February 13, 2018 Arts & Culture White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance By Ismail Muhammad A scene at the race disturbance in Wilmington, North Carolina. Originally published in Colliers Weekly, November 26, 1898. Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi protestors as “very fine people.” I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. “Racism,” he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, “is evil … white supremacists and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Nobody could mistake his droning boredom for actual investment in the words he was speaking: his attempt to embrace the decorous discourse of liberal tolerance was baldly hypocritical. As the summer ended and the fall semester began at U.C. Berkeley, where I study literature, far-right agitators descended along with the cool weather. A succession of activists and pundits—Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and their ilk—made their way to campus. They brought the far-right protestors and threats of violence along with them, all the while invoking the language of tolerance and free speech. Berkeley’s former chancellor Nicholas Dirks even cited the campus community’s “values of tolerance” in defending Yiannopoulos’s appearance. The myriad ways in which people were deploying the word tolerance managed to drain the already-insufficient term of its content. All that was left was am empty concept that could accommodate any agenda. It was more clear than ever that the language of tolerance had become ineffective, just a mask behind which antipluralist demagogues could hide. Read More
February 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Hamburger: An American Lyric By Carol J. Adams Campaigning for president in 1992, William Jefferson Clinton proved himself to be the citizen’s candidate by his penchant for hamburgers. Burgher: citizen of the city. There he would be, according to the press, stopping in for hamburgers at local diners. Bill Clinton, not just the citizen’s candidate, he was the citizen candidate; he liked the average Joe’s kind of food (not the sloppy joe; though they use a burger bun, they are not burgers). “It’s the economy, stupid,” was the mantra of the Clinton campaign. The burger is the citizen’s economic food choice, the Everyman’s lowest common denominator. His opponent, President George H. W. Bush, on the other hand, scion of a prominent New England family with a banker father who became a senator, had been cast as out of touch with the average citizen of the United States. “Poor George,” the future Texas governor Ann Richards famously said in 1988, “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Not Bill Clinton: from the media reports, one got a sense he had been born with a hamburger in his mouth. And not a hamburger like President Lyndon Johnson’s favorite hamburger in the midsixties, made from thirty-five-dollar-per-pound ground-up aged sirloin. (Factoring in inflation that would be about $280 in 2017.) Read More
February 12, 2018 Arts & Culture When Women Aren’t Angels By Francine Prose Detail from the poster for Der Blaue Engel Not long ago, I watched, on the Internet, footage of myself being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It was May, 2000, and the subject of our interview was Blue Angel, my then-recent novel about—of all things—sexual harassment. Or at least, that’s what Charlie thought the novel was about. Early in the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that he hadn’t read my book, but that someone at the other end of his earpiece had. And, just in case I hadn’t figured that out, Charlie told me, moments after the cameras stopped rolling, that he didn’t “have time to read fiction,” but his girlfriend did. As he said this, his face wore precisely the same blurry mask of interest that it had worn when we spoke on camera. In Blue Angel, a middle-aged novelist, who teaches creative writing at a small New England college, falls in love with (and ruins his life for) a talented female student. Charlie didn’t want to talk about sentence structure or about where the idea for the novel came from. The earpiece steered us straight to the subject of sexual harassment and political correctness. Read More
February 9, 2018 Arts & Culture Gabriel García Márquez’s Road Trip Through Alabama By Caleb Johnson García Márquez in his home in Mexico in 2003. Photo: Indira Restrepo. In the summer of 1961, Gabriel García Márquez lived with his family in the Webster Hotel on West Forty-Fifth Street in New York City. They paid two hundred dollars a month for a room. The thirty-three-year-old García Márquez had moved to the city a few months earlier to join Prensa Latina, the fledgling Cuban state news agency with offices at Rockefeller Center. While he worked, his wife, Mercedes, and infant son Rodrigo spent their days strolling Central Park. The FBI was monitoring the newsroom, which was itself consumed with subterfuge and rumors over who among the journalists were counterrevolutionaries. Before long, García Márquez’s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who worked at the agency’s Havana bureau, heard of impending mutiny and flew to the States to warn him. By the time Mendoza arrived, Gabo, as he was affectionately called, had already quit. He had enough money to get his family to New Orleans aboard a Greyhound bus. Mendoza returned to Bogotá and wired the cash the family would need to reach Mexico City. There, Gabo had friends and the prospect of part-time journalism work to sustain him while he wrote his next novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Read More
February 8, 2018 Arts & Culture “Even poverty is ancient history”: Resurrection City, 1968 By Jill Freedman Now out in its fiftieth-anniversary edition, Jill Freedman’s Resurrection City documents the culmination of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination. Three thousand people set up camp for six weeks in a makeshift town that was dubbed Resurrection City and participated in daily protests. Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests, and their eventual eviction. Jill Freedman, Demonstrators in the streets, Poor People’s Campaign, Washington D.C., 1968. I knew I had to shoot the Poor People’s Campaign when they murdered Martin Luther King Jr. I had to see what was happening, to record it and be part of it, I felt so bad. Besides, it sounded too good to miss. So I went and had one of the times of my life, and this is my trip. And I never realized how much it had become a part of me until I was writing this and saying “we” and “us” and feeling homesick. Which is what Resurrection City was all about. Of course, it was old stuff from the start. Another nonviolent demonstration. Another march on Washington. Another army camping, calling on a government that acts like the telephone company. Even poverty is ancient history. Always have been poor people, still are, always will be. Because governments are run by ambitious men of no imagination. Whose priorities are so twisted that they burn food while people starve. And we let them. So that history doesn’t change much but the names. Nothing protects the innocent. And no news is new. Read More
February 7, 2018 Arts & Culture The Women Writers You’ve Been Overlooking By Zan Romanoff The Young Adult section at Parnassus Books In December, it seemed like all anyone did was go to the movies and cry. My friends sobbed over Call Me by Your Name, with its dizzyingly lush depictions of queer desire; over the women leading Star Wars’ resistance; and over a girl who called herself Lady Bird. At most of these, I cried, too, but the outpouring of feeling around Lady Bird made me feel sad, and a little isolated. Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut; it follows the titular Lady (née Christine)’s struggles over the course of her senior year of high school. In the weeks after its release, my Twitter timeline overflowed with women who related to its particulars: who had grown up in stifling suburbs or spent their teen years singing along to cast recordings in overstuffed minivans. We had all, it seemed, written boys’ names onto our notebooks and sneaker rubber and wrists. We had all fought bitterly, epically, endlessly, with our moms. Every time I saw a woman opine that Lady Bird was the future of film, an unprecedented and astonishing event, I wished we were somewhere other than on Twitter, where everything sounds like shouting. I wanted to be able to say, gently, There is actually a very rich tradition of this kind of writing available to you. You just have to know that you want it. And then you have to know where to find it. Read More