Professor Sean Carswell

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Race Writings 4: Where’d You Go, Robert E. Lee?

This is a piece that I wrote in 2017. I’m a little amazed at how relevant it is now, three years later.

Front Royal Confederate Memorial

The CSA Memorial in Front Royal, Virginia

Where’d You Go, Robert E. Lee?

            Dona Maria, queen of Portugal from 1777-1815, had a collection of little people. Most were gifts given to her by slave traders or conquistadors. Most were African, though at least one was Brazilian. All were slaves. In 1788, the queen commissioned artist José Conrado Roza to paint a work commemorating the marriage of her two favorite dwarf slaves. Dona Maria dressed the slaves in traditional wedding clothes. She dressed another of her dwarf slaves as a bishop to perform the ceremony. Three African dwarf slaves wear formal clothing and hold musical instruments: a flute, a tambourine. The Brazilian dwarf wears a grass skirt and feather headdress. He points a tiny bow and arrow at the loving couple. Also in the picture is a young boy who is about as tall as the dwarves. He wears only a tiny pair of shorts, leaving most of his skin visible, allowing the viewer to gaze at the pigment condition that afforded him the opportunity later in life to make a living as the sideshow act “Leopard Boy.”

Whether or not the marriage of the queen’s two favorite little people was real is in question. The title of the painting, “La Mascarade Nuptiale,” and the fourteen-year-old bishop suggest that the queen was just playing a game, dressing her slaves like dolls and holding the wedding ceremony as a lark. Roza didn’t title the painting “La Mascarade Nuptiale.” He called it “Portrait des nains de la Reine Marie du Portugal” or “Portrait of the Dwarves of Queen Mary of Portugal.” All we know about the slaves we know because Roza painted their biographies in the hems of their clothing.

Roza’s painting hangs in the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, France. La Rochelle sits on the Atlantic coast, midway between Nantes and Bourdeaux. It’s a beautiful old town. Its harbor and its wealth can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century slave trade. The Musée du Nouveau Monde shows works that seek to remember the slave trade, to put it context, to examine it unflinchingly.

In May, I presented a paper at an academic conference held at the Musée du Nouveau Monde. Roza’s painting hung in the back of the room. The slaves stared at me, locked in poses seeking to reclaim their dignity, their humanity. They haunted me for the hour-long panel discussion. They set up a residence in my mind and have been living there since I walked out of the museum. They forced me to ask myself questions about global trade, the dehumanization of labor, the mythologies of race and the ways in which these myths justify centuries of oppression. These slaves—according to this mythology—are better off in the court of Dona Maria then they would’ve been in the wilds of Africa or Brazil. They’re lucky. They live in wealth and comfort. At least Dona Maria would’ve rationalized her collection this way, if she ever felt the need to rationalize it. Just as we, in contemporary culture, rationalize the conditions of Foxconn workers by saying that they’re better off than if Foxconn didn’t exist, if they were unemployed and struggling in rural China. As Apple pointed out, Foxconn workers don’t commit suicide at that much higher of a rate than the general population. The nets around the factory are just a precautionary measure.

But when I’m faced with the stares of Dona Maria’s collection of little people, all the rationalizations fall flat. I’m left wondering about my own place as an English professor who travels across a continent and an ocean to present a paper on masculinity in Thomas Pynchon novels. Is my ability to make my living reading books, writing about them, and teaching them predicated on slavery?

I don’t know. I’m not the Dona Maria in this situation. I don’t come at society from a seat of power. Though I have a great deal of empathy for them, I’m not the slaves in this scenario, either. If anything, I’m closest to the painter. It’s my job to document the scene, to try to make meaning of it.

I’ve been thinking about the Musée du Nouveau Monde all summer. In the US, the summer began with New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu removing a Robert E. Lee statue from the city center. It ended with Nazis causing a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one and wounding nineteen more anti-racist protestors. The president tacitly supported the Nazis for two days before issuing a disingenuous condemnation, followed by an explicit support of the Nazis. The firestorm was triggered by the proposal to remove another Robert E. Lee statue. The debate about the Civil War monuments is largely framed around the issue of history: are we erasing history by removing these monuments?

This is a naïve question. It treats history as if history is a single document upon which one person with an eraser can demolish something. It ignores that events are frequently lost and found in the retelling of the past. It ignores that history is not some monolithic or objective or definitive thing. History is always political. It is always written. Some aspects are always ignored, others are always privileged. History is always a negotiation about how we want to envision our present, how we represent what we think can be the best of our society, what narratives we want to guide our culture. In his landmark 1973 work Metahistory, Hayden White explained that history always uses the structures and tropes of narratives. White argued that history is primarily told as a romance, a tragedy, a comedy, or a satire. Historians choose the narrative structure to apply to a grouping of historical artifacts. The history itself is not the artifacts—or, if you prefer, facts—it is the narrative that gives meaning to those facts. These narratives are always negotiations of power.

I grew up in Florida in the seventies and eighties. When I learned about Robert E. Lee, the story was tragedy. He was a dashing hero, a brilliant man. As a general, he was far superior to Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was a drunk, a failed president. Lee was a tactical genius who lacked the support of his government, who lacked the war budget of the Union, who lacked the munitions needed to realize his plans. All of his failings could be blamed on someone else. He was also a misrepresented man. He wasn’t a racist. He believed in states and the rights of those states. He was more Virginian than American. He stood up for Virginia, his home and his neighbors.

At least that’s the story I was taught in school. If anyone raised her hand during the teaching of this tale and asked which specific rights the states were fighting for in the war, she’d be sent to the dean for disrupting class. If anyone suggested that the war was about slavery, he’d be corrected. No, we were told, Lincoln didn’t agree to free the slaves until a couple of years into the war. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was a territorial occupation by a hostile government. The Confederates were fighting for their land, their homes. I even had one ninth grade teacher who insisted we refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.”

I left this history behind when I left my backwater hometown. I educated myself in more complex narratives of the Civil War. I forgot about the Robert E. Lee tragedy I was taught in ninth and tenth grade. But another historical monument brought it all back to me. I was in Front Royal, Virginia, looking for a place to eat lunch in downtown when I crossed under the shadow of a monument to the CSA. It took me a second to even figure out what the CSA was and who the armed man at the top of the monument was supposed to represent. Next to this monument was a historical placard that told the story of the Union invasion of Front Royal, the heroes who resisted the brutal Union soldiers, and the battle when Confederate soldiers forced Union soldiers out of the town. The placard claims that the Confederate soldiers were—using language borrowed from George W. Bush’s Iraq War public relations team—greeted as liberators.

As I read the placard and looked at the statue, I became hyperaware of my whiteness. I watched a woman with all the socioeconomic signs of someone who was poor and who had skin that I’ve been taught to see as black walk into the courthouse. I wondered if she was going inside for her own court case. The outfit that looked like her Sunday best and the battered manila folder in her hand seemed to suggest so. And I wondered what it would be like be a poor black woman who has to walk past this Confederate soldier monument and this placard that portrays the war as a War of Northern Aggression on her way to court. How must she feel about her chances once she gets inside?

Knowing nothing about this woman, whether she was an employee at the courthouse, an attorney, or a defendant, I wanted to add a statue of her to the courthouse lawn. Maybe, if I was feeling preachy, I’d add a simple inscription. “With no liberators to save her from the institutional racism of her town, she still got out of bed and faced the day.”

The racism of the Confederacy shouldn’t be something that is earnestly debated. Of course a government formed to enslave a group of people based upon their race is racist. Of course the people who fought for that government are racist. There is more to it. People did have to fight for their homes. United States soldiers did commit atrocities. Some citizens probably did celebrate the arrival of Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. But on top of all that, the war was an attempt to enslave a giant group of Americans based on their perceived race.

Even if we take the supporters of the monuments for Lee and the Confederacy at their word—that we need to honor soldiers who fought against an invading force for their homeland, that we need to remember General Lee as a powerful general and a brilliant tactician—there’s something very troubling about the narratives these monuments tell. For the monuments to the soldiers, we’re defining heroism as a willingness to obey your superiors unquestioningly and a willingness to fight regardless of the morality of the battle your superiors are fighting. For the monument of Lee, we’re defining a strong, authoritarian leader who rose to power as part of a military coup as a hero. These are the values of a totalitarian regime, not a democratic state.

La Mascarade Nuptiale

“La Mascarade Nuptiale” by Jose Conrado Roza. (Sorry about the corona of light in the corner. It was unavoidable.)

 

I know that Civil War monuments aren’t the only troubling representations of history. The California town I live in has a statue of Junipero Sera in front of City Hall. For whatever good Sera may have done (the Pope just made him a saint), the defining act of his mission building along the coast has to be his enslavement and brutal treatment of Native Americans. Most California missions are surrounded by the mass graves of the slaves killed during the construction of the missions. Farther up the coast of California sits the Hearst Castle, a state park and monument to a man whose newspaper empire was the first step in the long deterioration of a free media in the United States, who fabricated an international incident to catalyze two unjust wars, who destroyed Orson Welles’ career just because Welles made fun of Hearst’s mistress, and who unequivocally supported McCarthyism. And what did he get for all his crimes? Why, this beautiful mansion in one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

The list of problematic monuments goes on and on. In one of his responses to the riots in Charlottesville, Trump pointed out that George Washington was a slaveholder, as was Thomas Jefferson. He asked if we should go after monuments to our founding fathers as well. Trump didn’t ask this question in earnest, but maybe we should. Maybe he’s tapped into the heart of the problem, which is that we know our history has been written to favor people whose actions are reprehensible, but we don’t know how to fix that. Maybe, to take one step in the right direction, we shouldn’t tell the story of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with a slave as a great romance. Instead maybe we should start the story by asking some very basic questions like, can a sexual relationship really be consensual when one participant sees the other as his property? And, if it can’t be consensual, isn’t that rape? And maybe she did love him, but wasn’t she essentially a kidnap victim (weren’t all slaves?), so wouldn’t any love she might have had been more akin to Stockholm Syndrome? Finally, if we asked these questions, would we have a fundamentally different relationship with people in power?

What impressed me most about the Musée du Nouveau Monde was its ability to raise difficult questions without pretending to know the answers. It raised questions in one particularly special way: the city of La Rochelle purchased the house of an old slave trader. That house is now the museum. As you walk through the spoils of slavery—the opulent home in the beautiful harbor city—you see art that forces you to reckon with the dehumanizing acts that comprised slavery. What if we did that here? What if Hearst Castle wasn’t full the wealth Hearst hoarded and instead was full of the art of the lives he destroyed? What if, instead of taking down statues to Robert E. Lee, we instead added statues of former slaves chipping away at Lee’s pedestal?

Or maybe not we could do something that’s more quietly radical. My favorite monument is just outside the San Luis Obispo train station. It’s a statue of two gandy dancers building the railroad tracks. Their hair, posture, the very wrinkles of their clothes show them working hard. One wears a hat. Both have long braids. They’re both recognizably Chinese, but nothing about their features is exaggerated or caricatured. They look like real people, like the sculptor used a real photograph (which would’ve been impossible) or real models. It sits in the middle of a traffic circle. Seen from one side, the workers are flanked by a train station and the tracks they built. Seen from the other side, the workers stand between buildings that are more than a century old, that were once the inns and restaurants and boarding houses of workers and travelers. There’s no indication about the working conditions of the gandy dancers, about whether or not they could stay at the inns or the boarding houses, about what happened to them once the railroads were built or during a twentieth century that was long and unfriendly for Asian Americans. All of that you have to learn on their own. That’s okay. At least the workers are here, visible again.

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Race Writings 1: The Totalitarian Playbook

Berlin Mural

A mural in Berlin, not far from the Topography of Terror

If there’s one thing I think everyone agrees on, it’s that talking about race in America right now is hard. It’s uncomfortable. Part of the difficulty has to do with the way we talk, especially when we’re all separated by a pandemic. So much of our communication is done now on social media, where brief statements, pictures, and memes replace the long-form conversations that we should be having.

Obviously, I’m not good at social media. I rarely engage with it. I haven’t taken the time to learn how to communicate through it effectively. Still, I don’t want to say nothing in the middle of this massive moment in the history of social justice. So I’m going to pretend it’s the early aughts and use my personal website to post several essays, columns, and book reviews that I’ve written about race over the years. I’ll post one or two of these a week for the next couple of months. Here’s the first.

This essay was originally published on Morpheus in November 2017. I think it’s as relevant today as it was then. It’s long, but I also think it’s engaging and some people might find comfort in it. I hope you enjoy it.

Topography of Terror

Topography of Terror in Berlin

The Totalitarian Playbook

1.

An exhibit called the Topography of Terror stands in front of a remaining section of the Berlin Wall. It’s longer than a soccer field and it details, step-by-step, the rise of the Third Reich. In June, 2017, I traveled around Germany with my father and uncle. Berlin was our last stop before returning to Bremen, the city where my uncle lives. It was blistering hot out. There’s no real shade at the Topography of Terror. We baked in the sun and took our time with the exhibit, reading all the text, checking out the pictures, watching people around us doing the same.

Afterward, we grabbed lunch and talked about what we’d just seen. My dad said, “I can’t imagine how a guy like Hitler gets so much power.”

I pointed out that the Topography of Terror details exactly how Hitler did. It’s an old totalitarian playbook. First, you marginalize dissent by attacking the free press, intellectuals, and academics. Second, you find a scapegoat—typically a religious minority—and craft a narrative that details that scapegoat’s plans to destroy your society. Third, you redefine what a real member of your nation is. You usually do this on racial or ethnic terms. Then, you take what’s left of the populace, the ones who don’t question you, the ones who hold the same religious beliefs as you, the ones who look enough like you so you feel pure, and you start picking fights and building walls.

I said this to my father and uncle because, among other things, they’re Trump supporters. To his credit, my father had the decency to keep his Trump support to himself during the trip. My uncle did not. When faced with the opportunity to educate me—who he saw as a real life liberal university professor from California—he went for it. He baited me a lot on politics. I mostly wouldn’t take the bait. I’ve had decades of experience of political disagreements with my family. What all those conversations have in common is that everyone leaves believing the same thing they started the conversation believing. All of us, everyone, not just my family, develop complex patterns for seeing the world. We hang all of our beliefs on an ideological framework, whether we articulate that ideology or not. The only way to genuinely alter someone’s beliefs is to alter the framework they use to hold those beliefs. That’s a tough thing to do, and not a project I wanted to undergo on my trip around Germany.

Still, our political differences were heavy in Berlin. The whole time I walked through the Topography of Terror, I couldn’t ignore that Hitler’s not the only one to use the totalitarian playbook. Tyrants did it before him and after him. Right now, I live in a country where the president is trying it out. The Third Reich used the term lügenpresse, which literally means “lying press.” Trump supporters used this term until a more dynamic phrase meaning the same thing, “fake news,” caught on. The first budget cuts Trump attempted were to the federal funding for intellectuals. He went after the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. He went after funding for climate research. He attacked the very cornerstones of institutions that produce our scientific and cultural knowledge. In particular, Trump and the American right have been attacking universities and academics. Entire think tanks have been built and supported just to demonize academics (e.g. Turning Point, Texas Public Policy Foundation, which are just two of many). Republican governors and legislators in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Utah have crafted bills to attack academics. All of this has happened subtly and been mostly overlooked in news cycles that tend to chase after the more spectacular and outrageous stories.

The second and third parts of the playbook are more obvious. Instead of the Jews, our current administration is banning Muslims, acting as if all 1.8 billion Muslims in the world are terrorists, ignoring that, if all 1.8 billion Muslims were terrorists, they would’ve won by now. And, while we don’t have a myth about an Aryan race (not much of one, anyway), we do have a myth of Making America Great Again, which means characterizing Latinos as rapists and murderers, kicking out immigrants, jailing African Americans, using a twitter war with Kim Jong-Un to reintroduce the myth of the Yellow Peril, and basically defining “a great America” as a white America.

I want to be clear that, by pointing out these similarities, I’m not saying Trump is the next Hitler. He’s not. He’s a buffoon, a lousy president, and an even worse human being, but he’s not Hitler. Still, he’s following the totalitarian playbook. When I was in Berlin with two of his supporters who just walked through an exhibit that details the playbook, and they didn’t make the connection, things got heavy.

 

2.

In October, 2017, I did a reading at the Avenue 50 Gallery in Highland Park to celebrate the 100th issue of Razorcake. I co-founded the magazine with Todd Taylor back in 2001. One hundred issues of a punk rock ‘zine in the twenty-first century is no small landmark. I worked day-to-day on the magazine, doing close to half the work to create, publish, and distribute the first twenty issues. I can’t take much credit for the eighty issues that followed. Even so, I got to be one of the readers at the celebration.

Chris Terry opened things up by reading passages from his essay “One Punk’s Guide to Rap Music.” He told a story about hanging out in a parking lot, waiting for his dad to come out of the store, blasting A Tribe Called Quest on the car radio. His dad got back to the car and turned down the music quickly. This was right around the time of the beating of Rodney King. Racial tensions were high. Chris describes his dad as “the only black man in sight.” Recognizing this, Chris had to confront the dangers inherent in his biracial identity.

The next reader was Donna Ramone. As you may have guessed, Ramone is not her real last name. She introduced her reading by saying that she wished she could read fun stuff about gross Oreo cookies, but, as a Muslim woman in America in 2017, she felt like she had to use every platform she had to speak out. Her story was about being targeted and harassed at an airport, and about how that target and harassment was indicative of an overall trend she, her family, and the Muslim community faced increasingly. Amazingly, Donna made the reading funny.

Up next was me: a white guy. I read a story about skateboarding. Talk about white privilege.

The final reader of the night was an eleven year-old poet, a member of the Puro Pinche Poets collective. She performed in front of a crowd of rough-looking, heavily-tattooed punk rockers in their twenties, thirties, and forties. She read a bilingual poem that ended with a condemnation of Trump. It was amazing and touching. I couldn’t imagine doing what she did when I was eleven. But when I was eleven, I didn’t have to deal with the problems she has to deal with. Unlike this poet, my dad wasn’t swept up in an ICE raid. The totalitarian playbook never separated my family across two borders.

Berlin Wall

The ruins of the Berlin Wall

3.

When I was in my late twenties, I worked construction. I daydreamed a lot about a novel I would write. It would be about a construction worker who decides that, if he’s still working the same job at age thirty, he’ll kill himself. As that birthday approaches, he decides to enter into a life of crime instead, figuring a cop or another criminal would polish him off and he’d have some fun on the way out. I never wrote the novel. Instead, I asked myself two hard questions. First, why was I thinking so much about a main character just like myself committing suicide when he reached the age I was about to reach? Second, instead of a life of crime, why didn’t I find a better way to get out of construction?

So I made a plan. It started with scraping together enough money to allow me to change my life. Though I was already working 7:00-4:00 in my regular construction job, I took on a side gig renovating a dentist’s office. I worked there evenings from 5:00-11:00 for the length of the job, which was about three months. It was exhausting, but I figured that I’d be a few grand ahead of the game at the end. While it mostly worked out, I did run into one real snag.

Every night when I finished, I had to drive past the police station to get home. I would have all of my tools in the back of my truck. I knew going into this and I learned again the hard way that, if you’re driving a truck full of tools and the sun has set, a cop will pull you over. Not every time you drive that truck at night. Just every time a cop sees you driving that truck at night. Over the course of that three months, I got pulled over six or seven times. I wasn’t violating any traffic rules prior to any of those traffic stops. Once, I got a ticket for not wearing my seat belt even though I was wearing my seat belt. Once, I got a ticket for listening to headphones while driving though I wasn’t wearing headphones while driving. Every time, I was asked if I’d been drinking. I hadn’t. Twice, I performed field sobriety tests. I passed.

I thought about these traffic stops when I read an open letter that Derrick Estrada wrote for the website Morpheus in 2017 (which, sadly, is no longer available on that website). On the one hand, I know the anger, the suffocating disgust that comes from being hassled and bullied so much by cops. On different occasions, I’ve had cops punch me, crack me with a nightstick, jab a gun barrel into my sternum, and slam my head against the hood of his car while I was handcuffed. In all of those cases, the cops were in the wrong, acting because they saw me as poor white trash, an easy target. So when I read that piece from Derrick, I knew somewhat where he was coming from.

But there’s one big difference. Derrick’s black and I’m white. Derrick will always be more vulnerable in a traffic stop than I ever was.

And also this: I’m not poor any more. My plan worked. I scraped together money and moved to California and started a punk rock magazine and published some books and got a doctorate and got a job at a university and even got tenure at said university. Now, I have gray hair and all the signifiers of a middle class white guy. I drive a Prius or an old BMW motorcycle. Cops never pull me over, even when I drive past them going eighty. If I talk to a cop these days, he usually calls me sir. He never sees the poor white trash, the easy target, that he would’ve seen when I was driving a truck full of tools at night.

Derrick may accomplish all I have. Full disclosure, I know Derrick and I fully expect him to be more successful in life than I’ve been. But even when Derrick gets gray and cops have to call him sir, they’ll still see the black. He’ll still be an easy target.

 

4.

Lately, these three memories have been grouped in my mind. I’ve been thinking that, though I’m not a Muslim, Donna’s problems are my problems. Though no one sees me as black, Chris’s problems and Derrick’s problems are my problems. Though the new ICE gestapo isn’t going after my family, the Puro Pinche Poet’s problem is my problem. I don’t mean this in a Je Suis Charlie kind of way. I’m not going through the same shit that Donna, Chris, Derrick, and the poet are going through. Donna, Chris, Derrick, and the poet aren’t going through the same shit as each other. All of our problems are individual, but all of our problems are connected.

In some ways, this connection is literal. Chris, Donna, and the Puro Pinche Poets all write for Razorcake, the magazine I’ve poured so much of my heart and soul into. In no small way, my hope for the future of the world is tied to the continued existence of Razorcake. And Razorcake is dependent on arts grants to survive. When the arts are no longer funded, Razorcake no longer exists. When the voices of African Americans, Muslims, and Chicanos are attacked, Razorcake—a ‘zine that provides a platform for those voices—gets attacked, too. Also, the university where I work services mostly working class students: white kids who know what it’s like to be called “trash,” Dreamers, first-generation kids who will have to raise their younger siblings because their parents are being ripped from their family in ICE raids, black kids who’ll have to drive home through white neighborhoods where cops will see them as an easy target, Muslim kids who are just holding on, trying to weather this storm of religious ignorance and intolerance. When academics like me are attacked, the one institution that gives these kids a chance is attacked. When these groups are marginalized, the job that I’ve dedicated my life to, the one that services these groups, is marginalized.

In their 2004 book Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri outlined their hope for a revolution. It began, they theorized, with a multitude of people recognizing that a single, networked power structure is leading to massive injustice and global devastation. Later, the Occupy movement gave us the term “the one percent” to understand what this power structure is. For the multitude to be successful, they have to join to fight against this power, but they have to maintain their singularities to do it.

So, for example, I can read Derrick’s piece and recognize that I need to help the Black Lives Matter movement. I need to help them because institutional violence against African Americans and particularly African American men is out of control. I need to maintain that singularity. But I also need to work with Black Lives Matter because if black lives don’t matter, then brown lives don’t matter and Muslim lives don’t matter and white trash lives don’t matter. And when I see a Muslim ban that keeps Donna’s overseas family from being able to come the her wedding (if she decides to get married), I need to fight against that because a Muslim ban is seriously fucked up. But also because a Muslim ban is part of the same totalitarian playbook that marginalizes academics like me and defunds arts programs like Razorcake and supports institutional violence against Derrick and Chris and lets ICE kidnap a Puro Pinche Poet’s dad and put him on the other side of a border from his family and tries to build a wall between an eleven-year-old poet and her father.

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A Lure for the Devil

I wrote a piece on one of my favorite forgotten crime novels for the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read it here.

Gunn_Deadlier Than the Male cover

The novel is bonkers (as you can read about in my article). French philosopher Gilles Deleuze named it as one of his favorites in his incredible essay, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” I talk about both of these things, plus femmes fatales, truth, sex, murder,  and all kinds of interesting stuff.

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Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe

Lebowski screenshotHave you ever watched The Big Lebowski and wondered to yourself, where does the Dude fit in the spectrum of constructed masculinity from Philip Marlowe to Doc Sportello? Have you ever wished there were a Pynchon scholar who could explain to you the ways in which writers rewrite famous texts, and how they revise them? Have you ever wished someone would really explain the specifics of how our culture teaches males to act like men? If so, you’re in luck. I just did all that.

Of course, I know most people don’t really ask those questions. But I do. I do a lot of scholarship. The University of Georgia Press published my book on Thomas Pynchon last summer. I’ve had a handful of articles in peer-reviewed journals lately. I’m proud of all that stuff, but there’s a downside. It’s hard to share it. Most of the peer-reviewed articles are behind a paywall. Only students and academics can access them. And my book on Pynchon is really important, but it also costs $60. I wouldn’t spend sixty bucks on a scholarly tome on Thomas Pynchon. Actually, I would. I have. Many times. But I have a hard time asking others to do that.

Anyway, bringing it all around, I’ve recently published an article in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature. It’s on all the things I wrote about up in my first paragraph. And Orbit does things right. They don’t charge people to read their journal. They don’t charge scholars to make their work open access. And still they find a way to get the top scholars in the field to vigorously peer-review everything they publish.

So long story short, if you want to read my article on masculinity in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, you can read it here.

And, while you’re there, you can read the review that one of the top Pynchon scholars in the world did of my book (it’s the fourth review; you have to scroll down).

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The Totalitarian Playbook

Morpheus Totalitatarian PlaybookThree incidents in my life had become linked in my head. I felt like they were connected, but I couldn’t explain why. Whenever I talked about it, I ended up rambling. At the same time, the editor at Morpheus asked me if I’d written anything recently he could use. So I sat down and wrote an essay that allowed me to clear my head, articulate my thoughts, and get something over to the editor. I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. You can read it here.

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Liberal University Professors

Holocaust Memorial BerlinMy university has a running column in the Ventura County Star on Sundays. Our public relations person asked me to contribute a column recommending books for the summer.  She also wanted me to make it newsy. So I did what everyone in the news is doing. I started with Donald Trump. This was my original first paragraph:

Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Starting tomorrow, see how long you can go before encountering a reference to Donald Trump. After the first, time how long before the second comes along. You’ll be stunned by how incessantly everyone talks about Trump. It’s like we’re all in a room with a small child wielding a knife. We know he’s just a narcissist trying to get us to pay attention to him, but we still have to pay enough attention to not get stabbed. We keep thinking someone is going to take the knife out of his hand. But, no. That’s not going to happen any time soon.

This situation can cause anxiety for anyone. Perhaps it’s causing some anxiety for you. If so, I can help. I can’t take the deadly weapons out of the narcissist’s hands, but I can help with the anxiety.

I sent it off to the PR person. She liked the column, but she didn’t like the part about Trump being a small child wielding a knife. She feared that some of the university’s donors would be offended. So she rewrote the first paragraph for me. This was her version:

Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Starting tomorrow, see how long you can go before encountering a reference to Donald Trump. After the first, time how long before the second comes along. You’ll be stunned by how incessantly everyone talks about Trump. For or against Trump, it’s a continual topic of conversation.

Those against him may feel like we’re all in a room with a child who has a knife and we must pay attention or be stabbed. Those who support him may feel they are constantly under attack themselves.

Either situation can cause anxiety for anyone. Perhaps it’s causing some anxiety for you. If so, I can help with the anxiety.

Not to be a prima dona, but I couldn’t let this opening stand. This tone isn’t me, and I wouldn’t let my name be associated with these ideas. I disagree with the whole idea of “for or against Trump” being equally valid positions. Trump is following the playbook for establishing a totalitarian regime. He has scapegoated an entire religion and tried to ban members of that religion from entering the United States. His nationalist rhetoric has led to unconscionable attacks on immigrants. He has marginalized academics, intellectuals, and the free press. These are the first three steps that every totalitarian leader takes: scapegoat a minority population, heighten nationalist feelings, and silence opposition.

The next step is to push for a war to solidify this ideology.

It’s personal to me. My wife immigrated to this country. I’m an academic. Trump’s stances are stances against me and my wife personally. I teach at a university that is largely comprised of white women (another group he has attacked) and Latinos. His attacks are directed at my students. The guy even took my sister’s health care away. Her premiums went from $190 a month to $1300 a month when he insisted on trying to repeal the ACA, then refused to fund parts of it.

None of this is okay. If you support Trump and you feel attacked for your support, that’s a good thing. I honestly believe most Trump supporters are better people than Trump is. If you’re one of his supporters, I hope you do feel attacked and this leads you to rethinking your attack on politically precarious populations.

I didn’t say all this to PR person. Instead, I wrote a compromised third opening. You can read it and my five recommendations for good books here.

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My Next Book

I’ve spent the past few years working on an academic study of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, the systems of power in those novels, and his depictions of resistance to that power. I started the project as my dissertation, which I finished in late July, 2011. As I was wrapping up the writing of it, global events like the Arab Spring, the revolution in Tunisia, and austerity protests in Greece and Spain started to occur. In September of 2011, a handful of activists set up camp in Zuccotti Park in NYC, and the Occupy Movement was born. Occupy’s ideas of participatory democracy, their strategy to forego protests and instead develop alternative societies (even if they were just a demonstration of a genuinely democratic society) matched a lot of what I’d read in Pynchon. At this point, one would think that I may have participated in the demonstrations. I didn’t. I’m the worst about attending rallies, even if I’m sympathetic to the cause.

What I did instead was look deeper into the political and economic theorists who provided the foundations for both Pynchon and Occupy, and I wrote a book about it. The book is called, appropriately enough, Occupy Pynchon.

occupy-cover

I index and proofed the typeset version of the book just as our nation descended into the madness which resulted in the one percent taking over every seat of power in the US and unapologetically working to make this a nation by, for, and of the 1% (to borrow Joseph Stiglitz characterization). I took a little comfort in knowing that I’d at least written a handbook for resistance to this takeover. It may be an academic text geared largely for literature scholars, marketed to university libraries, and costing $60, but at least it’s out there. Or it will be this coming May.

So that’s been my rabbit hole. If you want to see more about the book, here’s the page from my publisher’s web site.

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Bumbling Sexual Predators

Sutherland in Animal House

I’ve often wondered where fictional English professors get their awful clothes. Donald Sutherland gives me the name of his tailor above.

I’m a little obsessed with English professors in movies. I don’t care how bad a movie is, if there’s an English professor in it, I watch it. Even if that movie is Some Kind of Beautiful, which takes bad film-making to the point where it’s almost so bad it’s good, but not quite. It’s just so bad it’s bad.

Most films with English professors are lousy. I watch them because I have this sick fascination with the cliche professor in movies. He’s almost always a white man, slovenly, flighty, and sleeping with a student. At the end of every movie, I daydream about writing a book about these slanderous portrayals and calling it Bumbling Sexual Predators.

I was talking about this with a buddy of mine, Mike Plante, a few months ago. Mike published the long-running film magazine Cinemad. He still does a Cinemad podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Mike interviewed me about being an English professor and films about professors for his podcast. You can listen to it here.

While you’re at it, spend a little time on the Cinemad site. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

And, for what it’s worth, my award for the best (and most realistic) English professor in a film goes to Regina Hall’s character in People Places Things.

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Love and Gravity’s Rainbow

Gravitys_rainbow_coverFor the past several years, I’ve been working on a book about politics in Thomas Pynchon novels. It’s been a hell of an undertaking. I’ve reread all of Pynchon’s works several times. I’ve read hundreds of books and academic articles about Pynchon’s novels. I’ve studied economic and political and literary theory. I’ve written several drafts of a book, published a few chapters in peer-reviewed journals, found a publisher, and finished one round of edits. The book is under contract right now with the University of Georgia Press. It should come out sometime next year.

In the meantime, I wanted to do something lighter, something that reminded me why I was first attracted to Pynchon’s novels a couple of decades ago. I wrote an essay about the love stories in Gravity’s Rainbow and how they helped shape my own real-life love story. The folks at The Millions were gracious enough to publish it. You can read it here.

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A Punk’s History of Howard Zinn

 

Illustration from Razorcake #55 by Brad Beshaw

Illustration from Razorcake #55 by Brad Beshaw

Celebrity deaths elicit some strange reactions. I sometimes get wrapped up in mourning the loss and forget that I didn’t know the person. I was hit pretty hard by the deaths of Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone, even though I’d never met them and had no intention of meeting them. I have to remember that the things I love about those guys still exist very much in the present. I can listen to them sing any time I want to. And, let’s face it, the grand productive days were over for those two. As decent as their final releases were, neither of them was going to produce another Give ‘Em Enough Rope or End of the Century.

Maybe the fact that three of the original Ramones are dead and all of the original Eagles are still alive is proof that, if a god does exist, he’s a bit of a dick. Nonetheless, the point remains that celebrity deaths need to be taken with a grain of salt. But I’m struggling over this most recent one.

On January 27, 2010, we lost Howard Zinn. Among other things, Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, which is probably the most comprehensive history of Americans who fought against racism, sexism, imperialism, and classism; of Native Americans who refused to be annihilated, of African Americans who refused to be dehumanized, of women who refused to be the second sex, of citizens who fought against wars rather than in them, and of workers who fought against exploitation. I remember my first time reading A People’s History. It was about a dozen years ago. I was living in a small town in Florida, working as a construction supervisor. The eight-hundred page tome rode shotgun with me as I drove my truck from jobsite to jobsite. I read snatches of it during breaks, eating lunch, waiting for subcontractors to show up, or sitting in my thrift-store recliner in my one-bedroom apartment. It was a time in my life when I felt particularly powerless. Although most of the construction workers viewed me as a boss, I had no real authority. I made less money than most of the skilled workers (many of whom were less skilled than me), and it was becoming more and more clear to me that I was just fuel in a generator that powered the banking and insurance industries—the ones who really make the money in construction. I’d spent a decade trying to get out of these kinds of jobs. I’d gotten two college degrees (a bachelor’s and a master’s). I’d published my first novel. And I still found myself in a low rent apartment in a white trash neighborhood, living a life that most of America feels comfortable calling white trash. Amid this atmosphere, A People’s History was empowering.

Zinn, like all historians, tells history from his point of view. His values are reflected in whom he chooses as historically significant and what events he chooses to focus on. Unlike most histories that I was familiar with, though, Zinn focused on people like me. He was less concerned with presidents, generals, and leaders of business (unless he was knocking them off their pedestals). Instead, he acknowledged that real change comes from the bottom up. While Abraham Lincoln may have signed the bill that freed the slaves, he didn’t do it out of a deep-seeded belief in social justice. He did it as a response to an overwhelming resistance movement that fought against slavery, be it through the dozens of violent slave uprisings throughout the South, the Quaker network of safe houses for escaped slaves, the challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act, or the narratives of writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. In most cases, politicians don’t act. They react. And their reactions are often based the uprisings and resistance movements of ordinary people.

Think for a few seconds about how significant this perspective is. In the American educational system, we’re taught to look for heroes. Christopher Columbus discovers America. George Washington wins the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln frees the slaves. General MacArthur leads the Good War and defeats fascism. Martin Luther King gives a few speeches and ends racism. This type of mythology pervades our national consciousness. It is manifested in our movies, where the action movie genre is dedicated to promoting the myth that a single man (with the right amount of firepower and a few inhuman stunts) can simplify any complex concept and solve it himself, while we get to sit idly by, eating popcorn and drinking soda. And we believe it. Sometimes, we even elect one of those action heroes as governor. Or we elect Obama president and expect him to give us jobs and money, take on the health care industry, and end two wars by himself. And when Schwarzenegger proves to be exactly the idiot he sounds like, and Obama demonstrates that the president of the United States can’t solve all our problems, we blame the men themselves without questioning the underlying myth that enabled us to place these unrealistic expectations on them.

We also ignore our personal responsibility.

So for me, reading A People’s History a dozen years ago hammered home the point that I had to take responsibility for my own actions. I couldn’t just sit around my low rent apartment and complain about the system and its injustices. Or I could. It just didn’t do anyone any good. What I needed to do, instead, was get off my ass and fight for what I believed in. And I had to do it as a lifestyle change—something I could do every day.

I looked at how Zinn fought for what he believed in and noticed that he stuck with his strengths. He worked for social justice as a historian, as a speaker, as a writer, and as a teacher. And I thought to myself, what are my strengths? Well, both of my degrees were in writing, so I needed to stick with that. And I was an excellent student and researcher. I was comfortable talking in front of a crowd, and I could articulate my ideas verbally. In short, though history isn’t my discipline, many of my strengths were similar to Zinn’s. So I could use him as a role-model.

I picked the issues that were important to me to fight for. I wanted (and still want) a free media, and I couldn’t just kill Rupert Murdoch like some action film hero would (and even if I could, I’d have to remember that his real power comes from his legions of followers, not from Murdoch himself). But I could co-found this here punk rock magazine. I could write hundreds of essays and stories for dozens of independent magazines. I could write books that dealt with American classism and get them published on indie presses. And so I did. My writing may not have the impact that Zinn’s has, but I’m doing about as well as he was doing at my age. If I stay on his schedule, I have twenty-one more years to come up with my equivalent of A People’s History. I have forty-eight more years to become the cultural force that he is today.

The second issue I chose to fight was this creation of the Superman myth that enables us to deify men like Washington, Lincoln, and Obama while ignoring our own personal responsibility. Because the second really significant thing I got out of A People’s History was that, historically speaking, people like me have mattered. I do matter. I don’t need a hero to free me or a politician to give me hope. I can take care of these things myself.

One thing traditional histories do is make people like you and me feel insignificant. In all likelihood, second graders of the future are not going to be learning about us. Punk rock probably won’t even be a footnote in texts in fifty years. But we can ask, whose traditions guide these traditional histories? How can we change them? How can we write a history that defies the myth of super humans and empowers those second graders?

So, along these lines, I’ve spent the last six years at a state university, developing my own personal pedagogy of social justice, one that explores the literature of writers who resisted the powers that were. About twenty-percent of my students will go on to be K-12 teachers here in California. Hopefully, by learning to question some of these myths that continue to be perpetuated in our public school system, my students will decide to stop perpetuating them.

 

Of course, here I am at the end of my column, one which started out seemingly eulogizing Howard Zinn, and I’ve hardly talked about the guy at all. I haven’t talked about his amazing career, his wonderful books, or so many things that made him great. I haven’t even talked about the time I spent with him—because I actually did meet him and spend time with him. He was nice enough to stay in touch with me for a little bit after that. He even blurbed one of my books for me. He was a great human being. But, first of all, I’ve already written quite a bit about Zinn in Razorcake (see, for instance, the interview Todd and I did with him in issue #6, my story about that interview in issue #31, plus the multiple reviews I did of his work in other issues). And, second of all, it would be contradictory to write a eulogy that puts Zinn on a pedestal while I compliment him for teaching me that no one belongs on a pedestal. So, instead, I just want to take this moment to thank him, a couple of months too late, for teaching me that I have the power to change my own life.

Thanks, Howard. I miss you already.

Author’s note: This is the nineteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #55.  For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.