Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 311

September 17, 2015: Given Days: The Great Molasses Flood

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]Three telling details about the unique 1919 North End disaster, which plays a small but significant role in Lehane’s novel.1)      The Anarchists Did It—Or Not: When a tank containing more than 2 million gallons of molasses burst at the Purity Distilling Company on January 15, 1919, suspicion initially fell—as it did so frequently in this Red Scare era—on “anarchists.” Some of the alcohol produced by the factory was used to produce munitions, so the accusation wasn’t entirely without cause. But after nearly three years of investigations and hearings, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) was held solely responsible for the disaster; one theory is that the company was trying to work faster in order to outrace Prohibition, as the 18th Amendment was ratified the day after the flood. In any case, the disaster serves as a telling reminder, in this pre-Depression moment, that corporations were at least as dangerous to American communities as Reds.2)      A New Class of Response: The reason for those three years of investigations was simple but very new as of 1919—local residents brought a class-action lawsuit against USIA. In our famously litigious 21st century moment, that response might seem like a given; but in 1919, the idea of a class-action suit was largely unfamiliar, as illustrated by this list of six game-changing such suits that dates back only to 1925. So when these North End residents brought their suit against USIA, when they pursued it to victory and received an unprecedented $600,000 in settlements from the company, they represented a potent, populist extension of the Progressive Era’s efforts to regulate and curb big corporations.3)      How We Remember: Adjacent to the site once occupied by the Purity tank, and now home to the city’s Langone Park and neighboring Puopolo Park, is a small plaque (placed by the Bostonian Society) that commemorates the flood. Yet I would venture that literally millions more Bostonians and tourists have encountered this history not through the plaque, nor through Lehane’s novel (bestseller that it was), but rather through one of the city’s ubiquitous Duck Boats (run by Boston Duck Tours). That dark brown boat, named Molly Molasses, comprises a pitch-perfect representation of the role that historic tourism plays in our collective memories, for good and for bad. But far be it from me to critique any attempt to better remember this unique, compelling, and exemplary historic disaster!Last Given Day connection tomorrow,BenPS. Historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!

September 16, 2015: Given Days: The Boston Police Strike

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]On what Lehane’s novel gets right about a controversial history, and what feels wrong.If the first third or so of The Given Day is structured around the influenza epidemic, the novel’s culminating section is thoroughly dominated by a far more local but just as significant historical event: the Boston Police Strike of 1919. While Boston’s wasn’t the first police force to employ this extreme negotiation tactic (Lehane’s characters, both pro- and anti-police, refer frequently to earlier events in the U.K, for example), it was the first in the United States, and comprised a hugely controversial watershed moment to be sure. Underpaid, overworked, and generally treated as poorly as it’s possible for a labor community to be treated, the Boston police had a long list of genuine grievances, along with the support of prominent Bostonians from Mayor Andrew Peters to James Storrow. But the strikers also faced powerful adversaries, not only in leaders like Commissioner Edwin Curtis and Governor Calvin Coolidge, but also in the fearful communal narratives of “Bolsheviks” and “anarchists” so prevalent in this era of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare.Lehane’s portrayal of the strike is a masterpiece of balancing these different historical realities, narratives, and contexts. Because cop protagonist Danny Coughlin is our main perspective character, and because Danny becomes the VP of the officers’ “Social Club” that would morph into the union and briefly affiliate with the AFL, we are necessarily understanding of and sympathetic to the policemen’s side to these histories. But as in so many classic historical fictions, Lehane also takes the liberty of imagining the perspectives of actual historical figures, including in this section those of Peters, Storrow, Curtis, and Coolidge. In so doing, he rounds out his portrayal of this historical moment and its different moments and meanings quite successfully—and at the same time primes readers for the genuine, multi-faceted chaos that results when the police choose to strike and, for a few nights, the city descends into a series of demonstrations, confrontations, riots, and crimes. We’re never far from Danny (or his co-protagonist Luther Laurence, who by the novel’s midpoint is also living in Boston) in this section, but neither are we limited to his individual take; the strike and the city become vibrant characters in their own right in this climactic set-piece.There’s one element of that set-piece that doesn’t ring nearly as true, however, and it’s one that features another of the novel’s fictional protagonists: Thomas Coughlin, Danny’s father and a longtime Boston police captain. Disgusted by the crimes taking place during the strike, and learning of a group of scab policemen who have been pinned down by a group of such criminals, Thomas assembles a small force of his own and heads out into the chaotic night to bust heads, an action he performs with relish across multiple action scenes. I don’t doubt that some of Boston’s worst criminals took advantage of the strike and deserved the kind of beating Thomas and company deliver, but this whole thread contradicts one of the novel’s overarching themes: both Danny and Luther come, in their own way, to see violence as something that, even when seemingly justified or directed at deserving targets, becomes its own vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy, one that takes good men and women and whole communities down with it. That’s a particularly potent theme for the post-World War I era, with its Palmer Raids and massacres of African American communities alongside the war’s lingering effects. Yet in this Thomas thread, historical novelist Lehane seems to give way to crime novelist Lehane, and the section and novel are the worse for the shift.Next Given Day connection tomorrow,BenPS. Historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!

September 15, 2015: Given Days: The Influenza Epidemic

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]What Lehane’s novel helps us understand about the largely forgotten health crisis.As I wrote in this March blog post, the 1918 influenza epidemic (or pandemic, more accurately) was by most measures the deadliest worldwide health crisis since the Black Plague (and perhaps of all time). While its international effects far dwarfed its American ones—nearly 100 million people died worldwide, compared to about half a million in the U.S.—the crisis was nonetheless felt deeply and widely in the United States, across three distinct waves in 1918 and 1919. Coming so quickly upon the heels of World War I—or rather, as I highlighted in that post, coinciding with and then extending the deadly effects of that earthshattering, far from great war—the influenza epidemic could not have had worse or more brutal timing. Indeed, it must have felt to many across the globe, and most especially in war-torn and disease-ridden Europe, that the world might well not survive the end of the 1910s.Dennis Lehane gives the influenza epidemic a prominent role in the first third or so of The Given Day, and in so doing he helps humanize two of those historical aspects. While the disease’s connection to World War I soldiers has never been definitively established, there’s no doubt that wartime camps and travel at least amplified and spread the illness, and that’s where Lehane starts his version of the story: Aidan “Danny” Coughlin, a Boston cop and one of the novel’s two main protagonists, volunteers alongside his partner Steve Coyle to investigate a ship in Boston Harbor that is carrying soldiers returning from the war; it’s revealed that some of the ship’s passengers have come down with a horrific illness, and soon enough the flu has come ashore with those infected soldiers, hitting Steve along with so many other residents. Yet Lehane does more with these soldiers than use them as patient zeroes—in telling exchanges between soldiers and the cops, he also highlights the unique double burden that the soldiers face, having fought in and survived the war (unlike Danny and Steve and others who remained on the home front) and yet now being exposed to and decimated by this fatal illness.If returning soldiers were ironically among the hardest hit communities, however, the fundamental truth of the influenza epidemic was that it extended to and ravaged every community. Lehane captures this reality with particular effectiveness, creating a Boston world in which every individual and family, at any and every moment, is but one bloody cough away from facing the imminent and likely fatal presence of the flu. As both a police officer and a member of multiple Boston worlds (his family is among the city’s wealthiest but he himself lives in a North End tenement house), Danny is the perfect character to help Lehane trace that deadly presence throughout the city and its different settings and spaces, to offer a window into all the human lives and relationships affected and altered (whether they die or, like Steve, are permanently crippled by the illness) by this horrific virus. To be sure, the influenza epidemic was big enough to merit its own historical novel, and it has produced some—but by making it a part of his broader canvas, Lehane helps capture and humanize the disease and its effects.Next Given Day connection tomorrow,BenPS. Historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!

September 14, 2015: Given Days: Ruthian Realities

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On Babe Ruth, symbolism, and race in America.
There’s no doubt that sports can bring out the worst as well as the best in us, and that sports fandom does so with particular force. But even those of us who have experienced hateful sports rivalries are likely to be shocked when we read about the death threats (among other horrific attacks) that Hank Aaron faced as he approached and then passed Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. This wasn’t Jackie Robinson, breaking baseball’s color barrier and changing a still-segregated society nearly thirty years earlier; this was simply a very talented baseball player finishing a very succesful baseball career, one that had landed him at the top of the record books. And yet something about the combination of his race and identity with those of the iconic legend he was eclipsing led to some of the ugliest expressions of which we Americans and humans are capable.
The moment and those expressions tell us a great deal about racism in America, and it would likely be a mistake to focus our analyses on any other side to those histories. But at the same time, I do believe that if Aaron had been approaching a Lou Gehrig record, or a Joe DiMaggio record, or a Ty Cobb record, or any other legendary player, the responses might not have been quite so vitriolic. There’s just something about the Babe in the collective consciousness of a number of American sports fans, or rather a few related somethings: his literally and figuratively larger than life status, the way in which he was already a myth of sorts before he became one after his career was done; his concurrent representation of an earlier era in baseball and sports and America, one that likely couldn’t help but feel to many fans contrasted with the world of professional sports in Aaron’s 1970s; and, yes, the way in which each of those histories was made possible in large part because Ruth played in a segregated league, competing with only a portion of his era’s best ballplayers.It’s with all of those different sides to Ruth, his era, and history in play that Dennis Lehane creates a series of bravura sequences interspersed with the main narratives throughout his early 20th century historical novel The Given Day (2008). One of Lehane’s two co-protagonists is an African American ballplayer named Luther Laurence, and Lehane opens his novel with a set-piece in which Ruth and some of his fellow professional players (en route from one 1918 World Series site to the other) encounter Luther and other African American players, leading to a pickup game that is at once color-blind and yet ultimately as segregated as the rest of society. Ruth reappears in a few additional set-pieces later in the novel, always bringing with him the same uneasy combination of baseball and society, mythic ideals and gritty realities. Some reviewers critiqued the Ruth sections as tangential to the book’s main narratives, which is true enough—but they make great use of the Ruth mythos, illustrating one more time how much this larger than life figure can say and do in our national conversations and stories.Next Given Day connection tomorrow,BenPS. Historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!

September 12-13, 2015: Memorializing 9/11

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ve offered a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to this special memorial post.]On our current 9/11 memorial, what it could be, and why the difference matters.In the interests of full disclosure, I should begin by noting that I haven’t yet had a chance to visit New York City’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum (although I have seen One World Trade Center jutting into the city’s skyline). So as always, but even more so in this case, I welcome any corrections or different perspectives, along with any and all other comments. I do have a number of family members and friends who have visited the memorial, however, and from their responses and reviews (as well as those I’ve read online, with that amazing Adam Gopnik piece as exhibit A) it seems clear to me that its designers made a clear and conscious choice to focus largely on two sets of stories: those of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and all those affected by their deaths; and those of the first responders and others who did such heroic work in the attacks’ aftermath. As Gopnik highlights, the terrorists themselves are present in muted and even intentionally opaque ways (such as their “last night” letter/manifesto, which at the museum is untranslated from the original Arabic), reinforcing that overarching focus on the victims and responders rather than the attacks’ histories and contexts.To be clear, I don’t have any issue with a memorial focused on those two communities. Indeed, that seems to me precisely what a memorial should do: help remember those lost and commemorate those who worked on their behalf. Yet a museum is (or at least should be) something quite different from a memorial, and from what I can tell the 9/11 museum repeats the memorial’s work far more than would be ideal. Am I suggesting that a museum should include the kinds of complex and controversial histories I’ve written about this week, those of Afghanistan and the CIA, of wartime excesses and debates over Gitmo and torture? I most definitely am, as it seems impossible to me to study the events of 9/11 without considering both their antecedents and their aftermaths, both the contexts that contributed to them and the ways in which they have echoed into so much of our 21stcentury society and culture. The museum could certainly also include further information about the victims and their worlds, about the first responders and their efforts, about both the tragic and inspiring sides to the attacks—they too are unquestionably part of studying these histories. And studying is precisely what distinguishes a museum from a memorial, as I would define them.To put the distinction simply, as I see it a memorial is a space for reflection and remembrance, while a museum is one for thought and analysis. As Americans we often seem to think that performing the latter actions is somehow anathema to the former and to emotions of all kinds, while I would argue instead that the two responses complement and enhance each other. We also, far too often, treat analysis as if it’s an insult to those memories and those on whom they focus, another offshoot of the “love it or leave it” school of patriotism about which I’ve written this week as well. Yet as with so much in our collective conversations, it seems to me that the answer is addition rather than competition—that finding a way to both remember and study, to do the work of both memorial and museum, should always be the goal of historic sites and spaces such as this one. As this site and all our collective spaces move forward, I hope we can find ways to do and model that additive work, and make these kinds of memorials and museums into vital parts of our collective conversations.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? How should we remember 9/11?

September 11, 2015: AmericanStudying 9/11: Art in the Aftermath

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post this weekend.]On the strengths and limitations of three post-9/11 cultural works.1)      Foer’s Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is narrated by Oskar Schell, a 9 year-old boy whose father was skilled in the World Trade Center attacks. In creating this complex, compelling, wonderful young narrator and his voice and perspective, Foer brings to life a profoundly human and universal side to the attacks and their aftermath—questions both of loss and grieving and of the persistence of love and inspiration. But it feels to this reader that Foer wasn’t able to imagine a successful story for that narrator to narrate, and the resulting novel comes to feel both repetitive and, at times, manipulative, using rather than illuminating this tragic moment.2)      Binder’s Film: Filmmaker Mike Binder wrote and directed Reign Over Me (2007), a film that stars Adam Sandler as a man who lost both his wife and daughters in the WTC attacks and Don Cheadle as the former college roommate with whom Sandler forms an unlikely but mutually beneficial friendship. Although many reviewers found the film’s use of 9/11 in service of what becomes a relatively light-hearted dramedy troubling, I’d call that a strength—not every story from or about history is an epic, after all. But ultimately, Reign rules or falls on the back of Sandler’s performance, and I just don’t think the comedian is up to the challenge; his character comes to feel (as his so often do) more like a collection of mannerisms than a fully realized human, and if an epic isn’t necessarily called for, humanity certainly is.3)      Bruce’s Album: C’mon, you didn’t think I could write a post on post-9/11 art and not include Springsteen’s The Rising (2002), did ya? Bruce says that he decided to create the album after a man on the street yelled out to him, in early 2002, “We need you now!”; whether the story is true or not (Bruce is nothing if not a literary storyteller), it most definitely captures the album’s ambitious and to my mind achieved goal of representing the wide and deep swath of emotional, psychological, spiritual, individual, and communal responses to the attacks. Nearly every song on the album goes in a different direction, yet at the same time there’s a clear and compelling unity across them all. It’s certainly the case that some of the songs are a bit on the nose (I’m looking at you, “Waiting on a Sunny Day”), but many are among the Boss’s best—and taken as a whole, I don’t know that there’s a better 21st century rock album, nor a better artistic response to 9/11.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?

September 10, 2015: AmericanStudying 9/11: The Siege

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post this weekend.]On the most salient aspect of an underappreciated, premonitory film.made three films with Denzel Washington, and it’s fair to say that each was less successful and significant than the one before. Glory (1989), their first collaboration, is an undisputed American masterpiece, did hugely significant historical and cultural work, and stands as perhaps the greatest film yet made about the Civil War. Courage Under Fire (1996), their second collaboration, was far less prominent, but nonetheless won a ton of awards and remains one of the best films made about the first Gulf War. And then there’s The Siege (1998), a film that, despite the combined star power of Washington, Bruce Willis, and Annette Bening, lost an estimated $30 million at the box office and has, as far as I can tell, disappeared entirely from our cultural landscape and collective memories.That disappearance is pretty strange—not because the film is brilliant or anything (although I don’t think it’s bad at all, and it features great performances from the three leads as well as future Monk star Tony Shalhoub), but because this 1998 movie foreshadowed and predicted so, so thoroughly the 2001 terrorist attacks and nearly all of the events, debates, and revelations of their aftermath. [SPOILERS FOLLOW:] The film’s Islamic terrorists are members of an Al Qaeda-like group that was trained in Afghanistan by CIA agent Bening before turning against the United States; after their attacks on New York City, debates ensue over the best ways to respond, with military officer Willis favoring civil liberties restrictions, illegal detention and torture, and other methods of what FBI agent Washington calls “shredding the Constitution just a little bit”; and the film thus becomes at one and the same time a thriller about stopping the terrorists and one about the battle between these opposed American perspectives on an unfolding “war on terror.”All of those elements and themes remain highly salient for our contemporary society, of course. But there’s one particular plot thread that resonates strikingly with the late July 2015 moment in which I’m writing this post: after declaring martial law in New York City, Willis’ general instigates a forced internment of most of the city’s Arabic and Muslim American residents (including the son of Shalhoub’s FBI agent character). In the aftermath of the mid-July, Chattanooga, Tennessee killings of five US servicemen by what seems to have been a radicalized Muslim American, retired General Wesley Clark advocated for precisely such an internment program. (To be clear, Clark officially advocated for only interning “radical” Muslim Americans—but that’s the ostensible goal of Willis’ program in The Siege as well, and I’m quite certain such an effort would cast just as wide and indiscriminatory net in reality as it does in the film.) While part of me finds it impossible to believe that we’re even talking about interning Americans once more, another part recognizes—as, years before 9/11, did Zwick’s film—that such extreme, dark responses to tragedy remain a part of our national identity, and one with which The Siege helps us engage.Last AmericanStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?

September 9, 2015: AmericanStudying 9/11: The Neverending History?

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post this weekend.]On wartime excesses, and whether our current ones will ever end.
I’ve written before in this space about the World War II firebombing of Dresden, and through that horrific and largely forgotten (here in America at least) event about the ways in which event the most “good” of wars can bring out the worst in us, as a nation and as humans. The same can of course be said for another, more extended, more explicitly chosen and intended, and perhaps even more horrific home front policy during World War II: the internment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. And if we examine any other American military conflict, the Civil War for example, we can find plenty of equally troubling and terrifying such wartime excesses, none more so than Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus for the duration of the war. Lincoln’s unconstitutional policy applied not only in Confederate states, but throughout the nation; and it targeted not only Confederate soldiers or those citizens actively fighting against the Union, but also those who “discouraged volunteer enlistments,” among other activities.
Compared to most of the other excesses and horrors in American history, though, those wartime ones have consistently been ameliorated by one key fact: when the wars in question ended, so too did nearly all of the excesses. Habeas corpus was restored after the Civil War; the US stopped bombing European and Japanese cities after peace treaties were signed with those nations; the interned Japanese Americans were freed and allowed to return home; and so on. Such definite endpoints don’t of course make up for or erase the horrors that have come before, nor do they mean that the aftermaths and effects of the excesses don’t linger for decades or longer still (as any visitor to 21stcentury Dresden can attest), but nonetheless, a horrible and brutal past policy or action beats the heck out of a horrible and brutal continuing one. Moreover, these briefer wartime excesses are at least somewhat easier to recognize as the horrors they are than long-term and so more ingrained policies—as evidenced by the US government’s formal apology and reparations for the internment, only forty years after the war’s end, compared to the complete official silence on the century of institutional and legal support for segregation (in a wide variety of arenas) that followed the end of slavery.
I have plenty of problems with the way the US government specifically and Americans more broadly have responded to 9/11—with what has sometimes come to be called the 9/12 mindset—but certainly at the very top of the list would be the concept of the “war on terror.” Such a war would seem to be a parallel to other non-declared governmental wars—the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime—but in fact, both as the Bush administration intended the phrase and as it has been deployed and hardened over the decade and a half since, the war on terror has been treated quite exactly like a full-blown, declared, shooting war. That means, again not surprisingly to anyone with a knowledge of American and human history, a whole range of excesses and horrors, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretapping and the darker corners of the Patriot Act to torture and extraordinary rendition to CIA black sites, and much else besides. But in this case, because the war is one that may well never end, so too is it difficult to imagine an end to the wartime excesses—if anything, the last few years seem simply to have added new and just as horrifying ones to the mix, including drone strikes and the idea that the president has the authority to assassinate American citizens with alleged terrorist affiliations.
To put it another way: Roosevelt responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by terming December 7th, 1941 a “day that will live in infamy,” but when the war with Japan ended three and a half years later, much of that antipathy was forgiven; but when Americans say about 9/11 that “everything changed” and that we will “never forget,” the phrases seem more darkly and troublingly prophetic than we could ever have realized. Next AmericanStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?

September 8, 2015: AmericanStudying 9/11: Do No Harm

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post this weekend.]On doctors, dark histories, and remembering the worst of what we’ve done.
While many if not most of the facts of what has happened for the last decade and a half at Guantanamo Bay (to say nothing of the even more opaque Black Sites around the world) will likely remain forever unknown or at best uncertain, more and more information about that profound stain on our recent national identity is nonetheless beginning to come out. A few years ago, for example, we learned of an extensive medical study, conducted and written-up with all the experimental and analytical rigor and precision one would expect from such a report, that detailed at great and extremely wrenching length the contributions of many physicians to the torture regime’s efforts at Gitmo. This past year, a similar report was released on psychologists’ participation in those torture programs. I understand the dual allegiances held by any military physician, but it is impossible to read these reports and not recognize just how fully, in serving their military masters, these doctors and psychologists violated every line of their medical oath and ethics, most especially the pledge “to abstain from doing harm.”
It’s especially difficult for me to read these reports because I know, from various sources not only journalistic but also personal (a connection whom I will not throw under the bus here spent time working at Gitmo in a role I try not to think about, and reported with no sense of outrage that one of the prisoners he encountered there was a young boy), that many of the hundreds of prisoners held for well over a decade in this facility are at best collateral damage from the war in Afghanistan, and at worst even more grotesquely wronged than that (for years it was standing military policy in Afghanistan to pay locals a reward for turning in “terrorists,” and I can only imagine how many of those turned in were as a result simply someone’s enemies or adversaries or even just targets of opportunity; at one point at least over 80% of the prisoners in Gitmo had been captured not by US forces but by proxies in this way). One of the prisoners about whom I’ve read a good deal (through Glenn Greenwald) is a teenage boy, and another a middle-aged father to a large family; in cases like those I can’t help but read report like these and imagine my own children or myself, taken thousands of miles away from family and loved ones and brutalized for more than a decade with no possibility to prove or even genuinely argue for my innocence or standing in any way.
Despite the powerfully specific and un-generalizable realities of that place and situation, however, I can’t help but also connect them to a broader AmericanStudies concern of mine, and one at the heart of my next book project. We have a national tendency to seek to whitewash over our darkest histories, partly for cowardly or jingoistic reasons (“We’re the greatest country in the world and shouldn’t go around apologizing for ourselves!”), but also certainly for more understandable and even logical ones (a desire to build community through shared forgiveness and moving past our differences and divisions, for example). Yet I firmly believe that this tendency has the potential to do great harm, not only in allowing us to forget and so perhaps repeat our darkest errors, but also in keeping us from genuinely striving to be the best version of ourselves; that version depends precisely on engaging with all of the times and ways in which we have come up short of that best version, and then finding a path through and beyond that engagement to something more real and strong. While that’s far from easy, it’s most certainly possible; I would note for example the amazing Stasi Museum in Berlin, a place where Germans and visitors alike can engage with and seek to understand one of the darkest eras in that nation’s history.
Could we as Americans do the same—building an Internment museum, an Indian Wars museum, a Slavery museum, a Torture Museum? I don’t know that we could, but I know that in all of those historical cases we already have, in much of our literature and art and scholarship, complex and dark and powerful engagements with those histories, and with who and what we are through and, perhaps, beyond them. If I can add my voice to that mix in a way that gives us a slightly better chance of doing real good, now and in the future, I’ll have lived up to my own oaths for sure. Next AmericanStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?

September 7, 2015: AmericanStudying 9/11: Allies in Afghanistan

[Even—perhaps especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post this weekend.]On how two 80s films force us to confront uncomfortable histories.
There are lots of reasons why many 1980s films are difficult for a contemporary audience to watch and take seriously, but for two late 80s action films, there’s one specific, shared element that would produce a great deal of discomfort in a 2015 American audience. Timothy Dalton’s first James Bond film, 1987’s The Living Daylights (a personal favorite of mine, for lots of reasons not germane to this blog post), and Sylvester Stallone’s third Rambo film, the aptly titled (and much less effective, at least for anyone not a 10 year-old boy) Rambo III , both feature extended sequences set in Afghanistan, plotlines in which our heroic protagonists join forces with the Mujahideen, the Afghan resistance to the invading Soviet forces. The logic of these alliances is obvious enough—not only are the Mujahideen opposing the Evil Empire, the superpower against which both Rambo’s US and Bond’s British are thoroughly allied, but they’re also the plucky underdogs, freedom fighters taking out tanks and helicopters with rocks and cleverness, the Minutemen and the Redcoats all over again.
Thanks in significant measure to the Mujahideen’s efforts—and in these filmic universes to Bond’s and Rambo’s contributions as well, of course—the Soviets were indeed repulsed, withdrawing all troops from the country in 1989 (a debacle that contributed without question, in both financial and public relations terms, to the Soviet bloc’s collapse over the following couple of years). The problem for a contemporary American audience is what happened next: the Mujahideen morphed very directly into the Taliban and al-Qaeda, extremely conservative Muslim radicals and terrorists with CIA training and funding, American and Western European weaponry, and a healthy grudge against all foreign invaders (a category that would almost immediately be redefined to include American troops stationed in Arabic nations, such as Saudi Arabia, during and after the 1991 Gulf War). That the US helped create or at least refine and weaponize Osama Bin Laden and his cohort does not, of course, absolve those individuals of the responsibility for their decades of brutal attacks, mostly on innocent civilians and much of the time within the Muslim world; neither, to cite an explicit parallel, does the Reagan and Bush Sr. Administrations’ decade of support of Saddam Hussein in his conflicts with Iran and the Kurds (there’s a particularly telling picture of Reagan envoy Donald Rumsfeld shaking Hussein’s hand in 1983, during a time in which US intelligence knew Hussein was using chemical weapons on the Kurds) make Hussein any less of a brutal and evil dictator.
And yet, can we tell the stories of Bin Laden and 9/11, of Hussein and the two Iraq Wars, stories that each have ended in at least partial US triumph with the captures and deaths of both men, without including these significantly more complicated earlier histories? Or, more exactly, in telling the stories without the histories, as we have most certainly largely done over the last decade and a half, what kind of harm are we doing not only to the complexities of our historical and international role and presence, but also to our understanding of the far from static nature of good and evil in the world, of for whose victories we’re cheering as opposed to in whose deaths we find justice and how much those categories can change over time and with other shifts? These questions are quite literally exhibit A in the thinking I’m continuing to do about these American issues, not only because they’re so salient and present but also precisely because they’re so controversial –by far the easier kind of patriotism is just a celebratory one, the chants of “USA” on the White House lawn and at Ground Zero; and yet the harder and more meaningful kind of patriotism remains one that celebrates justice while recognizing the interconnected injustices to which we have contributed.
Again, this isn’t an either-or; admitting and engaging with the injustices does not in any way excuse or mitigate Bin Laden’s horrific and evil deeds, nor minimize the importance of bringing him to justice for them. But at the end of the day, Bin Laden himself is entirely insignificant compared to the questions of how we understand and engage with our own identities and histories; and on that score, we’ve got lots more work to do. Next AmericanStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?