait of an 84 year old Mississippi Woman

Lange’s photograph elevates the chair. Its straight back rail is at an offset angle to the vertical boards rising like timbers, towering above the sitting 84 year old woman. The chair is a throne more than a place of rest. It is a fixture exalted by its function. Its special role is to be a gathering place. Sitting here, the elder womanoffers silent, contemplative thanks for the immeasurable gifts of life given by an immeasurable God whose hand and will wrote the sky and colors and trees and fields seen by her living eye, restored her peace after troubles and calmed her fears, and gave her the health and strength she feels within. Look carefully at her face: her eyes are looking within; this wonder is almost too much to contemplate. Her hand supports the weight of this glorious knowledge, this lived experience.

 Each day the woman sits in this chairknowing that God calls to her. Her face is etched with a light filled with bright love. She is seeing something that belongs only to her. Dust, hard work, and weariness can not diminish this place she has entered. In fact, the journey to this place is a praise song deep in the soul. This elder woman has worked and earned a living turning the ground with a long handled hoe. Her real earning shows in the promise of her face, her hand touching her cheek to affirm that this presence that stirs within her is as real as the ground she works. Yet Lange’s composition makes this photo work: she photographs the woman from the side, allowing the viewer to look in. She subtly uses wood, the chair and the long, vertical house boards (rising out of view of the photo) to call to mind the altar chair in a church. Her composition frames and presents this woman’s story.The second shot is deceptive and its features easy to miss. It looks like the stereotypes often associated with this era, but close inspection offers a profound difference. This women, by her own words, born two years before the surrender, in 1863; in 1937, sheis 84 years old!

 At 84, she poses as a life-long, proud farm worker, a skilled laborer, knowing both how to tend a crop from planting to harvest, but also knowing, from long experience, how to preserve her body from the wear of sun and hand labor. Back and neck muscles and worn-out arthritic bones have often put others out to pasture, but she proudly is going on. Smiling, looking straight into the camera, her face expresses her easy confidence, a fierce pride, a lifelong way-making. This second portrait is taken at work rest.

Master Work: Portrait at Work Rest of an 84 unnamed Mississippi Woman,
A Sharecropper skilled in “hoe culture,” “born two years before the surrender.”

 The details of her longsuccess are in the details of her stance. Her thin frame is at an angle to the hoe. The angle offsets the pulling action of chopping by torquing the pull. As she chops the ground and pulls the hoe to turn the soil, her body twists from her lower back, hips, and thighs. In fact, by the portrait, her action works exactly like a modern rotary tiller, whose curves blades lift and spin the soilin exactly the same way she does with with the pose of her body!Her head is elevated, raised from the neck. Keeping her neck up and her head raised staves off the painful onslaught of arthritic that field workers who bent their necks and dropped their heads suffer from.

 But the signature adaption she has made is easy to miss. Look carefully at her right hand. Her palm is turned out. Her thumb is below her fingers. Pulling out prevents the muscles and tendons from becoming sore and uses the shoulder and back to pull the load as her lower back swings around, using her legs and thighs to complete the action.

 This portrait is a brilliant photograph. It is an anthropological study of advanced farm worker’s techniques. (I can find no other photograph of workers before or after the civil war photographed in a similar pose, showing similar techniques.)

 I am glad to share both photographs with you. Enjoy this remarkable story, connecting the American experience, told by two woman, one whose life touched the 1861 war, experienced freedom as an infant, and hoed the cotton fields of the rural Mississippi Delta; the other, a polio survior, a society photographerwho livedin large cities; both collaborating on a July day in 1937, before and behind a camera set up in the Delta to make these lasting images.

Sharecropper’s Home, 10 Miles from Jackson, 1937

All photographs by Dorothea Lange from the Library of Congress (available with no known restrictions).

Click here to see the Denver Post’s photo blogs amazing color photographs of America during the Great Depression.  Many of these are from the same time period as above.

Pat Cleveland: The Runway Muse

Perlo’s sense of history and culture is seen through the prism of the 20th century. The scattered patterns of sparkle shine on the success of men and women from the small villages of the world, of youngsters who climbed off dirt roads and gritty sidewalks into celebrated roles in the world’s power corridors. This storm of dancing lights is a main theme for this arc of time. The 20th century finds its renaissance in the bright flowering of people, in names tied to spectacular achievements. This high arc has wide, deep, and amazing reflections in the new millennium.

In time’s back and forth, the amazing lights of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana changed our world in large and small ways. Gandhi’s India changed America’s customer service and is now a major economy, source of immigration, a community of contrasts and emerging ideas; Nkrumah’s Ghana helped make “Funga,” an African welcome dance, the standard taught in community centers to thousands of young girls and boys. But most importantly, Nkrumah led his nation from colonialism to freedom, ending the European dominance and control of Africa. By throwing off Europe’s governance for independence, he began the liberation of a once conquered contiment.

Golda Meir (Meyerson), the daughter of a Jewish carpenter and Milwaukee grocer once raised $50 million–money that made the state of Israel a reality. Later, she was Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, and won election as Israel’s 4 th Prime Minister.

Chou En Lai (now spelled Zhou En-lai) survived the Long March, a 8,000 mile march in winter crossing the world’s roughest mountainous terrain, served as China’s first Premier under China’s revered Mao Se Tung (Mao Zedong), and paved the way for China’s unprecedented emergence from a feudal, pleasant society to the world’s most advanced economy; China makes trade goods from computer chips to infant seats for the American market-but its fastest growing US imports are zinc, nickel, and lumber!

The 20th century was a time of names, long before cable and the internet. One of these names died two years ago, Naomi Sims, one of the earliest and most auspicious African-American 20th century models. She appeared on the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Time.  (Women of African descent have modeled for eons; they appeared on coins in the ancient world and on paper money in every Confederate state.)

Sims was born in Oxford, MS, grew up in Pittsburgh, raised by a white foster family, and went to New York after she graduated from Westinghouse High. Creative, beautiful, and persistent, she self-marketed her skills directly to photographers and advertisers who clamored for the fresh, astounding face that agencies rejected with thin excuses. Naomi Sims jumped the color bar and found astounding success as a model and later, as a business woman. In its 1 st year, her wig business grossed $5 million.

Naomi Sims’ death at age 61, brings another name to mind from the fashion world, a woman, gratefully still with us, a name from the social columns of my college years, Pat Cleveland. Although in the same industry, Pat Cleveland had different gifts than Naomi Sims. Largely, Pat was and still is an insider. Among those who follow fashion she causes a stir.

What Michelangelo did with a brushstroke, Pat could do with her toe. When her foot hit the carpet, something electric happened. Fashionai would surge forward, bounding out of their seats to see what dress or jacket, sports outfit or formal wear Pat strutted. What Michelangelo put on canvas, Pat brought to life.

Innocent with an edge, street-wise and beautifully normal, Pat was the original quiet storm. Scientists call it kinetic, the ability she possessed to allow her whole body to give unspoken definition to feeling, mood, or attitude. Her runway walk offered combinations of sass and charm, without allure. Pat could project sheer joy, a bounding, transparent happiness that caused watchers to gasp and smile. She was glorious without excess. Pat didn’t just show clothes. She touched hearts.

Believe it, that Pat Cleveland has special gifts. But her gifts of body and soul didn’t make headlines; rather than celebrity and fame, Pat build a career on connections: connections to clothes, to people in the industry, to people who support and follow it. Outlandish, sophisticated, cloistered, Pat changed the air in the room and made the colors more vivid. For an Italian designer she once emerged in complete darkness, trailing a 72 wedding veil light by hundreds of twinkling Christmas lights.

Having reached her fifties, Pat is still the guiding light of the runway. Many feel she is the best runway muse of all time. Halston called her his muse, and so did Yves St. Laurent.

Her mother came to New Jersey from the 1940′s poverty of rural Georgia and won an art scholarship to Pratt Institute. A youthful Pat grew up with the doyens of the New York art world; she was the youngest model to work in Ebony’s Magazine’s national touring show, Ebony’s Fashion Fair. Her friendships and loyalties are deep, unusual in an industry that is catcalled as superficial, diva-driven, laced with angst, with even the hottest season’s models soon disposable. Yes, she danced at Studio 54, and partied in Paris, New York, London, Milan. Yet, after 4 decades, Pat remains. Intact. Still revered.

 

Pat Cleveland’s virtues are singular and unparalleled. Her hair has been described as a “untamed halo of fluffy, spiral curls” that Pat use to think of as her “flying carpet.” As a youngster, she and her mother were photographed at Carnegie Hall, which give her her first feeling of being on the runaway. Vogue photographed her and she moved to Paris at 21. By 25, she was traveling to Asia, Africa–escorted by a hand puppet she talked to in restaurants.

 

 

 

 

 

She walked into fashion without ego or aspiration or ambition, thrilled by the incredible talents of the designers and their clothes. She found in the trail of simple steps along a fashion show runaway a chance to throw off all the strings and demands of an industry built on whimsy.

What she offered instead, was a joy as fierce as the sun, signaled by an extended finger, a sly turn of the shoulders, a lift of the head, the whirling cross of a leg flashed in motion, each detail done with the spare economy of a shout in a joyful blues. The runway was her chance to shine.

As she paced, she showed us unknown places and ways to feel, places we immediately recognized, although they had been unmined. Pat Cleveland’s very real theatre guided us into a new body language and taught us to extract an exciting freedom, both intimate and vulnerable, both loud and shy. More than race, she broke down human barriers. For all that she changed within the industry, Pat Cleveland’s biggest advances came by showing us how to negotiate the terrifying obstacles we stumble over, in our own fashion, within.

All photos, fair use.

Walter Rhett, Writer

The 2 interviews below feature Walter Rhett, the founder, publisher, editor, and writer of Southern Perlo, the South’s most successful review of shovel ready ideas.

with Walter Rhett, Writer

In the recent Shorty Awards, called Twitter’s Oscars, Rhett was the first place Shorty Award leader in Southern History and Blog. Below is his Shorty Award interview.

 What are six things you could never do without? Sweet Potatoes, baked

and hot; good thoughts, improved by memory; hope, love, mercy, and faith, given by eternity.

How do you use Twitter in your professional life? Manage and accelerate stories, ideas, and views.

What’s your favorite Twitter app? Kanaso, allows unlimited characters, great wingbats, modified RTs. Versatile! Paper li – twitter news web dailies. Great sources!

Twitter or Facebook? Tweets, all the way, baby!!!

What was the funniest trend you’ve seen? Whatever it was, a new, more outrageous trend will come tomorrow!

What feature should Twitter add? The ability to op out of sites they recommend! The ability to link multiple accounts.

Who do you wish had a Twitter feed but doesn’t? Many of my good friends!

Is there someone you want to follow you who doesn’t already? If so, who? One never wishes and dreams and tells to titillate! NYB!

Have you ever unfollowed someone? Who and why? Yes! For being press releases w/o new content or views.

Why should we vote for you? I engage; I offer cutting edge content in southern history; I support my followers & others, I look at issues deeply & globaly, I write well.

Terms you wish would start trending on Twitter right now? #peace. #faith. #mercy. The gifts that belong to us all that we can share.

What’s the most interesting connection you’ve made through Twitter?To leading news reporters. (I prefer not to mention names.)

Hashtag you created that you wish everyone used? #perlo for the American subsistance found in every life and story.

How do you make your tweets unique? Fresh insights, good stories, hot tips, personal support, caring tone, honest questions.

What inspires you to tweet? Living; the lives of others. The global human spirit. Every tweet tells of a heart, in joy or distress.

Ever get called out for tweeting too much? In the beginning!

140 characters of advice for a new user? Be silent. Listen to what others have to say. Find your community. Change and grow.

How long can you go without a tweet? Weeks, if I’m deep into a project. But I feel guilty.

How do you imagine Twitter changing? Great platform and search options.

Who do you admire most for his or her use of Twitter? Soledad O’Brien, her amazing humanness; Cory Booker, an inspirational mayor who combines new and old.

What is one of the biggest misconceptions of Twitter?It only duplicates FB. Shorter version. That it has no features.

Why should people follow you? They find their own reasons; it’s presumptive of me to suggest.

Can you name some one-of-a-kind Twitter accounts that you follow?NepalTV, who will often provide ground level commentary upon reply.

How do you decide what to tweet?  Posts that travel the world, touch its people, that find and share its stories, old and new, preserve its love, and recall its fear, greenly and cheaply.

Why’d you start tweeting? The posts reflect interests, are easy to share and offer a means of personal support and contact.

Has Twitter changed your life? If yes, how? Yes. Greater confidence, greater satisfaction, new friends, renewed faith in spirit and social action.

What do you wish people would do more of on Twitter? I write history because its truth and honesty gives my writing intimacy and authority. I wish people shared more local history.

How will the world change in the next year? I don’t have a crystal ball. I hope for improved water and health among the world’s poor.

What are some big Twitter faux pas?  Sales pitches; too many lists and bests; bad research; inaccurate facts; pushing ideologies, name calling, cursing.

What will the world be like 10 years from now? I love living in the moment.

Walter Rhett has been writing since the fourth grade and has a variety of awards and achievements under his belt: He first published poetry in Essence and a Paris journal, Presence Africane.

Then he switched to nonfiction, winning a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University’s summer writers’ workshop in 1986. He can be contacted at southernperlo@yahoo.com for information regarding readings and signings. He also does tours.

Rhett

Q: What’s your identity as a writer? Where do you find inspiration?

A: I react strongly to stories. I write about epic memories. I’m a Perlo writer — perlo is a Charleston rice dish made with local bounty. Perlo’s spice is history. I write history because the debate is settled and the facts are not disputed — unless you are talking about the Civil War. I write nonfiction because its truth and honesty give my writing voice intimacy and authority.

Q: Who are your major influences?

A: Frank Yerby, a wildly popular Georgia novelist from the mid-20th century who lived in Spain and sold 30 million books. Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston — she had absolutely the best ear among Southern writers. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks for her elegance. Local jazz writer Jack McCray for his swing. New York Times columnist Gail Collins — I actually scream and cheer at her lines.

Q: What advice would you give to local writers?

A: Practice craft. Find your voice and gain a sense of discovery and authority.

Q: When and how often do you write?

A: I write daily, usually posting in the top 100 online markets. Using standard metrics, my weekly audience averages 100,000 readers. New York Times Nobel and Pulitzer winning columnists frequently single out my work. Times columns feature and promote comment essays. The writers and editors highlight the exceptional essays and rank readers’ recommendations. I’m usually there.

I post my Southern Perlo blog (www.southernperlo.wordpress.com) weekly in 35 mid- and major U.S. newspaper markets: Savannah; Montgomery, Ala.; Des Moines, Iowa; and San Francisco, where the online editor invited me to post on their political page. I publish Southern Perlo on its own site with beautiful graphics and photos. I also publish three online news dailies and update a news stream and a unique Lowcountry history stream on twitter (www.twitter.com/walterrhett). I love photographs; Perlo and my twitter streams feature many of them.

Q: What’s in store for the future?I just finished my new paperback, “Butter My Biscuit,” a collection focused on Southern wit and storytelling. It’s available for the holidays.

To stir the pot, here’s a brief passage:
“But my mind always goes back to Ms. Lucy’s lunch. There are days when the single thought of a bite of her breads is enough to sustain me through the crush of a world that has left me starved for so much.”

The Natural Mystic, Extended

Click to hear Bob Marley sing about the mystery of the natural mystic.

Aunt Liza; Pueblo, CO, 1893. Former slave of the Hamilton family; cook at Ft. Francisco.



In Tahrir Square: Packed. Peaceful. Joyful. Proud. Women in full cover. Teenage girls in fashionable jeans. Families everywhere. Terry Moran, ABC News 

Ahh, data, statistical measures, and country names are the means of comparison when it comes to change, but there are also intangibles.

One very important mystic is that those who seek change do so in common and tap something unspoken and hidden. Change isn’t created from poverty statistics or job prospects (if it were so, the South would still be in revolt rather than fighting to cut the health care that will pay for their tarred lungs, clogged arteries, and overweight souls). Nor is change tied to the experience of poverty or scourges. Change’s most important measure is an uncountable quality that the US intelligent forces spent much of the week acknowledging they couldn’t identify.

As the eminence Frank Rich writes in his NYT column, it will take “months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.” When something big happens, we miss the small,  and the fault lies within ourselves: We miss the new beginning.

Coptic priests stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslim imams on a platform, calling for togetherness.

The natural mystic of change is sparked by a collective voice. It occurs when an individual voice realizes it can only achieve its purpose if it is spoken in concert with other voices; in what one dreamscribe and NYT commenter Amelia calls “an epiphany of collective action.” These voices when raised bring the world to attention and invite the mighty to test their mettle. Heads buried in the data don’t hear the signs or see the challenge beyond. They can’t identify the moment when the sky catches fire. When the blood burns. When the collective passions unite. As Dreamscribe Amelia says, “though miles divide us, dreams unite us; the blood dripping in your fight / falls through my hands. .”

In Tahrir Square: An old couple shuffle along through the crush, hand in hand, smiling the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen.

Change requires one other propellant–courage. To bring about change, the collective voices must stand for something and be supported by something. They must willing to confront the hardships and trials that attempt to silence their voices. They must enter that special zone of living where each breath is hammered with peril and the breath which is life brings and breathes the specter of death.

In the myths and realities of change around the globe, from the mythic appeals to India’s Shiva to the songs of civil rights (“ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round”) the courage of change must have the steadfast character of peace. (Think Mandela, Gandhi, Lincoln; others.) Dire predictions of political abysses, of chaos, of unsettled unrest ignore the basics and beg the question: change is always steadfast when based on peace which flourishes as progress.

Finally, change requires conditions that activate its substance. Corruption, injustice, violence really set the stage for change more than poverty, and never fear. These dark forces are the spark but never the source. The source, as poet Robert Hayden said, is “the immortal human wish, the timeless will.”

Yet limitation is an important part of peace. As the world watches change along the banks of the Nile, the I Ching recalls the image: “Waters difficult to keep within the Lake’s banks: The Superior Person examines the nature of virtue and makes himself a standard that can be followed. Self-discipline brings success; but restraints too binding bring self-defeat.”

So that brings us to the big question: after Egypt, will America change? Lots of comments I’ve read lately draw parallels and offer analogies and suggest we are on the cusp, ripe and ready. The key differences are the founding fathers had a greater vision than stopping conspiracies of caliphs or fighting against imaginary death panels while real people are dying through the indifference of those who fight imaginary struggles. The founding fathers had a clear vision lined up and stood together in courage and spoke with one voice. They faced peril but knew nothing of fear. The slaves followed in their foot steps, showing that courage was universal and change could alter any human condition. From Haiti’s maroons to China’s long march, under many banners, some alien, others detested, change marks and reveals elements within. It can be sparked from conditions outside, but it must flow from an inner source.

The founding fathers and old slaves would have laughed at those joining the present fight here at home. After their fight, they would have chortled at the idea that their cherished ideals of defense protected the right to sell guns to killers. They knew courage and fear couldn’t occupy the same place and the two didn’t operate in the same plane. Or achieve the same ends. They knew: fear, you fix it. Or maybe you didn’t. But courage leaves fear behind for a change that is transcendent and soars. It fixes you.

It’s not sparked by data. And it’s never on the radio or television, daily, dosed at the same time.

An enormous crowd of ordinary Egyptians. And they sing, and chant, and pray, and the children wave flags and the men openly weep.

O B Joyfulls

5000 Women Singing on US Capitol East Steps to Support Suffrage, 1914

 How You Sound

 It’s a huge struggle it for a people to maintain a worldview. Holding on to beliefs means acting against forces seeking to alter your way of life. Protecting your identity means nourishing your roots, even in a hostile world. It means casting your light and blinding those in the dark. The adjustment of vision by those looking in and those looking out takes time.

Looking in or out, it’s no surprise, but there are really two Americas. They are separated not by wealth or race or religious belief, or by region, sex, or age. They are not divided by political party, geography, or by liberal or conservative ideologies, or those for or against change. They are not split according to symbolic or real foxes, elephants, donkeys, guffaws, or mules.

Increasingly, America is divided and dispirited by the remarks of living that are our daily requiem on the future. A weary world, speeding by, comments on its turning points. Without a careful eye, it is easy to overlook our serious differences.

As each day dies, our requiem is supposed to celebrate the passage of our common journey, recount its steps and its scars, secure its common hope. Yet increasingly, dead words mark the future and its hope. Distorted words mark our past. Difficult words mind our future.

There is another requiem rooted of tested wisdom. Its words are seeded in experience. They grow our future. They nurture us past the shouted and silent fears.

 Unlike others across the chasm, these words rise from hope and this rquiem will never be a judgment that shuts mercy out of our ears.

Dreams For Sale

Glen Echo, MD Amusement Park, 1943

Price increases are killing the American dream. They nibble and tear away its fabric in the short and long term, by indirect and immediate means. Profits were once tied to the values of a country founded to benefit the common good, a country where those with more pledged to do more. Profits now reflect the simple intent to get more and to widen the gap between rich and poor. 

Prices are an economic element that seldom draws any attention in discussions except as a bugaboo for inflation. Few remember that Nixon, who believed in the powers of big government, actually implemented nation-wide price controls, requiring every price for every item be posted and increases were strictly regulated by the feds. His party now carefully overlooks the utility of big government practices and controls they pretend to abhor.

The debate over economics rarely views the impact of prices on the family as a whole. When it is expressed, it’s mentioned as an index, rising and falling in percentages, of “real income.”

The dying ideal of prices is tied to our dreams. In Disneyland, the price of an admission in 1971 was $3.75. A 2010 one day children’s pass (9>) was $68.00. Have family wages kept up with the price increase?

What’s worse, income, falling behind prices, is now divided by ceilings. It is broken into horizontal layers, with no trickle down to the unemployed, with minimum wage workers locked in to service occupations that offer limited advancement and even fewer benefits, with middle class professionals having no employment guarantees, with retirees not able to depend on pensions (re: Pritchard, Alabama), with fewer services provided by businesses at the local level. This alone shows how we have misdirected economic efforts away from a conservation model that would conserve resources, produce growth and enhance prosperity. (Example: the $80 solar power units in demand in African villages but produced in China.) Instead we have turned to a consumer model that produces a runaway contradictory spiral of profits and shortages – a model rapidly approaching the limits of diminishing returns with the family as its first catastrophic victim.

Revolutionary Twitter

Tunisia Protests

Sure, it’s new media, but the small spark that triggers revolutionary change has caught fire in many places and eras. No matter the technology or circumstance, the seemingly insignificant happenstance touches something deep and profound at the source. The obvious example, for me, is Mrs. Rosa Parks’ weariness that tapped into a deeper strength that day in Montgomery when she boarded a city bus and refused the driver’s order that she give up her seat because of her race. Arrested, fingerprinted, her personal protest of an embedded system of injustice was the flash point for an entire country to be galvanized into action.

The irony of social media is that as it grows, mass action in America is almost extinct. No more stadiums filled with protesters opposed to war, no more marches with the giant ballons that symbolized the power of the masses for peace, progress, and jobs and justice, not even the feel good event that was “Hands Across America.” Now we all participate by texting our vote and waiting until next week.

We are left with tiny screens that transmit our images and chronicle our actions, but also leave us trapped and segmented and separated into bubbles with personal passion but without the power of collective action. Once, the tweet was less important than the feet. I think we are too exuberant and effusive in our praise of the power of the new media and its role in change. It should not obscure the fact that revolutionary conditions had to be heightened, and were roiling just beneath the surface, ready to spill over into the streets where people stand for change.

Back in the days of handwriting and putting words on paper, a Poet of the Library of Congress, in his poem, “The Middle Passage,” Robert Hayden, said it best: you “cannot kill the deep immoral human wish, the timeless will.”

 (O B Joyfuls were strawberry daiquiris served from pitchers by a host of a Charleston winter inn in the 1950s. /wr)

The Word is a Paradigm

Photo from the Library of Congress

Studying a language without learning the nusances of culture and historic ideas and connotations of the language can result in just as much misunderstanding as the mispronunciation of a word. While schools focus on verbs and enunciation as authenticity, the real danger is losing sight of the China’s broad world view. China’s traditional vision of reality as a paradigm with complex, interactive, contradictory, transforming passive and active forces, each of which can have prime influence is equally as important to understanding China but not yet as “cool” as rambling off a few sentences in Mandrin.

The same holds true for the study of Spanish. More than a working langauage, it is a gateway to a world of ideas and experiences that are a part of a human treasury many Americans no longer hold dear.

It is a great irony that the study of languages has a danger implicit at its base: the purpose of making the world more American, the desire to make ourselves understood without an investment in understanding the legacy and grand traditions of others who spoke and created the language being learned. Frantz Fanon once said to speak a language means “above all to assume a culture, to carry the weight of a civilization” . . to be afforded “a remarkable power.” Being able to ask directions and order corporate cuisine may be practical, but it doesn’t produce the talented tenth so persuasively advocated for by WEB DuBois, who studied in Germany and England, a trained community that can apply the skills and ideas that are the legacy of the global community to problems in order to generate new approaches and solutions.

To be honest, I don’t speak Chinese, but I still use the I Ching, whose forecasting method I learned decades ago in college, to generate models and review procedural steps and warnings for issues of social justice. In the choice between learning the language or learning the great ideas of the dynasties that drove its political and social actions, I have always much preferred cultural literacy. I think the ultimate goal for those who want to exceed the utilitarian use of language is to learn to think in the language – in the way the best native speakers do. Then a part of world peace will be the lack of the “ontological resistance” that Fanon spoke of. I know as a SC tour guide working in a region where the only African language was created in America, my clients enjoy the forms and meaning within the language as much as its usual phrasing and articulations. The words, once thought to be assigned to those unlettered and untrained, do hold and reveal a civilization transforming and surviving by wrapping and preserving its humanity in ideas shared and maintained through speech. That language’s function was very different from the status assigned by outsiders. To guard against this contradiction, learning languages should lead to fluency in global thinking.

Oppression is a Many Splendored Thing

Protesting Congress Denial of Women's Rights. Photo, Library of Congress.

Denial is a part of every system of oppression. Republicans deny their oppression of working class families and the poor by pretending to be “for” family values and “free” enterprise, while shifting the balance of power and profit to those who exploit the public good for private and personal gain.

But what we are seeing with President Obama is a new class of denial. It’s a denial that denies it is denying. It calls for him to do things many–not all–but many don’t want him to do. Perhaps instructive is a story from my high school years, where as a member of the group of first African-Americans to integrate my hometown high school, I was encouraged to take full advantage of opportunities and activities. Except for the state BETA Club convention, when everyone wondered who would be my roomates, and the regional band clinic, another overnight trip, where we were suppose to stay with families (I was told I could decline the trip if I wanted to, although I had made first chair), and the Christmas parades where the good citizens of neighboring towns through cigarettes at the boots of our one African-American majorette. The point here is not to shock, open old wounds, or cite old history, it’s to point out that America never seems to know anyone who has done those things. We offer opportunity and equal expectations, but deny the invisible expectation of limits silently imposed by race–and then deny race is a factor.

With the President, remember the New Yorker magazine cover with his head wrapped and his wife in a 70s-styled afro with platforms with a fist bump, the American flag burning in the fireplace – the modern militant radical equivalent of the watermelon eating stereotype that supposedly was only a “parody”? Remember the discussions during the primaries as to whether the President had street cred (was he “black” enough)? So consumed were many with panning race and denying the panning, that no one saw what is obvious: it’s worse–his politics are neither racial or socialist (and socialist is simply another code word for race that can be denied by those who use it).

Now many who deny their denial have discovered they can have it both ways and are playing both sides. I feel like I’m watching an old Sidney Poitier movie, in which he is suffering silently under the yoke, as impotent as Gershwin’s Porgy, as tragic as Ellison’s Invisible Man’s battle royal–sympathetic, a source of fury–but safe.

This is meant to be a larger reading of Obama within the cultural dynamic of race outside of its usual confines of bias and prejudice. It is not a reading of his personality or politics, but of the subtle ways America invents to deny its denial that it (we) see race, and often hold out expectations which we don’t expect to be met. Newt’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” was an unveiled, unvarnished clear academic reference to the Mao Mao, yet not one pundit, broadcast or print, labeled it or nailed it. I found it insidious and bankrupt. It labeled the President in a way that really labeled the broader image of African-Americans–no longer welfare cheats but now deadly killers of western civilization’s right to its manifest destiny. It shut a door for me that no one among the Republicans or Tea Party folk renounced the remark. To support those who hold or who let such views go by would be like fighting for the Confederacy. (Which incidently some African-Americans did not based on principles or beliefs; they were promised freedom and pensions, creating a win-win in their political hedge.)

How can the country leave unnoticed the Kenyan anti-colonial reference while wanting him to “man up”? Actually the country is doubling down on its denial; from the Duchess who found him uppity to the pan cake boxes that bootstrapped him to recyled imagery, no one seems to be able to find anyone who thinks race is an issue, when it fact, it’s all over the place, but outside of the narrow confines of bias or prejudice by which we have been conditioned to think about it. Cultural attitudes are difficult to identity and can not be counted in surveys or polls, or one by one. They linger and reproduce as a interior legacy–and a big part of that legacy is that the complexities of the culture of race are denied.

To borrow and paraphrase an image from my favorite Ismael Reed poem, “Jacket Notes,” the President is like a man going over Nigara Falls in a barrel. Many of the gawkers hope he falls on his face. Some don’t think much of his act. The barrel makers don’t think he can cut it. “But what really hurts is / he is bigger than the / barrel.”

Interstellar Influences

The lunar eclipse on the day of the winter solstice had mystic effects on Congress and embrazoned the President with new unearthly powers. Or perhaps he has simply turned the executive operations into an apparat, with his almost invisible staff being apparatchiks who wielded the levers of power whhile remaining on the down low. In either case, things have been drastically different since Rahm left to go to the city of blues and polkas.

Putting aside interstellar influences and Marxist metaphors for his wins, the President’s record this week has certainly been impressive. Most impressive was the mandate sent to Sen. Kyl by his own Republican collegues that their role as apparatchiks for Obama’s future defeat was not worth risking enhanced national security and undermining world peace. The ghosts of former Senators could be seen in their votes that actually put country first and did pretend that the treaty, a 17 page document agreed to and available since last April, was being rushed through. Kyl’s objections bordered on being bi-polar; at best his was a transparent, brazen attempt to co-op the executive branch and dishonor America’s word and leadership around the world for flimsy procedural reasons.

More impressive was the vote to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Extending dignity and rights to those who fight for and are willing to die for freedom really does express our “better angels.”

This season, I’m really glad to be sitting around the fire with the television on mute.

Bokors, Spells, and Buzz Words

 

 

skullboysketchZombie

 

Living Bad Dreams

 

Gail Collins in her Saturday column cited an unusual phantasmagoria–a zombie jamboree as an extended conceit for American politics. Here’s my spin: Gail, change your brand of popcorn! I much prefer the image and ideals of the Red Queen. Why she never munched a kidney, but loved her tea. And she embraced the impossible things. Practiced them and proudly acquired the knack. (I refer to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass–And What Alice Found There.) She of course, is the model for Michele Bachmann, who looks straight into the lens and sees and tells the impossible things. $200 Million a day travel caravans, a billion for a five day work week! Too bad about Christine O’Donnell. I was counting on her to be the understudy.Actually, Haiti’s concept and descriptions of the “bokor” is a wee bit more apt. These are priests and priestesses with special spellings and an insatisible appetite for chaos, destruction, and inflicting pain as a means of enhancing their power. Their fury and willingness to overlook or withhold truth leave effigies of the common good in the marketplace and fuels their mimicry. The whole while, they remain fully alive, but in a detached, dream state.

Thursday’s charge led by Eric Cantor against NPR, in which a legal albeit controversial (to some laudable) action led to a frontal attack on the free press and free speech, is the kind of rites that bokors perform. In Haiti, they are legend. They lead their followers in lock step to complete support their actions. Their band rushes and attacks the weak.

A Bokor’s offering guidance rests on denials; they claim their dark magic is genuinely benevolent. Kind of like having a tax cut reduce the deficit. But the civility of the Red Queen, her earnestness, still has great appeal. She is beseeched by dilemmas. Can you hang someone if there is nothing there? Is hers the impending model of our national policy? On energy, education, nuclear arms, job growth, QE, health care?

Oh dear. More tea.

The Clouds Above the Dawn’s Early Light

 

American denial expands as its power shrinks. The economic deflation which many are wary of has already hit the spirit. Its worse than Jimmy Carter’s malaise. It’s more self destructive.We have lost sight of our own interests. Abandoned our inner compass that always pulled us up short before things spiraled out of control. We have become witnesses to our own implosion. Detached, we seem to derive a strange dignity from our self-inflicted sacrifice. We offer our hearts far too willingly to the wrong priests.

The New York Times op-ed pages have parallels today, so the pull of the force is strong. A colleague writes of zombies, but the bokors are the ones who raise up the zombies; nothing happens on its own. There is money and power behind our malaise. How else can South Carolina rank 46th in income with unemployment over 12%, while producing the convertible BMW’s for the world and soon, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The state also manufactures paper, Honda ATVs, and cement. Yet 20% of its families have been below the poverty line for 30 years!

 

 

A Mandala of the I Ching

I am reminded of what a Professor told me long ago. That throughout history, most of the world, its leading states and empires so celebrated, has been in a state of decline. Egypt, Rome, China, Spain, Mali, the Cheek, the planters of the south, all have passed as time faded their powers.

Yet I recall from the I Ching that such a fade is not inevitable. If we are careful and bold like the fox, to use our eyes to see the steps along the path while using our ears to detect the dangers ahead that are beyond our sight, they we can successful achieve our mission without blame, finding the proper place for things. Will our results be good fortune or nothing that will further? Stumbling block or steeping stone, it all depends on how we use

A Mississippi Saturday Night, 1937.

our feet and hearts and minds. Stay resolute and steadfast. Success will overcome our misgivings.

 

Racial Crosstalk

Race involves crosstalk. Flying recriminations of race reflect the times. Laughably, even before Booker T. Washington,  conversations and buzz words about race are buried in history.

A personal favorite of mine is “drapetomania.” It referes to a colonial era disease that supposedly infected slaves and caused them runaway! More recently, “white power,” a not-to-original copy of “black power,” has been used to rally those who oppose those who crafted the original slogan!

Tracing discussions of race through history shows several paradigm shifts. The early discussions during slavery were often dominated by biology and biological terms. Blacks were described as genetically and mental inferiority by biology; biological descriptions abounded of low foreheads, thick brows, bungling muscles, et.al.; hence, Africans were hopelessly child-like and simple–or brutes and savages.

Then, in the 1800s, political terms and values were introduced to the discussion by abolitionists and by slavery’s defenders. The rhetoric of race entered a golden age. It took on the form of high art on both sides.

Charleston-born, Philadelphia President of the Underground Railroad Robert Purvis, (his mother Jewish and Morrocan, once slave; his father wealthy English; he, born 1810) offers an eloquent plea: “We love our native country, much as it has wronged us; and in the peaceable exercise of our inalienable rights, we will cling to it . . . Will you starve our patriotism?”

But a Purvis contemporary; Beaufort, SC politican and slavery supporter John William Grayson spins his “support” for those “starved” quite differently than Purvis. “Slavery is the negro system of labour. He is lazy and improvident. Slavery is that system of labour which exchanges subsistence for work. Slavery makes all work, and it ensures homes, food and clothing for all. It permits no idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy and old age.”

Fast forward pass “Jim Crow” to the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, The word “agitator” expressed scorn on both whites and blacks who worked to break segregation. The extreme epithet of the era was “communist,” often applied to Dr. King.

Anti-Civil Rights Demonstrators Use Racial Epithets on Their Placards. Image for the Library of Congress.

Today the American debate on race has a moral/behaviorial/political context. It is summed up by a term appropiated by both sides. Racist!

Both sides concede the basic right of equal opportunity and freedom for all. So the key to the present debate is to recognize that “racism or racist” as an allegation or as tar and feathering, has an embedded code. For both sides, it has a hidden flash point designed to rally supporters of different views.

In today’s contrived gibberish, Black “racists” fully intent to take rights away from white people (Beck hears the Nikes coming). For those folk, as blacks gain, whites lose.

For the other side, white “racists” are psychologically impaired. They unable to accept the new status quo. They are trapped in the pain of losing something they deeply cherished and thought unassailable: their legacy and birthright to reign.

Anybody who talks about race, is pulled toward to align with one view or the other. The NAACP video clip of Shirley Sherrod showed this when a number of commentators insisted the long standing cultural practice of nods and words encouraging and supporting the speaker to bring forth the story (not to agree with its actions, but to support its telling and confession) was a sanction of “racism.”

Race will still be around and new buzz words will shape the discussion. It’s a fact of the American legacy. On that score, there’s not much we can do.