"Those" People

[photo (c) Eric Tourneret, http://www.thehoneygatherers.com/html/photolibrary3.html ]


I have spent a lot of time lately excoriating William F. Buckley and, more, our act, as a culture, of putting him on a great grand pedestal of a PBS television show which ran for decades and implied that he was an intellectual par excellence, a seer, a wise voice counseling us all to at least "go slow," (to quote Nina Simone). I posted a segment of the long "debate" with James Baldwin which, for all that he lost the debate, somehow made his bones with the cultural elite which anointed him. Even in the debate itself, and as well in the subsequent anointing, Baldwin's point is made by Buckley and the culture--exemplified. Baldwin objects that he, as a black man in America, is taught his "place," that there is not even an alternative choice. And in Buckley's willingness to objectify "those people" and characterize them, he entirely admits Baldwin's thesis, that this is exactly what it's like.

This sort of thinking still persists, and is easily, almost randomly discovered. Only last weekend I encountered it immediately upon turning to a John Stossel television show, where I found some "libertarian" pundit discussing the need for a personal interaction between "those people" who receive public assistance, and the localized benefactor class who would he hoped replace so-called faceless bureaucrats who don't make eye contact because they are not in the same place. The whole rigamarole was about guilt and shame, and a libertarian utopian fantasy of what might possibly come "after" the end of our tattered and failing social safety net.

That this arrogance persists right along, generation after generation, is shocking, even if it is perhaps a terrible truth about human nature--something we as a whole are confined by even as we are confined in the tiny place our planet inhabits, and the tiny temporal frame of our hospitable environment--something we can even understand by just looking at fossils and glacier tracks, much less acknowledging that in tiny bits of seeming darkness in the night sky reside in fact billions of galaxies, which are as unreachable as the hope of entirely ending racism.



[Hat tip to Digby, who posted this video on her site today.]

So this morning I encountered a beautiful acknowledgement of a great poet by a terrific blogger and writer:

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=68124

Gwendolyn Brooks has been dead for 13 years. While living she wrote some of the finest poems around. O'Malley quotes this one:

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

The sad thing about William F. Buckley is that he spent his whole life defending the indefensible. There is a tragic arrogance to his life's work that points directly to despair. It seems doubtful that Buckley ever allowed his obviously fine mind to look directly into this pit of horror. He was instead content to live in his luxury, enjoying his privilege, his "star" status, his yacht, his "place." No one ever came in from outside. There was never even one moment of reality to intrude on his racist fantasy. The best that can be said is, Gore Vidal really pissed him off.

Oh yes, indeed, human nature does nontheless trap us all. This lesson is deeper, and more subtle. We watch with some dismay as Mr. Obama, who must have thought he had a great opportunity to repair a lot of damage, is instead wrapped in the cocoon of inevitables which deliver him to drone strikes and wiretaps and all the rest, the great necessity of survival, the contradiction of power and mercy. Already nice liberals like Jonathan Alter have published books explaining that at least Obama has saved us--for now--from the advent of true Republican rule again.

Meanwhile, as we discover a hundred billion new (ancient) out-of-reach galaxies, we watch the Arctic Ocean melt away, and set our engineers the task of finding the oil and gas that lies beneath those dark blue waters. We are always busy as bees.

Privacy--"Got Two Good Eyes and Still Can't See"

From Charlie Pierce yesterday:

The other thing I hoped would not happen -- but was very confident would happen -- was that the architects of the regime that made this business as usual would step forward now and claim that their own dingo had eaten their babies.

C'mon down, Jim Sensenbrenner.

"As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation," he said in a statement. "While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. He added: "The Bureau's broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."

See also: "Fk, Oh For The Love Of," That horse left the barn in 2002. Jim Sensenbrenner's the one who took the hinges off the barn door.

Stonewall Jackson knew about this phenomenon:



[photo from www.gosoutheast.about.com Luray Caverns, Virginia]

His boys might even have hid out in the Caverns while some dumbass Yankee patrol from Maine or Minnesota rattled past. It's the slow drip drip drip that makes the difference after a while. Last night I watched Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff." It's layers are many, including the incredible black and white photography throughout. But the viewer shouldn't forget what's being depicted in the foreground--the brutal exploitation of working people by a wealthy aristocracy with an army of goons. In the story (which is based on a Japanese folk tale), it takes an enlightened new governmental authority to put a stop to slavery and exploitation. The new "governor" carries with him a simple moral principle given to him as a child by his father: "even if you are hard on yourself, show mercy to others."

The trouble with Stonewall is the same trouble with Bishop Pike. Sensenbrenner could be a double for the Legislature of the Confederacy General Lee found when begging to them for more money, in the winter of '63-'64. They were a rabble, eating peanuts and tossing the shells on the floor, and they cared not a whit for Lee's money problems. By the following spring Grant was at their door. (And by the way, after the good Governor frees the slaves, they burn massa's house to the ground in a drunken revelry. I expected to hear strains of the "Year of Jubelo.")

You can visit the Luray Caverns while driving through Virginia. There are lots of signs. You can also see where Jackson lay mortally wounded and dying, after Chancellorsville, at a little railroad crossing called Guinea Station just a couple of miles off I-95 south of Fredericksburg. He was accidentally shot by his own troops.

Update. I was very affected by having viewed "Sansho" the other night, and thought about different details I remembered from it as the workday passed yesterday, a slow slow day full of rain squalls with little of my actual job to attend to. This morning I looked up Mizoguchi and found the following paragraph on "Sansho":

Sansho Dayu, in any case, transcends all reservations. It is the triumphant summation of Mizoguchi’s style and themes, as well as the most compassionate response imaginable to those atrocities which had been committed in then very recent years, in Japan and all over the world. It is the most humanist of films, but it asserts that humanism is powerless without politics, just as politics is purposeless without humanism. The last sequence is the most perfect ending in cinema, so broad in implication, so exquisite in form. The reunion of mother and son – the revelation of human love – is at once the most important thing in the world, and an event insignificant against the panorama of human suffering. The double perspective – never to see things in isolation, always in context – is assured by Mizoguchi’s style, and defines his art. Sansho Dayu is, in Gilbert Adair’s words, “one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists” (9). If any art has justified this medium, so often crude, thoughtless and mundane, it is the art of Kenji Mizoguchi.*

I seem to have recommended "Hamlet" to you, or "Oedipus," or "Crime and Punishment." Whatever. Hell of a movie.

*Alexander Jacoby, http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/mizoguchi/

It Was the Third of June...

Overnight the sunny weekend turned into more thunderstorms and heavy rain, which still falls as the dawn arrives this morning. Best thing I watched in a long time was the documentary, "Buck," about the horseman Buck Brannaman. I strongly recommend that you rent it. It is a portrait of a man who has found his calling, and the genius within himself, which consists of an openness to animals, and particularly horses. It's something he had as a little boy, during a time when he was controlled by a very warped, angry father and suffered abuse which somehow didn't break him, or warp him, but contributed to his empathy and ability to see deeply into animals and, for that matter, people. Buck has judgement, and a perspective. I found it heartening to discover this fine individual, alive and well, in today's world. There is so much pointing to a more negative way of seeing the drift of things.

As night fell I was watching the pretty good police procedural "Killing." Commercials from time to time hyped an upcoming show airing tonight on something called "ABC Family." The preview featured a camera shot from underwater of a teenage boy's face, also underwater. First you might think he's swimming. Then you realize he's being drowned, his head held underwater by another man. The shot goes on and on, until at the end he is indeed drowned. It was little short of snuff porn. You and your "family" can all watch it together this evening, if you want to expose yourself and your kids to such a thing. There's also some "weirwolves" involved in the deal. Maybe that's supposed to make the murder ok.

Meanwhile, on "Killing" a teen boy who's been searching for his missing girlfriend for the whole show figures out where she is, but before he can get to her, behind a locked door, her abductor catches him and stabs him to death. The murder is calculated, brutal, and another "snuff." That it happens off screen matters little. I switched the channel sort of randomly, and found myself watching some John Stossel episode, people on a stage with an audience, Stossel the kind of "moderator" figure. The "guests" were making an argument about how social programs such as medicare and social security are somehow bad for the "moral fiber" of our citizens. What we need, one of them said, was a more intimate, local kind of social security, where an administrator could look a recipient in the eye when the recipient was discovered to have bought a TV with his dole. Another panelist asserted that "most" government aid doesn't go to poor people anyways, but to middle class and rich people. "The last things to be cut are social security and medicaid" he said. Presumably snuffing the last flickers of empathy in the audience of just plain middle class white folks who were watching the presentation.

(Note to the newbies. When you hear people talking about the "moral fibre" of the American people, you are hearing paternalism in action. Who appointed these yuppie libertarians the judges of our "moral fibre." No doubt these boys all went to good colleges like Harvard and Yale. So what? Mitt Romney went to Harvard too. As we saw in horrible detail during the last election, he apparently didn't learn a fucking thing there.)

I turned it off at that point. It was bedtime. I shut my eyes and remembered Buck and his daughter Reata doing rope tricks for a crowd. When Buck was five or six he had a pet bull calf. He rode the calf, and even saddled him. One day, out of the blue, Buck's father took him out to the barn, shot the calf between the eyes, and made Buck butcher him. This story is one of the "deleted scenes" on the video. I'll bet Buck didn't particularly want such cruelty to be part of the central story of the movie, even if it was probably an important moment in his life in the sense that it was a trauma and a thing for his heart to deal with.

There's a lot about Buck Brannaman on the google. He makes his living giving clinics on horse riding and training.

They All Sound Alike, Pt. 74

Back in 1970 me and the other folks that made up the Fuzzy Mountain String Band tried to work up Tommy Jarrell's "Back Step Cindy." We thought we had it down pretty good, and recorded it on our recording debut on Rounder Records. This is what we looked like back then, sitting in front of Malcolm and Vickie Owens' lodgings just northwest of Chapel Hill, an old farmhouse owned by Bibi Danziger as I recall--she was a shop owner and restauranteur in Chapel Hill and owned "Danzigers" and several dining establishments catering to the college kids, and with some of her spare change she invested in various old farms dotting the landscape near Chapel Hill, which I expect she wisely figgered would appreciate greatly over the years. Till then she was fine with renting to grad students such as Malcolm and Vickie, who seemed and were capable of dealing with an old farm house with a bunch of fire places, and a dirt path in so sloggy in wet weather that Blanton's "positraction" green Ford panel truck positracted itself right down to the differential one November afternoon.



There we sit on a fine spring day. Later the record came out, and a second one too. But the more I listened to "Back Step Cindy," the more I felt I'd not learned the thing right. In fact, the more I listened to Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham and various other Round Peakers play the thing, the more labyrinthian the mystery of the tune became, and the less I understood it, and I quit playing what I had thought once was the tune, and never went back to it, there being many many other tunes to worry about and get with.

So, here's Fred Cockerham and Kyle Creed playing the tune right:



I wish you could see Fred's bow arm, but all this newfangled easy videoing world we live in hadn't been invented when Fred was alive. All we have is County Records pretty much, and Ray Alden's work.

One of these days I might still go back to "Back Step Cindy." I love the little extra measure, which maybe is the very "back step" of the title. Or maybe the title is referring to some dancin' fool Cindy Fred knew in 1925. Some mysteries cannot be resolved. These days I'm trying to learn Major Franklin's "Tom and Jerry," which is about the most elegant and elemental version of that great steaming warhorse I've ever heard. Benny Thomasson's got more notes, and Mark O'Connor more notes still, but sometimes despite the cute commercials more is not better.