"My Own Quarrel With America"

After a conversation with Henry Thoreau in October 1850, Emerson recorded in his journal: "My own quarrel with America, of course, was, that the geography is sublime, but the men are not." He then noted that those who had joined Atlantic to Pacific had done so through "selfishness, fraud, & conspiracy." Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson (1981), 545.

Nothing has changed.

Melville's Mad Biographer

Hershel Parker

Fly The Blue Flag!

A plain blue flag serves as the banner of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic: a non-state subsisting within the travesty that is the militarized corporatocracy calling itself the United States of America.

It is a declaration of difference, of The Great Refusal, of the determination not to be counted among the sublimated slaves of post-industrial civilization--those who have been enslaved "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument," reduced to the state of a thing. (see H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 32-33).

Declare your independence and your difference: on national holidays and occasions of state, on July 21 (the date of Emerson's letter to Whitman congratulating him on the first edition of Leaves of Grass), and on any date you damn well please:

Fly the blue flag and RESIST, REFUSE, RENOUNCE the violent consumerist catastrophe that now plagues the world.

Show your loyalty to the country's refounders: Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

Fly the blue flag!

The Four Horsemen

If people really understood how the justice system operates, they would know that the cop in the Michael Brown case should not have been called to testify as a material witness to the crime that the Grand Jury was investigating--since he was the prime suspect. This is NEVER done--except, of course, when you want to confuse the Grand Jury into thinking that their job is to decide on guilt or innocence instead of whether or not there is sufficient evidence for an indictment.

We should expect riots in every American city right now--only, that won't happen, because the Administrative State has the One Dimensional society under its thumb. Meanwhile, China's economic troubles might just kick off a global financial collapse in the coming year.

I hear the pounding of the hooves...

Michael Brown

All Americans must begin to make the connection between the violence we export and the violence we produce for "domestic consumption."

And all should take note that, in both cases, the victims are the poor and people of color.

And, no, I don't think it's a coincidence; I think it's a cancer.

RIP JFK

Peter O'Toole on his Youth and Literary Influences

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went mad for fear of the devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the philosopher's stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence, in very many countries of Europe, to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilised and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated,--that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate them entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

--Charles Mackay

The Fixer

"All men are Jews, though few men know it." --Bernard Malamud

Lately, I have been re-reading Bernard Malamud's stunningly memorable novel The Fixer (1966). I say "stunningly memorable" because I first read it in 1977 (the Fall semester of my senior year in high school). I have not read it since. And yet, picking it up again in 2014, I recall scene after vivid scene--as if I had read the book just recently. And I recall, as well, my own confusion as a white Protestant and reasonably affluent seventeen year-old male who was being exposed, for the first time, to the reality of rabid anti-semitism.

Growing up during the high tide of the civil rights era, I had been sensitized to the plight of people of color living in the United States as second or third class citizens. But Jews? I thought of the Jews I knew--and, granted, my exposure at that point in my life was fairly narrow--as privileged white people like myself. And so they were; what they were not was Christian. At the time, I did not see why that fact should occasion intense hatred of Jews by Christians (and still don't) and so, although I was aware that anti-semitism existed, I regarded it as an anomaly--like Nazi Germany. And, like Nazi Germany, I regarded it also as largely a thing of the past.

Malamud's novel brilliantly evokes how bigotry, superstition, and modern scientific rationality sat together quite comfortably in 19th century Russian society and, when combined with the Czarist state's legal bureaucracy, could create a tidal wave of blind cruelty capable of crashing down on an unsuspecting life: in this case, the life of one Yakov Bok, an impoverished handyman who, though born to Jewish parents, considered himself a "free thinker" in the mold of Spinoza, and left his native village amidst the wreckage of a bad marriage in the hope of starting fresh (and passing as a gentile) in Kiev.

And therein lies the true genius of the novel: for, try as he might, Bok cannot escape his Jewishness because it is thrust upon him repeatedly throughout the story--not by fellow Jews, but by the gentiles who wish to see him suffer because he had the temerity to be born to the "wrong" parents. This insanity--for there is no other word for it--is a brokenness that the fixer cannot fix.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argued that part of our moral education as Americans at the close of the 20th century should include books that "help us become less cruel." (CIS, 141). He does not mention Malamud's The Fixer, but it would have made a superb example of the kind of book he had in mind.

And at the beginning of the 21st century, with Muslims now filling the social role of the "new Jews" in the U.S. and elsewhere, Malamud's book is as relevant a read as ever.

My Own Private Mt. Rushmore

On my own private Mt. Rushmore, I continually carve the faces of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville...

The Ghost of Tom Joad

American Midrash

In my obsessive-compulsive reading habits, I return again and again to American literature; I suppose I do this because I fear that, if I don't, I will reach the point where I decide that there is nothing redeemable about this country.

I began to read Emerson and Thoreau early--the latter at age 13, the former a little later, around 16 or 17. In any event, it was at such an impressionable age that they continue to think through me. I cannot escape them (though I've tried) and am learning to reconcile myself to that fact. It's not that hard, really. Father Emerson rattles on through Thoreau and Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Frost, but also Nietzsche and Tolstoy and, as fate would have it, Norman O. Brown.

Word-madness is the gift of the gods. If we remember to drink deep at the well of language, we may fortify ourselves against the Orwellian Newspeak with which we are daily inundated. Stay close to the Logos and you remain connected to the Over-Soul. Lose touch with that and you risk being turned into a monster: just another one-dimensional zombie wandering through the consumer-capitalist Apocalypse.

The Invisible Republic We Hold In Our Hearts

I claim as kin father Emerson, brother Thoreau, and weird uncle Walt, but friends and neighbors abound.

Old man Melville lives in the big house high on the hill, overlooking the port, while Billy Faulkner, displaced scion of the old south, haunts the dirty bars down by the docks.

And what of Tecumseh, and Frederick Douglass? We feel their presence in the streets and alleyways, but we should be walking next to them, side by side. Such is the state of our American exile.

Emily Dickinson is but a silhouette against the shade of a window that looks out on Main Street when the shutters are not closed. Woody Guthrie, whooping like a wild bird on the street corner, keeps his guitar case open for loose change. Mr. Stevens, solemn at his desk, shuffles papers while dreaming in tropical hues. Jack London pilots a skiff in the bay; Robinson Jeffers buys a ticket at the station for the first train headed west.

Henry Miller, uncle Walt's sketchy disciple, and yet a genius all the same, goes out for drinks with the bearded lady when the circus is in town. And moody Tom Wolfe, lately from Chapel Hill, tries his hand at playwriting at the kitchen table of his mother's boarding house while old Sam Clemons smokes a cigar outside the bank and cracks rueful jokes under his breath.

This is but a small sample of the dramatis personae who populate the Invisible Republic we hold in our hearts.