Standards and Whitewash

The controversial standards that were developed by the Florida Board of Education concerning the teaching of African American history display the remarkable ignorance of the developers of those standards. Ignorance here refers to the willful decision not to know, to voluntarily remain stupid. Teachers will now be required to instruct students “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied to their personal benefit.” To my mind this is just another attempt to absolve whites from their heinous crimes and to even aggrandize their behavior. The second dubious standard cautions teachers to include in their lessons how during the Ocoee Election Day massacre “acts of violence were perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This African American history standard, history a subject the Florida Board of Education cares little about, again whitewashes (pun intended) perpetrators of horrific acts by turning rioters into victims and casting the real victims into perpetrators. But on this day in 1920 whites massacred 30-35 African Americans to keep them from voting, and those whites destroyed almost all the African homes and Black owned businesses and expelled the surviving African Americans from the city. The history of racial prejudice in Florida and multiple states is replete with events just as ugly as the November 2, 1920 massacre and lynching. In Florida Julius Norman was hung from a telephone pole alongside a sign that read, “This is what we do to niggers who vote.” The leader of that lynch mob was soon elected mayor. But the Florida African American history standards want students to know that during the massacre African Americans defending themselves against rioters committed acts of violence! Derrick Johnson, current president of the NAACP, said that the standards “are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that … slavery and Jim Crow … represent the darkest period in American history.” These so-called standards are an obscenity.
            In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, I read the following: Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s brother, was an activist and Communist Party member in the 1930s. Of one campaign he said, “We tried to integrate the [Pasadena] city swimming pool. They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” The campaign was unsuccessful; the pool remained segregated. The legacy and history of slavery and racial prejudice in the United States is long and ugly. And so I urge us to consider this: the Florida standards argue that slaves received benefit from the “skills” that slaves under the whips of their masters were forced to learn for the benefit of the masters, and that these skills helped them after their emancipation. The conclusion from the standards could only be that, well, slavery wasn’t all bad! But the reality is that all those skills couldn’t get African Americans into a city swimming pool, or buy a house in a suburban neighborhood, or vote in elections. What benefit could any skill be to a person whose very stature as a human being is called into such question that white people wouldn’t get into the pool water after African Americans had swum in it. And the newly accepted Florida standards suggest that to defend oneself against such groups as the murderous KKK and the ignorant white population is equally as wrong as massacre perpetrated against the African American community to deny them essential rights afforded to all citizens. 

 

 

 

 

Blindness

One thousand people have been arrested for their actions during the insurrection of 6 July 2021; many hundreds have pleaded guilty and several hundred have been sent to prison, convicted by a jury of their peers though I suppose that there are not a few insurgents who would say that the only jury of their peers would be like-minded insurrectionists. Leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, will spend eighteen years in prison; Thomas Webster was sentenced to ten years, Jessica Watkins to 8.5 years and Patrick McCaughey to 7.5 years. The man with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk will spend 4.5 years in jail. Other coconspirators in the violent events of that day have been placed on home detention. There are, obviously, many others who have been since charged and are now awaiting trial or sentencing. And still the Republican sycophants continue to whitewash (not a pun) the event, decry the persecution of its pacific protestors, and the indited Trump, and there are even some who claim that the whole happening was a) a peaceful event; b) an event provoked by FBI infiltrators, or Antifa or (of course), socialist or Communist sympathizers. I suppose some might even blame the insurrection on the product of an alien invasion. But as the violence proceeded and the treasonous rioters called for the hanging of Mike Pence, not a few senators and representatives took cover from the rioters in safe places in the Capitol that was under attack, and several prominent Republican leaders subsequently accused Donald Trump of inspiring and helping to foment the riot and did nothing to stop his ugly base from their heinous acts. But now and two years hence many of those same Republicans have since walked themselves pusillanimously back from these charges and not a few despite a complete lack of evidence continue to promulgate Trump’s Big Lie that the election of 2020 was stolen. The level of cowardliness and blindness confounds and shocks me.
            Jose Saramago’s novel, Blindness, concerns the visitation of a plague of blindness. Without warning citizens are suddenly and without etiology struck blind. Suddenly and without cause individuals go blind but this blindness is not an experience of total blackness but one of milky whiteness. I do not think Saramago refers here to white supremacist propaganda, but it is to my mind an apt infection with which people suffer. But plague is an occurrence that I have experienced and suffered with for the past three years. I am not blind to its consequences. One of the early victims of blindness was an ophthalmologist who had earlier received an understandably panicked visit from the first victim of it. The now-plagued doctor ascribes his blindness as having spread from his patient, but the doctor’s wife understands that “blindness isn’t something that can be caught just by a blind man looking at someone who is not, blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.” Blindness can sometimes be a willed condition and occurs when a person sees only what they want to see without regard to what else might be obvious. Ah, but that is a cliché finally, I think. I think this is an apt description of the blindness of the Republican congress members and of the hard-right base who would support Trump even if he shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue. This blindness is, indeed, one that has been chosen. These are the core supporters of the disgraced, twice impeached, and yet twice indited former president. The ophthalmologist says that no one is to blame in an epidemic but that we are all victims, but in fact that is not exactly the case at present. There are some who have been self-infected and they have turned us all into victims. We have become oppressed and ill by the willed blindness of these others.
           Now, physical blindness is a result of a malfunction of the optic system and except in rare cases does not suggest a problem with brain functioning. Actual physical impairment of sight almost always has no emotional/psychological etiology. This type of blindness is a physical disability that has resulted in an unwished-for incapacity for sight. Those who experience this form of blindness must (and for the most part do) learn to function in the diurnal by their own and other assistive agencies. Society has created alternative stratagems and devices to facilitate daily life for the sight-impaired, for those who are physically blind that had not been considered necessary for the sighted, though it is certainly true that auditory signals offering safe travel at crosswalks serve as a benefit the unsighted and sighted alike. There are other modifications that were originally developed for the benefit of the physically sight impaired and that has improved the quality of the life that can be enjoyed. But the blindness Saramago refers to is a conscious decision made by an individual not to see; this blindness is, indeed, an affliction whose etiology is emotional and psychological and for which education might have been the only remediation. I think that it is possible that the afflicted can be taught to choose not to be blind. These blind-afflicted individuals and groups would prefer to remain sightless and therefore, refuse to be educated. Their white-cloudy infirmity is to them a welcome attribute and an emblem of pride. Such has been evident in the arguments denying the benefits of the COVID vaccines and the subsequent boosters despite all of the studies proving their effectiveness. One of those deniers is actually running for President of the United States. 
            There is a wonderful Peanuts cartoon: Lucy and Linus are looking up at the sky and Lucy says to her brother, “Clouds are very peculiar . . . sometimes they seem to form actual words.” Charlie Brown, who has overheard, corrects Lucy. He says, “Those aren’t clouds . . . That’s sky-writing.” Lucy looks at Charlie Brown and turns back to Linus. In the final frame again looking up at the sky, Lucy says to Linus, “Clouds are very peculiar  . . . sometimes they seem to form actual words.” Ignorance is more than an inability to see; it is a repudiation of seeing. It is a willed blindness. 
            Republicans and others of their ilk will their blindness. Despite all evidences to the contrary they would look at the skywriting and say it is clouds. But they are also ignorant. They will not learn. They do not learn.

 

The Return of the Mask

For almost two years I donned a mask whenever I traveled into a market or liquor store. For the most part over the past months I have put away my supply of face coverings and not found it necessary to mask-up when I shopped or entered a restaurant for dinner. The threat of the coronavirus has receded and besides, I am vaccinated and boostered.
            Alas, I have taken my masks out of storage again, this time as the smoke from the wildfires in Canada make the air I breathe unhealthy. Over the past month air quality alerts have appeared regularly cautioning older folks (of which I am one), people in sensitive groups with issues of health (that includes me), and angst-ridden citizens (always, me) to either stay inside (da return to sequestering!) or wear a mask when venturing out of doors. Elizabeth tells me that she heard on the news that there have been twenty-four air quality alerts in the year thus far. Nevertheless, as for the pat 50 or so years I have engaged in physical outdoor exercise on most days, I want and for my physical and psychological health I want to walk. Consequently, I have taken my masks (I possess a variety of styles) out of storage where I have placed them in anticipation of the visitation of the next plague.
            Today Highway 61 Revisited, the WUMB radio program I have listened to every Saturday morning for many years now is celebrating the birthdate of Woody Guthrie. Actually, Woody was born on a July 14, 1912, and yesterday they did play a good amount of Woody’s music, but the themed radio program takes place on Saturday mornings and so the program began with Woody’s narrative “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” It is a song that reflects on the human impact of the mid-west dust storms in the 1930s.

A dust storm hit, an' it hit like thunder

It dusted us over, an' it covered us under

Blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun

Straight for home all the people did run, singin'

So long, it's been good to know yuh

So long, it's been good to know yuh

This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home

Plus ça change, plus ca même chose, though it is ironic that whereas for more than two years I could walk unmasked out of doors and don the mask whenever I entered into establishments that now I mask whenever I go out of doors and remove the face covering indoors. The Dust storms in the 1930s were a result of bad farming practices and climate changes; now as the earth warms and there is drought, the forests burn and there is no rain to put them out! Plus ça change, plus ca même chose. I think again of lines from another song from Woody’s accomplice: “Oh when will they ever learn?”
            Growing up all I knew from masks was the Lone Ranger, Zorro and bank robbers. And all I knew about climate change was the regular change of seasons. Growing up my parents urged me to get out of the house and go out of doors. Now, I tell my children to stay inside or at least when they must go out at least to wear a mask! What a shameful world we have created for our children.

Of Words and Meaning

It interests me that the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 by terrorists trained by Al Qaeda is usually referred to as nine-eleven (9/11), but the insurrection that took place at the United States Capitol by native terrorists is never called one-six (1/6) but is always spoken as January 6. This practice pertains to all spoken and written references to the events. Both events were horrific and I have wondered why they should be referred to differently. The abbreviation of the former (9/11) couldn’t be the result of a verbal laziness: both September and January contain almost the same number of syllables: the earlier event six and the latter five. The vocalization 9/11 does elide sonorously where that of 1/6 does not do so. To my ear the reference 1/6 has no resonance: it is  hard and harsh vocalization. In my memory no other event other than September 11, 2001 is referred to simply by the number month and date; Independence Day, for example, is always called July 4, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is dated December 7, and D-Day is always June 6.  Flag Day is June 14. Christmas day is December 25 and not 12/25. The question then remains as to why it is that only the events of September 11, 2001 are referred to simply as numbers. I have heard it said that Al Qaeda chose the date, 9/11, as a reference to the emergency number 911. I suppose it is as plausible an explanation for the day being chosen for the attack as any other, but then wouldn’t we have taken to referring to that day as “nine one-one” and not as nine-eleven. 
            Finally, however, even the number reference 9/11 is referred to by words and are voiced as is the 6^th of January or any other holiday or event, and so it is words, perhaps, about which I am wondering. I know that words are used to communicate, but I wonder what is communicated in our differing references to 9/11 and January 6. There is meaning that here remains opaque. I can speculate and find theory to explain, but even to do that requires words and that is where the trouble begins. Fernando Passoa, the Portuguese poet who is a ghostly presence in Jose Saramajo’s novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, says to Ricardo Reis, “We have never lied to each other, when the need arose, we confined ourselves to using words that lied.” All words lie, I think. Inside every word is an entire context that remains unspoken. And what the word is intended to mean cannot then be realized because the context of the spoken word cannot be fully known by the hearer. I think this may have been Wittgenstein’s idea when he spoke of language games. Wittgenstein argued that a word or sentence only has meaning depending on the "rule" of the "game" being played. That “rule” is the context in which the word is used! For example, “Roll that stone away” has different meanings for African-Americans who were seeking freedom, Sisyphus pushing his burden up the mountain, and a person working to cultivate a flower garden. Preparing the garden might seem a Sisyphysian struggle but it is not equivalent to the torment of Sisyphus.  And I have been thinking that Henry David Thoreau might have preceded Wittgenstein. Thoreau knew the inadequacy of words. He argued, “If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart . . . If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. By this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.” Words require other words to make understanding possible, but the need for that increase would leave then no time to think. The poet Passoa says, “If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words.” But we can never say all words, absurd though they be, and thus all communication remains incomplete, as it were, and lacks truth. The narrator of Saramajo’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis says, “Words hover in the air, waiting for someone to pay attention . . . he could be telling the truth, he could be telling a lie, such is the inadequacy, the built-in duplicity of words. A word lies, with the same word one can speak the truth, we are not what we say, we are true only if others believe us.” What we say then becomes not a lie but the meaning of the words depends on their reception and not by the speaker’s intent. We have no control over words and meaning.
            So it seems to me that the various voicings of the date of the events of September 11, 2001 and January 6, 2020 demands some knowledge of the “rule” in which the words have meaning. And I don’t seem to know the game!

 

Detectives

Peter Brooks, in his new book, Seduced by Story, writes that the detective story is the most rule-bound of genres. He writes, “When the game is played fairly, the story presents us with all the facts, and the detective will pick those that are truly clues and enchain them into the narrative that leads to the solution.” And the reader would follow along with the detective’s intellect to the solution, though the author also does all she can to place obstructions in the reader’s path, disguising some clues, adding distracting characters, and intentionally sending readers down false paths. And sometimes an author doesn’t even present all of the facts! Though I read a great many detective stories (why I do so is an ongoing conversation I have with myself) I usually feel deceived reading in this genre because it is the purpose of the author to confuse the reader with too many characters, motives, clues and suspects. The detective story attempts to place me in the position of the detective searching for a murderer, but it is not a role I covet not least because the author refuses me the freedom to investigate as would be my wont. I have to attend to only those clues and facts the author offers, and I cannot ignore those that are intended to deceive. Josephine Tey’s detective, Alan Grant, in a slightly different context says, “You could get away with anything if you distracted their attention.” And it seems to me that detective writers create sufficient distraction so that they can get away with anything in their narratives. 
            But this distraction is integral to the formula of the detective story, and this prescription, suggests Brooks, allows the reader to focus on something else. He writes, “Yet it seems to me that what we really seek in the detective story is the sense of discovering a solution from intelligence working on a recalcitrant reality, claiming a victory of mind over matter, wresting order from the apparent chaos represented by the crime.” But in fact intellect is not always a detective’s first or strongest method. Strafford, in John Banville’s Snow, “had a way, when he was trying to sort the facts of a case, of lapsing into a sort of dull half-trance. Afterward, when he had come back to himself, he would hardly be able to remember what direction his thoughts had taken, or what the result of them had been.” This work effort, however, is all accomplished by the detective invisibly to a reader. Following intuition is infeasible. Perhaps that is why a detective story is referred to as a ‘page-turner:’ the reader hurries on to discover the murderer and is not first focused on the intellectual work of the detective and certainly not their intellect! It is engagement in a world more exotic than reality that draws many to the detective story. In the novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, this comment appears: “And dull men in offices read detective stories” the latter being escape and vicarious pleasure from the life of the former. 
            But perhaps it is not a natural but an invented chaos the detective story portrays: to paraphrase Beckett’s Estragon who refuses Vladimir’s offer to describe his dreams with this objection: “This one isn’t enough for you?” This one is definitely enough for me and is getting nastier every day! In fact, I prefer the character of a detective like Adam Dalgleish who wants only to find himself and is distracted from doing so by the presence of crime. When he is not dealing in gritty murder, Dalgleish publishes poetry. A policeman in Josephine Tey’s To Live and Be Wise says to Alan Grant, “I was just thinking how shocked the writers of slick detective stories would be if they could witness two police inspectors sitting on a willow tree swapping poems.” I have read a significant number of detective stories and streamed not a few shows and I don’t think following the intelligence of the detective solving the murder is what draws me to the genre. In some sense, I don’t really care who committed the murder: the motives for the murders are often mundane—greed, jealousy (which is almost the same thing), love (ditto), and revenge. Solving the murder and arresting the murderer suggests that now these sins will be eliminated from the social order, though the detective knows that soon he will be called to another murder scene. Lew Archer says, “I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty.” Archer knows that such is not the case. No, what interest me about the detective scene is the character of the detective of which intellect is only a part: they are a complete person engaged in a full life. The detective formulaically is almost always an unwed, divorced or widowed lonely individual who braves and battles the criminally cruel forces of the world though inevitably to find one murderer only leads to the next murder. The detective works alone though their contacts in the community are often called upon and they are often assigned a partner of lower rank to aid in the investigation. I think of Wimsey’s butler, Bunter, and the number of sergeants who accompany the detective in the investigation. Often the detective is an outsider to society and can even be in conflict with the regular police. I think of Sherlock Holmes or EZ Rawlins. Sometimes I don’t admire the detective’s personality and I do not read further. Hercule Poirot is one such example as is Lord Peter Wimsey, for whom detective work is merely a hobby. In Nine Tailors Wimsey says to a police official who complains of the difficulty of the profession, “You musn’t quarrel with your bread and butter, Superintendent. No difficulty, no fun!.” But the superintendent responds, “Fun? Well, my lord, it’s nice to be you!” Indeed, Wimsey himself discounts the role of the intellect in the search for the criminal: he announces that his detective work represents “The triumph of instinct over reason.” The ending of every detective story is always known: the detective of record will find the murderer and the social scene will return to some semblance of order, though the detective (except for Wimsey) does not seem to be either satisfied nor content at his work.  Unlike in a Shakespearean comedy where society begins anew with nuptials, the order that the detective story ending portrays reminds us that underneath what might appear to be order, chaos continues to swell. The murder indicates that the social order has been shattered, and there is no lack of venality in society. Alas, that next story in the book series or television show begins with yet another murder that is motivated by the regular evil motives for homicide. They are, these motives, in fact, universal and enduring. Occasionally politics might appear as the motive for murder; in Foyle’s War politics is complicit in the crime but is not usually its main motivating force. Foyle is a local police detective attempting to solve murders in the violent and corrupting environment of World War II. Complicating his investigation are the politics of the war and the venal attempts of some to take advantage of the situation. Underlying the politics that arise as an accompaniment to World War II exist the usual motives: see above. In Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora novels, Bora, not a detective by profession, serves as a Nazi lieutenant in the war effort. He is himself complicit in mass murderer. In each of the novels (I have read the first five of the series) Bora is ordered by his superiors to investigate the crime and catch the murderer, but the task is connected to the Nazi war effort rather than to a quest for justice. Bora is a proud-enough Nazi, and nothing he does in his search for the murderer can erase the crimes in which he plays a significant role. I do not like Martin Bora nor do I have much interest in the crime he investigates. In the Martin Bora series, Bora finally is an accomplice to murder most foul. 
            I’m presently reading John Banville’s detective novel The Lockup. (Banville has written a number of detective novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. I’ve read them all.) Strafford is yet another solitary, lonely detective who isn’t all that enamored of his work. Quirke, the forensic pathologist, is a deeply troubled human, instigates the investigation into what he says is a suspicious death of Rose Jacobs. Again there will be a political theme to the novel, this time I suspect related to the Holocaust, but it is not the murder, the politics nor the discovery of the perpetrator that interests me but the character of the detectives who interest me. I prefer to follow them rather than the clues.