Tag Archives: the american pageant

same, same. but different.

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Thinking about Saturday’s shooting in Tuscon, I remembered an Adam Gopnik piece from the 2007 New Yorker in the wake of the Virgina Tech Shooting. It’s worth a re-read as we uncover ‘facts’ and salacious details about the psyche and life of the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner. While we’re all trying to find space to engage in discussions about gun laws, mental illness, and political criticism (discourse versus rhetoric versus vitriol versus sedition), the excerpt noted below was particularly resonant for me:

If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

via Shootings : The New Yorker.

There’s our knee jerk responses to these mass shootings: the naming of the perpetrator (he inevitably has three -John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald– now this kid Jared Lee Loughner), the narrative of the ‘loner’, the mental defect or illness that motivates one to murder, the very definition of nihilism. This feels routine. We hope (swear) it will never happen again. It always does. And it always will. In reading the piecemeal narratives on Loughner today in Mother Jones, a friend’s view of the shooter’s motivation was curious:

Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. “More chaos, maybe,” he says. “I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what’s happening. He wants all of that.” Tierney thinks that Loughner’s mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: “He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there’s no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: ‘Another Saturday, going to go get groceries’—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in.”

A lot of us (me included) looked to assign blame to the far right and Tea Party for inciting this kind of violence on a Member of Congress. But now, I have to take a step back. Our conversations about these matters have reached a complexity that requires mature reasoning, and a news cycle that moves slower than 140 characters or less.

holding us back.

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I don’t watch a lot of television. In fact, most of my television consumption these days is completely over the internet.  However, I have five shows that I’ve deemed essential: House, Community, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Mad Men. Private Practice is a residual holdover because of my love for Grey’s.  I watch Grey’s regularly and at the conclusion of Season 6, Writer/Producer Shonda Rhimes took the show to a devastating turn. In last year’s double episode season finale, Rhimes unleashes a gunman on the staff of fictional Seattle Grace/Mercy West Hospital, opening with the shooting of one the key characters (Dr. Reid at point blank range in the head) leading to a day of mayhem and domestic terror.

Yes, it makes for great sensational drama, and while some of the extremes in the crisis and dialogue were a bit much, I can’t ignore that conversation that Rhimes and fellow Grey writers are facilitating about terrorism, trauma, gun violence, grief and recovery.

Clark: Five days ago when I bought this gun… Did you know you could buy a gun at a superstore?

I did not. In most states, one can acquire a firearm from a superstore like Wal-Mart, and wait five days for a license. A fact that I often take for granted living in the Republic of Brooklyn.

The 14 episodes between the conclusion of Season 6 through the mid point of Season 7 are deceptively complex. I’m fascinated that one of the most popular dramas on network television is exploring these themes. I had been watching Grey’s for so long, so familiar with the slow unfolding of the character’s personalities that I took the shooting personally. The writers researched gun ownership/control, and while it seems like gun rights and laws are political wedge issues, GA offers it’s viewers the opportunity to experience, if you will, through the lives of their characters the reality of gun ownership, regulation and use. They also present another face of terrorism that we take for granted.

The September 11th parallel is not lost on me. Some may scoff, but the show opens with a series of vignettes, a perfect normal, sunny day in Seattle, not unlike a perfect September day in New York, or perfect July day in London 2005. Katie Herzig’s sweet and haunting soundtrack juxtapose against the brutal images of another main character (McDreamy) shot in the chest at close range.  Additionally, I think about April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City. It was a beautiful day in New York City then. I can’t remember if it was a beautiful day April 20, 1999 when two teenage boys shot up their classmates outside Boulder, Colorado. I do remember it was a Tuesday. Continue reading →

on huck finn.

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Tayari Jones zeroes in on my feelings on the subject:

The revisions to “Huckleberry Finn” have been described as “politically correct,” but I disagree with this characterization. Political correctness is not about airbrushing history to allow us to remember our past in a way that more closely resembles our present. Though more honorable in intent, these changes are more in line with recent Virginia textbook scandal in which units of black soldiers were said to have fought for the Confederacy.

American history is a complex narrative that is by turns inspiring and shameful. If there are teachers and parents who would prefer that their children and students not to be exposed to the truth, that’s their call. The solution is not to fight willful ignorance with willful misrepresentation.

via Opinion: Scrubbing ‘Huck Finn,’ and Our History.

Erasing the word doesn’t erase racism in America or her history. So how do we engage in a smarter conversation about race in America?

radio silence.

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I think I’m burned out from the news. Too much salt, not enough sweet.

I’m trying to catch up yet find myself sinking deep into a malaise, my eyes flood with too much information. It’s difficult for me to focus on a single item long enough to concentrate. I read somewhere that the internet is ruining our brains. Maybe that’s true. I can’t even remember where I read that. Could’ve been a blog, or a newspaper. I honestly don’t know. I think the midterms put me in a funk. For every forward progression I think we make in civil society, there are dogged forces that pull us back. This may be contributing to my malaise.

For me, I know that when I’m overwhelmed by bad news, I seek solace in art. There’s an urgent need to be in a sublime space, the quiet, the understood relationship between you as viewer and the artist. So this past weekend I checked out Wangechi Mutu’s latest work at gallery in Chelsea. Peeped a view of the Copley exhibit. For three weeks, I had been immersed in reading, editing, coding Union Station Magazine’s latest issue and our new blog. While I was doing that I listened to music over the internet, alternating between Pinna Storm’s October Playlist (h/t Shani!) and Kanye’s Runaway. I bobbled up to the surface to read postmortems on the elections, the Maddow/Stewart showdown, and Bush being …well a victim. But I returned to my inner space, which is to say, I really appreciate Ye’s latest effort (more on that later). He won me over with a brilliant appropriation Bon Iver’s Woods. And going up in the woods is what this girl from Wisconsin really feels like doing. As the world spins, I really need to maintain my center.

what narcissism means to me… a mixtape.

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1.
Clip from taped interview with George W. Bush for Matt Lauer Reports:

MATT LAUER:
Well, what he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
That’s – “he’s a racist.” And I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business.” It’s another thing to say, “This man’s a racist.” I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my Presidency.

MATT LAUER:
This from the book. “Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust.” You go on. “I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low.”

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
Yeah. I still feel that way as you read those words. I felt ‘em when I heard ‘em, felt ‘em when I wrote ‘em and I felt ‘em when I’m listening to ‘em.

MATT LAUER:
You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And– it was a disgusting moment.

MATT LAUER:
I wonder if some people are going to read that, now that you’ve written it, and they might give you some heat for that. And the reason is this–

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
Don’t care.

MATT LAUER:
Well, here’s the reason. You’re not saying that the worst moment in your Presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana. You’re saying it was when someone insulted you because of that.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
No – that– and I also make it clear that the misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well. There’s a lot of tough moments in the book. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple.

(emphasis is mine.)

2.
Later, Kanye West on 97.9FM Houston:

I definitely can understand the way he feels, to be accused of being a racist in any way, because the same thing happened to me, you know, I got accused of being a racist. For both situations, it was basically a lack of compassion that America saw in that situation.

With him, it was a lack of compassion of him not rushing, him not taking the time to rush down to New Orleans.For me, it was a lack of compassion of cutting someone off in their moment. But nonetheless, I think we’re all quick to pull a race card in America. And now I’m more open, and the poetic justice that I feel, to have went through the same thing that he went [through]-and now I really more connect with him on just a humanitarian level.”

(emphasis, again, is also mine.)

h/t Gawker.

what narcissism means to me…

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Once I got through my haze of disappointment with my home state of Wisconsin over Feingold’s defeat, I began reading this interesting take on the psyche of the American voter in this week’s New York Magazine. Senior winnows the electorate’s binary options through the prism of child psychology, noting that ‘We are thinking in fanciful, binary choices. Obama and his government must save us; he and his government must disappear. Neither option is especially real.’

Senior continues:

When children act this way, we say they’re simply acting like children. But when adults behave with this same paradoxical mixture of self-importance and insecurity, we call it something else: narcissism. By definition, narcissists are impatient, vainglorious, easily insulted, and aggrieved; they’d never dream of making sacrifices on anyone else’s behalf, unless it simultaneously advanced an agenda of their own.

But the fact is, everyone is capable of narcissism in times of crisis. It’s a very typical response to feeling out of control—especially if you’ve had plenty of control before (or at least the illusion of it), and especially if you still have some means to express your dissatisfaction. And control has been a defining theme of this election cycle. With record unemployment and foreclosure rates, everyone across the system is feeling deeply disempowered. As Obama recently said at a fund-raiser (and was immediately criticized for it afterward), “We’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”

Similarly, one could argue that, if the conditions are right, an entire culture can plunge into narcissistic behavior. In fact, we’ve been here before. In The Culture of Narcissism, the 1979 classic about the spread and normalization of self-absorption in the United States, historian Christopher Lasch suggested that seventies rebellion culture was at once the result of too many constraints and too few. On the one hand, people felt powerless in the face of a changing economy and the expanding impersonal complexity of the modern world, a world that “made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.” At the same time, a sexual revolution was taking place, the mass media was replacing the church and the family as the main source of culture and values, and Madison Avenue was “undermining the horrors of indebtedness”—all of which gave people a sense of lawlessness and dizzying personal freedom.

The result, in other words, was a culture where people felt the same paradoxical combination experienced by angry children: powerlessness and a destructive, deceptive sense of might.

Although others may have explored these themes during this election cycle, this passage resonates with me deeply. The narrative in our politics has been distilled into comic book actors, and certainly our political leaders, Obama included, have played to these fantasies. Continue reading →

stuck on repeat.

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Japanese American store owner placed sign outside store day after Pearl Harbor. photo by Dorothea Lange - Oakland, California, 1942.

Ann Friedman writes that our culture wars will continue ad infinitum:

Economic strife doesn’t just restart the culture war. It reorders the conflict, shifting both the issues at stake and the targets of the moment. One of the great errors of defining the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s as primarily about women’s and gay rights is that liberals got the idea that this was a war we could win. Just give it time, and Americans would become more LGBT-friendly and more accepting of abortion rights, and we would have somehow mended America’s deepest ideological rifts. In some ways, that is proving true. Affirmative action, welfare, women in the workforce, “political correctness” — these were all once battles in the culture war. Today we have a biracial president. Women’s right to work and be compensated fairly is generally accepted. Each poll on marriage equality is more encouraging than the last. These particular issues are falling off the agenda.

Even as we make progress on specific issues, however, the broader culture war seems to get uglier and uglier. The underlying sentiment that has fueled this conflict from the start –that only certain Americans are “real Americans” who deserve rights and respect — has not gone away.

She’s right. While some of us may have congratulated ourselves on the election of the first African American president (Friedman points back to the 2008 Atlantic issue where Andrew Sullivan declares support for Obama to end “the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam … a war about war — and about culture and about religion and about race”), many of us failed to recognize the root we need to do in embracing America, the Plural Society. We’ve made some marked improvement in areas of gender and race equality (as evidenced by a recent study on happiness in black americans) yet… The photo above was published on a blog I frequently visit called These Americans. There’s a series of images by photographers from WPA era and beyond, documenting America that is worth exploring. It’s a visual history of how far we’ve come and how far we still have yet to go. Continue reading →

‘who is this america dem speak of today?’ cont.

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Russell Banks says so much more eloquently than I but below is a highlight:

After long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the single defining, likened sequence of stories that all Americans, north, south, and meso- share, regardless of our racial characteristics or ethnic cultural backgrounds, the one narrative that we all participate in, is that of the African Diaspora. This I the narrative template against which all others can be measured, fit into, laid over, or veneered onto. It doesn’t matter where in time one enters it –as Faulkner said, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past –or from whose point of view it’s told. For we have all played different roles in that long serpentine story, and depending on our racial characteristics, sometimes we have been victim, sometimes victimizer, sometimes merely horrified, or thrilled, onlooker with something important, and self defining to lose or gain in the outcome. It doesn’t matter where it’s located. Surely by now we know that there is no town, no county, no state in America that has not been profoundly affected by the events, characters, themes and values dramatized by the story of race in America. It opens in the early seventeenth century, and it continues today in all the Americas, an in Europe too, as a late chapter in the Tale of Empire and in Asia as that chapter called the Vietnam War; and in Africa itself, in the chapters that describe and Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s tragic, ongoing civil wars for instance. And you don’t have to be a prophet to see that, if this is indeed the era of the American Empire, the African Diaspora is a tale with chapters that will be set worldwide, whenever there is an American presence, well into the next century as well. I might go even further and say that if American culture, from McDonald’s to Disney to Nike, in all its subtle and not so subtle manifestations, has come to dominate the New World Order and if there is today no truly creolized society left on this earth—that is, no multiracial society in which power is not dispensed according to its citizens’ racial characteristics—then we might be able to speak of the universality of the African Diaspora as origin-myth. At least for the foreseeable future.

In its essential outline, it’s the story that begins in violence with capture, permanent enslavement, and forced migrations, passes into institutionalized racism and through emancipation rises to a first and false climax, where it undergoes sudden reversals and embittered transformation, withdraws like a wave falling back to gather force and new complexity, and leads eventually in our time to a future vision not of assimilation but of creolization—a strictly American vision in whose light we are led not to the denial of racial difference or to the celebration of either but to a vivid image of its eventual elimination as a means of group identification. Central to that story—the dialectical engine, one might say that drives its plot—is the conflict between the crime of slavery at the beginning and the morality expressed in our sacred documents, the Bill of Rights and the Constitutions; so that ultimately for the conflict to be resolved in favor of that morality (as it must, if we are not to be a nation of criminals) race in America will be seen to have been all along nothing but a social construct. It will be no longer possible to describe a child in racial terms. To say that a child’s skin is ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ will be to day noting socially meaningful about him or her. We will have become a true democracy at last, and, who knows, perhaps we can begin then to talk coherently and openly about economics and class. Continue reading →