J. S. Bach & Zarabanda, the Congo God: African Influence on Western Music

Where to begin? Ned Sublette, author of the seminal Cuba And Its Music, which I commend to all curious readers & require for all music lovers, begins with the Phoenicians, the biblical Canaanites, who brought Africans with them in their settlement of Cadiz in plus or minus 760 b.c.e. Apart from its large silver mines, Cadiz became one of the most cosmopolitan & important trading cities of Spain, the second largest city in the Roman empire by the time that the Romans reached the Atlantic. Among the most popular entertainers of the Phoenicians were singing courtesans, many of whom were black. It is not possible to know what these women sounded like, but the musical sex worker would later continue for all seven of the centuries of Muslim rule in Spain. Sublette posits that African people in Cadiz must have affected the culture, explicitly the music of Cadiz, as they have changed the music of everywhere else that they have lived.

But I think it best to begin at a place where more is known of the history & culture. The major African influence in medieval Spain began with the arrival of Abd al-Rahman & his Berber army in 755. Abd al-Rahman was the scion of the Umayyad family, rulers in Syria. His family was annihilated by the Abbassids, who assumed dominion over the empire of Islam. The only Umayyad to survive the massacre, Abd al-Rahman ran to the end of the west, gathering disaffected Berbers as he went, & made his way across the strait of Gibralter to Iberia. As Asian Berbers, the Umayyad do not represent the African culture that I intend to sketch here, but they did bring some of it with them, & they did set into play the African Muslim arrivals that were to follow.

Iberia in the mid-eighth century was no place at all, as culturally & economically undeveloped as could be found in what we now call Europe. There was an emirate at al-Andalus, Andalusia to us, but it was overthrown by the Umayyad army. Abd al-Rahman established his capital in Cordoba & made it the most sophisticated city in the world. He spread his emirate over much of Iberia, establishing in the process one of the most tolerant, literate and culturally advanced civilizations in Western history. Christians & Jews, as “people of the book”, lived in fairly integrated prosperity: many Jews held high office, & Christians were free to worship, though they could not build new churches or proselytize. Jews & Christians also paid taxes, though Muslims did not according to Islamic law. Jews in particular enjoyed a valued status as an educated elite. They would not be so comfortable in Europe again for a millennium.

Intellectual culture was all but dead in the Christendom of the time; the policies of the Church discouraged it. Theology after St. Augustine was full of Platonic absolutes, with an undertone of Paul’s dictum (after being ambushed a group of philosophers while preaching in Greece) that when reason & scientific evidence contradict the scriptures, go with the scriptures. Significant European intellectuals from the classical line would not appear again until the arrivals of Peter Abelard, Hildegard von Bingen & St. Thomas Aquinas in the 12th & 13th centuries.

The lords of al-Andalus were the polar opposites of such Paulist anti-intellectualism. In The Ornament of the World, Maria Rosa Menocal wrote,

It was there [in al-Andalus] that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered & reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style – from the intellectual styles of philosophy to the architectural style of mosques….This vision of a culture of tolerance recognized that incongruity in the shaping of individuals was enriching & productive…

The vernacular tongues that would evolve into Romance blended first in al-Andalus; poetry, which had not much been heard since the Roman Empire fell, followed the vernacular.

The Umayyad employed Qiyan, enslaved African singers & dancers who were also sex workers. They were said to know thousands of songs, & were often the most valuable possessions of their owner. Professional male musicians were new to Muslim culture in the eighth century; the first known to arrive in al-Andalus was an African known as Ziryab, a male Qiyan of well-earned legend. One translation of Ziryab is “Black Songbird”. His origin is unknown, but he came to Cordoba by way of Tunisia after antagonizing his teacher by singing too soulfully for the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad.

In Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman II had filled his court with excellent singers, & Ziryab was the greatest of them. It was said that he knew 10,000 songs. His style was distinctive & he had vast knowledge. More important for our purpose is the fact that he made important improvements on the oud, which would aid its transformation into the lute: he improved its design, added a fifth string & originated the use of an eagle quill instead of the wooden plectrum. Ziryab was a great music theorist who established the world’s first music conservatory. As if his music innovations were not enough, according to Ned Sublette,

…[H]e popularized new styles of dress, adding to the winter & summer clothes a specialized wardrobe for spring & fall;…he popularized facial shaving for men;…he introduced toothpaste, underarm deodorant, & the use of salt as a laundry bleach; he popularized asparagus & made many culinary innovations, & popularized the drinking of wine…He is also said to have given Cordoba that fundamental contribution of the singing star: a new hairstyle.

Generations of musicians acceded to Ziryab’s principles in Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, Toledo, & Valencia. If the ninth century was Islamic music’s golden age, setting its course up to our day, then the Black Songbird may be said to have founded its renaissance.

The Muslim’s returned high culture to a Europe that had lost it after the Roman fall & the ascent of the Church. In addition to a refined medium of sung verse, dance & musical instruments; they introduced radical new knowledge in medicine, astronomy, agriculture, chemistry & most important, mathematics, not to mention historically pivotal innovations that they brought over from the far east, such as gunpowder & paper. They had a nascent banking system, including bank drafts. The roots of the Renaissance are in the mid-east & North Africa, for without the mathematical & financial innovations of the Muslims, the Medici would never have developed the banking systems that financed the artists, architects & other humanists whose work we so admire. Without the Arab &, to a lesser degree, Jewish innovations in navigation & navigation technology the heroic voyages of discovery could not have occurred. Even the celebrated late medieval rediscovery of the writings of antiquity is attributable to the Muslim scholars who preserved them when the Church was destroying pagan writings. Let me resist the impulse to linger over this most interesting subject; instead I commend to you Jerry Brotton’s The Renaissance Bazaar: From The Silk Road To Michelangelo.

Al-Andalus grew fat & lazy & underwent a series of civil wars, with the emirs allying with various Christian lords in an undulating series of battles for one prize or another. The ascendancy of the Christian lords would eventually congeal into the reconquista, which would continue until Ferdinand & Isabella’s expulsion of Muslims & Jews from Spain in 1493. First the Norman princes captured Palermo, the Islamic seat of Sicily, then Cordoba in 1013, & moved on toward Toledo. This does not mean that that they overthrew al-Andalus’ culture; rather, they moved into it. For the first time they read the great libraries, particularly the one at Cordoba, an event that would alter the intellectual life of the West permanently. Maria Rosa Menocal observed, “Over the course of the subsequent century & a half, the Arabized Normans ended by becoming near captives of the culture they had conquered.”

After the Christians under Alphonso VI of Castile took Toledo in 1085, the Ummayad caliph of Seville, al-Mutamid, applied for help to a fundamentalist regime that recently had risen to power in Marrakech in the polity now known as Morocco, the Almoravids,. Al-Mutamid, a wise, literate & accomplished man, expected that the Almoravids would be a short hire, that they would defeat Alfonso & then return to Marrakech. But he underestimated their fanaticism; defeat Alfonso they quickly did, but the Almoravids were contemptuous of the Andalusian way of diplomacy with the Christians & integration of the Jews into all manner of high civic function. These dour & intolerant jihadists took over al-Andalus &, with their successor Almohads, ruled for 150 years; yet they never defeated the proud Andalusian culture

The important aspect of the Almoravid arrival for our story of African music is that the army that they brought comprised enslaved warrior Africans, mostly Sudanese: the Moors, or Blackamoors according to the English, & the Moors brought a powerful new weapon, the war drum. The armies of Christendom had never heard the like, & it terrified them.

These probably were kettle drums; the drumheads might well have been made of the skins of enemies; the great music historian, Fernando Ortiz, wrote that 11th century African war drums probably were “fed” with the blood of enemies. These were drums of power – they called to earth supernal beings. They talked, and therefore had a great military value as they could give commands. The drums were of great utility in the course of battle as the primary means of maneuvering troops. Theirs was not a sound that your army & townspeople wanted to hear during a siege. El Cid, the first great modern epic poem (a form that was a byproduct of the culture of al-Andalus), mentions the Moorish drums three times. These kettles would evolve into the tympani, whose importance in Western music is well known.

Other instruments that settled into Iberia during the years of al-Andalus included the rehab or rebec, the first bowed strings that the European continent heard; it would be the antecedent of the violin. Another was the shawm, a double reed instrument that may or may not have been the progenitor of the oboe. They also had a cylindrical bore trumpet that was more advanced that any brass that Westerners played. They introduced the tambourine.

There is much, much more to be written about the infusion of North African & Mid Eastern music into the Western vernacular, particularly in the instance of sung poetry, but I will skip ahead a few centuries to a hot relationship that Ned Sublette tells of so well: the marriage of Havana & Sevilla.

….


What, you might wonder, can the god of steel, the primary god of the Congo, have to do with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach? Quite a bit, actually, but I’ll take the long route to the answer.

The word “drum” has no documentation in the English language before 1529. Europeans had danced to the tambourine, introduced, as you will recall, in al-Andalus, & a few small drums have been noted here & there. European armies adopted the Moorish military kettle drums during the wars of reconquista, but they had not yet been employed in music. Why? because the church designated drums the instruments of the devil & banned them. This was not unreasonable from the church perspective as they considered the polytheistic gods of other cultures to be demons (a belief that had prevailed since Peter settled in Rome) & these drums spoke articulately to the gods as could be seen in the routine possessions that occurred during African religious ceremonies. Of course, all dance & dance music were banned by the church, though they never were anywhere near eradicated.

In medieval Europe, dance & musical instruments essentially existed almost entirely within the domain of the lower classes. Andalusia, with its powerful Moorish retentions, was the source of much of the continent’s instrumental music. The moresque or morisca, which mean “Moorish dance”, is the dance that appears most often in texts from the 15th century. In Britain it became the still extant Morris dance.

Cultural change accelerated when Portugal instituted the transcontinental African slave trade in the 15th century. The conservative, up tight Portuguese didn’t know it, but they were importing rhythm & a love of dancing to Europe. Fernando Ortiz wrote, “from the south, hot & black, the rhythm of Africa invaded Europe up to the cold countries, where the negros were frequently drummers, both in the armies & in the popular diversions.” The source was Iberia: Lisbon, Cadiz, & increasingly, Sevilla. By the mid-16th century drums had become integral to show music, & then to court music, because the new dances could not be done without them.

The social mobility of dances & their rhythms will be familiar to us today: the popular dances were done first by black people, then by poor whites, & then by the “society.” Yet Western music historians have been silent on these origins, though the documentation is ample. Sublette observes, “The entry for ‘rhythm’ in the 29 volume New Grove Dictionary of Music does not once mention Africa in its 32 page text. But it does speak of a ‘metric revolution’, noting that

Around 1600 a dramatic change took place in Western rhythmic notation…The appearance of this constellation of notational features is significant, for it indicates that a basic change in the rhythmic foundation of Western music was underway…Before 1600 some music was metric while other music was not; after 1600 most music was metric.

Ned Sublette:

I would like to suggest that this European metric revolution had something to do with a new wave of dancing, which in turn had more than a little to do with the rise of the African slave trade & the entry of Africans into European society. As everywhere else Africans have gone, they played music & got people dancing.

The Spanish purchased their enslaved Africans primarily from the Portuguese for settlement in the New World. A rebellion in 1522 in Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic & Haiti, struck chords of memory of the fierce warrior Moors, & the Spanish, who still dreamed of crusades to rid Jerusalem of Jews & Muslims, wanted no more of it. In 1526, King Carlos issued an order that banned the importation of any “Gelofes [Wolofs, from the Senegambia], nor those from the Levant…nor any others raised with Moors.”

Cuba, then, was settled by Africans from the forest regions; drum speaking Africans, unlike those from the North of Africa, the grass & desert lands, whose musical orientation was strings. Those Africans went to the British colonies, a fact that provides Sublette the basis for an elegant explanation of the reason that jazz musicians & Afro-Cuban musicians had such a hard time playing together when Dizzy Gillespie & Mario Bauza tried to merge the two in the 1940s, but that’s another story. The Cubans came from the region of Africa that Europeans called the Congo, though it was much larger than the Congo & included Angola & more. They were the people who are most often referred to as Bantu, an appellation that these Africans dislike as it is applied correctly only to language & not to people.

In 1539, “the year before the drum made its first appearance in English history”, a writer made note of an African dance in Panama called the zarabanda. It came from the Congo, called by the Congolese Nsala-banda, after the god of iron, the principal god of the Congo. It was later noted in Havana.

The zarabanda would soon show up is Sevilla, the port city of preference in commerce between Spain & Cuba. Sevilla by then had a large African population. There was a grand May festival there, the Festival of Corpus Christi, “a splendid fiesta of religious drama, sacred music, & even sacred dance, with floats supported on the shoulders of a dozen men” (Sublette). As with any large popular festival, the partying went on all over the city, in streets & alleys & other public spaces. Africans came out in costumes of their own, performing their own dances accompanied by their own instruments, especially the drums, still satanic to the powerful clergy.

The zarabanda quickly grew wildly popular in Spain; the church declared it anathema & threatened to whip men who did it & sentence them to the galleys, & to exile female performers, but still it raged. Covarrubias de Orozco wrote in his Spanish dictionary of 1611, ”It is lively & lascivious, because it is done with immodest shaking of the body.….Although all parts of the body are moved, the arms make the greatest gestures, sounding the castanets.” The dance dominated the Corpus celebration of 1593 with everybody joining in, to the disgust of the clergy. Padre Juan de Mariana thought that it was “so lascivious in its words, so ugly in its sway, that it was enough to set decent people afire.” Padre Juan seems a bit contradictory here, but one can imagine the sheer irresistible power of the rhythm & the release of inhibitions.

Soon, the zarabanda was seen, not only in festivals, but also in the open-air comedy that would lead Spain into its golden age of theater. People of African descent were very popular in Spanish entertainment in the 17th century when Spanish theater was the most highly developed in Europe. As Fernando Ortiz wrote, “the negro & the mulatto…were something more than figures in the background; they were also musicians, dancers, singers, comedians, even authors.”

The zarabanda adapted as its adoption spread. African guitarists of Seville, with their percussive phrasing, were the best in Spain. They played the zarabanda music on this new instrument & made it what Sublette names the rock & roll of Spain in the way that it acquired rapid popularity. As the guitar quickly moved into the poor quarters across Europe, the zarabanda rode with it. It was soon in Naples, another city with a large African population. As it traveled it became instrumental: it lost its text & context. The first notated example appeared in Italy in 1606; Ben Jonson mentioned a saraband in England in 1616. By the time it settled in France it had doused its percussive fire & become the common conclusion of a dance suite. In the 18th century, J. S. Bach wrote at least 39 sarabands, the most dances that he ever composed. Instead of the rabble rousing, sexually graphic demonstration that shocked Covarrubias & Padre Juan so much, it had changed into something that Lincoln Kirsten called “elegiac, meditative & noble.” Ned Sublette’s summary:

So imagine that Zarabanda, the Congo god of iron – the cutting edge, if you will – traveled on a slave ship with his magic, his mambo [“mambo” originally meant magic] & his machete as soon as the New World was open for business. Then he went back through Havana, across the ocean again, where he got all of Spain dancing, then covertly crept up through Europe – through the servants’ entrance, of course - & became part of what we call classical music. In the process, his name was frenchified, he lost his drum & his voice, & his tempo slowed way down. All that remained was the distillation of his dance onto the lute & the guitar, with only the barest of the original flavor remaining. Today we call that process going mainstream.

As it was with the zarabanda, so it would be a generation later with the chacona, which replaced the zarabanda with the dancing poor. A verse from that time of that giant of Spanish theater, Lope de Vega, reads, “From the Indies / to Sevilla / it has come by post.” For “Indies”, read Havana.

The chacona was most often played on the guitar with castanets & tambourines. Like the zarabanda, it was the dance of slaves & servants; like the zarabanda, it was said to be Satan’s invention: its movements were sexually suggestive, its lyrics mocking, even of the clergy. It was danced very fast. Its course through the hard strata of society was the zarabanda’s. By the time that it worked its way up through the dance masters & musicians of the courts of Europe & entered classical music it had become entirely instrumental, & was much slower. It was no longer the chacona; it was now the chaconne or passacaglia, the terms were nearly interchangeable. However, the “constructive device” as Sublette calls it, remained the rhythmic cell that is the common constructive device of the drum cultures of Africa.

Ned Sublette’s conclusion of this chapter is cogent & challenges what we thought we knew of the cultural basis of classical music. I quote it here at some length as I am loathe to paraphrase & certainly can’t improve it.

The undulation of the zarabanda & the ostinato of the chacona were badly needed in European music. The sixteenth century was a time when church composers, after centuries of stretching the boundaries of the liturgically permissible, had erected a complex superstructure over the cantus firmus of Gregorian chant, elaborating rules of harmonic movement for independent vocal lines, what theorists call voice leading. When composers transcribed the multiple, independent lines of the early polyphonic vocal composers for lute & for organ, a new kind of music was born: a complex, legalistic, purely instrumental music for listening.

With the gradual acceptance of equal temperament, the system that made the keyboard king, a concept of functional harmony was developing that would reach its peak in the “well-tempered” works of J.S. Bach. With that came a new concept: harmonic rhythm – the resolution of tension & release in time. This led to the tonal-dramatic structure of the sonata, whose internal architecture, combined with the multimovement structure of the suite, would give rise to the symphony.

It was a tremendous intellectual & aesthetic achievement. It’s the basis of what university music departments teach to this day. Rhythmically, however, it was much less sophisticated than what the Pygmies had been doing for millennia. It definitely wasn’t for dancing.

But Europe wanted to dance. The slave trade, which had previously spurred a fantastic prosperity in the Islamic world, was now generating riches for Christian Europe. &, as previously had happened in the Islamic world, there grew a moneyed leisure class that wanted music for dancing.

But the Europeans never learned to drum. Ortiz writes:

A curious phenomenon occurs whose consideration is indispensable to appreciating duly the influence, then & later, of black drums. The musical transcendence of blacks in the musical cultures & theaters of the whites manifests itself preferentially by the penetration & dissemination of the characteristic rhythms of their drums, but not by the adoption of those drums, except for those of military character. This social phenomenon in Europe has hidden much of the reality of African influences…& the invasion of the rhythms, which then penetrated the whites’ music, has remained in large part unexplained.

In other words, the rhythms were taken up but were shifted over from the drum to the tambourine, an instrument not associated with the vileness of the negro. The masters, not the slaves, wrote the history; the slaves’ culture was invisible, even as it transformed that of the masters.

When that African – probably, specifically Bantu – thing of dancing to a syncopated rhythmic loop came into Europe via Spain from Havana & found a home in the dance suite, that was about as rhythmic as European art music was going to get until well into the twentieth century.

Well said.

Next, Jeseph Bologne, the Chevalier de St. George, whose mother was African & whose father was a French Noble, becomes the greatest swordsman (double meaning here) in France, one of its greatest composers & violinists, & creates the first modern orchestra.

The Last Of My Time Makes A City

the last of my time makes a city that fills
is filling now with all the music i have ever loved
sonatas for cellos & congas, for arpeggiones & oboes d’amore
choirs of saxophones, entire symphonies of scat & arias
in languages i’ve never learned but know the music of
this is where i live, this is how i feed, on memory
& melody whose fey structures surround me
whose architects have shaped my time

but perhaps i make too much demand of song. could
some other art better compose my summary years?
does the poem reach far enough / spread wide enough?
can i clear the stage of people whom i do not wish
to know? is the eye to be trusted after all
that it has seen? could my last city be well built
on canvas, its thoroughfares curving & arcing
in perspective up past the smokestacks & bridges
where the factions of my years lob color bombs
at each other across the boulevard? no & no
my last time is a swinging tune in a minor key
in a town built of timbre, with lithe ethnic dancers
& a hell of a band

2

i have come so very far & gone nowhere, memory wearied
long ago & now rests with my youth at the start of paths
old runaways like nat turner wore across the Great Dismal Swamp
where my home town floated. cottonmouth & cohorts
of nocturnal forest felons hunted & mated there
so much leaf over the eye & under the foot
loam so alive each fallen twig bored down roots
vast orchestras of birds sang of me & other peripatetic
tourists of the swamp. the summer sun blinked down
its checkerboard patterns according to the whims
of breeze & leaf & i was domiciled with my serenity
until the perfidious dark chased me home

my city walk is no less shaded by time & euphony
(the birds sing a cappella here) no less the habitat
of hunters & prey. i know where the ocean is
can smell it from here, can find the houses where
the specters of my loves reside, can shop for melodies
of every shade of humankind. some days my wealth
enlarges me, for i own treasures as short as
a four beat phrase or as long as that string of 16th notes
that trilled through my head just now. you i value
most of all for the billowing love that let you read
this far. please describe for me the light
we met inside of. did our breath collide? i do not mind
that i can’t recall the cubist planes of your face
but when you spoke, how was your cadence tempered?
what was your favorite word?

3

in homer’s time they tracked the body’s hollows
for fumets of the soul. the colon seemed a likely host
which we can understand, but if their excavation
yielded one, what would they have done with it?
dyed it green & sealed it in an jar so natural philosophers
could worry it to death? nagged it for tutorials
in metaphysics until the poor thing bled ectoplasm?

i have read so much & learned so little. it’s not just
that age stutters the mind, that i can’t recall the sequence
of the presidents or where the peloponnesus is
it’s time’s obliteration of all those smart ideas
that could have cued my life; knit together they might have told me
how we came to live in this kakistocracy & how to lead us out
how history defies hegel & adopts the progress
of the cottonmouth, fanging & breeding & shedding
its odious skin as it slithers along. it’s that i can no longer
sing on key so what does it matter if i know ten thousand
songs? it’s that i can’t chant the tribal story like a griot
or think my pea green ass out of this goddamn jar

4

despite or because of all i remain a man
of song. there’s a boogie in my blood that palpitates
my body in the tempo of the present. in the presence
of my children who are wiser & more comely
than i my low bass voice projects a dust of summer
colors as far as its range will carry. unlike me
they have such perfect pitch they do not have to sing
to be understood. on the theme of karen
i blow a mellow blues of owing what i don’t know
how to pay. my vows swore me to clarify her dreams
pitch a brick into the eye of the cyclops that bars our way
& all i’ve done is compound a long confounding puzzle
even i have no solution for

so that’s the quest i’m off on now. i’ll drive
till the map runs out, fly till i reverse the globe
spin & spin till i’m dervish enough to improvise a song
that’s free of every image in this poem. transcribe that lyric
& you’ll have my answer

The Endless Campaign; Some Final (I Think) Thoughts

1) It pisses me off that of all the commentary that I’ve heard on CNN & all of the op ed pieces that I’ve read in the New York Times & the Washington Post, not once have I heard anyone say or seen anyone write that Obama won because he was, by several furlongs, the superior candidate. Yes, Bush made most voters realize how incoherent social conservatism is as a working political & economic ideology. Yes the economy made voters anxious to throw the bastards out. Yes, McCain made some blunders, but it was clear to anyone who wasn’t dead or, worse, ideologically locked into voting Republican at any cost, that Barack Obama was the best of all the candidates of both parties, & that’s why he won by such a plurality.


2) As much as everyone, including me, complained about the length of this Presidential campaign, in some ways its length, its very enormity, was of historic substantive importance. First, it gave Barack Obama time to grow. The Obama whom I saw Sunday night on 60 Minutes is a much larger man than the Obama who announced his candidacy however many eternities ago. Remember that neophyte? He read his speeches beautifully but had long gaps in his answers to interviewers while he searched for safe places to stand. Did you not think, “talented young guy, but not ready. He’s building his name, marking his path to 2012 or even 2016.” People who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew said that he expected Sen. John McCain to beat Sen. Hillary Clinton in ’08, that his run was a rehearsal. But as the months passed we saw him steadily pile up elements of competence. His delivery grew progressively smoother. His responses to interviewers appeared less & less like a grad student who had stayed up all night studying for the quiz & more like those of a professor who might have taught the course. Similarly, the Barack who did well to survive the first debate with the formidable Sen. Clinton was replaced by the fully hatched man of depth & scope who seemed mildly amused by the desperate jabs & hooks of Sen. McCain, an old pro who actually was at the top of his game in the three debates. In sum, by the end of the campaign, Barack Obama exuded a reassuring command that made us comfortable in our votes. I’ve been watching these campaigns for more than forty years, & I’ve never seen such growth in a candidate before.

3) Then there’s the campaign its own self, as we used to say in North Carolina. Remember how the early speculation was that, while Sen. Obama would be able to raise a fair amount of money & attract a lot of attention, Sen. Clinton’s organization was too well made for him to challenge seriously; nor could he aspire to raise the cash that would flow to her. & anyway, Sen. Clinton had already locked up all of the leading strategists, so there was no one left to guide Sen. Obama. Yet Sen. Obama’s operation was so well conceived, so meticulously organized that it dropped the jaws of hard, life-long politicians. My sister-in-law, a State Senator, was one of a group of Connecticut politicians that included at least one Congresswoman, who convinced Sen. Obama to fight Ms Clinton for Connecticut, which his staff had thought the New York Senator had locked. This was a tough group of hard leg pols who worked effectively to help deliver the state, but they all swore that they had never seen an operation & a staff with even half the efficiency of Obama’s, & this was in the early primaries. This, they said, was something new. By the time of the election, the organization had grown so large that it might easily have become unwieldy. Yet everyone I know who volunteered to work on the election, including my wife & daughter, both experienced street organizers, shook their heads in amazement at the competence & resources of the Obama enterprise. It’s an interesting sidebar that the staff that my wife encountered in Virginia comprised primarily older women, while my daughter met twenty-somethings & college students in Cleveland. Even the Republicans, accustomed to the efficiently cynical, leave no bull pie unthrown campaigns of Lee Atwater & Carl Rove, were boggled by the supremacy of the Obama machine.

All of this was governed by an intellectual acuity that was the solvent of all of the slander, misdirection & faux populism of the opposition. It was the first 21st century campaign. One Republican Governor complained this week that, “Obama’s got an email list of ten million, while our candidate doesn’t know how to use (a blackberry)”. Enough has been written about President-Elect Obama’s application of the internet to mobilize suporters & to raise money, & I’m more like Sen. McCain than the President-Elect in this respect, so I will not comment on this more. But they will go to school on this operation for a long time. Don’t think for a minute that Republicans won’t woodshed on it & apply its lessons in turn. They did not like being outspent by an attractive young man who could legitimately claim to owe no lobbyists, with some $500,000,000 raised on-line.

Too, as noted above, Obama was superior to any other politician who declared for President in strategy. He & his assistants out-thought them all. Sen. Clinton was dead certain that she’d have the nomination locked by super Tuesday & was completely unprepared by Sen. Obama’s methodical accretion of delegates. Nor Was Sen. McCain able to cope with the red state challenges that Sen. Obama posed. There was such precisely cold-blooded analysis at work in all the demographic groups, the campaign so sure footed, so prepared for every assault, that Senators McCain & Clinton must have felt themselves surrounded.

The result was that by the end, voters were reassured that someone who could build such an organization, conceive such a strategy, execute a two-year march with such originality, discipline & skill, was competent to be their hard-times President, no matter the skimpiness of his resume. I have never seen the very management of a campaign become a crucial mode of evaluation of a presidential candidate, It was the campaign of a new generation of politicians, & it is only right that they take over this world that my generation has screwed up so bad. & no, the left is not blameless for this state: we fell dormant too often & for too long to have a serious historical effect during the last twenty years.

4) Can we please stop hearing from Sarah Palin for a while? Doesn’t she have a job? This is a genuinely annoying person who has nothing interesting to say, but there she is, every day, blabbing inanities to anyone with a microphone. Will she shut up if we let her keep the shoes? Even though she shows no evidence of ever having read a book voluntarily, she’s gotten a fat book contract. What will the title be? Maybe Knocked Up In The Tundra: Miss Alaska Heads For Washington With A Moose On Her Hood But Gets A Flat On The Way. No, that’s the whole book. She’s going to need a hell of a ghostwriter.

But seriously folks, as Peter Beinart has written, the culture war that the right loves to wage & that Gov. Palin personifies so perfectly is irrelevant in depressed times. Few people are preoccupied with issues of racial, sexual & religious identity when they are struggling to buy groceries & pay the mortgage. Beinart notes that in the roaring twenties, elections were fought over immigration, evolution, the Ku Klux Klan & prohibition. He wrote, “in 1924, the Democratic convention so bitterly split over prohibition & the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.” (I trust that no one will think that he was implying that bigotry became impotent during this period). The Depression put the progressive wet candidate, FDR, in office. In 2000, one of several years when the business flourished on the kind of abstract capital that the ‘twenties roared on, 22% of voters cited moral values as their primary concern against 19% who named the economy. Compare this with the Newsweek poll in the week before the 2008 election wherein 44% named the economy as number one & only 6% held to “issues like abortion, guns & same-sex marriage.” This is why McCain-Palin couldn’t anchor Bill Ayres & the Rev. Wright (again, a better man than most of you think) to Obama. This is why Sarah Palin couldn’t help Sen. McCain extend his reach.

5) If you go back a few entries you’ll see my essay entitled …Being & Politics
in which I discussed the Existential implications of Sen. Obama’s candidacy for inner city youth, who often are so alienated that they think that being smart is white. I wrote that the symbolism of his success might bring at least some of them to the kind of angst that could cause them to reconsider this lost view of blackness. Now we have innumerable anecdotes describing teenaged African American & Latino youth talking about how, after watching Obama work, they might try to go to college. I saw literally hundreds here in D. C. wearing Obama t-shirts. He made smart cool.

I hope that he & Michelle remember the kids like those with whom he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. Of course, he’ll try to improve their education; perhaps he’ll fund developmental after school programs for kids who have no constructive leisure time activities. Some intensive job training would be good. But most of all, I hope that he occasionally talks to them, goes to see them, shoots some hoops with them. Show them how cool smart really is.

A. B. Spellman

The End Of Campaign Blues

The electoral campaigns, which seem to have been running for my entire adult life, will be over soon, & one form of stress will be replaced by another. The pre-election stress is of a type that is shared by, probably, all who read this essay: it is the fear, & this is literal, not hyperbolic fear, that the McCain – Palin ticket will through some maliferous miracle prevail to lead America into a worse state than we suffer now. There is much to fear on this score.

First, these are not the most intellectually gifted politicians around. The debates, as redundant & tedious as they were, exposed McCain as a man of little scope or depth beyond the single issue of national security, & even here there is much to concern us. On all other issues he was a debater in search of an argument. On health care, on the economy, he was & remains like a traveling salesman with an empty case: he has no product line to sell, so he can only tell us why we shouldn’t buy Obama’s. This is why his ads are so desperately negative. Obama is so clearly the superior candidate that McCain & Palin must try to paint him as a fellow traveler of terrorists or the apostate acolyte of Jeremiah Wright who is, by the way, a much better man than the public has been led to believe.

Governor Palin’s problem is that she doesn’t know anything. Her well advertised executive experience consists of less than two years managing a staff of fifty, & she added a position so that she could delegate most of her management duties. I certainly am not one to believe that our Presidents must be white male career politicians, but what on earth does the incredibly annoying Gov. Palin have to offer? She shows no signs of having even studied for this test. Worse, she is hard headed, ill informed, & representative of the most bigoted, reactionary & jingoistic tendencies in American politics, a very dangerous combination. Even reasoned people of the right are damning this ticket because of her.

Which brings me to fear # 2: McCain is seventy-two years old, & his cancer has not been in remission for ten years. It is altogether possible that Pres. McCain will croak in office & leave us with Pres. Palin. The world shudders at the prospect. I’m sorry, but this prospect is too grotesque to apply my imagination to. I would have to compose my death poem & slit my wrists.

Fear # 3 has to do with the policies that McCain would apply during his administration. Any reforms of Wall Street will be minimal & short-lived. The man has never read Keynes or he would know that the financial cannibalism that has broken the economy is the predictable result of deregulation. An engine with greed as its power source needs a governor to keep from burning itself up.

Under McCain we can expect the military to consume an even greater portion of the budget than the nearly half that it already owns. The excesses of the Patriot Act would increase. The environment would get little attention, & the number of people without health care would increase. These are near certainties.

Fear # 4 concerns the fact that Obama will undoubtedly break my heart several times as President. I fear that he might actually be the centrist that he advertises himself to be when the world needs a more radical direction. I do not expect him to be as left as I, but I do hope that he proves to be at the left end of liberal. Indeed, the term “liberal” seems to slide more & more to the right every year. For example, the Supreme Court Justices, Stevens, Ginsburg et al who are described as “liberal” or even “left” in the press are really mainstream moderates by American standards. I am not even comparing them to European liberals & certainly not to the European left, but to such of their predecessors as Marshall & Black. The Supreme Court needs strong progressive libertarians in a time when social mores can be pushed forward or backwards in ways that they never have been pushed before. The prevailing far right on Court cannot be balanced by centrists, whom I fear Obama will appoint.

Will Obama advocate for economically viable borders for the state of Palestine against the force of Israel’s Biblical revanchism? Almost certainly he will not. Will he seek a way to end the distortion of the federal budget by reducing military spending, thereby increasing allocations for progressive causes? Not a chance. Will he adopt the model of F. D. R. & undertake true reform of the financial system & initiate massive programs of much needed public works & social welfare? Possibly. The fact is that he will have to make some awful compromises in order to govern. We already see him sliding to the right on issues like off-shore drilling, which he always has opposed, incursions into our personal liberties under the Patriot Act, & the military budget. Still they try to red-bait him by calling him “Marxist” or “socialist”. Only people who never have read Marx & don’t know anyone who has could utter this.

Still, that might be greatness that we see shining out of the man, & these times demand greatness. Bush certainly has left him enough shit to shovel to fill two very accomplished terms. If the promised Democratic majorities attain, the possibilities are there, but it will require more discipline & creativity than we’ve seen the party show since Lyndon Johnson. As I wrote earlier, the fact that two parties must house all of the divergent, even contradictory interests that need a voice in American politics means that too many of us have to submit to powerful interests that rise to dominance. It also leads to the stultifying consensus that the middle course is wisest. The only group that defies this principle is the far right, which quite happily would dictate to the rest of us if they could.

& so, one week from this entry I will file my vote for Obama in my attempt to ensure that the District of Columbia’s one Electoral College vote goes to the best candidate in many, many years. In my heart there will be conflicting fears that, on the one hand the Republican vote theft machine will steal yet another election &, on the other hand, that Obama will be inhibited in office to such a degree that the change that is needed won’t get out of the garage.

I wish that I still drank.

A. B. Spellman

A Wrongful Death

Gentle reader,

I don’t know if I explained this to you, but I am the most techno-lame individual in the English language, viz., I wrote this blog two weeks ago & posted it, or so I thought. Then a friend told me that she looked to see if anything new was up & saw a title, but no essay. I’ve no idea how I messed this up, but mess it up I did. My daughter in her humanity has consented to post this for me, thus relieving me of this source of stress in my old age. She didn’t even ask for a larger portion than her sister in my will.

As I wrote above, the piece is over two weeks old. It doesn’t treat this abominable trillion dollar subsidy of our banking system which seems to have succeeded in eating itself in its edacious greed. Why should anybody be surprised at this? The rich have always favored socialism when it favored them. It’s only when tax funds flow to the less well off that they, the wealthy, condemn it as big government being wasteful by supporting people who don’t carry their own weight. The Wall Street fundamental, that the solution to any economic problem is to make the rich richer, still holds.

So here’s the essay that my blog site told me was posted, big liar that it is. I’ll be back in a little while with the first in a series on how diasporan Africans have helped to shape Western culture, in the first instance classical music.


A Wrongful Death

I am so goddamn sick of this campaign that it is entirely possible that I will die of it. It seems that it has been going on for my entire adult life, bloviation upon expatiation, relentlessly destroying any lingering faith that I might have had in the American electoral system. One of the candidates, Obama, I have held in general political concurrence; the other I have agreed with only on the need to limit the amount of money that’s thrown at election to public office, a principle that he has left in whatever graveyard my patience with this election went to. Yet, I heretofore thought John McCain to possess at least a modicum of integrity.

Can anybody actually date the beginning of this campaign? The primaries started decades ago, & what started as a reasoned, inspiring debate between two historic Democrats quickly evolved into a duel of spears which I’m proud to say, Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama have peacefully reconciled. But the conflict that followed between the parties degenerated into a painful display of Obama trying to get in front of these absurdly trivial obfuscations that McCain sends after him like a swarm of bees. It’s as if the parties conspired to pound the public sensibilities with corrosive inanity until all objective capacity decayed & we submitted utterly & became two facets of one community, the zombie community, incapable of critical thought & awaiting instructions.

At this stage, late September, 08, substance has turned to silliness, & there’s Barack haplessly defending himself on his use of a common Washington vocabulary simile about pig lips. There are life & death, maintenance of a reasonable standard of living, survival of the planet, etc issues on the table that can’t be punted to a future President & the man is ducking cream pies or, more accurately, cow pies. Of course, the Republicans are primarily to blame for this. They have developed this awful, torturer’s skill of vicious irrelevance that millions of voters bite on every time. Remember the Willie Horton ad that Bush, Sr. threw at Michael Dukakis? it convinced a voting majority that Dukakis liked black, murderous rapists so that he, Dukakis, nearly fell off the polling charts altogether. This was a late 20th century revival of a common practice of the earlier decades when Southern politicians – incidentally all Democrats as there were almost no white Southern Republicans in those days - would swing destitute white voters to their side by claiming that their opponents were “nigger lovers”.

In the 21st century when the American attention span is measured in seconds, Republican strategists apparently have concluded that the kind of profound issues that we face, which are too complex to reduce to sound bites (curious metaphor), should not be discussed at all. If the issues won’t reduce, make something up, like “Obama’s going to raise your taxes.” It’s a whopper of a lie, but easily understood & deeply cutting to struggling voters. Obama’s “McCain is just Bush lite” is ineffective because a) it needs explaining, & 2) Bush has become so irrelevant that his image doesn’t resonate anymore. (Parenthetically, there’s danger in ignoring Bush these days because he’s sneaking some pretty bad stuff through, like the extraordinary powers that he’s just given the FBI.)

& then there’s McCain’s clever debasement of Hillary’s campaign by adding Sarah Palin to his ticket. This Nobody from Nowhere qualifies to be President by being photogenic, able to read a speech with enthusiasm, as mean as an Alaska wolverine, having a family, & being to the right of the edge of the wide, flat earth. & yet she sells. H. L. Menckens’ dictum that nobody ever went broke by overestimating the bad taste of the American people applies here.

But seriously, folks, the Democracy that America advertises on it’s chest like a superhero emblem seems to diminish every year. Our national electoral system is sick in its heart. First there’s the Electoral College. I understand why we’re stuck with it; the small states would have declined the Union without it, but it seems kind of silly now. Because of this antique system & its compromise of the one-person-one-vote principle we’ve had to suffer eight tragic years of neocom madness in the White House. You know the result of the Bush reign: the most reactionary Supreme Court since Chief JusticeTaney kept Lincoln up at night; a war that makes life worse for the poor Iraqi people, at least for those who survive it, further destabilizes the most unstable region in the world, kills & wounds thousands of American youth, profoundly deepens the debt that we’ve been struggling with since our last stupid credit card war in Vietnam; the corruption of the Constitution; hell, you can finish the list. But I do want to add one more item that’s particularly germane to this ’08 election, & that’s the assault on the progressive income tax.

I digress, but this is arguably the most crucial issue of this campaign. I am no economist, but it seems to me that capitalism generates more wealth than socialism, but doesn’t distribute it well; instead of trickling down as Republicans historically have advertised in various iterations, the wealth flows to the top. When we had a manufacturing economy with strong unions there was at least a modicum of balance, a force to countervail big capital. Now that big capital has found a way to gain wealth without heavy industry & its annoying unions through the miracle of “outsourcing” (an obnoxious euphemism), there remains no natural means of ensuring that the national treasure will distribute at all. & so the statistics on the numbers of people who hold the greatest percentage of the wealth gets smaller & smaller every year, so that today one percent of the population controls twenty three & a half percent of the wealth The much maligned system of Big Government with its numerous programs, as clumsy & inefficient as it is, is absolutely fundamental to the survival of all but the wealthiest class in the U. S. This is why Obama’s proposal to increase the tax rate for those who earn more than $250,000 per annum while lowering it for the rest of us while McCain works to cut corporate taxes is central to this election. But it isn’t even being debated! Reduction of complex issues to slogans & campaign ads is not debate.

The other essential function of government that has diminished during the last three & a half decades is regulation. Deregulation & lower taxes on the corporations & the wealthy are the reasons that Republicans fight for election with such berserk, ferocious ruthlessness. Yet as working Americans clutch their increasingly shaky 401ks & their flighty mortgages to their chests as the flood waters pour over the financial sector they should remember that the greatest President of the last century, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who held that private wealth had gotten too private & had become privileged, saved & restored the financial sector with a thorough & elaborate regulatory system. They should recall that Herbert Hoover tried to lead big business to financial health through suasion, which only earned us the depression; that Republicans fought Roosevelt’s regulatory efforts tooth & nail. Roosevelt’s regulatory successes included:

1) The Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, which separated investment banks from commercial banks, thereby insulating depositors from the lustful gambles of Wall Street. We’re experiencing this massive financial crisis in great part because the investment banks wormed their way out of this stipulation.
2) Under the same act, the formation of the Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation or FBDIC, now the FDIC., which insures our bank accounts. Without that one we’d be saving our money between the mattress & the box springs.
3) The creation of the Securities Exchange Commission, which forced publicly traded firms to open their books & have them independently audited. (see 1 above)
4) The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which imposed uniform national appraisal standards on the real estate market. (ditto)
5) The FHA, or Federal Housing Administration, which insured long-term loans & created standards of home construction,
6) The Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae. You know all about that one, but it’s enough to say that without these last three agencies we’d all be renters.
7) Social Security
8) The Fair Labor Standards Act, which, among other things, putatively eliminated child labor. I write “putatively” because big capital has successfully transferred this particular abuse to developing countries.
9) The much abused National Labor Relations Board, which Republican administrations have practically beaten to death; and
10) Several others that endure, which I’ll only name because this is not an essay on the New Deal: the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), & the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

That, boys & girls, is what Republicans mean when they vilify big government. Looks pretty good right now, doesn’t it?

That system has been increasingly neutered under the several Republican administrations with the pusillanimous complicity of Democrats. As the big Wall Street investment houses have, in effect, sucked themselves dry, the cries of “the signs were evident; why didn’t somebody do something?” sounds like wolves howling in complaint that somebody has eaten all the sheep. Nobody who could do anything about it complained as the tools of correction were turned into scrap metal. Every time the rotten underpinnings have been exposed, the predacious scions of Wall Street pled to be left alone to solve these problems themselves & increased their campaign donations to candidates of both parties, so that now Wall Street contributes more to politics than any other sector. They did this under Hoover & got us a depression; they did it under Reagan & the Bushes (&, yes, Clinton) & they are doing it now. (I must add that with much of South Texas underwater, many people there are going to learn how cynical the insurance business is as the people of New Orleans learned. This, too, is because the insurance companies have fought off almost all significant efforts to regulate them, so nobody holds them to account.)

Back to the electoral system & how it is a biopsy of the sickness of our well-advertised democracy. First: the length of the campaign does not educate the voters, it makes them dumber. The sheer superficiality of candidate & pundit commentary on complicated contemporary problems accustoms people to tendentiousness so that the best slogans are rewarded & the most thorough analysis is punished. You can ask Gore & Kerry about this. Perhaps a three-month & done race like the Brits have would make the candidates stand up in a few well-broadcast venues & actually have meaningful conversations with the electarate. The media, with all their instant analysis & nitpicky parsing of every insignificant utterance, are a part of the problem & not a solution.

Second, it costs way too much money to run today. We cannot complain about lobbyist influence in Washington & tolerate the obscene amounts of cash that are spent on getting elected. True, Obama has broken the mold with his program of small contributions, but there are a lot of people running for the House & Senate this year, not to mention the state & local elections, & they all need big bank accounts. Few will succeed without large, “bundled” contributions, which leaves influence where it always was, with the wealthy. There is no representative democracy without parity of influence, & we don’t have that in America. This explains why candidates’ words have little to do with their actions once they are elected.

Finally, our two party system is inherently anti-democratic. In a society as large & complicated as ours, political pluralism is mandatory. In our two party set up, the vortex pulls the power to the safest point. This point usually is referred to as the center, but “center” of what, I ask? For some reason probably having to do with our red-baiting history, the left is cast as “fringe”, even when it speaks obvious truths on such as global warming, which was thought to be ”fringe” a few years ago. Compare this with the placement of the far right in the form of Sarah Palin in the center of the ’08 Presidential campaign.

A parliamentary system would offer truer representation, would give people like Dennis Kucinich & Ron Paul parties that would often have to be solicited to form coalition governments; would offer Ralph Nader & Ross Perot constructive roles in government. Yes, I know that parliamentary governments are messy & unstable, but the people are better voiced in parliamentary societies. What we have is two parties that are the left & right of what seems more & more to be one big consensus party. The trick is that the Republican side is so awful that those of us on the left never can afford to vote for a left party like the Greens. We certainly can’t afford to do so now.

++++++

The Women I have Not Slept With

Dear Reader,

I'm a little delinquent on the new essay & will need a few more days to write it. As I wrote in my last, I am trying to write substantial pieces, & they take a little time. So please accept this poem, more recent than my book, Things I Must Have Known, as a token of good faith. It was written as an alternative to the tell-all books that many people, including some friends of mine, keep publishing. I truly do not understand this imperative to confes all to the world & name everybody whom you did the nasty with in the process. So I thought that I'd write the un-tell all poem.

A. B. Spellman


The Women I Have Not Slept With
For all my friends who have written tell-all books



they number in the trillions & that’s if i only count
the living. for example, i have not slept with maggie
thatcher & not because of her ”iron maiden” cognomen
no i perceive a certain low simmer there
i have not slept with her because she’s too far right
i’m too far left & that’s too much miscegenation
to arouse. nor have i slept with that woman
monica lewinsky or hillary clinton, though
i did have a shot with hillary & i have a photograph
to prove it. that’s me shaking hands with her, head
cocked to the side, a mating signal in every mammal male
& i think i saw something in the curl of her mouth
but i couldn’t make my move there in the gold room
with the line pushing at my back. but we’ll see, we’ll see
i have not slept with madonna

before you get the impression that i’ve only not slept
with white women, i have not slept with oprah either
no fault of hers, no fault of mine, we just never hooked up
never made it with vanessa williams & that one hurts
she split on me in a sexual fantasy. took one look
at my admittedly adipose body & disappeared &
wouldn’t come back. to my fantasy. broke my tumescent heart
& then there’s chaka khan. sweet sweet chaka
the lust of my life. i did get to hug her once
a nice belly to belly rub but my boss was in the room
& it went nowhere. she sent me a box of chakalets

& so it goes or doesn’t. if i haven’t slept with you &
haven’t mentioned you please don’t be offended
i’m not the kind of guy to not kiss & tell & anyway
i thought you deserved your own poem

Being & Politics: Another Way Of Looking At Obama

Being & Politics: Another Way Of Looking At The Obama Campaign
A. B. Spellman


I was talking politics with Marc Sims, the contractor who was renovating our house, & the electrician whom Mark brought in for some installations. The subject was, of course, the Obama campaign & Marc, a man who has pulled his family out of one of the most desperate quarters of Washington, D. C., remarked, “well, if Obama makes it, these kids in the ghetto got no excuse.”

It is a statement that has stayed with me because it speaks of the defeatist psychology of one of the most oppressed sectors of American society, “these ghetto kids”, sometimes called the urban underclass, long thought to be phylogenetically problematic. I took Marc’s comment to concern the power of Barack Obama as a symbol: Sims is too smart a man to think that this one event will obliterate the very tangible social factors that sit on the shoulders of our criminally under-educated & under-valued urban youth like a yoke of lead & keeps them from rising. He was speaking of the awful ghetto world view in which so many of our kids grow into a consciousness, or rather an unconsciousness that learning is pointless, not cool, for white people; that to be smart & literate is to surrender one’s blackness, the proudest possession that they own.

This kind of presumed self-defeat is social death, as I will discuss. It begins with the premise that the positions in the American social polity that determine how things will be, what buildings will be built, whether wars will be fought, how much food & energy will cost, what jobs will be available - the positions of power, are designated white. & there is plenty of evidence to support this belief. There are exceptions, but until African-American & Latino participation in the executive class is unexceptional the youth can at least argue their point.. But when this degree of nihilism sinks down so deep that large sectors of American teenagers believe that they will lose their soul by studying, the issue becomes existential. Mark Sims’ statement implies that they have “excused” themselves from the effort of the broader social participation that is advancement because they think themselves born locked out. It rings disingenuous when we say to them, “you can be anything you want to be, even President”. That the grandest job in America is one that they could not apply for even in their dreams is the billboard symbol of their subordination.

To the Existentialist, such individuals live in a state of alienation: they Exist, but they cannot Be. Jean Paul Sartre wrote that self-negation is an absurd form of freedom. In this way Sims’ self-excused ghetto kids are not so very different from large numbers of inert people of all races & classes who do not examine their lives & therefore do not act to become realized.

Amiri Baraka recently compared 21st century America with the Weimar Republic, that boiling cauldron of social, intellectual, political, & artistic experimentation that was Germany in the decade & a half between the Revolution (actually, it was a half revolution) of 1918 & the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. Baraka’s point was that division on the left allowed a right wing minority party to assume power in those depression years, & that the same could occur in the U. S. in this depressed time. True. In this brief essay I will write of the implications for this political year of a philosopher that Weimar produced, perhaps the most influential thinker of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who extended the Existentialist theories of the Dane Soren Kierkegaard, & other Existentialists.. (Note that I do not pretend to be a philosopher so I will not be offended if someone more competent takes the discussion further or refutes my applications).

From our inner city young, from most of us, really, I hear echoes of Heidegger’s argument that the fundamental material of existence is not selected or sorted by the individual, so the structure of existence escapes the consciousness of the individual self. In other words, we accept without question the stuff of life that makes us what we are. We begin with an “inauthentic” conception of ourselves as our sense of self is not gained by reflection, by looking deeply into ourselves to determine who & what we are. We assume that we are like everybody else. Therefore, if everybody around you is doing everything they can to avoid being seen as a nerd, you are likely to do the same. “Angst” for Heidegger occurs when we become aware of our own inauthenticity. Angst directs us to ourselves. We need a magic mirror to tell us no, you are deeper than that. You’ve got to break this assumed image. Only then can we begin to become.

For Heidegger, the made world of modern capitalist industrialism removed man (& he meant man) & his work from nature &, therefore, from himself. Its concomitant mass communication, its standard products with all the sameness that they offer, put us into the assembly line existence of conformity, which can be devastating for those whose lives are directed by the opinions of their peers, viz. “these ghetto kids”. Technological mass communication, the “they” of Heidegger, demands awareness to overcome. “Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by…struggle becomes just something to be manipulated… This…averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency…which we call the ’leveling down’ of all possibilities of Being.” In this context Sartre’s dictum that “we choose ourselves” is less forgiving.

Reason, says Heidegger, is too weak a weapon against this state. It takes understanding to become authentic, to Be, & understanding is more akin to revelation than to logical conclusion. We can approach understanding through the integration of the self into nature, a prospect that is denied us in this artificial world, or through “action in time.” This relationship of action & Being is the aspect of Existentialism that gives it relevance to us in 2008. I think that it is true that the effect of passive inertia is more than a lost election or a failed career, it leaves us in an unfulfilled state of existence, it stunts the self. For Existentialist thinkers from the antimodernist Heidegger to the progressive Frenchmen Jean Paul Sartre & Albert Camus, one can only attain the transcendence of existence by knowing the world & acting on it. There is no raw human essence that forms a skeleton for human life that can be separated from the goals & actions that comprise our existence by adding a practical layer to our individuality. We are what we do; action liberates the self. The corny but effective “yes we can” of the Baraka campaign applies here.

Furthermore, the self neither Exists nor transcends to the state of Being in solitude. Eric D. Weitz in Weimar Germany, Promise & Tragedy, wrote, “Heidegger links Dasein [Being] to the community so that the organic racial & national community becomes the individual writ large: through an authentic community Being is writ large”. Further, “there is no completely abstracted “I’ in Heidegger’s philosophy.” Wrote Heidegger: “Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with.” But without reflection & Understanding the mass can crush the individual. Sartre, who disagreed with Heidegger’s belief that authenticity is not an ethical issue, extended & improved Heidegger’s community ideal by arguing that authenticity can only be attained within a community that values mutual respect.

Perhaps this denial of the relevance of ethics represents a contrary in Heidegger’s thought, for his life leaves us with a flaming flag of caution about this aspect of his thinking. There is an incipient nationalism in his conception of national & racial Being that the right of Weimar Germany found to be delicious. Nationalism, a world view that African-Americans know well, is a politically & socially adolescent orientation: good for national esteem but insufficiently analytical to build a modern state. Xenophobia follows naturally from nationalism, & a Xenophobic state is a danger to the world, as we can see so readily in our times, & which Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, & Franco’s Spain made clear in Heidegger’s. Nationalism is inherently incomplete as ideology; unless it matures into broader, more humanistic theory, it can corrupt into fascism. While his work was read by literate Germans of all political orientations, Heidegger, like Oswald Spengler, the Weimar author who wrote The Decline Of The West (as popular in the ‘30s & ‘40s as it is irrational) contributed, wittingly or not, to the intellectual foundation of Nazism by arguing so fiercely against the modern world with all its liberalism, & by calling for a specifically German national soul as an antidote. Heidegger’s writings did not call for Nazism, but they did enable it.

Heidegger became a Nazi after Hitler’s ascension. Whether this was because of opportunism or ideological attraction does not matter; he behaved as a Nazi by expelling Jewish students from the University of Freiburg, which the Nazis made him President of, & he fired the Jewish Phenomenologist philosopher Edmond Husserl, who had been his mentor, & to whom he had dedicated the early editions of Being & Time. Still, this should not deter anyone from reading Heidegger; his thought heavily influenced such as the philosopher Ernst Bloch, a Marxist, Hannah Arendt & Hans Jonas, both Jewish progressives, &, of course, the mighty Jean Paul Sartre, the most powerful left intellectual of the mid-late 20th century.

This cycles us back to Baraka’s analogy of Weimar Germany, the U. S. in 2008, & the danger of the political right. It is not a perfect simile of course; we do not have armed groups of left & (in greater & more vicious numbers) right activists slaughtering each other in the streets, or hostile armies occupying our territory until we comply with a hated peace treaty, but many of the conditions of Weimar do attain today: massive governmental indebtedness, intractable economic problems as manifest in failing banking and manufacturing sectors, deflated currency, an eroding employment base, a cynical & jingoistic right that is not above playing the working class races against each other, increasing antipathy to immigrants, the kind of hunger for meaning that caused Heidegger’s Being & Time to be written – all this we share with Weimar Germany. If the Republicans had not created this mess, if they could blame liberals for it, the survival o f the American left, such as it is, would be in question. As it is, we stand to blow a rare opportunity if we do not build a strong & enduring coalition that extends into the bottom of our economic & social strata.

This 2008 election promises the broadest public participation of my adulthood. I do not know what the opportunities are on the right, but the Obama campaign is remarkably open. You actually can walk into an Obama office & get an assignment. Because of the democracy of the internet & the fact that, & this is difficult for an old fart like me to understand or even admit, the virtual world is demonstrating such a capacity for activism that it now possesses body in the real world. Someone smarter than I about the sociology of reticulation can correct me on this, but it seems that the meaning that the internet generation has been decrying the lack of is being somewhat reified in the Obama campaign.

As for the inner city youth who got me into all of this lucubration, I have no way of knowing the degree to which Barack Obama has illuminated this existential light, the Angst of understanding, for them. Of course they are alienated; when was the last time that a Presidential election really suggested tangible hope to their class? Certainly not Kennedy in 1960. Maybe Roosevelt in 1932? Lincoln in 1860? I can only imagine that more than a few will look at Obama’s inauguration, if it occurs, & say to themselves, “that could be me.” Or at least, “maybe it is cool to be smart.” Then the questions might be asked: whether submitting to the standards of their peers is best, whether they might be able to act in time, whether they can Be. Kierkegaard wrote that, “It is impossible to Exist without passion.” By this he meant that we only perceive our identity by becoming involved in situations that arouse passion. Obama can offer them passion, can offer it to all of us who consider ourselves progressive.

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There is a lot being said today about how the Obama campaign, with or without victory, exemplifies how the U. S. has matured into a post-racial society. This is a pleasant conception that the candidate himself has come close to suggesting. It suggests that America has taken half the time to clear its head of structural & pathological racism than it took to get rid of slavery.

I can understand how many Americans of all races & political orientations would be anxious to believe this. It would relieve us all of the burden of motive as it applies to the situation of ethnic minorities, particularly poor people of color, as individuals (the kid you saw on the news being beaten into jelly by the police) or as a subclass (the preponderance of African-Americans & Latinos who lost their homes because of predatory lending). If America has grown out of racism, the teenager in the video either brought it on himself or was the unfortunate victim of a couple of cops who didn’t get the post-racial America email &, anyway, wasn’t one of the baton swinging cops black? As for the mortgagees who saw their furniture deposited on the street by the sheriff, that was economics, not race; they weren’t picked out by vampyric lenders; the burden is on the borrowers to assume no more debt than they can afford to pay. That’s the American way.

But tell me the truth: what goes through your mind when you see four or five black teenaged boys walking toward you with their belts strapped below their asses? How lucid do you imagine that the explanation of the risks of variable mortgage rates in this economy was to the Latina mother who thought that she was, finally, moving her family into a nice home? No, not even an Obama victory will bleach race from the subconscious responses of most Americans, nor will it alleviate the fierce anti-immigrant sentiment that exists in many parts of the country, nor will it dissolve the invisible Berlin wall that surrounds our inner city communities or the overt prejudice that my Muslim friends tell me they experience almost daily.

An Obama victory, as meaningful as it would be, would not make America post-racial any more than Virginia became post-racial when Douglass Wilder was elected Governor, or Cleveland when Carl Stokes was elected Mayor. I do not mean to suggest that there has been no racial progress in America as many of my friends insist. I grew up in the ante-Brown v. Topeka Board South which was proto-fascist & not ashamed of it; where racism was proudly enforced by law, advertised by signs wherever one might not be sure of what to do, taught as good manners to children, black & white, & where white murder of African-Americans for violating racial taboos was tacitly legal. This ain’t that, but it is real enough.

Make no mistake: race will be a determining factor if Obama loses to this demonstrably inferior opponent. I spoke recently with a young woman who canvassed for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania. She told me that she actually spent half of her time defending Obama because the racism that she encountered was so outrageous. The political scientist David Leege of Notre Dame has written that from 17 to 19 percent of white Democrats will not vote for Obama because of his race. Then on the flip side there’s the fact that greater numbers than ever before of African-Americans will show up for Obama because he is black, though it is true that most of those would have turned out for Hillary too. So win or lose, race is in it.

As I’ve written above, I hope that an Obama victory will have great meaning for all Americans, particularly those in our inner cities. But the group for which it would signify the most is the African-American middle class. Obama reminds me of my daughters, my nieces & nephews: educated at elite schools, about 2/3rds deracinated, comfortable with & unthreatening to white people. He does things, like my children, that my generation could not have dreamed of doing: my son writes screen plays for a living; my older daughter plays classical oboe in a successful contemporary wind quintet; my younger daughter is a minister in a predominantly white denomination, though the United Church of Christ has long had black ministers. I look at Obama & think, “I raised you for this” (I know, his mother is white & his father was gone. But still…)

What Obama represents is that the catalog of career choices that is available to the black middle class is much broader after Brown v. Board & the great civil rights movement. The Movement accomplished very little for the poor; voting rights in the South comes to mind, but even that is often compromised & severely discouraged as in Florida & Ohio in 2000. Obama highlights the class nature of modern racism. Not that bigots don’t often fail to distinguish between the classes of color, but the suppression of the urban poor, still the majority of us in many places, is the primary mode of racism in contemporary America, & this society will not become post-racial until they are free.


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Note to the reader: This is my second posting, so I’m new to this blog thing. I’m told that blog readers expect new material from writers almost daily, at least weekly. But I’m going to try to write essays that I have put a fair amount of thought & research into, & I can’t produce those every day or every week. I’m going for every two weeks, though sometimes it might take longer. If you have enjoyed these first two, please be patient with me & don’t give up if you check back in a few days & don’t find anything new.

A. B. Spellman