Critical News Scan from the Colorful Conservative

Black Republicans (and their rich literary history)

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:21:00 +0000

[I dedicate this essay to the fine mentors who inspired me to found this blog and write The Colorful Conservative. Blessings to you as the Internet midwifes new genres.]

Rethinking Black Novelty

delivered in Atlanta, American Studies Association

Nov 2004

Martin Delany

In this paper I would like to propose a new way to discuss the emergence of the African American novel. While there have been many studies of nineteenth-century black writing in recent years, there is still room for critics to strive toward a narrative about what "the emergence of the African American novel" means. There are several historical peculiarities that could be pointed out, which have not received enough attention. The African American novel was born, as a genre, just before the advent of the Civil War and emancipation. The birth date of this genre is highly debatable as I will outline shortly. Clotel, by William Wells Brown, published in 1853, usually receives the title "the first African American novel," but I would like to reconsider this delineation for important reasons. Even if 1853 no longer stands as the inception year, by 1859 there have already been enough other attempts at longer black fiction, including the notables Blake by Delany, Our Nig by Wilson, and The Garies and their Friends by Webb, to make it impossible to argue for a year later than the 1850s. Therefore, the transition point between the age of slavery and the age of Reconstruction seems to coincide, albeit imperfectly, with the transition point between the slave narrative and the African American novel. The significance of the larger melodrama in American history almost demands that critics find a correlating melodrama in the shift in black writing.

Frederick Douglass

It is not enough to say that the slave narrative reached closure and the black novel was born, but rather, the African Americanist should intervene with an interpretation to extract a historical meaning from these facts. In constructing the melodrama, critics could choose to pattern the transition from the slave narrative to the novel on the historical movement from slavery to abolition and reconstruction. Because there is not much black fiction prior to 1861, and remarkably little fiction that could be classified indisputably as "novels," it is irresistible to map "antebellum black writing" onto the idea of "the slave narrative era." Houston Baker, in Blues Ideology, for instance, calls the slave narrative the locus classicus of black writing. This demarcation of the slave narrative as a genre that both reflects and denotes the boundaries of time is intellectually compelling. The term locus classicus implies a "golden age," a time of pure authenticity; it implies that the original or classical location of black writing belongs wholly to the slave narrative and has no room, except for minor exceptions, for other genres.

On Genres, History, and Slavery Physical & Moral

Nonetheless, I would urge critics not to conflate the slavery era with the slave narrative era, for a host of reasons to be examined here. I assert that the transition from the slave narrative to the novel is profoundly significant; but I also assert that the relative value of the slave narrative and the black novel to each other and to the black tradition, is far too murky and contested to privilege either genre as a "locus classicus" or superior in quality or authenticity. First I would like to take stock of what is at stake in differentiating between the slave narrative and the novel in the first place. We must always answer to the first question of literary criticism, "who cares?" In African American literature, this is a transition with wide-reaching political implications. If the slave narrative is, in the view of countless critics like Michele Wallace (to name one), an exercise in defining freedom as literacy and literacy as freedom, then we can assert by syllogism that African American literature's genesis is based on an equation of writing with freedom. I would refine this to state that African American literature was born from an equation of narrative with freedom. Defining it as "narrative" rather than "writing" allows us to embrace the storytelling tradition, the myths woven into quilts, and the very practice of performing "black history" as a countertext against white supremacy and its attempts to stifle black freedom – though these orally based markers of black narrative authenticity will be contested very soon in this paper. A critic like Frances Smith Foster might choose to characterize nineteenth-century black writing as "bearing witness" first and foremost (I am taking some liberties with the theories of her book Witnessing Slavery). Witnessing here is not only a passive act of viewing, but the empowering act of recounting, restating what has been witnessed in the language chosen by the liberated black subject. The slave narrative, existing as a written product, could be fairly characterized as a phase of upward mobility in witnessing. With a fixed and disseminated text encoded in the language of respectability, the African American who bears witnesses can imbue his or her witnessing with greater cache. Literacy does not erase or debunk the oral roots of the black writer's stories, but merely arms them with a greater chance to circulate. The cache of the written word, both in historically real and in abstract terms, advances the black voice toward a desired state of freedom, but perhaps the fundamental value of telling stories underwrites the advancement. The evolution of a nationwide phenomenon like Black History Month still reveals debts to this notion of narrative as freedom. One becomes free by narrating. One narrates the process of becoming free. Also, freedom, like narrative, is a process and a progress, a movement generally upward, though not without ups and downs.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Writing and Freedom

If we begin, therefore, by asserting that the African American literary tradition is grounded on narrating freedom, then the transition from the slave narrative to the novel carries much higher stakes than people might choose to admit at first. The narrative is changing. With such a change, the nature or status of black freedom also changes. And the narrative or meta-narrative that we, as critics, use to describe the shift from the slave narrative to the novel is itself making a statement about black freedom. But it's even bigger than that, because African American narrative has always contended with a definition of "freedom" as understood by the white majority of their society. Let us stop for a moment to reflect on the famous chiasmus from Frederick Douglass' slave narrative: "you have seen how a man was made a slave, now you shall see how a slave was made a man" (326). Douglass equates leaving slavery and attaining freedom with the acquisition of humanity. This event is his entry into the circles of mutually recognized human groups. Douglass' shrewd chiasmus strikes in many ways at the core of American conceptions of freedom. Since Jefferson's famous words legitimated revolt against England based on the concept that all men were created equal, Douglass knows that African Americans must prove, through the language of their narratives, that they are to be counted among equally created human beings in order to become free.

William Wells Brown

But the chiasmus of Douglass' humanization leaves unclear which dynamic makes Douglass equal to the white men entitled (in Jeffersonian terms) to fight for freedom. Was it the altercation itself or the written artifact that preserves a collective memory of the altercation? Douglass' chiasmus seems prima facie to refer to his own physical struggle against Covey, but what really allows him to become a man is not necessarily fighting Covey, but writing down his memory of the fight in the sophisticated form of lyric word games passed down from classical antiquity (the chiasmus, which stems from the Greek letter chi). Writing the struggle humanizes him because it allows the struggle to live on as a fixed narrative and because learning to write has allowed him to transform the raw material of reality into a linguistic trick, chiasmus. Ironically, self-abstraction in Douglass' narrative humanizes him to the extent that it distances his selfhood from the physically real and ensconces him further in language. And this matches the philosophical ethos of Douglass' times. In Reason and History, Hegel, for instance, argues that human history is driven by ideas; but Hegel refuses in that text to give people of color a place in that history, claiming that they are only "obscure peoples" existing outside of human history. It is because of this delicate gerrymandering of the boundaries of the human that Hegel is able, in that text at least, to erect an empowering Master/Slave dialectic that nonetheless excludes actual black slaves from its liberating potential. Humanity is defined by mental acuity and the possibility of self-transformation into ideas and battles in language; African Americans can only prove their humanity by mastering narrative itself. Hence the relationship between narrative and freedom is even more acute, when we throw in the element of defining what is human.

There is a wrench in a seemingly airtight equation of narrative=freedom=humanity, however. Not all narratives are the same. And specifically, the slave narrative and the novel are not the same. The slave narrative differs from the novel in that it is a specifically African American genre. While influenced by other literary forms such as Christian spiritual autobiographies, the picaresque, and sentimentalist fiction, the slave narrative belongs to African Americans in a way that the novel does not. That's one difference which should be reckoned with.

Statue of Harriet Wilson in New Hampshire

Witnessing & its Discontents

At the same time the novel differs from the slave narrative in that its range is wider in a technical sense. The slave narrative, predicated on bearing witness, exists to memorialize something that must be as close to the truth as possible. If it betrays any deviation from truth, then it risks losing its authority and can no longer exist as a legitimate text at all. Some critics, from Eugene Genovese to William Andrews, have pointed out the capacity of slave narratives to deceive. But to jump from this conclusion to a belief that the slave narrative exists within the framework and value system of fiction would be to misunderstand the genre's raison d'etre. If the slave narrator chooses to toy with the truth in order to enhance a desired effect, he is effectively lying. Notwithstanding postmodern sensibilities about the falseness of historical accuracy, to be a slave narrator who bears witness, one must be operating under the pretext of pure truthfulness. With the novel, suddenly, the black writer is allowed to lie without it being called a lie as such. This is truly a revolutionary change in writing that deserves more meditation from critics. If the slave narrative genre may have performed a charade of truth at times, the novel no longer has to perform a charade; its truth is a charade and its charade is truth.

In strict historical terms, William Wells Brown's novel Clotel follows swiftly on the heels of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The preface to Clotel resorts to language dramatic enough to be characterized as historically self-conscious. It is clear, at that point, that Brown knows that he is making history by imagining a full-length story and putting it into writing. The first fourth of the book is a bizarre review of William Wells Brown's life, including a summary of his popular slave narrative from a few years earlier. For fifty pages, prior to the beginning of Brown's novel, Brown narrates the life of William Wells Brown in the third person, even covering the details of his slave narrative's publication and success. There is a splitting within the text itself, a noticeable metamorphosis of Brown, the slave narrator, into Brown, the novelist, and a palimpsestic moment when both beings coexist. Included in this strange panegyric to himself, or perhaps a past self, is a quote from a periodical called The Eclectic, in which a reviewer is cited for saying

The extraordinary excitement produced by Uncle Tom's Cabin will, we hope, prepare the public of Great Britain and America for this lively book of travels by a real fugitive slave. Though he never had a day's schooling in his life, he has produced a literary work not unworthy of a highly educated gentleman. Our readers will find in these letters much instruction, not a little entertainment, and the beatings of a manly heart, on behalf of a down-trodden race, with which they will not fail to sympathize (40).

The book, within Brown's strange splitting of himself into two authorial voices, flaunts its own awareness of his historical status and chooses to mark the watershed, the birth of black fiction, overtly rather than subtly. The language, even in this clipping, is rife with claims to legitimacy and self-empowerment. And the goal of the watershed is also unambiguous: black fiction, rather than being born for dilettantish or belletristic pursuits, will serve to instruct, entertain, and incur sympathy.

The fact that a black author is now authorized to imagine should not be undervalued by critics. Brown's seemingly pompous self-awareness should be contextualized not only as a massive step forward in African American literature, but also as the fulfillment of a literary mission declared almost eighty years earlier. At the dawn of African American literature as a genre, in Phillis Wheatley's 1773 collection of poetry, Wheatley includes an ode to Memory as well as an ode to the Imagination. Memory, called by the Greek name Mnemosyne, symbolizes rightful vengeance but also intense suffering:

By (Memory) unveiled each horrid crime appears,

her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.

Days, years, misspent, O what a hell of woe!

Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know (63).

By contrast, for Wheatley, the "soft captivity" of Imagination is a desired goal, a place to which the black writer should one day arrive, but cannot yet, under the strain of her conditions:

Fancy might now her silken pinions try

to rise from Earth and sweep th'expanse on high;

from Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,

her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,

while a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.

The monarch of the day I might behold

and all the mountains tipt with radiant gold

but I reluctant leave the pleasing views,

which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse

Winter austere forbids me to aspire

and northern tempests damp the rising fire (68).

Brown is conscious, as the introduction to Clotel reveals, of his role in accomplishing what an earlier tradition has sought but found elusive: the right to dwell, in Wheatley's words, in the realm of imagination and be freed of the wormwood of memory.

By writing the first black novel, Brown not only repays an old debt to Phillis Wheatley but also claims new territory for the black voice and in a sense breaks down Hegel's wall separating the whites of history from the nonwhites who are ahistorical and, by implication, non-human. By imagining things as opposed to merely being a clear lens through which events are remembered by others, African Americans now traffic in new ideas and react to white ideas. Brown claims the right to react, even if passive-aggressively, to Stowe (when he includes a clipping that reduces Uncle Tom's Cabin to a prelude to "this lively book of travels by a real fugitive slave.") To be able to react to Stowe, rewriting her views and attempting to outdo her, Brown finally becomes a legitimate half of a dialectic and can therefore claim membership in Hegel's vision of history.

And yet within the melodrama of the birth of the black novel, as I have presented it, there is cause for some chagrin. While the birth of the black novel signals an advancement for the black writer, it is also an emigration out of one space, the slave narrative, into another. The peculiar tragedy in that emigration is that the slave narrative is a specifically black genre (no matter how imperfect) and the novel is definitely not. Even worse, the specific novel that initiates the new dialectic is Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that would forever haunt African American writers as an insult despite its high intentions. James Baldwin, voicing a prevailing sentiment among later black writers, attacks Stowe by saying that "sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel…" and that Stowe "was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer" (12). The characteristics that drive Baldwin to fault Stowe – that of maudlin superficiality and narrow political determinism – are unfortunately the very values that Brown trumpets in his own description of the motives behind writing Clotel. One might call this a literary traffic accident, that the birth of a new African American genre happens occurs through such a controversial, non-black midwife, and the dialectic that Brown fought to enter strikes later black writers as a suffocating and reductive binary they will later choose to avoid entirely.

Brown's novel, by being a novel rather than a slave narrative, must unfortunately submit to the harsh and unflinching literary standards of Western humanism and modernity. Paul Gilroy and Walter Mignolo aptly point out that the Renaissance and modernity, and the humanism associated with such delineations, existed because of slavery, rather than despite it. Humanism therefore bears the wound of historical atrocity, and it is difficult to enter into its value systems without repeating one's own victimization by it. And part of humanism is a privileging of beauty as a transcendental principle to which all human art must answer, including narrative. Via Stowe, Brown and his important novel stumble into a problematic position – by entering humanism, Brown exposes himself and in a sense his race to the brutal artistic judgments of humanism, which tend not to favor African Americans.

One unfortunate tragedy in this trajectory is the text of Clotel itself. Though it is not popular to say so, it is still my contention that the book's form and organization, while acceptable as literature, are riddled with flaws if one evaluates it according to humanistic ideals of literature. Too long to review here, the book is scattered and contains a dizzying sequence of stories, many culled from other black writers or slave narratives, and the novel fails to attain a smooth unity. Therefore it is a regrettable fact of history that the book born of a desire to inaugurate the black novel is unfortunately poorly equipped, on formal grounds, to do so. Clotel is not leaping into a literary milieu still crude and unformed. It is not breaking new aesthetic or structural ground, so its flawed form, when contextualized, is unable to shield itself from aesthetic judgment based on claims to naivete, or a courageous foray into uncharted territory. Set beside the American novels of the American Renaissance, the Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick and yes, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Clotel looks, unfortunately, badly written. And Brown has no way out of this conclusion because he is choosing to jump into the fray that has already developed among his white counterparts.

The traffic accident of Clotel's emergence is not incurable. I think this is the perfect place for literary historians to make a critical intervention, as follows: We need to revisit the notion that Clotel marks the beginning of the African American novel. Though the book screams to be classified as such, we may do a greater justice to Brown by denying the book exactly what it demands, and instead crowning Clotel as an amphibian literary form, crawling gradually out of the slave narrative into fiction, a sort of "monstrum" in the Latin sense, a divine omen of something bigger to come in the near future – the Civil War, Emancipation, freedom in political rather than artistic terms, and, after all, other novels that do not pose the same problems. Much like a deformed birth that a Roman oracle would take as a message from the gods, we can look at Clotel as a harbinger or prelude to something else, rather than a generic exemplar.

The Power of Blake

Martin Delany's Blake, while not completed as far as we know, is a wonderful candidate to replace Clotel in our literary history. It has formal flaws but it does not pound the reader over the head.

Hegel, who said nonwhites live outside history

This may not be as dangerous as it sounds. Because of Brown's status as a slave narrator and his responsiveness to Stowe, the use of Clotel as the first and perhaps quintessential black novel often fuels certain misperceptions about the emergence of the black novel as a genre. First, Brown's indebtedness to Stowe often leads people to generalize that the black novel grew out of a sentimental tradition and had no independent generic innovations of its own. Second, the original black novel was almost monomaniacal in its political obsession with slavery, which it purportedly inherited from the slave narrative that grandfathered the black novel, and lacked aesthetic complexity. Third, the black novel was born from a binaristic definition of race and therefore imparted the crude and essentialist notion of racial separateness (to which I have alluded) to the fiction that followed it.

All three of the foregoing assumptions are wrong, as we can see by first overthrowing Clotel as the first and definitive African American novel and shifting attention, instead, to the two black novels that were written prior to the abolition of slavery: The Garies and their Friends, by Frank Webb, published in 1857, and Martin Delany's Blake, published serially between 1859 and 1862. The Garies and their Friends, though following Clotel by four years, is aesthetically much more advanced and does not suffer from the myriad formal flaws of Clotel. Since Webb was born free in Philadelphia, moreover, and never wrote a slave narrative nor wrote his novel as a response to Stowe, he constructs a narrative that looks beyond slavery and can address other issues facing African Americans with full complexity and sophistication. And while it is valuable to use early black literature as a lens into the problems of slavery, it is urgent to find other values in writers like Webb and Delany, because regardless of whether we wish to admit it, the dominant literary standards of American literature (of which these two authors must be viewed as a part) cast aspersions on writing that stays too narrow, fails to universalize its themes, and cannot be interpreted in human rather than in socially specific terms. In Black American Literature and Humanism, R. Baxter Miller has this to say about the urgency of interpreting African American literature as humanist as well as ethnic, which so often we as critics fail to do:

How does one relate Afro-American literature to humanism? The reader must realize, first, that the term humanism is complex historically; second that the oppositions set against it are largely contrived; third, that the New Humanists of the 1930s distorted the high purpose of the philosophy into a conservatism which indirectly encouraged bigotry; and fourth, that the essays collected here suggest the possibility of freeing scholarship from Western culture's self-imposed restrictions. In the reopened range of human effort, Black literature has dignity and meaning (1).

Miller's 1981 pitch for a humanist interpretation of Black literature seems to have been overlooked amid the din of our anti-essentialist and anti-anti-essentialist conversations, which appear, by the 1990s to be obsessively talking around the main idea that Miller expresses clearly. Can't African American writing be about human experience as a whole? Why do we have so much difficulty simply stating the debate in those terms and why do we chase our tails with the exhaustive studies of the constructedness of racial difference, the falseness of essentialized dichotomies, the sites of hybridity between white and black? The critical preference for Clotel as the first black novel and the neglect of Blake and the Garies and their Friends is part of this evasion; in Clotel we can magnify the novel's inability to think outside of slavery questions and we can force the book to implode the black/white divide that we ourselves our projecting onto the novel's starting premises. Neither Blake nor the Garies and their Friends begin with neat essentialized stereotypes about blackness and therefore, they frustrate the assumptions that we get in the work of critics like Sollors.

More importantly, Blake and the Garies and their Friends serve as testaments to early African American sophistications about class. As Angela Davis points out in Women Race & Class, "During the 1970s the slavery debate reemerged with renewed vigor. Eugene Genovese published Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made… Conspicuously absent from this flurry of publications is a book expressly devoted to slave women" (3). Davis, writing in 1983, makes good on her promise: she gives us a book expressly devoted to slave women and gives us a tour of working class black life after slavery. Before abolition, there is no issue of African American class. After abolition, African American class issues are working class issues. In doing so, she relies heavily on autobiographical forms like Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth, which will contribute to the problematic conflation of antebellum black writers with slave narrators. In the Afro-American Novel and its Tradition, Bernard Bell writes that "Slave narratives and black autobiographies provide dramatic personal testimonies of the discovery of racism in the process of secondary acculturation, a process that at some point frustrates individuals in their efforts to realize their potential wholeness, unity, or balance as black people and American citizens, compelling them to turn primarily to their ethnic group for protection and direction" (9).

[Post-Script, 2010: Whatever the colorful conservative is, it must come into being the way the black novel did. It is ultimately defined by transgression against convention -- a revolt, first and foremost, against Harvardthink and groupthink, which have proudly brought slavery and repression to the American people since 1636, always under the flag of high intellectual standards, decorum, beauty, and respect. Genres die each time a group that once could only ask for permission, begins to feel it has permission and needs never to beg for it ever gain. The purveyors of Harvardthink and groupthink, confronted with the mammoth power of something new, self-assured, wielding the arrogance of ancient authority and the courage of modern innovation, must tremble in fear. They ought to. As soon as they classify alternative forms of beauty as upstarts, impertinent fools, crude savages, and braggarts, they classify themselves to intellectual death--which was the hidden providential purpose, perhaps, of their existing as authorities in the first place. Long live the Blog in all its forms! Long live the colorful conservative!]

Abort, Retry, Fail -- How Pro-Choice Activists Have Hijacked "women's health"

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:12:00 +0000

I have been less active on this blog because the start of the spring semester really kicked my behind, and my goal has been a cease-fire with the academic Left, at least until my book gets off the ground and I inch closer to job security in the liberal-dominated professoriate, where the cost of apostasy against leftist doctrine (such as gay marriage and abortion "rights") is often joblessness, starvation, humiliation, and emotional torture.

I have also been backing away from Mark Steyn for a while, because he irritated me last year with his dismissals of Occupy Wall Street. But alas! The Left brought me to a boiling point on the Susan G. Komen debate, and Mark Steyn rose to the occasion with this excellent article in the OC Register:

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/komen-338772-planned-parenthood.html

via Orange County Register

So here we are.

I posted a brief, one-sentence statement on Facebook and was immediately told I had my head stuck up my ass. To which my imaginary reply was, "If I did have my head stuck up my ass, I would have many places to go to have it removed, which didn't also provide 330,000 abortions every year."

And therein lies the rub of the Komen debate.

Planned Parenthood, like many organizations, believes in its mission. Almost fanatically. I have had close friends who worked high up in its power structure and know that they sincerely believed that women need affordable access to abortion so that misogynistic moralists do not force them into miserable lives by encouraging them to give birth to children they supposedly cannot raise. My main counterpoint against pro-choice ideology is that it assumes a great deal about what poor, young people are capable of. I do not believe that struggling to raise a child without a lot of money is so scarring and horrible that any option other than terminating the pregnancy is automatically a non-starter. I also do not believe that never being born is better than being born into a life with economic and social difficulties. For me, the objection to pro-choice people does not hinge on what the issue of "murder" as much as the larger difficulty I have with the assumptions pro-choice activists make about poverty, sex, and hardship.

Like any organization that believes fanatically in its mission, Planned Parenthood strategizes about how to fulfill its mission given some of the obstacles that life presents. The main obstacle is that abortion is controversial, as is sex, especially when we are talking about young women who are financially dependent on their parents -- the women who are instinctively at the eye of the rhetorical storm of Planned Parenthood.

If your life mission is to make possible something that a large portion of the population deems morally reprehensible -- aborting offspring in the womb -- then the first challenge will be juridical; you must change the law to make it legal. Pro-choice advocates won that battle in 1973. Even during eight years of Bush's presidency, Roe v. Wade was not overturned.

But then there's money. Since young women who find themselves in the controversial position of having had sex and now facing pregnancy are, due to their youth, dependent on parents to support them, the pro-choice movement is perpetually at war with pro-life parents about how to finance a system of abortion that's immune to parental financial intervention.

The pro-choice strategists do what all strategists must do: They brainstorm ways to channel money into an abortion infrastructure without leaving an opening for pro-life parents to punish their daughters financially for doing something -- abortion -- that they view as profoundly immoral.

Pro-choice strategists must first build up a physical structure which can (1) offer the medical procedure, (2) pay for the medical procedure with funds not traceable to the girls' parents, and (3) keep the medical procedure secret.

Now, points 1-3 are problematic, which is why Planned Parenthood sometimes falls under legal scrutiny. Abortion is a medical procedure, and most medical procedures performed on minors (even piercing one's ears) require that the minors' guardians be notified. Laws in some states require parental notification.

The pro-choice strategists must therefore engage in savvy public relations, deflecting public attention away from the fact that they are doing something that is legally problematic and morally incendiary, in order to keep its funds flowing so the abortion infrastructure doesn't collapse.

Following the lead of racketeers, monopolists, and money launderers, Planned Parenthood diversifies its services and then monopolizes public health money so that other services which are not as controversial -- like the prevention of breast cancer, screening for HIV, and distribution of condoms -- are held captive to an organization whose primary raison d'être is to ensure that young women have access to abortions against the wishes of their parents.

Hence we get the propaganda campaign, which is full of patently bogus talking points:

We hear about "poor women" who lack access to health care. This is a matter best addressed by the larger debate about health care and accessibility in the United States, and best managed by people who are not simultaneously invested in abortion politics. Conflict of interest, first of all. Second of all, this is exploitative. The existence of Planned Parenthood depends on the existence of poor women who can't get health services elsewhere, which makes Planned Parenthood therefore reliant on poverty and desperation, without which their claims become weaker. This is how warlords and racketeers work! Godfathers in ghettoes get their hooks into everybody's lives and then say, you can't overthrow me, without me you wouldn't have had birthday parties, the down payment on your car, or a place to sleep on those rainy nights when everyone else turned their back on you.

I am pro-life and not afraid to admit it. I will not donate to the Komen Foundation if their money is going to an organization that provides over 300,000 abortions every year. Period. There are other places that research breast cancer and provide referrals. If some communities only have Planned Parenthood, then the deeper problem is that nothing else exists, and often, that deeper problem results from the fact that Planned Parenthood has monopolized funding, controlled the discussion, and pushed out anyone with another plan. The solution is not for Planned Parenthood to maintain business as usual. The solution is other agencies to get a chance at funding health options not entangled in abortion politics.

We hear a lot about back alley abortions and stories from the 1950s about pregnant women shunned from society. The legalization of abortion is not the only thing that has changed since the 1950s. In the United States, people have become more open about sex and less dogmatic about sexual purity and marriage. It is not as big of a scandal for a teenage girl to be pregnant. Nor is it such a huge scandal for a woman to raise a child without being married. It is not easy, of course. But raising a child is also not easy when you are grown up and struggling to climb the corporate ladder. Child-rearing has always been difficult. What has changed is the severity and proportionality of ostracism a young woman is likely to encounter if she is unmarried and pregnant. That change in severity means we can no longer talk about back alley abortions and the 1950s when talking about whether or not to fund Planned Parenthood.

Moreover, since the 1950s there was an explosion of social programs known as the "Great Society" as well as a drastic increase in couples willing to adopt newborn babies. (In fact, tens of thousands of couples must adopt babies from overseas because the waiting list is so long to adopt babies domestically.) In 1955, a woman might be forced to get a back alley abortion because there was literally no way for her to support her child, and the baby might end up in an orphanage. We cannot speak in 1955 terms when discussing what the best moral compromise is for a pregnant girl in 2012, who can qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, and other benefits, and who can place her baby up for adoption knowing it will land in a financially stable and carefully screened adoptive household.

The abortion debate is irresolvable. Breast cancer, poverty, and sexual irresponsibility are deeper problems that need to be addressed by organizations that aren't weighted down with the moral controversy and legal issues of giving 300,000 abortions as a year, largely to women who are dependent on family members who don't want them to get abortions. I'm not going to go on a crusade against Planned Parenthood, because they believe in what they do. I just think they don't need to be the only game in town -- any town. They are sucking up all the oxygen and because of Planned Parenthood, we are unable to have a reasonable debate. Enough already.

Whiteness and American Invective -- a piece from 2004

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:29:00 +0000

Fig. 2
Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul
1600-1601

I promise that this essay will have a lot to say about two of Caravaggio's depictions of Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus, in Acts 9. It has a lot to say about the Bible.

But I can't lie, this is also a paper that was selected for a publication by a scholar who teaches in the UK. The anthology was called Are We Post-Double-Conscioiusness Yet? It was all set to go, but the publisher turned the editor down at the last minute, and as a result, this article languished on my laptop for years. It uses the memoirs of the gay conservative bête noir, David Brock, to reflect upon the lasting meaning of Acts 9 in our society. It arrives at a contemplation on the two canvases completed by Michelangelo Caravaggio in the late 1500s and early 1600s, depicting the moment when Saul was on his way to Damascus and got "blinded by the light."

David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right.

I went out on a limb and guessed that David Brock's autobiographical auto-da-fé, Blinded by the Right, was drawing from the artistic tradition of depicting Acts 9, in many wore ways than one might presume. It might be a nutty thesis, but it did impress the audience at the 2004 Northeast MLA conference, in Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

The Elusive Whiteness of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right:

Christianity, Bodily Purity, and Heredity in Clintonian Washington

by Robert Oscar Lopez

In this essay, I hope to offer new ways to read literary theory and political rhetoric in relation to one another, as a means of enhancing the reader’s conceptions of whiteness. Along the way I will argue that scholarly analysis can and should be applied to popular political commentary. The genre of “rhetoric,” sometimes unfairly left out of literary discussions, deserves greater critical attention. For my purposes, the political biographer David Brock, who chronicled the fundamentalist anti-Clinton movement as both insider and defector, will assume center stage, not only for his overlooked insights into the psychology of whiteness, but also, for the social relevance of his autobiography to the last decade of the twentieth century. I consider the 1990s a dramatic shift in American racial logic, with profound implications for the way that intellectuals should talk about race.

Fig. 1

Michelangelo's Conversion of St. Paul 1600-1601

Much of race theory has rested on the claim that whiteness can only be understood in relation to other races, and that whites are only aware that they are white at the moment of “contact” with a racial other. But David Brock’s accounts of the 1990s prove that whiteness does not necessarily depend upon racial otherness to define itself; it exists independently and participates in struggles that often have little to do with people of color. The great American culture war of the 1990s was not between whites and other races; rather, it took place between conservative white Christians and a white President. Clinton was erroneously dubbed “the first black President” simply because commentators lacked a sufficient vocabulary to describe how Bill Clinton’s status as “white,” in a religious and allegorical sense, was taken away. Little in the invectives hurled by white fundamentalists at Bill Clinton could be interpreted as blackening him. Most of such invectives could be interpreted as de-whitening him (which is quite a different concept and has to be theorized further), or as denying him a theological purity that has been coded, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, as white in color.

The theological construct of whiteness as moral purity does not correspond perfectly to the racial definition of “whites” as people with Caucasian phenotypes or European ancestry. But even if they are not identical, these two kinds of whiteness are inseparable. The memoirs of David Brock prove that the racial and religious senses of “whiteness” often overlapped, and the racial implications of the term were still a powerful factor in fin-de-siècle Washington. As I will examine below, David Brock’s homosexuality was not what prompted him to break ranks with the fundamentalist Christian groups that he initially endorsed. His alienated sexual status caused him less anxiety than the secret fact that he had been adopted as an infant in the 1960s and therefore was uncertain about his own racial origins. Moreover, coming out of the closet as gay did not decisively estrange him from the fundamentalist agitators who embattled Bill Clinton. Rather, the seismic shift in consciousness worthy of his book title “blinded by the right” resulted from the death of Brock’s father and Brock’s confrontation with issues of inheritance, bloodline, and lineage – things more pertinent to a racial than a theological construction of whiteness.

To understand the nuances of whiteness in such a decade, cultural theorists may do better to consider the influence of religion, and particularly scriptures, rather than arts, popular media, or socioeconomics. This essay will suggest some routes of inquiry, with a special emphasis on the Biblical texts that fueled so much of the fundamentalist hostility to Bill Clinton. Whiteness in the 1990s is uniquely interesting because of the ascendancy and impeachment of Bill Clinton (as I will explore below), but the decade is not isolated by any means. The Clinton presidency can be read as a chapter in America’s racial history—even if the chapter is a uniquely lurid one.

Why whiteness became something new in the 90s

WEB DuBois

Early models for theorizing race sidestepped serious discussion of whiteness. In his 1903 Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois laid out the important concept of “double consciousness,” implying that people of color contained within themselves two subjectivities: one shaped by their experiences as racial others and one shaped by the conventional ideologies promoted by whites. The “peculiar sensation” of double consciousness was something that the Negro, “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight,” alone understood. The Negro had a “twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (45). To take DuBois’ model seriously, it would be logical to assume that, by studying the thoughts of people of color, one sheds sufficient light on the thoughts of white folks. People of color can think like white people even though white people cannot think like people of color. DuBois uses the metaphor of “the veil” to illustrate a porous barrier allowing blacks to see white experience, while preventing whites from seeing black experience; therefore blacks have “the gift of second sight” but whites do not. DuBois marks African Americans as “the seventh son” in the family of races, giving American blackness a place in human history apart from “the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian” (45). But he sometimes lumps all people of color together and implies that his sociological models could apply equally well to any race that is not white. Elsewhere in Souls of Black Folks DuBois writes:

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea (54).

In effect DuBois invites races across the globe to occupy the veiled and duplicitous position of African Americans, the only requirement being that a group must be darker in relation to a nearby light-skinned group with more power. As a result double consciousness encourages a global and white/nonwhite opposition, rather than an exclusively American and black/white one. DuBois’ trope of the “veil” renders black thoughts (and by extension the thoughts of all people of color) inaccessible to whites and announces the race scholar’s role as that of a chronicler. The chronicler is responsible for documenting and transmitting an accurate but culturally positive portrait of people of color. Since the veil is porous and blacks can see through it while whites cannot, in the DuBois paradigm no corresponding chronicler is needed to document and transmit an accurate but culturally positive portrait of whites.

Changes in the century following Souls of Black Folks left some of DuBois’ social model untenable. It became clear, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, that theories about race would be inadequate if they did not devote some scholarly time to serious discussions about whiteness as a racial construct in itself. The underlying supposition in the double-consciousness model—that whites were already knowable to people of color and therefore required no cultural explanation—began to unravel for various sociopolitical reasons discussed below. We see, as early as 1986, works such as White by Definition, by Virginia Dominguez. In the 1990s, inquiry into whiteness spawned countless works by scholars such as Valerie Babb, Homi Bhabha, Anna Maria Chupa, Ruth Frankenberg, Mike Hill, Noel Ignatiev, Jane Lazarre, George Lipsitz, Ian Lopez, Toni Morrison, Samina Najmi, Thomas Nakayama, Judith Martin, Richard Dyer, and Robyn Wiegman. Limited space makes it impossible to delve into the manifold positions taken by these scholars, or even to list all of them. Suffice it to say that the interest in whiteness was probably not merely a philosophical epiphany, but also a result of sociopolitical developments in the world at large.

One can identify at least four plausible causes for the gradual realization that whiteness had to be taken seriously by race scholars. First, race in the United States was clearly moving beyond a black-white model by the late 1980s, with the growth of non-white, non-black groups like Asian Americans and Latinos. Antagonisms among people of color made it impossible to argue for a double consciousness based on “people of color” on one pole and “whites” on the other pole. For example, the conflict between African Americans and Korean American grocers, while most saliently acknowledged during the riots following the Rodney King trial in 1992, had already been captured in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing three years earlier. Countless other permutations of conflict made it undeniable that race was not a strict dialectic between two poles, but rather a kaleidoscopic array of grudges, truces, and affinities. Whiteness came to look more like one variable among many, rather than the exceptional oppressor against an omnibus aggregate of racial victims. Therefore one could study the thoughts of white people without the exercise becoming an apology for the sole culprit responsible for racism.

Second, an assumption embedded in DuBois’ model of double consciousness – namely, that people of color can think like white people even if white people cannot think like people of color – did not match important political and cultural events in 1990s America. High profile court cases like the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials pointed to consciousness that looked far more disconnected than doubled; blacks and whites were equally deaf to the cultural logic underlying the other race’s thought processes. If both races misunderstood what the other race was thinking, then the age-old educational mission of learning about other people’s perspectives would have to function in both directions. Not only would scholars need to explain people of color’s subjectivity to whites, but also scholars would need to explain white subjectivity to people of color (or even, perhaps, to whites curious about how their own subject position came about).

Clarence Thomas

Third, by the 1990s certain events revealed that not all white people thought alike, and not all black people thought alike. In the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991, American viewers witnessed passionate and vitriolic infighting among African Americans. In the Clinton impeachment of 1998-1999, they witnessed passionate and vitriolic infighting among whites. Scare quotes would have to be affixed permanently around “black,” “white,” and probably any racial designation.

Fourth, international events of the 1990s, while pointing to the importance of group identities in military conflict, hinted at the unlikelihood that wars were going to be strict cases of one race against another. The collapse of the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War led to the creation of unstable, poor republics in Eastern Europe, all inhabited primarily by people with Caucasian phenotypes. The whiteness of Eastern Europe did little to counteract the region’s poverty and explosive ethnic tension. Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, and other groups mingling in the former Yugoslavian provinces fought bitterly over bases of identification that had little to do with skin color. Simultaneously, the genocidal conflicts in places like Rwanda revealed the impossibility of blackness as a truly unifying label. Moreover the United States’ demonized enemies in the early 1990s appeared to be more Latino (Manuel Noriega) and Arab (Saddam Hussein). The United States’ motives for invading Panama and expelling Iraq from Kuwait were difficult to classify as a war of white against nonwhite, since Latin America and the Middle East had such a glaring diversity of complexions, hair textures, and facial features. Were light-skinned Panamanians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis “white” or “people of color”? Did it really matter, since whites were killing whites in Eastern Europe, and people of color were killing each other in Africa? On an international scale, the confusion about what made white people white, and whether their whiteness implied any privilege at all anymore, legitimized deeper scholarly reflection.

The gap in whiteness studies… and how David Brock can fill it

There are dozens of angles one could use to explain why whiteness became such a hot topic among race scholars in the 1990s; the four factors mentioned above are merely the most obvious structural ones given the decade’s landmark cultural events. By now there is broad agreement among race theorists that whiteness should be studied. The more interesting question is how to study it. I would like to comment briefly on two approaches to whiteness, before suggesting my own. One approach to looking at whiteness, the methodology of Werner Sollors, did not necessarily seek to isolate white literature as the object of study but rather to expand the revisionist focus of ethnic studies, and to read ‘white’ and ‘colored’ literature as intertextual reference points. In this view whiteness and color are impossible to separate. Whites and people of color are always defined in opposition to each other (colored means not white, and white means not colored), but all racial identities are ultimately slated for dissolution into a more fluid universe without boundary lines. As Sollors states in the introduction to Neither Black nor White yet Both, “Since there are no ‘races’ nor widely agreed upon definitions of ‘race,’ understanding the cultural operations which make them seem natural or self-evident categories may be desirable” (3). In other words, though there is no such thing as whiteness, we are still allowed to talk about why the meaningless word exists in our vocabulary, and the discussion should be allowed elaborate nuances, since we don’t know how long it will take to disabuse our readers of the myth that whiteness exists.

Ishmael Reed

Talking about whiteness leads other white scholars to feel defensive. In MultiAmerica, a collection of essays edited by Ishmael Reed, Robert Elliot Fox demands that the world acknowledge his right to consider himself “post-white.” Being white is such an intellectual paradox in his mind that the only real solution is to declare it null and void. Fox writes in Reed’s anthology:

It […] is argued that whiteness is colorlessness [and] constitutes the realm of privilege. Those who are critical of the deconstruction of race claim that it’s relatively easy for white people to engage in such deconstruction because they have never really been especially conscious of having a racial being, a ‘privilege’ they ought to acknowledge and refute. There’s a double bind here […]: white people are unduly privileged to be ‘raceless,’ but they are perverse if they manifest ‘race’ consciousness—unless it’s a consciousness of the culpability of being white (9).

Both Fox and Sollors work toward the same goal—a world where people of color do not have to worry about racism and whites do not have to worry about being racist—but unfortunately their methodologies are at odds. Sollors expects us to journey into whiteness, and to fill it with a content so that we can then dismiss it; Fox feels that this exercise is already oppressive, that these types of discussions have been given a chance to produce insights and haven’t gone anywhere. Sollors is pre-white, hoping to figure out what kind of a false construct whiteness might prove to be, and Fox is post-white, confident of the term’s banality and ready to move on.

Between pre-whiteness and post-whiteness, there is a critical gap. Where is our conception of a whiteness that is ambivalent, contradictory, under contention, indeterminate—yet still palpable and real? And why haven’t more theorists conceptualized a whiteness that has arguments with itself? When whiteness comes up, it is usually raised as a post-script to a discussion about some other race—usually but not always blacks—and more often than not we talk about whiteness because we need to, in order to come to a desired conclusion about people of color. By never discussing whiteness as an independent racial construct, we lose several valuable routes of discussion. First, we’re so busy observing the conversation between whites and other races that we forget, at least while we’re in the world of race theory, that whites are engaged in many conversations with each other that have nothing to do with other races at all. Second, we tend to skew our focus toward texts written by whites like Robert Elliott Fox; that is to say, whites interested in improving race relations, and antiracists identifying with liberal causes. The whites whose thoughts we usually study, one could say, are people who don’t want whiteness to mean superiority, or if whiteness must imply privilege, who don’t want to be white.

One remedy for the apparent lopsidedness in whiteness studies is to reconsider the primary texts that scholars tend to analyze. Up until now, novels, poetry, and films have been a popular focus; where nonfiction is considered, autobiography is often the genre of choice; and historical texts like Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia have been a common focus. An ideal supplement to existing whiteness studies would be a non-fiction text by someone who is white, wants to be white, sees whiteness as something desirable, and is historically close to us. I recently stumbled upon a perfect candidate for the literary microscope. David Brock, who describes himself as a former “right-wing hit man,” has authored books of nonfiction that speak volumes to fin-de-siècle race politics: one a vicious character assassination of Anita Hall called The Real Anita Hill, one a biography of Hillary Clinton that caused his estrangement from the conservative movement, and most importantly, his memoirs released in 2002, called Blinded by the Right, the Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

Anita Hill

Brock is not only a professional writer but also, by the 1990s, a significant character in history itself. As one of the few open gays working for the extreme right, he cut an unusual figure in Clintonian Washington and earned more than average notoriety. He published one of the most scathing articles about Anita Hill in the American Spectator, which became the biggest fuel for the right-wing countercharge during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Later, while doing research for the same magazine, he uncovered the case of Paula Jones and inspired her to sue the President for sexual harassment, which then entitled the Office of the Special Investigator to investigate Clinton’s other sexual encounters with his employees. That resulted in Clinton’s cross-examination about Monica Lewinsky, in which Clinton denied having sex with her. The President’s clumsy and self-incriminating denials ultimately made him vulnerable to impeachment. By 1998 Brock changed his mind about everything, turned against the very conservative machine that had made him famous, and collaborated with Clinton’s defense team. Blinded by the Right, written after Brock recanted, is an indispensable text to understand American whiteness. Part confessional autobiography and part exposé, Blinded by the Right is self-absorbed yet self-unaware enough to reveal, in naïve honesty, the psychology of whiteness, including its conflicted connections to religion and the nation state, and its tormented crucibles of class and sexuality.

Paul’s conversion, the Acts of the Apostles, and the theology of whiteness

The seemingly banal pun of Brock’s four-word title actually hides many layers of irony and complexity. “Blinded by the light” is a popular cliché, usually connoting a religious epiphany. Brock ironizes Christian banality when he replaces “light” with “right.” “Blinded by the light” originates in the moment of St. Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity in the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles is linked to the Gospel of Luke, since both were ostensibly authored by St. Luke and introduced with a letter to someone named Theophilus. As its title implies, the Book of Acts relates the experiences of the first generation of Christians who sought to spread the teaching of Christ after his death. In Acts of the Apostles, the pivotal character of St. Paul is introduced and the term “Christian” is first used to distinguish the new religion from various sects of Jews. The book’s eleventh chapter tells us, “in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians” (11:26).

“Blinded by the light” comes from the ninth chapter of Acts and underscores many of the important themes of Blinded by the Right. At the opening of Acts 9, the main character in the action is Saul, soon to have a conversion and become St. Paul. Saul/Paul’s life experience is an interesting parallel to David Brock’s description of his own life in Blinded. Before his name changes to Paul, Saul is the hateful oppressor, collaborating with intolerant Jews who victimize Christian converts. Stephen, one of the first Christian martyrs, is stoned by a crowd in Acts 7:58, and the text tells us that the “martyrs” lay down their garments at the feet of a young man, “named Saul.” Saul, rather than coming to rescue Stephen, seems to encourage his stoning by the Jewish mob. The original Greek reads:

Saûlos dè ên syneudokôn têi anairései autoû.

And meanwhile, Saul agreed with the religious faction [that stoned Stephen] (8:1).

In the ensuing narrative Saul zealously imitates the savagery of Stephen’s stoners. As it is phrased in the King James version of Acts, he “made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison” (8:3). Not content merely to be a member of the mob, Saul even musters the power of institutions to make his persecution more powerful:

Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem (9:1-2).

Saul is commissioned by the Jewish leaders of Damascus to further his repression of Christians, whom they consider apostates. But as he gets close to Damascus itself, he has the all-important transformation that would symbolize religious conversion to later Christians and inscribe the metaphor “blinded by the light” as a commonplace:

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight

(9:3-9).

Saul becomes “Paul” and turns into a fervent pro-Christian apostle. The phôs apò toû ouranoû, or “light appearing from Heaven,” which blinds Paul, has been interpreted by readers both literally (as a physical shock powerful enough to interrupt a man’s life), and allegorically (as the clarity that a man feels when confronted with his own hypocrisies). Saul/Paul becomes the paramount symbol of the misdirected enemy suddenly changing to the right side and becoming an ally of justice, goodness, and morality. Because Acts 9 explicitly presents Saul’s transformation into Paul as one man’s rapid change from Judaism to Christianity, the beauty of the phôs apò toû ouranoû and his change of heart have nourished a passive-aggressive form of anti-Semitism for two millennia. As a Jew, Saul kills the innocent; as a Christian, Paul is peace-loving and tender toward the needy. From this passage comes the all-important notion of conversion—a notion central to many of the fundamentalist groups with whom Brock’s conservative backers would eventually ally—in addition to the timeless theme of a man suddenly realizing that he is on the wrong path and changing to be true to his life mission.

The conversion narrative in Acts 9 is almost impossible to appreciate merely by reading translations from the original New Testament Greek, because so many of the common visualizations of being “blinded by the light” come from famous works of art. To the extent that David Brock chose to invoke a certain feeling by calling his memoirs Blinded by the Right, he was probably drawing from the emotional residues left by famous paintings of Saul’s transformation. Rome’s melodramatic painter Michelangelo Caravaggio, born in 1571, immortalized Paul’s shock in two paintings. Though the original text says nothing about a horse, Caravaggio’s paintings dramatize Acts 9 by showing a haughty Saul knocked by the powerful phôs apò toû ouranoû from a saddled stallion.

In 1601, Caravaggio painted two versions of the phôs apò toû ouranoû, strangely opting to make Paul a young man in one painting, and a very old man in the other. One portrays the young Saul with dark hair, recently fallen from his horse, with his arms outstretched (see Fig. 1). The other shows an older Paul as a thin man, with a hoary graying beard, thrown to the ground and painfully covering his eyes (see Fig. 2). In the latter version, Saul is sitting slightly upright, with his torso turned slightly toward the front of the painting. While both images rely on somber, stark colors and gloomy shadows, the painting with an older Paul emphasizes the stunning whiteness of his bared torso and thighs. When painted as an old man, the converted Saul seems to have literally turned white below the light that has left him blind. Bellori, a seventeenth-century biographer, commented explicitly about Caravaggio’s preoccupation with lightness and darkness, and linked the preoccupation with the painter’s own appearance: “he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this coloring was naturally reflected in his paintings” (qtd. in Langdon 5). It is intriguing that Caravaggio’s obsession with dark coloring would lead him to make the converted Saul – another character who obsessed him – so bizarrely white. Equally intriguing is that David Brock, another man with a dark complexion and black hair, would name his life story after the same vignette.

Hillary Clinton

Brock’s title almost begs the reader to picture the author in a Caravaggian pose of angst and mortification. Brock envisions such a pose for himself as he forsakes the persecutor role he played when he eviscerated Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton. Yet the pun in Brock’s title complicates the usual associations one would make between a political change of heart and the religious narrative drawn from Acts 9. Given his confessions that he was always teased about having possible Jewish ancestry and his repeated belief that as a right-wing homosexual he behaved like a “Jew in Hitler’s army,” Brock’s identification with Paul’s conversion would have to be tempered by cynicism toward Western white fantasies about the kind-heartedness of Christians compared to Jews. Since he was not blinded by a “light” but rather by the “right,” Brock was blinded by the very thing that he eventually disavowed, unlike Paul who was blinded by the thing to which he turned after conversion. Brock clearly seeks to capitalize on the Christian tropes of conversion while also deconstructing and undermining them. The motifs of “converting,” being “saved,” and defining one’s self as under attack and on a counterattack licensed by Heaven, are residues of St. Paul that attract Brock’s polemical nature even as he strives to repudiate them following his own transformation away from the fundamentalist right to the secularized left. The Caravaggian Saul/Paul polarity, even before Brock contorts it by playing with the rhyme of light and Right, is a troublingly two-sided trope for the autobiographical voice of Blinded by the Right. While on the one hand Paul’s change of heart is symbolic for a man who realizes that he has become a tool of repression (and vows to change), on the other hand, Paul’s religious strictures – including his famous hostility toward homosexuality in his letters to the Romans and Corinthians – represent ideological mainstays of the virulent Christian Right from which Brock would eventually become estranged.

By replacing the light with the right, Brock’s title foregrounds the senselessness of political identities as symbolized by the senselessness of the original pun. Light rhymes with right, and also with white; which is probably not lost on Brock because he clearly links the Christianity of the Christian Right to its whiteness. The phôs apò toû ouranôu (the “light from heaven” that blinds Saul) has often been coded in the popular Christian imagination as a whitening force – exemplified perhaps by the stark paleness of Saul’s torso and legs in Caravaggio’s rendering. There are Biblical verses that link whiteness to moments of religious conversion or purification; three such verses, examined below, are crucial to the American fundamentalist focus on Judgment Day. Often whiteness is presented not as a foil to blackness, however, but rather as a promise of moral regeneration in the context of rampant carnal pollution.

While references to whiteness as a kind of moral purity are few, they occur in several passages that are extremely important to Christian notions of an apocalypse. The Book of Isaiah is important to because it contains the central prophecy predicting the coming of Jesus (posed as the “Suffering Servant” in Isaiah 52-53). The Book of Daniel is pivotal; because in the Old Testament Daniel makes the most indisputable reference to life after death and the separation of the dead into the blessed (who live in a heavenly paradise “like stars forever and ever” [12:3]) and the damned, who will live in eternal torment. The Book of Revelations, the last book of the whole Christian Bible, also occupies an important role in fundamentalist theology because it describes the end of times and envisions horrendous suffering for people who live sinfully. In the all-important King James version of the Bible; Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelations, all configure Christian conversion, akin to Paul’s conversion in Acts, as a moment of becoming whiter. The first chapter of Isaiah depicts God saying to the Israelites:

Though your sins be as scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow;

Though they be red like crimson,

They shall be as wool (1:18).

In the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, preserved in Greek and used for centuries en par with the Hebrew original, the verb form leukanô is repeated with a slightly different implication from the way it is usually translated in English. Leukanô literally means “I will make white” and therefore grants to God the ultimate prerogative to whiten the sinners whom he chooses to redeem. In the Greek, sins don’t become white, but rather, God makes the sinners white to cure them. The Isaiah lines are obviously not meant to elevate whites above other races, since the “white” symbols are snow and the fur of an animal. But there is still a racially charged tie between baptismal purification and an outward change of color. The link to human skin would not be as powerful had Isaiah not included the line, òs érion leukanô, meaning “I will whiten [you] as I would whiten wool.” Literally bodily whiteness proves God’s call to a reformed sinner, with the added reinforcement of the analogy between a sin’s changed color and bleached wool. The Latin Vulgate composed by St. Jerome slightly changes the implications of Isaiah’s reference to whitening. Jerome’s Latin text reads quasi nix dealbabuntur, or “almost snow, they will be whitened” (Isaiah 1:18). In the Latin version the sins themselves are turned white in the passive voice; this construction is closer to the King James version in English.

In the apocalyptic conclusion to the Book of Daniel, Daniel prophecizes a final judgment day in which, as the King James Bible phrases it, “Many shall be purified, and made white” (12:10). The Septuagint phrases Daniel’s statement without a color-based implication, using the Greek verbs peirasthein (“be tested to prove one’s self”) and hagiasthein (“be made hallow” or “be dedicated”)--without a clear reference to the Greek word for white (leukós). Nonetheless, especially because of the King James translation, the ubiquitous ties between being purified and being “made white” (as English translations of hagiasthein) would cause many Christian minds to liken whiteness to a signifier of religious cleansing and transformation.

The work leukós, more explicitly meaning “white” in Greek, also makes a famous appearance in the cataclysmic imagery of Revelations. In the King James version of Revelations, John of Patmos sees the Final Judgment beginning when “a door was opened in heaven,” later to reveal that “about the throne were four and twenty seats, and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment” (4:1-4). The Greek of this passage phrases the elders’ clothing as en himatíois leukoîs (“in white cloaks”), more explicitly inscribing white as the sign of holiness, because leukós, unlike Daniel’s word hágios (“pure”), is clearly a color. A little after the reference to the elders en himatíois leukoîs, John’s Revelations offer other famous apocalyptic portents; including ho hélios egéneto mélas, or “the sun became black.” The word mélas would have to be translated into English as “black,” unfortunately the same word used to describe the complexion of African Americans. The conversion of normal colors to black in the natural world presages the end of time, the rising of the dead, and the final separation of the saved from the damned. The link between religious conversion and whitening is further specified when one of the elders explains to John the whiteness he sees:

And he said to me, “these are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14).

The link between whiteness and holiness is indisputable here because in the original text the Greek word is leukaíno, the verb literally meaning to make something leukós or white, and a synonym of leukáno, the term used in Isaiah.

Bill Clinton

One could hardly cite Isaiah, Daniel or Revelations as a license for racial discrimination; leukós in John’s apocalypse refers to clothing, not skin. The sun turns black, but nothing on humans, either skin or clothing, seems to blacken in these apocalyptic images. Nonetheless the impact of color schemes in John’s eschatology is extremely powerful. And the raging religious right that would eventually seek to destroy Bill Clinton seems, in Brock’s representation of the time, heir to the fire-and-brimstone absolutism of Revelations. The late twentieth-century fundamentalists’ coloring of Christian judgment would retain the racist configuration that equated whitening with religious conversion and blackness with a warning. But whiteness in this fundamentalist Christian sense is not a birthright: it is something that a believer earns through martyrdom, repentance, and violent struggle against iniquity. It is also ostensibly something that someone may fail to earn, if he is distracted by earthly temptation.

For Brock, it is already a given that Christianity becomes most intolerant and warlike when it becomes whitest. In a chapter of Blinded that he titles “Holy War,” he pinpoints 1992 as a gloomy watershed both in religious and racial terms. He says that at that point, “through organization and sheer force of numbers the religious right had won control of the conservative movement, and the movement, in turn, now was dictating Republican Party policy […] Republicans officially embraced right-wing fundamentalism as their own.” This moment of massive political religious conversion is dubbed at the time, however, not a Christian year, but the “year of the angry white male” (132). In the trajectory described by Brock, despite the riots in Los Angeles, the fundamentalist declaration of a “Holy War” does not result in a Christian Right crusade against minorities. While Brock says that the camp of the angry white male was looking for “post-Communist bogeymen” (132), the biggest bogeymen of the 1990s would not be a racial other, but rather, Bill and Hillary Clinton. And Bill Clinton would be damned for acts defined as carnal sin by fundamentalists. I would argue that, in keeping with the scriptures that link racial signs to divine judgment, it is more accurate to say that the Christian right forbade Clinton from claiming his own whiteness. It is inaccurate, given those scriptures and their implications, to say that the Christian right turned Clinton into a black man. The difference, while seemingly slight, has powerful ramifications for the way we discuss race in the 1990s.

Brock’s historical narrative doesn’t pit “angry white men” against other races. If one keeps in mind the Biblical source for righteous indignation as a coded whiteness, it makes sense that the “holy war” that angered white men, and whitened angry men, would not be entirely focused on hurting people of color. Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelations do not call for whites to crush other races, but rather, to strive unrelentingly against corporeal sins in a quest to make themselves as white as possible. The Holy War to which Brock refers was necessarily an internal struggle among whites; white Christians jostled for the privileged position as the whitest of all, by exposing the “scarlet” taints in other white people’s flesh.

In Brock’s diagnosis the angry white male turned to religious warfare because other forms of warfare were no longer operable. He traces the birth of the angry white male to the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War. Brock writes that after the Berlin Wall fell, “we had won the great struggle of the century with our militant anti-Communism, and yet there was an uneasy feeling that our vanquished enemy would be sorely missed.” When some conservatives asked, in 1989, whether the West still existed with no East to be against, “to ask the question was to answer it.” By the time the nineties were upon America, “The Cold War really was over,” Brock says (54). By focusing on the Cold War, he reminds us that white militancy was never about whites fighting nonwhites; rather, much of the great racial warfare of the twentieth century had pitted white man against white man. The Cold War, the apocalyptic showdown that would plant the Christian seeds for the angry white male, was a conflict between two white superpowers whose homelands included the frosty terrains of Minnesota and Siberia. In Brock’s reprise of the 1980s and 1990s, angry white men wanted their next foe to be as formidable as the Communists had been, which meant that their next villain had to be white. The crusade for whiteness, beginning with the christening of the angry white male in 1992, would culminate in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. They would choose, unsurprisingly, to target him based on the scarlet taint of his sexuality, a taint that corrupted his Christian whiteness.

The link between theological and genetic whiteness

If we allow ourselves to depend on Saussure’s definition of linguistic difference and say that terms depend on what they are not—meaning that, as summarized in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory, cat means “cat” because it does not mean “bat” (127)—then the term angry white male is a fascinating compound. It is a construct embedded with an antagonism against something different from itself; the tone of “angry white male” invokes immediate images of someone violently railing against an enemy. But what is the true enemy? Race does not seem to be the major axis on which angry white men of the 1990s attacked what they hated. They hated not what differed from their whiteness, but rather, the whiteness that differed from their male anger. In the eyes of the anti-Clinton conservatives, Hillary Clinton was angry enough, but not male. On the other hand, Bill Clinton was male, but the problem in his case, perhaps, was the other word in the catch phrase – anger. Bill Clinton was too nice, too liberal; not angry enough. And the jeremiad-style Christianity that angry white men embraced in 1992 equated liberalism (an unwillingness to name and crush iniquity) with the types of carnal sin that Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelations all posited as the foils to purified whiteness.

Brock’s memoir preserves a testament to the contested whiteness that we tend to misunderstand or overlook as we try, in the fashion of Sollors and Fox, to place whiteness always in dialogue with other races. The discourse of whites with whites is replete with rage and violent in its passions, irrespective of people of color. Christian whiteness of the 1990s is a site of internal struggle and constantly frustrated ambition, full of uphill battles and tests of one’s will, much like the apocalyptic texts that posit spiritual victory as the moment of reaching maximum whiteness.

The Washington conservatives who embraced the invective style of the Christian Right may have turned to concepts of moral purity to compensate themselves for a propertied whiteness that their ambiguous class backgrounds could not entitle them to. In describing the “counterintelligentsia” that the Christian Right bankrolled, Brock notes an anxiety about his and his cohorts’ genetic pedigrees:

We were drawn to Newt [Gingrich] in part because he wasn’t a country club Republican like the Californian multimillionaire industrialists who comprised Reagan’s kitchen cabinet. We had nothing but disdain for the airhead Republican set, the Biffs and the Buffys, who, with the exception of strategically placed Federalist Society lawyers, for the most part staffed the [first] Bush White House. By contrast, the young conservative activists I knew—the D’Souzas, the Kristols, the Ingrahams—were not, for the most part, well-off WASPs. We had not inherited our Republicanism, or much else—we were mostly the offspring of middle class, ethnic ex-Democrats (64).

Whiteness is the thing that Dinesh D’Souza, Bill Kristol, and Laura Ingraham, three notorious right-wing pundits of the 1990s, are striving to obtain. Once it is obtained, they must strive to hang on to it. They are white but still need more whitening in the apostolic sense. They are whites driven, like Saul/Paul, to proselytize even more fiercely for the ultra-white Christian right, because they know that perfect whiteness is not their birthright. The supreme whiteness that sits at the apex that D’Souza, Kristol, and Ingraham are scaling is clearly—as Brock himself verbalizes—an inheritance, a blood claim, an unforgivingly racial entitlement that middle-class ethnics and ex-Democrats cannot authenticate based on their pedigrees. They are white, but not quite white enough on their own, which makes them fight all the more fiercely, aggressively, for the theological purity hovering just beyond their reach.

This is the whiteness that race theory has consistently failed to articulate—self-contained but at the same time, unstable for people who fall under it. The blood-based method of defining race is still operative, but makes the definition constantly elusive. As Brock’s insider accounts of the conservative movement reflect, white Americans are trapped in a struggle to authenticate their claims to their own skin color; knowing that the dilutions of class, ethnicity, and sexual impurity constantly threaten to throw a pale of doubt over their authenticity. The President himself, after all, saw his whiteness doubted and taken away because of sexual indiscretion. David Brock’s life story, which he exposes in small, clumsy bursts throughout the book, reveals the dynamic of whiteness as the struggle to be authentic; it looks and feels much like a quest for conversion.

The inconclusiveness of conversions from (or to) whiteness

Brock’s memoirs insist that he had a conversion of his own – a conversion away from the suffocating whiteness of fundamentalism to some other identity. But throughout Blinded by the Right, the incompletion of his conversion is glaringly obvious; he retains a vicious streak of persecution, and still manifests a will to de-whiten his enemies, even if his enemies are now the white conservatives whose ideology he has supposedly repudiated. I, for one, can forgive him for not accomplishing a miraculous 180-degree turn overnight. Imagine how difficult Brock’s situation is in the late 1990s, after he breaks with the right-wing cohort. In recanting on his former self as the “stoner” à la Saul, he has to account for his racism first. When he was still the right-wing attack hound, he drew from racist assumptions to label Anita Hill ‘nutty and slutty.’ He coined the blatantly anti-black term ‘the Shadow Senate’ in The Real Anita Hill. The Shadow Senate is, in Brock’s vision, a dark and illegitimate, pigmy version of the real and authentic, white Senate (intentionally the Senate as opposed to the House, which had many prominent Black representatives in it).

In The Real Anita Hill, Brock writes about a shift of “the locus of power in judicial confirmations from the Senate, with its constitutional advice and consent powers, to a loose coalition of special-interest lobby groups, zealous Senate staffers, and a scandal-hungry press corps: a coalition worthy of the name the Shadow Senate” (36). The imagery of the ‘shadows’ fits his ultimate purpose, which is to equate the Washington community of civil rights and feminist organizations with witchcraft, backdoor dealings, and tribal warfare. Brock dismisses Washington blacks as lighter-skinned and middle-class African Americans; he contrasts the Shadow Senate not only against its whiter and legitimate version which meets in the light of day, but also against what he calls the real “black grassroots—nonpoliticized blacks who were ignored by the political establishment…They were the true saviors of the Thomas confirmation, like the very dark-skinned people, most of them women, who lined the Senate halls cheering and crying and praying” (80). Brock’s antiblack racism is vile but sophisticated; the darkest blacks belong rightfully in the hallways and in the realm of emotion; while the false, shadowy, fradulent ones (not dark enough to be real blacks nor light enough to be real Senators) belong nowhere at all.

Brock’s 2002 memoirs compensate for his earlier racism by switching to metaphors that minstrelize or caricature whiteness. In recounting what he knows about the underground conspiracy to trap Clinton, he comes up with a new nickname for people who plot and scheme in the shadows to undermine democracy. In Blinded by the Right, he calls the wicked parties “elves,” specifically identifying George Conway, Jerome Marcus, and Ann Coulter as smarmy lawyers who peddle illegal tape recordings and secret documents around in their subterranean crusade against Bill Clinton (347). If a “Shadow Senate” evoked images of Jung’s colored savage—the jungle-dwelling and uncivilized foil to white propriety—the term “elves” evokes degraded images of whiteness and pictures of pale, deformed sorcerers with hunched backs curled over a steaming cauldron. Brock’s minstrelization of whiteness goes beyond the elves. He also draws on stereotypes of the dumb blonde to belittle the right the way he once blackfaced African Americans on the left. In Blinded by the Right he refers to “a legion of brassy, blond, not terribly well-informed pundits whom television producers, lacking a stable of conservative voices in a moment when conservatism had suddenly become chic, booked to interpret the Gingrich Revolution for their audiences,” adding that “the blond pundits were pleased but they did the revolution no good” (254).

Brock never fully apologizes for his racism, and I, for one, don’t think it would be valuable for us if he did. He is most useful not for a possible source of reparation for blacks; but rather, as a lens through which to unpack the conflicts within a self-contained whiteness which resulted in such racist claims as a “shadow senate.” I respect Brock’s self-flagellating honesty about the familial neuroses that led to his extremism in the 1980s and 1990s. Blinded by the Right begins with his confession that his first hero was John F. Kennedy and the first time he voted, he voted for Jimmy Carter. He was born into the humanistic, pluralistic, and democratic appetites of American liberals. His adoptive father was an Irish Catholic and his adoptive mother, Italian American—both former Democrats who went to the GOP with the ascendancy of Richard Nixon. The magnetism of the far right was partly rooted in the ideological climate of the Cold War and Brock’s sense, while he was at Berkeley, that leftist students were excessive.

Brock is gay—though this does not affect the equation as much as one would expect. His outing in the early 1990s made him even more valuable to the right wing as a symbol of their open-mindedness, no matter how limited. He writes that by 1995 he had become Gingrich’s “openly gay dancing bear” (252). The part of Brock’s life that truly seemed to trouble him was the fact that he was adopted; a fact that he says his parents were extremely ashamed about, and a fact complicated because, as he writes, “Thirty years ago, adopting children carried a stigma; adoptive parents often were seen as inadequate, and adoptive children were considered ‘second best’” (12). Regina, Brock’s also-adopted sister, had “hazel eyes” and “fine features” and “dirty-blond hair” and resembled their Irish father. Brock himself has olive skin, a “strong jaw and jet black hair and eyes;” as a child he was told to say he looked like his mother (12). Brock says it was his mother who was prone to panic about people finding out.

“Living with secrecy and lies,” Brock says, “I acquired an unusual ability to block out and avoid the truth and to live my life with no inner questioning. So ingrained was the lesson that I never told even my closest friends about my adoption until my father passed away when I was thirty-seven years old” (13). Coming out as adopted was far more sensitive for Brock than disclosing his homosexuality. Early in the book he foreshadows the fact that he could only reveal his true origins after the death of his father, which is exactly the event that ends the book and marks his crucial transition away from the extreme right. He writes on the third to the last page, “I was asleep for maybe a couple of hours, when I became conscious of a bright, white beaming ray of light that seemed to have come through the drapes and hover at the foot of my bed. I calmly raised my head slightly off the pillows and felt a warm, reassuring, peaceful presence. I knew Dad had died” (364). This event, obviously presented as Brock’s moment on the road to Damascus, ties together the cryptic meaning of the book’s title with the revelation of what his journey through extremism was really all about: his anxiety over patrilineage and blood purity, his fear of biological inauthenticity—in short, the elusiveness of his whiteness. It is significant that his childhood memories include that “at a very young age [comments were] made by my mother’s sometimes bellicose Italian American relatives to the effect that I was Jewish. I took the comments literally and believed well into my adulthood that I was likely of Jewish ancestry […] Not that I minded […], for this allowed me to indulge the fantasy I had of being an aberration in my own family. I’m not sure which came first, the sense of not belonging or not wanting to belong” (13).

The issue of Brock’s blood descent—and its uncertain, unstable status—begins and ends his memoirs. Going back to the beginning of the book, Brock tries to reconstruct his orphic descent and does so by explaining, almost apologetically, that his agony over his biological impurity made ideological purity all the more attractive to him. “I fell easily under the spell of my surrogate father figures,” he writes, “as though anyone who gave me attention could dictate my beliefs. From them I found the moral and ideological clarity, the critical affirmation and acceptance, and the firm sense of who I was that my fragile psyche yearned for” (9). One of these surrogate father figures was the Jewish neoconservative Aaron Wildavsky, who employed him at Berkeley when Brock made his fateful switch of affiliation to the extreme right. Jewishness both attracts and repels Brock, both offering him an explanation of his swarthy features—perhaps assuring him that they come not from Latino or Arab or black ancestry but from a Jew—while also reminding him that his whiteness, like the whiteness of Jews, is dangerously frail. This is partly why, throughout the middle part of the book, he refers to his identity as a gay conservative by calling himself a “Jew in Hitler’s army.”

There is much more to say about whiteness. The 1990s must be the subject of greater scrutiny from literary critics, because that decade holds so many important clues about what whiteness really is. Many of the old tropes and themes used to deconstruct race do not work very well to unpack white identity in the highly charged and scandal-ridden fin-de-siècle. Yet it is the 1990s, I would assert, that leave the twenty-first-century scholar the most powerful racial dilemmas to unravel. After 2001, it has become common to hear that religion will be the great site of global contention in the twenty-first century. As I hope this essay has illustrated, the rising centrality of religion does not remove race as a factor; whiteness lies at the core of theological warfare. But a new discourse is needed to understand the many layers of such whiteness. Texts like Blinded by the Right are not a race scholar’s instinctual focus, but I think such texts will prove invaluable. Brock, for instance, seems like an untapped mine of insights and clues about the mysterious racial landscape that America inhabits in the “post-double-consciousness” era. Future analyses by race scholars will be able to engage American society as organic intellectuals, to a far greater extent, if they strive to apply critical theory to popular texts such as Brock’s autobiography, and if they think of whiteness as a complex, multilayered concept that exists—and struggles—in its own right, rather than merely as a foil to people of color.

WORKS CITED

Brock, David.

----Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

----The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. New York: Free Press, 1993.

----The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. New York: Free Press, 1996.

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi di.

----The Conversion of St. Paul [Fig. 1]. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Published in: Caravaggio. Ed. Alfred Moir. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982. 109.

----The Conversion of St. Paul [Fig. 2]. Collection Prince Guido Odescalchi Balbi, Rome. Published in: Caravaggio. Ed. Alfred Moir. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982. 105.

DuBois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folks. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1983.

Fox, Robert Elliott. “On Becoming Post-White.” Ed. Ishmael Reed. MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997.

Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983.

Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998.

New Testament: Greek Text Underlying the English Authorized Version of 1611. London, Trinitarian Bible Society, 1976.

Septuaginta [Septuagint]. Ed. Alfred Rahls. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1965.

Sollors, Werner. Neither black nor white yet both: thematic explorations of interracial literature. New York: Oxford U Press, 1997.

Vulgata [Vulgate]. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983.

The Music Man!

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:45:00 +0000

I have been obsessing for several weeks about how to do the right homage to this, my favorite musical of all time: Meredith Wilson's simple-but-not-so-simple masterpiece, The Music Man. A cliché which hides layers of profound meaning beneath a deceptively innocent surface, The Music Man is familiar to almost anyone who graduated from high school in the United States in the last third of the 20th century, as a result of its popularity for junior high school drama clubs.

Once you get to college, of course, much like conservative thought, The Music Man must be shunned with progressive piety as a syrupy and naive tonic for Republican dolts living in towns like the film's mythical River City, Iowa. In college, people announce to the world that they're gay, experiment with drugs, streak through the campus commons, and spend a night or two in jail for urinating on a statue. Of course during those years between 18 and 28 (by now you know 22 is not the outer limit for the archetypal bachelor's candidate), one must brow-beat the audience as well as oneself with the seriousness of Waiting for Godot, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Equus, and Huis Clos. To the extent that anything dramatic is permissible without heaps of angst, agnosticism, and amoral irony, one may be allowed to perform in Midsummer Night's Dream, Antigone, or even something by George Bernard Shaw.

The Music Man, however, is relegated to America's ideological basement as soon as the American is no longer calling his teachers by "Mr." and "Mrs."

Yet the film version of The Music Man does not need college students to matter; it is, I submit to you, one of the most eloquent expressions of the United States' colorful right-wing streak. There is no enfant terrible more terrible than the infantile Music Man, who is as much an archetype and allegory as a real protagonist in a specific plot. See this link for references to the film, if you have decided by this point that Coco Rico's thoughts on the film are simply too deluded to be worth your time. I love the movie so much, I can go on and on forever about it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056262/

In the 151 minutes of this film, the colorful conservative is allegorized with exquisite grace and joy. Armed with contrivance, shielded by practicality, and beautified by song, the film fights a valiant war in defense of hypocrisy of all kinds. What conformist conservatives and committed leftists call hypocrisy, in fact, is what the colorful conservative knows as the most dignified state of mankind: To find happiness and acceptance in the eyes of an extremely judgmental society, despite having done much to earn the condemnation of same. If such a notion allures you and you love this film, you are one of us cocos. Email me and I'll give you a column at The Wild West Coconut Show. If the very idea of The Music Man leads you to quote Marx and denounce the contradictions of America's small towns, then your columns belong elsewhere -- but keep reading, and let the film work its magic on you as it worked its magic on me.

The Music Man exploded on Broadway in the 1950s and did not reach the silver screen until 1962. Its transformation into a movie came when John F. Kennedy was president of the United States, the studio system had already been laid waste by the Television Age, and the "musical" with all it represented was the Sick Man of the Arts, gazing from his deathbed at the vitality of the newcomer destined to replace him: The Popular Song.

The full story of this passing of artistic legitimacy from the Musical to the Pop Song will be the subject of another monograph, The Meaning of Life in 50 Songs from 1964 to 2008, which is written but still at its larval stage currently. The latter book is still demanding my literary attention; it must be edited, tweaked, crafted, and placed with a loving press. Unfortunately I keep having to put the monograph on hold while The Colorful Conservative, my paean to the theatricality of politics, demands I see it through to its birth on paper as a publication of Rowman & Littlefield (some time, I hope, around January 1, 2011.)

Robert Preston in The Music Man

Yet I permit myself some time to talk about The Music Man here because in River City, Iowa, the themes of The Colorful Conservative and The Meaning of Life in 50 Songs meet in a stroke of lightning. For the Music Man as Robert Preston plays him is a colorful scoundrel who ought to be turned out by anyone who claims to defend tradition. Arriving under a false name, "Professor Harold Hill," he presents himself to the audience as the consummate trickster. We know, in fact, that he is chased out of many towns for lying to the residents about his credentials and defrauding them of money. We don't know who he is at the end of the film, any more than we knew who he was at the start of it, when Robert Preston jumped onto a train just in time to avoid being tarred and feathered, and waved at his haters with serenity.

Duping the town's pie-faced evangelicals, Prof. Hill/Mr. Preston convinces all around him that a pool table poses a dire theological threat to their souls, and they should pay him to form a young men's marching band as a way to keep the idle busy (and away from sin). Caught in lie after lie, Hill/Preston is finally exposed and nearly murdered by a band of angry parents, whose sons make rotten noise with their musical instruments and have no better chance of avoiding sin than they did before the music man came. Yet all is well in the end, because the townspeople realize that Hill/Preston gave them a sense of pride in themselves, small-town dimwit simpletons though they may be (pace Homer Gibbon).

The fact that he has no Ivy League degree, lies pathologically, and makes no music, makes him no less worthy as a music man; the town decides to enjoy the contentment with itself, which they view as the shuckster's gift--and they let the music man live. They let music live. Letting music and the man live means allowing themselves to live. By breaking some of society's conventions, you see, you find yourself embodying all that is purest and most traditional. The Music Man and the Colorful Conservative, both creatures of whim and trickery and hidden love for humanity, are almost the same. Professor Harold Hill, who is no professor at all, is the only name by which we can truly know the Music Man, who is also eligible to be called a Civilized Barbarian.

But that's not the real story of The Music Man. You know what the real story is: It's the romance between Shirley Jones' character, Marian the Librarian, and the Music Man. Books and song, reading and performance, silent thought and staged theatrics -- how can such concepts ever mingle? The tension between Preston and Jones is immediate, as Prof. Hill follows Marian down the street, desperately trying to seduce her. He tells her he is only in River City for a few days, to which Marian the Librarian answers, "good" and slams the door.

Jones and Preston

Yet we all know Marian the Librarian: She's the Statue of Liberty, the idealized female virtues of purity and decency amalgamated into one gorgeous golden-haired damsel. What is more perfect than the body of Shirley Jones? Not only is this actress one of the few Hollywood performers to defend conservatism openly, all the way from Nixon to Bush, but she is physically exquisite, gifted with song, and a model of personal rectitude. She was properly pregnant when The Music Man was being filmed, with the result that viewers can see a moment when she flinches in Preston's arms on the footbridge where "Till There Was You" was sung in a duet. The baby was kicking inside her. Motherly yet pretty, kind yet appropriately stern, Marian/Shirley is the mother/sister/daughter/wife every man needs.

Yet the film reveals one of Marian's secrets, which she would rather keep in the closet: She is not all-American at all. Her mother is a red-headed Irish spitfire, speaking in brogue and nagging the blonde prig to relax and get laid. Speaking to the faux Puritanism of her blonde daughter with the saucy wit of a Catholic diva, Marian's mother holds nothing back. Life is not for idealistic standards. Fun has to happen in real time. Marian's mother knows that behind every ideal façade of ethnic and moral perfection lies some darker, more scandalous truth--how could she not know as much? Marian is the façade behind which her darker, more scandalous mother is hiding.

Jones opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry

So what is Professor Hill's darker, more scandalous truth? We know from Buddy Hackett's little cameos that there's more to the story than we might imagine, and our imagination of the truth might be easier than the truth itself. A man, especially a music man, can rack up many evils drifting from city to city with no good girl to hold him to a moral standard: alcoholism, gambling debts, syphilis, Communist sympathies, a corpse dropped in the Cuyahoga River somewhere? What is Professor Hill's mysterious past? And why does Meredith Wilson refuse to let us know?

What matters is that Marian realizes the façade is good enough. Just as Professor Hill's think method is a metaphor for the artifice of music, his think method is just as much a metaphor for morality. One can think morality into being, regardless of what one has done. On the footbridge, with her baby kicking inside her, Shirley Jones kisses Robert Preston and thanks him for letting her hear the music in the hills around her. The truth doesn't matter. If only he can forgive himself, he can have her, and all will end well.

In my selfish imagination, I assume that Professor Harold Hill is a flaming homosexual who's hired boy prostitutes, frequented bathhouses, and even gotten crabs a few times. He's getting slower in his midlife years. Not too much of a stretch -- others have read Robert Preston as a gaydar siren, given that he plays a flamboyant drag queen in Victor Victoria, just a few years before his death in the mid-1980s. He steals the show from the desperately heterosexual Julie Andrews. Robert Preston's curiosity-provoking sexual demeanor is inseparable from the fictional character Professor Hill. Preston played Hill on Broadway and Meredith Wilson endangered the film's viability by insisting that Preston, rather than Frank Sinatra, play him on screen.

Why Preston and not Sinatra? Isn't it obvious? Professor Hill is a gay man who's had a change of heart and realizes that women, along with the traditional joys of marriage, are worth letting go of the troublesome urges that once held sway.

An older, and still sexy, Shirley Jones

Gay Inc. held Brokeback Mountain hostage and turned it into a polemic against gay men staying in the closet, so I declare my right to turn The Music Man into an encouragement to gay men: marry women and settle down and forget about protests, the Democrats, and San Francisco. Traditional life belongs to those who want it. Who cares if you've performed fellatio on a stranger at a road stop somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania? Marian the Librarian knows and doesn't care. You make her eyes twinkle and your music is good enough for her to forgive you. Let the amateurish songs and small-town simplicity wash away whatever came before. Be a conservative. Somewhere a lonely librarian hiding behind spectacles is longing for you to come and save her.

Gay conservatives ought never go to the grave without having blown a few kisses to photographs of Shirley Jones. She was on our side when nobody else was, boys. Not only did she play Marian opposite a viable allegory for the gay conservative, but also, she demonstrated for us how one can be conservative in a rabidly left-wing milieu and stay above cynicism. Shirley Jones didn't fight aging, for one thing. Watch her photos evolve and you'll notice she let the years show on her. She knew she was lithe and young once, but she made peace with elderly beauty and carried it off with class. Gay men, who are often tempted to fight old age and its bodily changes with the same horror often expected of aging females, can learn much from her. And if all else fails, there is always the think method.

SHIRLEY JONES IN 2006 -- I LOVE YOU, SHIRLEY!!!!!!!!

Busy with teaching!

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:36:00 +0000

I have been blitzed this semester since I am teaching four new courses. Count them, four!

I will be back in the news scan business before you know it. Bear with me, and wish me luck!

Shameless plug for my book!

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:03:00 +0000

Look, let's be honest:

There are almost no books by conservative literary critics today. But I have written one!

I have an awesome book about the roots of contemporary conservative thought in the writings of early American authors. The book combines political science, classics, and English. It's an awesome read.

Go like it! The like box is to the right:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Colorful-Conservative/306938052689907

My 2 cents on the higher education debate

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:44:00 +0000

I've been blitzed with the start of semester, so I haven't been able to blog much. Nonetheless, I saw in the Chronicle of Higher Education some responses to Obama's SOTU speech and the administration's references to forcing colleges to lower tuition. I had a longer blog post about this on December 25, 2011, which I reposted on January 14:

http://criticalnewsscan.blogspot.com/2011/12/top-ten-liberal-academic-let-them-eat.html

Here is my response to Claire Potter, who blogs at Tenured Radical:

I usually agree with you, Claire, especially when you go after the Big O in the Mostly-White House.

But on this one, I have to call shenanigans. I agree with you that sports get too much attention and public universities need to be a priority for states and the federal government, provided that they do not become Berkeley or Michigan, charging private-university prices

But ----

Tuitions are too high and that's the problem. Colleges, especially private ones that hide behind their status as "non-profits" (which is absurd), cannot cry foul when they are told to rein in the bill they pass on to students, especially if people expect taxpayers to fork over cash on account.

We can debate many reasons for the unreasonably high tuitions, but the government cannot go in and micromanage each college, so the simplest way to mandate change from the top is to do, essentially, what Obama has started to do:

--Say NO! to colleges that charge exorbitant tuition. That means Harvard, that means the New School, and that means for-profit colleges that milk students for online degrees. If anything, Obama does not go far enough. He should say (1) such schools cannot use federal grants OR federally backed student loans of any kind to pass students through the bursar's shibboleths, (2) such schools are ineligible for ALL federal or state research grants, and (3) such schools will lose their non-profit status and their endowments will be taxed.

--Say NO! to colleges that have a certain percentage of their employees on temporary contracts. We will need adjuncts here and there but this is a serious crisis now, with 70% of courses taught by people who don't have the time or institutional support to offer good instruction to students. Why is this happening? I'll tell you why: Colleges have pillowy foo-foo tracks for "tenure-track" scholars who get to teach 15 students a semester, go on sabbatical, and act like divas to their colleagues and students. Those people soak up huge amounts of money without adding to instruction for the country's masses, especially at the schools that not coincidentally have skyrocketing tuition. The taxpayers did NOT get their money's worth, and that has got to change. I wrote a book on literary conservatism while teaching 4 classes and 140 students per semester, drawn from the middle and working classes; the taxpayers DID get their money's worth from me. This system has to change, and we have to stop pointing fingers elsewhere. Time to face the music ourselves.

--Say NO! to elitism. Schools that do not offer educational services to underprepared or academically challenged students, due to restrictive admissions policies, should NOT be getting any federal money or state money of ANY kind. Why should the taxpayers' money go to Harvard in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, research grants, and federally backed loans, so that Harvard can say, "thank you," and then refuse to do anything about educating the taxpayers' children. No, it is not enough to say that you're going to endow a Platonic elite at Harvard with benevolence to help America's children one day. If a college's business is to form an elite and exclude people who might slow down the indoctrination process for the elite 1%, then that college has to do so ON ITS OWN F*CKING FUNDS!

--Say NO! to colleges that engage in problematic practices of admissions, tenure, or promotion. Insider trading, no-bid contracts, and monopolies have been outlawed for basic reasons of practicality and fairness -- those reasons fly in the face of the way colleges pick their students, tenure faculty, and promote people. If you are running an institution at odds with the public mission of the United States, do it with your own money.

Is this heavy-handed? Yes! But you say you're sick of non-educators lecturing us who who teach -- Guess what! I am sick of educators lecturing each other about how big, bad, people in the world outside are abusing us. We are a corrupt field full of rapacious inefficient elitists, all with a heavy price tag and a serious attitude problem.I welcome the severe scrutiny and the pressure to change. Change was Obama's slogan -- let's change. Or did you expect everybody but us to change?

Honest quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:52:00 +0000

"I just need someone who likes me to hang out with me and tell me I'm not worthless, even if it's disingenuous bullshit."

Apres South Carolina, le deluge

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:54:00 +0000

Well, Newt sure laid to rest the easy clichés about Romney having the nomination in the bag already. With only three state primaries behind us and Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich each having won one first-place showing, it seems that nothing is to be taken for granted.

I confess that I'm biased but I do not want Romney as the Republican nominee. Everything I find objectionable about Obama, I get in surplus with Romney: elitism, Ivy League cronies, snooty condescension, phoniness, and bad ideas on health care. Romney has his hidden tax returns, while Obama has his bogus stories about his mother being poor to distract people from his childhood in the hallowed halls of Punahou, one of the most expensive high schools in America. Obama's links to the African American experience are about as significant as Romney's ties to Latinos through his father and grandfather who lived in Mexico. Obama and Romney are both Trojan Horses selling false promises, as far as I am concerned.

Ron Paul is my favorite but his libertarianism is still too far from the mainstream to be plausible.

So this leaves me with Gingrich and Santorum. Frankly I am tired of conservatives crunching numbers and trying to strategize how to beat Obama. We need to look at Gingrich and Santorum and decide which guy is the one we want, based on his values and performance, the strategy be damned. Remember that the Democrats nominated Obama by casting aside the naysayers who believed he wasn't electable and Hillary had to be the candidate -- and Obama went on to become president. The same scenario could play out for either Gingrich or Santorum.

Between the two, I would take Santorum. He is an honest, decent man. His compromises with liberals seem to represent maturity and thoughtful reasoning, evidence of a flexible man who can change his mind. I give no credence to the antigay narrative, because Santorum seems to have been backed into corners for years by liberal operatives throwing irrelevant questions about gay rights at him when he'd rather be taking about national security or jobs.

If it is Obama versus Gingrich, I can vote for Gingrich. But I would rather cast a vote for Santorum against Obama.

If it is Obama versus Romney, I am writing in a vote for Ron Paul.

Government can issue gun licenses AND permission to smoke pot.... to the same person!

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:33:00 +0000

This just in from Guns & Ammo:

http://www.gunsandammo.com/2012/01/20/medical-marijuana-patients-retain-2nd-amendment-rights/

via Guns & Ammo

The US Supreme Court just refused to hear "an Oregon sheriff's challenge that US law trumps state law, meaning concealed gun owners who are prescribed medical marijuana will be allowed to keep their licenses."

The woman at the center of all this is Cynthia Willis, an Oregon woman who smoke marijuana for medical reasons but was denied a renewal of her gun registration by the Jackson County Sheriff, Mike Winters.

I am interested to see how this issue fits in with our typically oversimplified categories of left and right. Hmmm.

Mayhem in Nigeria; will northern Africa replace the Middle East as the next military quagmire?

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:28:00 +0000

This in from the Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0121/Multiple-attacks-in-Nigeria-kill-at-least-143

via Christian Science Monitor

Oil, Islam, anti-Western rage, postcolonial cultural tensions, splintered and bickering nations, revolutions, and entanglements with Britain, France, and the United States.

Sound like the Middle East?

Try northern Africa! From the horn to the bulge, from the Maghreb to below the Sahara, there is violence, civil war, death, and burning cities.

Small American special operations forces have already been sent in to some of these African conflicts, but one must worry that as the Middle East slowly fades as a flashpoint, nations like Nigeria, where at least 143 people were killed in civil uprisings in the last 24 hours, will rise to become the next possible quagmire for Western military operations.

Remember that Nigeria is the Saudi Arabia of the Bulge of Africa -- it has massive reserves of oil. Here is an excerpt:

The U.S. Embassy said it had canceled all staff travel to northern Nigeria after Friday's attacks.

President Goodluck Jonathan also condemned an attack he said saw innocent people "brutally and recklessly cut down by agents of terror."

"As a responsible government, we will not fold our hands and watch enemies of democracy, for that is what these mindless killers are, perpetrate unprecedented evil in our land," Jonathan said in a statement. "I want to reassure Nigerians ... that all those involved in that dastardly act would be made to face the full wrath of the law."

But Jonathan's government has repeatedly been unable to stop attacks by Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the Hausa language of Nigeria's north. The group has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law and avenge the deaths of Muslims in communal violence across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.
Authorities blamed Boko Haram for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an AP count, including an August suicide bombing on the U.N. headquarters in the country's capital Abuja. So far this year, the group has been blamed for at least 219 killings, according to an AP count.

Feels kind of like a "while you were sleeping at the wheel in Afghanistan" moment. Let's hope not.

Colombia's civil war is partly financial!

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:19:00 +0000

I found this report in the Brazilian news source Globo:

http://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/presidente-colombiano-diz-que-ex-chefe-das-farc-tinha-57-propriedades-no-pais-3730714

While we often hear about the civil war that has afflicted Colombia for several decades, we do not usually hear about the financial ways that the two sides war against each other. A recent report by Colombia's president indicates that one way the guerilla group FARC, classified as terrorists by the US, exerts its power, is by seizing proprietary control of assets:

BOGOTA (AP) – The president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, revealed on Saturday that the founder and ex-leader of the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) had more than 50 properties in two regions, in the center and northeast of the country.

During a public act in the city of Valledupar, the department of Cesar and 655 kilometers north of Bogotá, Santos said that Pedro Antonio Marín, known as Manuel Marulanda or “Tirofijo”, which in 1964 founded the guerilla group, had 57 properties in Cundinamarca e Norte de Santander, which were appraised at $US 52 million and had been taken illegally by FARC from farmers.

The information about Tirofijo’s properties was discovered on computers seized from the rebel leaders Victor Julio Suarez, the “Jojoy Monkey,” and Alfonso Cano, both dead by state forces en September 2010 and November 2011, respectively, by orders of the president.

“Tirofijo” died of natural causes in March 2008, according to what was reported by the guerilla group. Fifteen days ago, the government reported that FARC has estates taken from farmers between 5000 and 46,000 hectares in the southernmost part of Colombia and announced actions to regain control of those provinces. The director of the state Unit of Territorial Consolidation and Reconstruction, Alvaro Balcazar, said that the theft of the country’s lands by FARC “could be even more” than that reclaimed by paramilitary groups. He contended that the value of these properties could easily surpass $35 million in US dollars, including pastos de gado.

FARC is considered by the US and the EU a terrorist organization. According to the government, it includes between 8500 and 9000 insurgents.

Guns and butter. Guns and butter. And to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, all the FARC fighters want are houses of their own.

In India, new push to foster easy travel, earn more cash with tourism

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:54:00 +0000

This came from the Times of India:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/13-more-nations-to-get-visas-on-arrival/articleshow/11582848.cms

Despite the Taj Mahal, thousands of years of history, and fame for some of the spiciest food known to man, the second most populous nation in the world, India, racks in a tepid amount of money on tourism each year. Check this out:

Ramping up tourist numbers is seen as a significant revenue earner with 600,000 foreign visitors a year being a miniscule proportion of global tourism. With timely intervention, the sector can grow much faster than the 24 million jobs currently targeted in the 12th Plan. So far, the VoA scheme has registered modest success with over 10,000 visas issued last year.

At present, 13 countries whose nationals can avail a visa on arrival include Finland, Japan,Luxembourg, New Zealand, Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Laosand Myanmar. But the list excludes more populous nations even in the Asean who can be tapped for a much larger tourist footfall.

Come to think of it, I've always wanted to travel to India. Maybe now these new changes will make it easier.

Scientists forced to stop designing fatal bird flu virus

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:50:00 +0000

This just came in from Britain's Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-2089941/Scientists-Armageddon-flu-virus-suspend-research-world-risk-catastrophic-pandemic.html?ITO=1490

via Daily Mail

Scientists at Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison were both engineering deadly versions of the avian flu, in order to study how pandemics work.

Unfortunately, however, a lot of people saw the 1971 film Andromeda Strain, about scientists inventing a virus that ends up wiping out all of humanity.

A lot of people are also applying their commonsense doubts about the possibility of some covert operative stealing the research for bioterrorism. So for now, sorry to Holland and Wisconsin -- your fun with Erlenmeyer flasks will have to wait!

Occupy Wall Street isn't on Wall Street anymore -- it's a West Coast movement

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:42:00 +0000

The more I see Californians taking over the Occupy Wall Street movement, the more the whole enterprise wins me over. Also, I have decided that the street revolution envisioned by the campers in Zuccoti Park ought to be a West Coast job. The East Coast is full of protest pussycats. Out here, on the Pacific bank of the US, we keep going and going like the protest bunny. Check out how normally civil and well-behaved San Francisco has ventured into throwing bricks and bibles! This in from ABC News:

video platform video management video solutions video player

Awesome. The full link and story here:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/protesters-throw-bricks-and-bibles-at-police-in-san-francisco/

Now, I am waiting for these courageous brick-throwers to catch on to the message I've been repeating as of late: It's not the banks, folks! It's the elite colleges! Do this in Palo Alto, not in the Embarcadero district! Let's see if anyone leaps on the same bandwagon.

I guess the South Carolina debate was eventful or something

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:54:00 +0000

via Slate

I stopped watching the Republican debates about 14,000 years ago, some time over last summer, between Herman Cain's 999 plan being glossed as 666 upside down, and Jon Huntsman's Carmine haircut reflecting the overhead spotlights on one soundstage or another.

I am a registered Republican in California, which votes late in the primary process. If you live in California and aren't rich, you have no influence over the Republican primaries at all. So I figured, "let people in Dubuque and St. Anselm's College comb through hours of Rick, Rick, Mitt, Newt, Herm, Mish, J-Hunt, and Ronny throwing peas and carrot slices at each other."

Given that all of the people running for President have years of history behind them, there isn't much to be gained from watching all of the debates, or even most of them. They feel extremely repetitive.

They can also be quite annoying, such as when Michele started pouring water for all the boys to the cringes of liberated women everywhere, when a gay Army officer in a tight exercise T-shirt got booed by four random people and became a martyr for queer activism, or when Rick Perry took two minutes to forget the name of the Department of Energy (or was it Education? I was asleep before his brain freeze melted.)

It seems that I am one of the very few Americans who doesn't give a rat's tail about the debating skills of people who want to be president. Snarky, witty, crisp, or glib--no such quality indicates in any way that a person is going to be effective as a commander in chief.

As we learned with Barack Obama, it is entirely possible that someone has gone to Harvard and speaks very well, looks good in a suit, and feels like a charming person, without having a clue about how to reduce the deficit, stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb, or bring unemployment to a humane level like, say, 6.5%. The fact that people care about what candidates say and do in debates is, quite frankly, pathetic.

As the debate cycle wore on (and wore on my nerves), I tuned it out because it became evident that Mitt Romney's Ivy League allies on both sides of the aisle were going to pick off every alternative to the neoliberal corporate Establishment option with lots of gelled hair and Harvard lockjaw. I decided to spend my time doing more important things, like designing a new culminating experience for MA students.

But alas! I missed the South Carolina debates which were apparently full of fireworks. Here is the lowdown from Slate:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/01/south_carolina_debate_gingrich_nails_open_marriage_question_bests_a_flustered_romney_.html

I saw the YouTube clips of Newt slamming Jon King. Wow, what a night! I almost wish I hadn't gotten cynical so long ago, so I could have experienced this one in the heat of it, with sincere interest and real surprise.

Save Maine shrimp by strangling businesses with regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:30:00 +0000

An interesting little bundle of ironies fell off the truck known as Hispanic Business:

http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2012/1/19/lower_shrimp_catch_limits_choking_out.htm

via Hispanic Business

We hear about regulations hurting American businesses, but rarely do we hear about how this impoverishes our paella platters.

Well someone (probably a Democrat) in his or her infinited wisdom recently imposed a limit on how much New England shrimp catchers could net from the open seas. The result may indeed be happy, surviving shrimp on the North Atlantic.

But the result is also that Maine fisheries lose their business (or are they shrimperies) and customers have to eat cheap processed shrimp that catches freezer burn on its way home from China.

An excerpt:

As a result of the more restricted haul, those in the Maine shrimp industry have said, consumers will turn to Canada and China for shrimp, potentially for years. But some members of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Northern Shrimp Section argued that allowing higher limits could decimate the shrimp population to dangerously low levels, especially as the stock has been overfished in recent years.

The section met Thursday morning in a packed ballroom at the Marriott at Sable Oaks in South Portland. The regional panel had set a 2012 catch limit of 2,000 metric tons (4.4 million pounds) and has delayed the start of shrimp season by a month for trawlers and nearly two months for trappers -- a staggered start that itself was described as unfair by members of the nearly 200-person crowd.

Pat Keliher, acting commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources and member of the Northern Shrimp Section, made a motion to increase the harvest limit to 3,000 metric tons (6.6 million pounds). But he was the only panel member to vote in favor of the change and it failed. A subsequent motion to increase the limit to 2,211 metric tons (4.9 million pounds) was supported unanimously.

Now I am curious as to what limits there are on how much of that tasty cocktail sauce we can make.

New weapon coming out from LWRC

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:21:00 +0000

This in from Guns & Ammo:

Pentagon suddenly takes sexual assault seriously, over a year after gay groups rammed through the DADT repeal without mentioning male-male rape

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:59:00 +0000

Strangely, I got this story through the Brazilian press. Here it is in Portuguese:

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/1036378-pentagono-estima-19-mil-casos-de-abuso-sexual.shtml

Leon Panetta

Since chances are that you do not speak Portuguese, I have translated the article for you below.

It ran in Folha, a Brazilian newspaper.

The Pentagon now believes that there are 19,000 cases of sexual abuse each year, the overwhelming majority of which are not reported.

This would have been very useful information to share in December 2010, when gay military fetishists were pushing the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and conveniently ignoring the fact that a repeal would make it extremely difficult for gay men who get raped by other gay men in the military to get out of life-threatening situations. The notion that a bureaucratic system exists to adjudicate assaults is laughable. The notion that gay men can "control themselves" and won't go too far under stress conditions, and force themselves on other gay men in the same unit, is even more laughable.

And then the notion pushed on GayPatriot by right-wing gay officers that "officers will maintain discipline among troops" is REEEEEALLLLLY laughable. Notice how in the last two weeks there were Marines peeing on corpses, bludgeoning sheep, filming such antics, and putting footage on the Internet to go viral -- all without these miraculously well informed officers able to impose "discipline."

Officers rarely know what is going on among the enlisted troops. Enlisted male troops live in close quarters under highly stressful conditions. One gay in a squad won't be too much of a problem. But two gays in a squad piled in a tent, away from home for months on end? That is not just a problem -- that's a dangerous scenario, especially if one gay is stronger, higher in rank, and hornier than the other gay.

I have seen enough to tell you, this isn't science fiction. Gay men are men -- they are capable of raping other gays and then covering it up.

Gay activists were convinced that all this is just homophobic paranoia. No, they said, it isn't so -- gay men are superhuman angels who don't do any of the shenanigans we take for granted among their straight comrades. (To which I respond, "yeah, right. Read this.)

But now, suddenly, a year after taking away the law that would have kept gay men's identity secret from other gay men, and eliminating the separation chapter that gave gay rape victims a fast way out of danger, we hear that 19,000 people get raped in the military each year. Here's the full translation:

Pentágono estima 19 mil casos de abuso sexual

PUBLICIDADE

DA EFE, EM WASHINGTON

The US Armed Forces reported 3, 191 cases of sexual assault in 2011, but the real number should be around 19,000 because the majority of cases are never reported, stated this Thursday US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta.

Regarding this situation, the Pentagon decided to take new measures to avoid such occurrences in the heart of the military.

“Our men and women in uniform risk their life each day to keep the US safe. We have the moral duty to keep them safe from those who would attack their honor and dignity,” said Leon Panetta.

In 2011, there were 3,191 charges of sexual abuse, an increase over 2005, when the Department of Defense began to report cases with its current system.

Panetta announced the creation of a new Defense program that would include coordinators that respond to cases of sexual violence, as well as victim advocates, whose work it would be to supervise the response from the moment of an initial report, in the same way that national civil agencies pattern their response systems.

CONFIDENTIAL REPORTING

Moreover, the spouses and adult children of military personnel, as well as the civilians working with the Defense Department outside US soil, could represent their confidential reports of abuses.

The Defense Department would earmark $9.3 million over five years to the improvement of investigations and processes of issuing reports within 120 days about the availability of training for commanders on the subject.

Last month, the Pentagon announced two measures, one which permits victims to report the crime immediately to other units, and another whose goal was to save military documents for 50 years to make possible a revindication and reparations for future veterans.

Honduras beats out Mexico for "most violent city" title

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:47:00 +0000

Breaking news from the Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2012/0118/Honduras-home-to-the-most-violent-city-in-the-hemisphere?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Fcsm+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+%7C+All+Stories%29

via Christian Science Monitor

It used to be that Ciudad Juarez was the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere, but now that's no longer the case.

A small but very unhappy town in Honduras has now claimed the title. The Peace Corps had to remove its workers from the town over fears about their safety.

The cause is, unfortunately, narcotraffic:

According to a new report by Mexico’s Civic Council on Public Security and Criminal Justice, San Pedro Sula saw 159 homicides per 100,000 residents last year, topping the nonprofit organization’s list of the most violent cities in the hemisphere. Ciudad Juarez has topped the list for the past three years.This shift in ranking reflects major changes that have occurred within the regional drug trade over the past decade, in which Mexican drug traffickers have deepened their influence in Central America. There they have established connections to local crime bosses, known as “transportistas,” who facilitate drug shipments between South America and Mexico. The rise of these transportistas has been accompanied by a surge of violence in the region, which is exacerbated by a growing local market for drugs, weak state institutions, and government corruption.

The truth hurts! Gay mag offended to hear that gay fashionistas skew female body image toward adolescent male aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:40:00 +0000

This came in off the Advocate:

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2012/01/18/Radio_Host_Gay_Men_Cast_Skinny_Actresses_Because_They_Look_Like_Boys/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AdvocatecomDailyNews+%28Advocate.com+Daily+News%29

via Advocate

Even though I live in Los Angeles, I stopped listening to John & Ken's radio show a long time ago, mostly because they give me a headache. They're on perpetual outrage mode.

Recently, they made some statements about the Golden Globes and the abundance of anorexic women with bodies similar to 14-year-old boys, which ruffled the feathers of hypersensitive gays in the Internet universe. Read this little chunk from Michelle Garcia's piece in the gold-standard of Gay, Inc., the Advocate:

"Gay guys control the fashion industry and the casting industry and the whole Hollywood look," Kobylt said, according to Media Matters. "And gays like bodies that remind them of a 14-year-old boy. Guys like curves. ... It's biological, because a woman with curves looks like she can bear your children successfully and that's biologically what a man is looking for. So sexually a guy is much more turned on by a woman with curves than these 14-year-old boy stick figures. And that's how I know for sure, I don't need to do any research or any proof that it's gay guys who control the entire casting industry."

Media Matters wrote Tuesday that Kobylt's statements perpetuate the myth — which has been thoroughly debunked — that gay men are attracted to boys and therefore are more prone to molest children.

Oh, the outrage! How dare two radio hosts point out something that everyone knows already but won't admit?

For crying out loud, gay men predominate in fashion and entertainment--we know this. There is a reason that West Hollywood is the epicenter of gay male life; it is, as its name implies, right next door to Hollywood.

And John and Ken are absolutely right that straight men aren't making the misogynistic decision to cast and promote female celebrities with bodies that are unhealthily skinny, to the point of not even looking like normal women. Female stars are cast to satisfy self-hating anorexic tendencies in female fans, as well as the antifemale, ruthlessly judgmental aesthetics of gay men.

I am sorry that the Advocate gets so ornery hearing the truth, but it is the truth. It is not a "myth" that "gay men are attracted to boys." Have you heard of the term "twinks"? That's a slang term for the au courant ideal of gay male aesthetics: a fatless, skinny, ephebic boy of eighteen years old who looks a few years younger (such as, let's say, fourteen).

If you want formal research, I give you the results of a database search of AEBN, a clearinghouse of gay male pornography online.

"Bear" implies hairy, usually older males in porno flicks. The AEBN database shows 1,180 films themed around bears.

"Twink" implies young, teenage looking boys. The AEBN database shows 5,176 films themes around this boyish category.

Quite a numerical difference, wouldn't you say? Hard to say that gay male attraction to 14-year-old looking male bodies a "myth."

Face it -- John and Ken were right! Don't be so sensitive, gays.

Creepy interview between Anderson Cooper and a thirtysomething virgin who sells his sperm to lesbian couples

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:12:00 +0000

via Daily Mail

My, what light in yonder window breaks?

This strange little piece rolled off the Daily Mail truck: A California engineering geek who has never made love to a woman in his 36 years of life, has fathered a dozen children by donating his sperm.

Lesbian couples love this guy. He has high SAT scores and doesn't expect any affection or even pleasurable stimulation in exchange for endowing the gift of parenthood on homosexuals.

Now, mind you, I do not have many reservations about lesbian couples raising kids. One of the moms will carry the child in the womb for nine months, which is a much better situation than two men who raise a child -- gay male couples must take a baby away from a mother who carried it for nine months.

Still, is this the future of social engineering? I am not okay with this. Child-siring is still a kind of labor and ought to entail certain standards. People shouldn't be able to get the joys of parenthood without having experienced the mind-altering and soul-enriching ritual of full-on copulation.

Here's the full link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2087522/Organic-sperm-donor-fathered-14-children-admits-36-year-old-VIRGIN.html?ITO=1490

1,500 protesters gather close to White House, throw smoke bomb

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:12:00 +0000

Things are indeed going to get dire in 2012:

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Occupy-protesters-mass-outside-White-House-2591837.php

Even with the cold weather, enough protesters gathered outside the White House to pose a threat and necessitate Secret Service intervention. A "smoke bomb" was involved.

Obama meets with Jordan's king, calls for pressure on Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:11:00 +0000

This rolled off the wire on al-Jazeera:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/01/201211812136964281.html

via al-Jazeera

After meeting with the king of Jordan, Barack Obama issued a statement from Washington decrying the levels of violence in Syria and calling for "pressure."

I'm having difficulty following what the president means by "pressure," though. Recently leaders in other Arab countries raised the possibility of mobilizing a pan-Arab international military force, to enter Syria with the goal of restoring order.

Syria's leader, Bashar el-Assad, roundly rejects any discussion of other Arab countries entering his terrain. Assad claims the rebels are terrorists and has threatened to break away from the Arab League.

"Pressure" could be acupuncture, sanctions, or the Marines. I think Mr. President needs to be careful not to commit himself to yet another inflammation.

If colder weather causes flu pandemics, then are we less worried about global warming?

noreply@blogger.com (Colorful Conservative Professor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:02:00 +0000

This just in from Time:

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/01/17/under-the-weather-how-la-nina-may-influence-the-outbreak-of-flu-pandemics/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29

via Time

According to this brief post from Bryan Walsh, researchers have discovered that flu pandemics, like the one documented in 2009, are closely linked to dips in air temperature.

Basing their findings on studies of La Niña, the weather pattern over the Pacific, scientists discovered this:

Shaman and Lipsitch looked at the last four pandemics—1917/18, 1957, 1968 and 2009—then retraced the weather conditions in the months before the flu outbreaks. They found that all four pandemics were preceded by colder than normal sea surface temperatures, which signifies the La Niña effect. Previous studies have also shown that La Niña can alter the migration patterns, stopover points and interspecies mixing of migratory birds, all of which could favor the kind of gene swapping that can lead to new flu viruses—and those microbes, if they hit the genetic lottery, can then trigger pandemics

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/01/17/under-the-weather-how-la-nina-may-influence-the-outbreak-of-flu-pandemics/#ixzz1jmbzrnck

Interesting. So global warming won't always lead directly to epidemics? Does Al Gore know about this?