Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 433

September 20, 2011: Creative Histories

In the brief prefatory note to Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1826), about which I blogged here, Sedgwick positions herself, and more exactly her work in the novel to follow, as roughly equivalent to the efforts of Native American "historians or poets." The moment speaks directly to her revisionist goals for this work of historical fiction (about which I focused in that earlier blog), but at the same time it more implicitly but just as importantly reflects an era in American writing when the genres of historical and creative writing were not at all separate, and often in fact coexisted in the careers of prominent individual writers. After all, the nation's first professional creative writer, Washington Irving, was also at least as well known as a biographer of George Washington, a historian of both the American Revolution and medieval Spain (among other interests), and the author of a work of historiographic satire and criticism, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809).

I don't want to glorify that pre-specialized era, either as a time when writers chose not to limit their interests (it wasn't a choice since such specialized genres simply hadn't been developed) or as a time when better work was produced (I could blog daily about the number of amazing works of American history writing produced by more specialized academic historians and not run out of topics any time soon). But as someone with an obvious interest in interdisciplinary work, and a lifelong passion for historical literature to boot, I have to admit that many of what I'd call the richest American works—whether creative or scholarly or, y'know, some complicated combination of the two—defy any obvious categorization, or at least bring many elements of other genres and types of writing into their own most central forms. Even when the writer in question is not necessarily in the upper echelon of American talents, the very nature of these combinatory texts makes them, to me, significantly more compelling than might otherwise be the case, yields works that embody some of the best AmericanStudies questions and ideas.A perfect case in point would be the early 19th century poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865). One of the era's most popular poets, Sigourney's works can seem from our 21st century vantage point far too traditional, in both form and theme, when compared with the era's true innovators, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; less politically potent than James Russell Lowell at his best; less catchy and engaged with American myths than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; less spiritually potent than William Cullen Bryant; and so on. But whatever Sigourney might lack in those areas, I believe she makes up for in her strikingly historical poetic style and themes; works like "The Indian's Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers" and "Indian Names" (both available at the first link) may be written in rhymed and metered stanzas, but they engage with founding and ongoing national histories and narratives very centrally and successfully. And in a book such as Scenes in My Native Land (1844; full text at the second link), Sigourney does away with generic boundaries even more fully, intermingling prose and poetry freely and smoothly in her powerful and compelling reflections on national sites and symbols as varied as Connecticut's Charter Oak, Niagara Falls, and the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (in Hartford, Sigourney's hometown). As is the case with virtually every topic about which I write here, I don't want to replace our current emphasis on distinct genres and modes of writing; instead I'm suggesting that there's significant value in complementing such valuable distinctions with a sense of what authors and texts that blur or erase the generic boundaries also have to offer. In the case of writers like Sedgwick and Sigourney, their creative histories bring our national narratives and stories to life with compelling success, a contribution to AmericanStudies that renders absolute categorization very much a moot point. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Some of Sigourney's best-known and best poems, including "Welcome" and "Names": http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/sigour01.html
2)      The full text of Scenes: http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/scenes/SCENES.HTM
3)      OPEN: Any genre-busting authors or works you'd highlight?

September 19, 2011: Still Fresh

Many of my favorite American novels are explicitly historical novels, texts that are centrally interested in creating stories and images of the past; that interest, whatever else it might mean, tends to make the texts feel particularly distant or distinct from our own, 21st century moment. To me that's one of their selling points—what Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition can reveal about the turn of the 20th century and the aftermaths of slavery and Reconstruction in it; what Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! constructs as the 1930s South and its fraught relationship to its own past; how Silko's Ceremony engages with the spiritual rebirths of the Native American Renaissance while reflecting the continued impacts of histories as diverse as the Indian Wars and post-World War II trauma—but there's no question that it can also make it tougher to sell them to a group of contemporary students, to argue for why these themes and questions still resonate just as fully in our own moment and world. Needless to say, I try very hard to do just that, but I likewise try to balance such explicitly historical (in every sense) texts with ones that, whenever they were published, feel in some crucial ways as if they could have been released just yesterday.

I just got done teaching one novel that fits that description perfectly: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), about which I blogged at length here. Carrie's contemporaneity is at least somewhat ironic, since Dreiser goes to great lengths from his opening paragraphs to highlight the fact that he is setting his novel about a decade prior to its release, and to trace many of the elements that have already changed in those intervening years (aspects of the blossoming city of Chicago, particular social character types, broad Gilded Age emphases, and so on). Yet this most recent experience with the novel, and particularly seeing once again (as I had in each prior instance) how fully the students connected to Carrie, to Hurstwood, to the themes of ambition and wealth, class and status, dreams and disasters, to the seemingly clichéd (country girl comes to the city, older man overtaken and eventually destroyed by his infatuation with younger woman, realizing your dreams but paying a price to do so) but still resonant plot threads. Like another novel that has consistently worked for my students, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , what Dreiser's book does best is just force us to think about how we define success, what the American Dream is and should be, whether it's possible to be happy in our society and what that happiness entails and costs, and other questions that it's vital for every American (and especially every young American) to consider, whatever his or her answers might be.Tomorrow, in another of my classes, we start two weeks of conversations on another hugely resonant and timeless American classic, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). As with Dreiser's book, Miller's play can be read at least partly as marking the passing of an era, the changes of one world into another, and its title character as thus already historical in his moment, much less half a century later. Miller's play is also more overtly and at times troublingly dated than Dreiser's (despite its later publication) when it comes to gender—Willy Loman's wife Linda is not a terrible character but is to my mind a lot flatter than the three men in her family, and the complex and interesting supporting characters are entirely male (with the most explicitly "bad" character known only as "The Woman"). But those historical or dated qualities ultimately cannot compete with the play's absolutely perfect and still completely resonant themes, its engagement with not only many of the same questions to which I connected Dreiser's novel, but also its extension of them to a vital question that Dreiser entirely elides: how fully our own answers to all those questions are influenced by our parents, by the lives and identities and experiences and dreams that they inhabit and give (consciously and unconsciously) to us. Willy is certainly the best character in Miller's play, and one of the best in American drama and literature period—but he wouldn't be nearly as great without his son Biff, and it's the dynamic between them that is to me the play's most powerful and most timeless element.Should be a fun couple weeks! More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Great scene from Dustin Hoffman's take on Willy (with, I believe, Chinese subtitles!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY-FyfpELfg
2)      Interesting and informative 2001 interview with Miller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABEd-xkAAY
3)      OPEN: Any books (American or otherwise) that you'd highlight as still fresh after (however many) years?

September 17-18, 2011 [Guest Post of Sorts]: Life Support

Much has been made, to my mind rightly so, of one particular moment from the most recent Republican presidential debate, when it seems as if the audience was making light of, even cheering for, the death of a hypothetical fellow American due to his or her inability or unwillingness to pay for health insurance. As the difference between inability and unwillingness suggests, there are various points of disagreement about what exactly was asked (and to what contexts the question and moment could be connected) and thus what exactly the audience was cheering for. I'll link to some video of the moment below, in the interest of fairness (and of course it would probably be ideal for you to watch it before reading any of these thoughts, including my own). But my main goal here is to highlight the exceptionally brave and powerful, tragic and terrible, and most of all righteously angry DailyKos diary that was written by the sister of a man (Steve Patience) who died in similar circumstances. Please consider it a guest post and check it out:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016557/-That-was-my-brothers-death-you-were-cheering,-you-a$$holesThis Balloon Juice post in response to the diary also includes a MoveOn.org ad that features both some video from the debate and interview footage of the diarist herself (Susan Grigsby):http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/09/16/for-rage-and-sorrow/It's difficult, if not impossible, to separate this debate moment from an even more unequivocally appalling moment in the prior Republican presidential debate, where the audience cheered for the extremely high number of executions that have taken place in Rick Perry's Texas. And why should we separate the two? Both reflect a callous disregard for the sanctity of American and human lives, a disregard that not only reveals the hypocrisy of a party that defines itself as pro-life, but that also reflects a stunning lack of empathy and compassion. It's one thing to support the death penalty (a complex topic to be sure, as I wrote in this post) or to believe that universal health insurance is impossible or etc; it's quite another to celebrate the deaths that such beliefs and policies ultimately and inevitably produce. More tomorrow,BenPS. Two links to start with:1)      This post contains Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the moment as well as the 70-second video of (some of) it, but of course you can watch the video and draw your own conclusions before reading Sullivan (or me or anybody else): http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/09/indecent.html
2)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 16, 2011: Get Out the Vote

Many of the most passionate and committed activists in American history have dedicated their efforts to extending the franchise, to giving the vote, to those who did not already have it. Those three young Civil Rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—who were lynched near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 were taking part in the "Freedom Summer," a period focused explicitly on voter registration among officially enfranchised but practically disenfranchised African Americans. While their story exemplifies the most extreme sacrifice, it's fair to say that they were taking part in a long tradition of suffragist activism, one extending back to those who worked to enfranchise non-landed white men in the early 19th century, to those who created and supported the 15th Amendment after the Civil War, to the generations of women (and men) who fought for female suffrage in the second half of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century, and to many other such advocates—and extending forward to the ongoing efforts of organizations like ACORN (about whom more below) to aid impoverished and other less fortunate Americans in exercising their own franchise.

Many of the most hateful and violent acts of domestic terrorism in American history have been undertaken in order to deny the franchise, to take away the vote, from those who were legally entitled to it. The 1898 Wilmington (North Carolina) coup d'etat and massacre, about which I wrote in my first post, took place on election day in that city in order to capitalize explicitly on local white fears and anger about African Americans and the ballot box; similarly, the Reconstruction-era rise of the Ku Klux Klan was predicated in no small measure on precisely that issue, as were many of Jim Crow's first laws (including the infamous grandfather clause and other backdoor disenfranchising measures). While the female suffragettes did not meet with that level of violent response, many of their marches and efforts were counter-protested in aggressive and ugly ways; both of those words would also describe much of the rhetoric about the movement and its activists in the media and in national conversations. Those most interested in maintaining hierarchies of power and privilege in America, in short, have always recognized the threat posed to their status quo by the ability of their fellow citizens to gain and then exercise their franchise, and have taken every conceivable measure to oppose those steps.Much was made in the immediate build-up to the 2008 presidential election, at least on Fox News and in the conservative media more generally, about ACORN and the potential for a fraudulent election; much has of course continued to be made about that organization in particular, and the idea of voter fraud more generally, in the years since. But the truth is that even if the narratives about ACORN's fraud were accurate—and they have been instead, not surprisingly, largely fabricated and entirely exaggerated—the accusations are that the organization is trying to allow people to vote who might not be legally able to do so for one reason or another. On the other hand, conservative activists have for many years worked diligently to deny the franchise to millions of their fellow Americans: the most overt example would have to be the almost certainly illegal disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of African Americans in Florida prior to the 2000 presidential election (which hinged, of course, on the very tight Florida results), but the truth is that in many states similar efforts to restrict voting rights and opportunities (including for example requiring photographic identification, something that many poorer Americans who lack a driver's license do not possess) have been undertaken in recent years by Republican legislators and activists.I suppose it's possible to make logical cases for at least some of those efforts. But given the broader and more defining American histories on either side of this issue, the crucial question has to be this: why on earth would an entire political movement seek to associate itself with efforts to restrict voting rights and opportunities? And, even more significantly, why have we focused so much in recent years on ACORN and its ilk and so little on these much more troubling activists on the other side of the issue? More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with:1)      An image of Norman Rockwell's lesser-known but very powerful painting Murder in Mississippi (1965): http://detroit.about.com/od/museums/ss/Norman_Rockwell_4.htm
2)      Images both from and against the women's suffrage movement: http://www.edb.utexas.edu/resources/team/lesson_4.html
3)      The Commission on Civil Rights' report on Florida's extensive disenfranchisement controversy and the 2000 election: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/ccrdraft060401.htm
4)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 15, 2011: Speaking of Hypocrisy

I can't speak with specific authority about the GOP legislators who now control the Pennsylvania State Legislature, but unless their campaigns differed from virtually every other GOP candidate in this past election cycle, they emphasized at the very top of their list of priorities "restoring" and "respecting" the Constitution. Various work for courses and the NEASA conference doesn't leave me with time at the moment to remark on the Constitutional origins and American histories related to the Electoral College, but I'll try to provide a couple links below as always, and will leave it up to you to determine whether those Pennsylvania Republicans are indeed restoring and respecting the Constitution here:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/changing-rules-by-david-atkins.htmlMore tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      A great starting point for those origins and histories: http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_elec.html
2)      Some further historical contexts, as well as arguments in favor of maintaining the electoral college: http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa102200a.htm
3)      OPEN: What do you think?
PPS. Just found out that the Most Valuable Blogger award winners have been announced. I wasn't one of the winners, but that doesn't make me any less grateful for all the support and votes that I got. Thanks so much, and please keep reading and commenting!

September 14, 2011: The Transnational Turn

Of the many trends and developments that have taken place in the broad and diffuse field of AmericanStudies over the last couple decades, none has been more prominent than the turn to the transnational: to emphases of 21st century international interconnectedness and interdependence, certainly, but also and more strikingly to arguments and ideas and narratives that connect American history and culture and literature and identity to other nations and communities at more or less each and every moment of our existence. Rejecting wholesale the still present and often still prominent arguments for American exceptionalism, these transnational scholarly frames seek instead to make plain just how much America has always been part of, and often in these perspectives defined by, broader circuits and links, from the web of the burgeoning 17th century slave trade to migrant labor in the early 21st century, the fad for authentic Chinese dishware in 18th century homes to the influence of Eastern spiritualities and philosophies on the Transcendentalists, and countless more.

All of those specific connections are really interesting and compelling to me, and I find worries about what's lost if we move away from an America-specific scholarly focus to be almost exactly opposite to what I'd say is a particularly salient contribution of such scholarship: to make plain just how much America has always included such transnational presences and influences. But in this post I want to make the case as well for a different, and admittedly much more potentially troubling or false, kind of transnational AmericanStudies: transnational comparisons, engagements with histories or voices or texts from other nations that can interestingly inform American narratives and identities.  As I say, I understand the limits and even dangers of such comparisons, which are roughly like cross-historical comparisons (ie, "The Abolitionists are just like Pro-Lifers!"; "The Clinton impeachment really echoes what happened with Andrew Johnson!") but with probably even more need for contextual specifics and distinctions. Yet if we don't try to argue for equivalencies, but rather simply look closely at the other history or text in question and then consider how it might speak to our American narratives, I think we allow our range of possible AmericanStudies texts and focal points to expand very helpfully.My case in point today is the late 20th century Australian rock band Midnight Oil, and specifically the band's best and (to my mind) most America-illuminating album, Diesel and Dust (1987). Like all of Oil's music—and like its frontman and creative genius Peter Garrett's whole life for that matter, as he left the band in order to run successfully for Parliament—Diesel is grounded very clearly in specific Australian issues and images, in this case the intertwined stories of the land itself and of the Aboriginal peoples who have inhabited it for many thousands of years. Since, as the album also captures on many levels, the arrival of British settlers (many of them convicts) and colonialists profoundly and often destructively impacted and has continued to impact those Aborigines, it's easy enough to make the direct comparisons to the experiences and identities of Native Americans. But in the album's best songs, and especially in the singular, beautiful, and haunting "The Dead Heart," it's the multi-level combination of content and form that is most powerful and most potentially illuminating, as Garrett writes (with great sensitivity and success) and the band sings harmonies in the first-person voices of the Aborigines themselves. I wrote in a long-ago post about the striking 19th century novel Ploughed Under, a text in which a European-American author (William Justin Harsha) created a fictional first-person Native American voice; despite its many flaws, the novel remains significant as one of the only American works (in any medium) to take that bold and empathetic step. Which is to say, we could stand to learn a good deal from the power that the narrative choice of a song like "The Dead Heart" conveys and captures.Diesel and Midnight Oil are well worth our time on their own terms, and I'm certainly not arguing that American connections make non-American artists or works better or more important than they'd otherwise be. But if an album is great and can also add to our AmericanStudies narratives and ideas, well, listening to it is a transnational turn that everybody can get behind. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Three complex and important takes—by three very prominent scholars—on the transnational turn in AmericanStudies: http://www.theasa.net/project_eas_online/page/project_eas_online_eas_featured_article/
2)      "The Dead Heart": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHNR3y9www
3)      OPEN: Any non-American works or artists with interesting AmericanStudies connections you'd highlight?

September 13, 2011: Great American Hypocrites

My post's title echoes the title of one of Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald's recent books, a work that focuses explicitly on hypocrisies at the core of the contemporary Republican Party. But while I certainly agree with Greenwald's premise and his specific examples, and similarly feel that hypocrisy has become a core ingredient of an entire political platform in a way that it has perhaps never before been (see the current GOP presidential frontrunner, Rick Perry, a man who, among numerous other such hypocrisies, threatened to secede from America and now accuses Obama of lacking sufficient patriotism, has attacked the stimulus vociferously at every stage while making sure to get and use every cent of its allocated money for Texas, and so on), I would also emphasize just how strong a role hypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout our existence. That argument could go back, for example, to the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American begging prospective arrivals to "Come over and help us": the seal reveals not only a core hypocrisy in the Puritans' perspectives, since (as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation and many others documents demonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well before this seal's creation) and thoroughly became the Puritans' greatest perceived obstacle to overcome on the path to building their city on a hill; but also another and more subtle hypocrisy in their experiences, since without the early aid of local Native Americans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) the Plymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it) would almost certainly have failed.

I could probably maintain a daily blog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon, but since this is more of a one-off I wanted to focus on a figure whose public and personal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) these national hypocrisies: Roy Cohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life as one of Senator Joseph McCarthy's nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived on ferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious at best) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targets and helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally the case in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directly linking homosexuality and other forms of "deviant" behavior to Communist leanings, since, in this perspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. It was only decades later, when Cohn was publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade's newest and most threatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn's own very secret (he had been famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity was similarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossible to speak with any authority about any other individual's sexual and intimate experiences and life, it's perhaps least unfair to do so when that individual has made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part and parcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he and McCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual should disqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his own identity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well as personally hypocritical.The truths of both individual identity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated than that, and while it's tempting simply to point out Cohn's hypocrisy, and more saliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimate roots of McCarthyism more broadly, there's significant value in trying to imagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representative American's life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohn produced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created by playwright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative and brilliant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner's play has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerful depictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without question one of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar, violent, petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also manages to be funny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as he struggles with both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the ghosts of those (especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he contributed so centrally. In a play full of interesting characters and show-stopping moments, Cohn is perhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero and villain and star, and I can't think of a better description of national hypocrisies more generally.While I earnestly hope we can find our way back to a politics that isn't quite so dominated by hypocritical positions and narratives, it's hard to imagine an America devoid entirely of Roy Cohns. And perhaps, Kushner's play intimates—despite the destructiveness that comes with such figures—we wouldn't want to. More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with:1)      Brief piece on, and image of, the Mass Bay seal: http://www.irwinator.com/126/wdoc36.htm
2)      Pretty amazing 1988 Life story on Cohn's death and legacy: http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/life/905W-000-035.html
3)      Great, great moment from Al Pacino's performance as Cohn in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Kushner's play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98fBiOVEcyI
4)      OPEN: Any especially hypocritical figures or moments or narratives you'd highlight?

September 12, 2011: The Neverending Story?

I've already written in this space about the 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 go further back, to the war about which I wrote last week—the Civil War—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: a policy that applied not only in Confederate states, but throughout the nation; that 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 were consistently 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 21st century 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 by 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 government 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 last decade, 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. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The text of Lincoln's suspension: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/historicdocuments/a/lincolnhabeas.htm
2)      An eloquent op-ed on the war on terror by former Carter cabinet officer Zbigniew Brzezinski: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301613.html
3)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 10-11, 2011: Rising to the Occasion

There are the obvious high-pressure professions, the surgeons and pilots, the cops and firefighters, the bomb defusers and Formula One drivers, the work worlds where the slightest split-second error is entirely unacceptable and quite possibly fatal. Then there are the less obvious but to my mind just as high-pressure gigs, a list at the top of which I'd have to put school bus drivers—seriously, would you want to drive a bunch of non-seat-belted and likely chaotic and distracting kids around in a giant unwieldy monstrosity, knowing that an error might well result in the worst possible thing that could happen for dozens of families? And at the very opposite end of the pressure spectrum, by all appearances and certainly in many genuine ways, are those of us who work with words, whose greatest error might be to settle for (to reference Twain's famous distinction) the lightning bug rather than the lightning.Writers don't face split-second or life-altering pressure, and I'd be a jackass—any time, but doubly so in a September 11th memorial post—to suggest otherwise. But there are other kinds of pressure, of course, and one that intersects with the idea of tragic events is the pressure to rise to such an occasion, to produce words that somehow do justice to, adequately capture and remember and mourn and celebrate, all of what the event is and means. It's for this precise reason, to go back to something that my colleague Irene referenced in her very insightful comment on Tuesday's Civil War post, that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has lasted as fully and centrally as it has in our collective national memory: tasked with responding not only to the Civil War's most pivotal and in many ways most extended and destructive battle, but also to the horrors and yet the necessity of the war itself, all while not eliding in the slightest the roughly fifty thousand Americans who had lost their lives in the battle, Lincoln delivered, and then some. That he did so with the utmost brevity, while not a requirement for rising to an occasion, certainly demonstrates just how fully Lincoln found each and every perfect word, and not one more than he needed.Lincoln wasn't President on September 11th, 2001—which might be the most significant understatement I'll ever write, but this isn't the post for politics so I'll leave it at that—so it has been left up to others, among them writers and artists across many genres and media, to try to rise to that tragic and terrible day's occasion. It will likely come as a surprise to precisely no one—at least no one already familiar with this blog or me—that to my mind Bruce Springsteen has come the closest to rising to the challenge. His 2002 album The Rising comprises nothing short of fifteen separate yet interwoven, distinct yet cumulative, contradictory yet complementary, and all necessary and so damn right responses to the attacks, and more exactly to their personal and familial, emotional and psychological, individual and communal resonances and effects. It's entirely possible to listen to and get a lot out of any of the songs by themselves—and I've linked my personal favorite below—but it was with the album as a whole that I believe Bruce most explicitly rose to the occasion. I know there are plenty of other possible nominees—Salon.com has featured a series of articles on works of art responding to or inspired by the attacks—and there's likely much to be said for a diverse and complex 21st century America's need for many such risings. But Bruce is a great place to start.I thought for a good while about what I might include in this post; certainly there would be darker and just as vital potential themes, including those I highlighted in this post. You could even say I felt some serious pressure, although neither my purpose nor of course my role here comes anywhere close to Lincoln's or Bruce's. But ultimately, this blog is about not one American occasion but all of them, and my goal not to meet one challenge but to pose a continual series of them, to my own understandings and narratives and histories, and to all of ours. After all, it's precisely through such challenges that we just might, as a nation, rise to our most ideal identity and future. More next week,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Info on the great Library of Congress exhibition on Lincoln's Address: http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/gettysburgaddress/Pages/default.aspx
2)      Probably my favorite Rising song, "Mary's Place": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qA1RDvo9LY&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL4372E0A6723B860A
3)      OPEN: Any texts or words that have you'd say have risen to the occasion (any occasion)?

September 9, 2011: Triple Play

I realized yesterday that I had the perfect way to follow the last two posts and round out this trio on AmericanStudies and rock music: "Galveston Bay" (1995), a Bruce Springsteen song from the same album as "The Ghost of Tom Joad" that also happens to be my second favorite song about (if in a very different way from Joel's) the Vietnam War. "Galveston" has spoken deeply to me since the first time I heard it, sitting in my freshman year dorm room listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad album, but I'll freely admit that I wasn't nearly ready then to appreciate two of its most perfect elements: its quiet but crucial portrayal of how its dual protagonists, two incredibly different men in many ways, are linked by their defining love for their children; and its (spoiler alert) surprising and optimistic and hugely powerful ending, one that (to reference my third book in progress) is entirely earned by the song's thorough willingness to engage with the darker American histories and realities from which that endpoint departs.Also doesn't hurt that this is perhaps the most fully AmericanStudies of all of Bruce's songs, at least in its ability to touch on pretty much every significant disciplinary question of the last few decades: race and ethnicity; transnational and international and comparative national identities; region and place; multigenerational family heritage; work and class; domestic terror and the reactionary backlash against post-1960s social and demographic shifts; America's foundational passion for violence and its connections to masculine ideals; the role of the legal system in aiding and furthering social progress on many of these issues; and of course the lingering effects and impacts of Vietnam (among others!). And in case that makes it sound like a textbook or something, it's also a deeply moving dual narrative of two men's stories, of lives that tragically but then much more hopefully interweave and intersect in an America that has long been seen as defined by only one of them but that, the song and this AmericanStudier argue, is finally being recognized as constituted very fully out of both, and even more so out of the worst and the best of their intersections.Okay, that's enough from me, just go listen to it if you would, and please feel free to share your thoughts (even if you don't love it quite as much as me) in the comments. More this weekend, a September 11th-inspired post,BenPS. Two links to start with:1)      "Galveston Bay": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEFYVaobZM2)      OPEN: Responses? And any suggestions for future musical AmericanStudies posts?