Bullock to Bring Black History Project to Davies

Vocalist and SFS Collaborative Partner Julia Bullock (photograph by Allison Michael Orenstein, courtesy of SFS)

In 2018, during her season-long residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, vocalist Julia Bullock launched her History’s Persistent Voice project. Bullock described the objective of her residency as follows:

Several years ago, the composer Jessie Montgomery and I started going through this anthology that was released just after the Civil War. These educators and musicologists went all across the United States to newly freed communities of people who had been enslaved, and transcribed 136 lyrics and melodies, along with notes on performance practice, and stories about when these pieces were performed, under what context they were performed—some of them at times of rebellion, others were during spiritual church services, others reflecting on hard times, laboring in the fields. After going through all of these songs, which yes, acknowledge the violence and the trauma and the oppression that was very much a reality at that time, what was deeply inspiring for me to read and also to vocalize is this clear affirmation of life.

However, the termination of her Met residency did not entail the termination of Bullock’s project. Later this month, Bullock will bring the second iteration of her efforts to Davies Symphony Hall in her role as San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Collaborative Partner. She will perform with SFS musicians conducted by Christian Reif. For this iteration California-based visual artist Hana S. Kim has designed immersive video installations that will appear across multiple screens throughout the performance.

The program will include four of the songs that Bullock sang in her performance in New York, all of which will be given their West Coast premiere. One of these, Jessie Montgomery’s Five Freedom Songs collection, was co-commissioned by SFS; and Pamela Z’s “Quilt” was entirely commissioned by SFS. The other two songs first performed in New York will be “Mama’s Little Precious Things” by Allison Loggins-Hull and “Green Pastures” by Tania León. The program will also include world premiere performances of two songs by Carolyn Yarnell, “I Come Up the Hard Way” and “ain’t my home.”

This program will be given only one performance, taking place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 17. A Web page has been created for purchasing tickets, but readers should be aware that several of the seating areas have already sold out all available seats. As of this writing, tickets remain for the 1st Tier ($35), Loge ($55), and the Orchestra and Boxes ($35–$55). Tickets may also be purchased by calling the SFS Box Office at 415-864-6000.

Finally, because we are currently in a transitional period with regard to COVID-19 precautions, SFS has released the following statement:

Davies Symphony Hall is currently operating at full audience capacity. A face covering is required for entry into Davies Symphony Hall and must be worn at all times. Due to the transmissibility of the Omicron variant, the SF Symphony strongly recommends that patrons wear a non-vented respirator, such as an N95, KN95, or KF94 face mask. The San Francisco Symphony requires proof of up-to-date vaccination against COVID-19 for everyone entering Davies Symphony Hall ages 12 and up who’s eligible—including patrons, performers, volunteers, and staff. “Up-to-date vaccination” is defined as two weeks after completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, or other WHO authorized COVID-19 vaccine, and one week after receiving a booster shot, for those eligible. Patrons under age 12 must show proof of up-to-date vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test (PCR test taken within 2 days of event entry or antigen [rapid] test taken within 1 day of event entry.

For those patrons under age 12 who wish to show verification of a negative COVID-19 test result, the following are acceptable as proof: a printed document (from the test provider or laboratory); or an email, text message, web page, or application (app) screen displayed on a phone or mobile device from the test provider or laboratory. The information should include person’s name, type of test performed, negative test result, and date the test was administered. Self-administered antigen testing is not acceptable at this time, but patrons may bring an unopened at-home rapid test with them to Davies Symphony Hall to take with a verified EMT present. Details about health and safety protocols at Davies Symphony Hall can be found here.

Uri Caine’s “Passion” of Racial Prejudice

courtesy of DL Media

At the end of last month, 816 Music, which appears to distribute only through download, released The Passion of Octavius Catto, the latest project of jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine. The title character was a freedom fighter in 19th century Philadelphia, a time and place that were not ready to deal with issues such as civil rights for people of all races and backgrounds. Caine performs at the piano in a trio whose other members are Mike Boone on bass and Clarence Penn on drums. However, they are only a small fraction of the performing resources, which include a full orchestral ensemble (called The Catto Freedom Orchestra), two vocal groups (The Nedra Neal Singers and The Philadelphia Choral Ensemble), and solo vocalist Barbara Walker. Clearly, a conductor is required; and that post has been taken by André Raphel.

My “first contact” with Caine must have been about 15 years ago in Herbst Theatre. That was when his trio was working on approaches to the music of Gustav Mahler. The results recalled a joke that must have been old when my father learned it:

Uri Caine played Mahler in Herbst last night … Mahler lost.

Caine’s approach involved extracting “the best tunes” from Mahler scores and then trying to improvise around them. San Francisco is a town that takes its Mahler very seriously, whether in Herbst or in Davies Symphony Hall; and, those who really dig their Mahler know that the themes themselves are a mere fraction of what makes his music so compelling. Caine clearly had no sense of the fundamental essence of Mahler; and, to this day, I still remember the agonies of sitting through two hours of utter cluelessness.

The same can be said of his understanding of the Passion as a musical genre most often associated with Johann Sebastian Bach but considerably older in the full scope of music history. While the genre began simply as an account of New Testament scripture, Bach extended it to interleave Holy Writ with commentary. The closest that Caine’s version comes to “Holy Writ” is a delivery by Walker of the texts of the thirteen, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution against a choral background with Caine at the piano. The rest of the libretto amounts to a collection of episodes that never really congeal into a narrative emerging through an inchoate muddle of different musical styles.

If I read Caine’s biography correctly, it seems that he studied composition with both George Rochberg and George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvanian somewhere around the mid-Seventies. There is a good chance that, at that time, I was on the other side of the parking lot in my office in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. From time to time I would cross that lot, usually to use the Music Library; but I also attended a seminar at which I acquired some basic skills in paleography under the tutelage of Norman Smith, my first real encounter with the distinction between marks on paper and the practices of making music.

Bearing that time frame in mind, I have to wonder whether Caine ever encountered The Gospel at Colonus, a musical interpretation of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” conceived as a gospel service staged by Mabou Mines veteran Lee Breuer. Music was provided by Bob Telson, whose understanding of gospel music was, to say the least, prodigious. I was fortunate enough to attend one of the first performances of this piece in 1983, when it was presented by the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When placed beside Colonus, The Passion of Octavius Catto is weak in narrative and tedious in execution.

I hate it when I find myself saying, “Things were much better 35 years ago!”

A Thought About History for Those Proud of Willfully Ignoring It

One of our most interesting historians currently is Annette Gordon-Reed, who boasts of two faculty positions at Harvard University, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the latest (January 19) issue of The New York Review of Books, she has written a thoroughly absorbing account of a major undertaking by Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. (For those who prefer numbers, “major” translates to 742 pages.)

The basic idea is that those founding fathers that we admire so much fully appreciated the wide differences in mindset across the thirteen colonies. They realized that any revolution could only succeed if there were some significant “common cause” that all of those colonies could embrace with sufficient determination to unite in resistance to British authority. This is one of the reasons why the Declaration of Independence itemizes all of the injustices levied on the colonies from the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. As Gordon-Reed observes, that sentence about the equality of all men is the one that is most quoted; but it is the laundry-list of grievances that did the trick. Any rhetoric about equality was simply there as a flourish before getting down to brass tacks.

Indeed, the question of equality was one that divided the colonies, rather than uniting them. The Declaration of Independence probably would not have been unanimously ratified had it not been for the depth to which questions of race, involving both Native Americans and slaves of African descent, had been buried in the document. Gordon-Reed’s text then delivers a particularly apposite punch line:

History has taught the sad lesson that fear and contempt are the most predictably powerful motivators for galvanizing one group to move against another.

“Fear and contempt” of the British had to take priority over the indignities suffered by those who were not, even in those days, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Apparently, Gordon-Reed wrote this piece while at a retreat for women writers in Washington State. No indication is given of when she actually wrote it. However, that sentence cited above seems to suggest that she was well aware of the strategy behind the rise of Donald Trump, if not the results of that strategy. Ironically, she does not mention the fact that the phrase “common cause” was appropriated in 1970 by a political advocacy group founded by John W. Gardner, whose mission statement included the phrase “work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.”

Given what happened during 2016, many would be justified in wondering whether Common Cause still existed (assuming they knew about it in the first place). The answer is that, as of this writing, the group has not yet folded its tent. Indeed, Common Cause is one of the organizations that George Soros funds through his Open Society Institute. Whether we shall be able to say the same thing a year from now is left as an exercise for the reader, preferably one who is not proud of his/her ignorance of history!

Politics by Terrorism?

One of the more interesting issues raised by HBO's The Newsroom involved the decision of the news anchor character to refer to the TEA Party as the "American Taliban." This was his way of venting his disgust at the way in which a well-financed minority had succeeded in hijacking what had previously been a rather wide class of values embraced by those who called themselves Republicans. The script for The Newsroom made it clear that the financing is in the hands of a few individuals who cared little for the values of TEA Party constituents themselves but simply (and selfishly) realized that those individual would be the perfect pawns for the large game they wished to play. Indeed, as has been recently observed, the best way to get the pawns to move is to exploit their feelings of "racial resentment."

There was thus some justification to that Taliban metaphor. The implication was that power was all that matters, not only having it but also exercising it for self-interest "by any means necessary." As I write this, the shutdown of the United States Government has pretty much been written off as inevitable. However, by following this story through the BBC, I realized that such terrorist tactics were also jeopardizing basic principles of representative government on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Italy. There we have Silvio Berlusconi, convicted guilty of tax-fraud, about to bring down the current government because, regardless of his criminal status, he still maintains control over what had been the ruling coalition.

Is it any wonder that there are so many people out there struggling to make ends meet who are now doubting whether or not the public good is really being served by the principles of government itself?

Time for Another Jesse Owens Moment?

I just finished reading an article of BBC News that begin with the opening summarizing sentence:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said a Russian law banning "homosexual propaganda among minors" does not breach the Olympic charter.

It did not really surprise me. I have never felt that the Olympic games deserved much attention, since it struck me as yet another form of self-aggrandizement for yet another form of elitism. Given what I wrote yesterday about the America's Cup, I am not surprised that my mind should be in this state. However, we have to remember that, in the longer view of the history of the Olympic games, human rights has never been a factor in selecting a venue.

However, rather than gnash our teeth over this state of affairs, we should remember that sometimes the athletes were willing to take up the burden that the organizers had made such a point to ignore. I was more than a little impressed to find that, on the Wikipedia page for the 1968 Summer Olympics, the very first item listed under "Highlights" was the following:

In the medal award ceremony for the men's 200 meter race, African-American athletes Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) took a stand for civil rights by raising their black-gloved fists and wearing black socks in lieu of shoes. The Australian Peter Norman, who had run second, wore an American "civil rights" badge as support to them on the podium. As punishment, the IOC banned Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Games for life, and Norman was left off Australia's Olympic team in 1972.

In 2008 there are an attempt at a parallel effort on the part of Team Darfur. Sadly, it attracted far less attention that seemed to be limited to Riz Kahn on Al Jazeera English and a blog post by Dave Zirin (who wrote a book about Carlos) on the Web site for The Nation. On the other hand, there have also been more passive instances of making an issue by not making an issue, the best example of that being the triumph of Jesse Owens in the face of a stadium full of proponents of the Nazi Master Race ideology, all of whom had expected to hijack the event for no purpose other than to promote their discriminatory propaganda.

In that context it might be appropriate for those affected by the Russian ban and those who wish to challenge that ban openly to train like hell for the Sochi Games and embrace the premise that there is no bully pulpit quite like the one on which an Olympic medal is presented.

Legislation by "Racial Resentment"

Michael Tomasky's article about prevailing mentalities in our nation's capital, "Our Town," in the latest issue of The New York Review concludes on a disquieting note. It is actually a reference to a recent book:

In his new book, [Alan I.] Abramowitz performs a multivariate analysis of the factors that are likely to make a citizen a Tea Party supporter. Conservative ideology matters most. But next—are "racial resentment, and dislike of Obama."

The punch line, in Abramowitz' own words, is as follows:

The Tea Party drew its support very disproportionately from Republican identifiers who were white, conservative, and very upset about the presence of a black man in the White House—a black man whose supporters looked very different from themselves.

It is worth keeping these words in mind when reflecting on the decision of the House of Representatives to impose a major cut on food stamp benefits. This vote was lead by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who claimed that it was the only way to deal with abuse of the program. In other words, Cantor is relying on the fact that telling Ronald Reagan's old stories about "welfare moms" still works, thus concealing the strong tendency of many to attach a racial stereotype to that "welfare moms" concept.

Of course, since the Senate is controlled by Democrats, there is little chance that the House bill will succeed there. This prompted Democratic Senator to declare the entire activity in the House "a monumental waste of time." However, if Abramowitz is right, then it was far from a waste of time for those who voted according to Tea Party demographics. (Note that I did not say "Tea Party ideology." The original ideology behind the Tea Party was a tax policy that was unfair to "the little guy." The food stamp vote was ideological only by extrapolation, under the knee-jerk assumption that the program could only continue through an increase in taxes or a failure to cut taxes.) Because the issue is demographic, we have to accept that every vote against food stamps came from a legislator whose electorate had a majority of voters that fit Abramowitz' profile.

When Obama won the election in 2008, many of us optimistically assumed that the country had taken a significant step forward; if we are to believe Abramowitz, that step forward has been followed by (at least) two steps back.

Our Virulently Divided Nation

As if our nation were not already divided enough over the values embedded in our legislation, along comes the Arizona Immigration Bill to emphasize just how irreconcilable the different worldviews that dominate our political discourse have become. In his post today to The Notion, the collective blog maintained by The Nation, Dave Zirin baldy refers to the new law as "the racist Arizona anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070" before citing a panoply of opposition statements from Major League Baseball's Latino players. Far more interesting, however was the statement from Michael Weiner, Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (better known as the players' union):

The recent passage by Arizona of a new immigration law could have a negative impact on hundreds of major league players who are citizens of countries other than the United States. These international players are very much a part of our national pastime and are important members of our Association. Their contributions to our sport have been invaluable, and their exploits have been witnessed, enjoyed and applauded by millions of Americans. All of them, as well as the clubs for whom they play, have gone to great lengths to ensure full compliance with federal immigration law.

The impact of the bill signed into law in Arizona last Friday is not limited to the players on one team. The international players on the [Arizona] Diamondbacks work and, with their families, reside in Arizona from April through September or October. In addition, during the season, hundreds of international players on opposing major league teams travel to Arizona to play the Diamondbacks. And, the spring training homes of half of the 30 major league teams are now in Arizona. All of these players, as well as their families, could be adversely affected, even though their presence in the United States is legal. Each of them must be ready to prove, at any time, his identity and the legality of his being in Arizona to any state or local official with suspicion of his immigration status. This law also may affect players who are US citizens but are suspected by law enforcement of being of foreign descent. The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.

This is clearly strong stuff, but it is a perfect example of how the many of a union can line up behind some few members facing the prospect of serious affliction.

One would think that our general population would be all too happy to lend their support to those who make the daily celebration of our national pastime possible, but this is not the case. Yesterday, C-SPAN's Washington Report invited Carlos Gutierrez to participate in one of their fifty-minute segments. Gutierrez was selected by former President George W. Bush to serve as Secretary of Commerce from 2005 through 2009, and those credentials should be sufficient to establish that he was there as an advocate of the new Arizona law. There was, of course, nothing wrong with his making an appearance. He actually did a reasonably good job of explaining what the law actually said, responding to all questions from the program's host without indulging in excessive ideological pronouncements. I was less disturbed by his participation than I was from the telephone calls he fielded. I did not listen to the entire segment; but, during the portion I did hear, all the calls he received supported the bill. I almost thought that I was stuck in a good-cop-bad-cop routine: Gutierrez could eschew inflammatory declarations because he could let the callers do it for him.

Is that what was really happening? C-SPAN usually does a pretty good job of letting callers from both sides of an issue speak; but if all of their lines were jammed with representatives of only one of those sides, there is not much they could have done, other than shut down the switchboard. So if their lines were so jammed, was it a mass spontaneous reaction; or had some supervising authority coordinated the whole affair prior to the broadcast?

I am less interested in the answer to this question than I am with the case it makes that our current culture is one that encourages divisiveness. Whether it is a question of immigration or of race within our own borders, there are those who passionately embrace discrimination as a fundamental value of "genuine" American culture. Furthermore, in the language of one of the spirituals that inspired the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, those who believe in discrimination will "not be moved." If we are lucky, we shall be able to confine the conflict over these irreconcilable differences to a war of words; but such moderation rarely lasts for long periods of time. What could happen if that moderation fails is too dreadful to consider.

From Undermining Health Care to Undermining Main Street

If the recent efforts to repair the health care system left us with any doubts about the priorities of the Republican Party, the shift of attention to financial regulation should make those priorities clear. John Nichols' post to The Beat blog on the Web site for The Nation gave a straightforward account of what happened and the sort of reaction it provoked:

The party of "no" said "no" again on Monday -- this time to tightening regulation of the nation's financial system.

While 57 Democratic and independent senators voted to open that long-delayed debate, Senate Republicans and a single Democrat (Nebraska's Ben Nelson) blocked a cloture vote that would have opened the debate on repairing a financial system so vulnerable and dysfunctional that it has repeated brought the nation's economy to the brink of collapse.

Monday's 57-41 vote offered a powerful perspective regarding which side the Grand Old Party -- which made its name a century ago as the champion of trust-busting legislation -- is now on.

Tom McMahon of Americans United for Change summed things up when he said: "Look up ‘Quid pro quo' in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with his hand out to hedge fund managers and banking executives just days before leading the filibuster against Wall Street reform. Pretending as if the financial crisis that cost over 8 million Americans their jobs never happened, Senate Republicans today stood in unanimous support of Wall Street over the Main Streets that suffered the consequences of the big banks' greed and recklessness."

McMahon's assessment was blunt and unforgiving:

Senate Republicans stood in unanimous opposition to ending taxpayer bailouts, to shining a bright light on the shadowy derivatives markets, and establishing a new watchdog agency on Wall Street that will protect American consumers against Madoff-style scams. They did just what they were told by the 1,500 Wall Street lobbyists camped out their offices this week that got every dime's worth of the $465 million they spent last year to kill reform.

Counting on Republicans to block financial reform was the safest and surest bet Wall Street executives have made in a very long time. But, with two-thirds of American people in support of stricter regulations for banks and other financial institutions, Senate Republicans just made the riskiest gamble of their careers. In the face of overwhelming public demand that Wall Street be held accountable for laying waste to our economy, it's not a question of whether reform is going to pass -- it's a question of how long Republicans can run from the pitch forks on Main Street.

While I enjoyed reading McMahon's rhetoric, I still think it is important to place this in the context of a bigger picture. Yes, the Republicans seem to be luxuriating in their strategy of being the "party of 'no;'" but they are not so much the party of "no Democratic majority" or "no Obama" as they are the party of "no government 'of the people, by the people, for the people," even if those are the words of the first Republican to win election to the White House. They are the party of those who gain from what Patricia Williams called "failure to govern at all;" and those who gain know exactly how to pay off those who can provide what they want.

Where does that leave the rest of us? It leaves us in a state of helplessness; and, as Naomi Klein observed in her report for The Nation, helplessness begets rage. What does rage beget? That is what I discussed yesterday. We have seen from the Tea Party movement how the Republicans can turn rage to their advantage, even when they are responsible for most of the causes of that rage. On the other side we have a President who sincerely wants to defuse the rage; but if, as recent polls seem to indicate, even a sliver (and the polls would indicate that it is far more than that) of Tea Party rage is over the race question, he will never be able to "talk this over" with the Tea-Baggers. If that is the case, then rage can only beget more rage; and a growing ecology of the verbal rhetoric of rage cannot avoid spilling over into actions of rage.

Once again it seems as if we all need to revisit the Preamble to our Constitution and remember our roots:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Who is willing to confront Republican leaders directly to ask just how much priority they place on the concept of "domestic Tranquility?" How many of them would need to be reminded of the origin of that phrase?

Short Beer?

I am not a big beer drinker, but I like the stuff enough to have cultivated a discriminating tongue for it. I also have a keen sense for beer humor, which is why I enjoy Web sites like Beer Facts. I mention this site because it contains what Jane Austen would have called "a truth universally acknowledged" had she been a beer drinker (which, for all we know, she was):

There is no such thing as a short beer. (As in, "I'm going to stop off at Joe's for a short beer before on the way home.")

This "truth" (complete with its convoluted syntax) was the first thing that occurred to me while reading the wire service account of last night's White House meeting on Al Jazeera English:

Barack Obama, the US president, has hosted a black professor and white police officer in an attempt to defuse a simmering race row that erupted when Henry Louis Gates Jr was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley.

The meeting at the White House - dubbed the "Beer Summit" - lasted just 40 minutes, but all three men agreed that something positive had come out of the incident, which had become a sensation in the US media.

Being white, I cannot say what I really want to say about this (but the second word is "please"); but, really, who the hell spends only 40 minutes over a beer? It takes at least half an hour for the beer to unlock the conversational wheels and get them turning at all! I appreciate our President's efforts to do damage control over his own counterproductive act in this "simmering" situation; but would it have been that much of a strain on his schedule to have a real conversation instead of a staged media event? Perhaps my historical memory has clouded, but I just cannot imagine President Jimmy Carter handling this kind of affair quite so superficially.

Implicit Anti-Semitism?

When I observed that a Yahoo! News item on the Apollo 11 anniversary described the original event as "infamous," I received a comment that I may have been making too much of "an incorrect word choice by a low-paid headline writer." However, now that Barack Obama's comments on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. have returned the "race question" to the front burner, I seem to have become sensitized to other instances of discrimination. Sadly, my feelers had to reach no further than the BBC NEWS Web site, where I encountered a story introduced with the following summary:

Two mayors, rabbis and politicians are among some 30 people arrested in a major corruption and money-laundering investigation, say US authorities.

This sentence, taken on its own, is not necessarily discriminatory or surprising. Consider, however, the headline under which this story appeared:

US rabbis arrested in crime probe

Even the addition of the word "politicians" could have blunted (if not dismissed) the anti-Semitic tone of the headline. So is this just the work of a low-paid employee bored with his/her work; or is it some kind of Zeitgeist indicator?

Rhetoric that Confounds When it Should Clarify

One can hardly criticize Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet for trying to call out Barack Obama on the race question behind the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. during yesterday's press conference. Unfortunately, that part of Obama's response that accused the Cambridge police officer who made the arrest of having acted "stupidly" has now resonated through so many media channels (even those overseas such as the Financial Times), that it is important to recognize that this is a perfect example of what happens when rhetoric does not align with logic. To be fair, my own recollection is that Obama's initial response to Sweet was that he did not yet have all of the facts; and it is unclear whether or not, one week after the episode took place, all of those facts have come to light. Had Sweet not posed her question as one of race, Obama could have closed the topic with that initial response; but my guess is that, had he done so, he would then have had to contend with at least one pointed follow-up question.

The real problem, however, is that Obama should have been better prepared for the possibility that such a question would have been asked. Apparently, he was so focused on making his case for health care reform that neither he nor his staff recognized that other challenging questions might arise. As a result, Obama managed to trip over the few statements on the table that could be confirmed as facts. Consequently, when the calm and certain rhetoric of his presentation declared that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama managed to distract the issue to where Gates was arrested (the question of whether he had been trying to enter his own house), thus overlooking the actual grounds for arrest, which Tracy Jan reported for the Boston Globe as follows:

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,'' the report said.

On the basis of what we now know, there seems to be little question of the nature of Gates' behavior. Whether or not that behavior provided grounds for a disorderly conduct arrest and booking comes down to a judgment call on the part of the police; and the media have now generated so much "data smog" around this story that we may never get an "authentic" account of how that call was made. We are thus left with an object lesson on the risk of relying too heavily on rhetoric, which may turn out to be a significant unintended consequence of yesterday's press conference.

Reporting or Rubbing it in?

Last night NBC Nightly News decided that the Chip Saltsman/Rush Limbaugh story was worthy of inclusion in their half-hour report. However, their version was a far cry from how Michael D. Shear had presented the story in The Washington Post. Of course Shear had the luxury of working in column-inches rather than sound bytes; but that was the crux of the problem. To this viewer it seemed as if NBC had decided to invest more than a few "bytes of sound" in playing the recording that Limbaugh had aired and Saltsman had distributed on a holiday CD. NBC thus gave us a far more thorough sampling of the offending material, displaying the text on the screen while the song was performed. This was then followed by a few "bytes" concerned with who was offended and how.

Yesterday I tried to frame the episode in terms of what Saltsman thought he was doing. This morning I find myself wondering just what the NBC producers thought they were doing. Did they think we would not get the point with a sample as brief as the one Shear had provided; or was this their way of providing Limbaugh with a broader audience under the pretext of "thoroughness?" Enquiring minds want to know!

Damage-Causing Damage Control

Yesterday morning my wife and I were watching the Book TV broadcast of the event at the 2008 Miami Book Fair at which Tavis Smiley shared the stage with Cornel West. This event took place approximately one week after this past Election Day and made for fascinating viewing. It was, as one might imagine, a highly forward-looking discussion, all the more interesting when viewed in the context of the transition activities that took place between the Book Fair and Barack Obama's departure for a vacation in Hawaii. Most important, however, was how Smiley and West framed their discussion in terms of both hopes and concerns.

A major concern had to do with the amount of flack that Obama would have to face over matters of race. They both agreed that the Election results did not mean that the United States had become "color-blind" and that race would continue to be an issue. They also shared the hope that Obama would be able to hold himself above most of that flack and simply sustain the rest of it.

Ironically, on the morning of this Book TV broadcast The Washington Post was running a story by Michael D. Shear about an example of that flack:

Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members this month a holiday music CD that included "Barack the Magic Negro," a parody song first aired in 2007 by talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

As of the appearance of this story, there has been no comment from Obama, which is consistent with that shared hope of Smiley and West. To the contrary, it seems as if most, if not all, of the backlash has been coming from within the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself (which, according to a follow-up post on Ben Smith's Blog for Politico, has all of three black members). Still, the real question behind the episode is the usual one: What was Saltsman thinking in circulating this CD to endorse his candidacy? Interestingly enough, when this story was first coming to a boil, Saltsman issued a statement to The Hill:

Paul Shanklin [who composed the song for airing on Limbaugh's show] is a long-time friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for the Rush Limbaugh show are light-hearted political parodies.

In other words Saltsman's response seems to be, "Can't anyone take a joke?" As I recall, this was one of the argumentative moves made in reaction to whether or not Don Imus crossed the line with a line that could easily be taken as a racial slur. However, that episode is now over a year old, making it beyond the attention span of Limbaugh, Shanklin, Saltsman, and probably the RNC membership, most (all?) of whom are worthy of my "history dunces" epithet. Particularly ironic, though, is that, according to Shear's report, two of Saltsman's rivals for chairing the RNC are African American, thus fulfilling one of West's futurist speculations voiced in his dialog with Smiley.

So where does this leave the Republican party? Personally, I am less concerned with Shanklin's role than I am with the idea that any of the content on Rush Limbaugh's broadcasts can be taken as "light-hearted." Whether or not Limbaugh should be subjected to the same extreme measures taken against Imus is for others to decide; but, if the Republican Party wants to assume the role of a "loyal opposition," then it is about time for them to distance themselves as far as possible from Limbaugh and others of his hate-speaking ilk. Obama's transition team has gone to great lengths to prepare an Administration that will take a bipartisan approach to the practice of politics. This is not a time for the Republicans to circle their wagons around Limbaugh in preparation for four years of intense divisiveness. Saltsman's unapologetic apology is that last thing the RNC needs, and I hope the Republicans recognize that when they choose their new chairman at the end of next month.

Permanence, Change, and the Civil Rights Movement

Much as I tend to enjoy the blogging of Andrew Keen, I was very glad to see that Book TV chose to use this day to provide me with an escape from Keen's recent indulgence in what I can only call "second-rate reading." This has included yesterday's reaction to Fareed Zakaria's recent palaver in Newsweek about Barack Obama as the savior of capitalism and today's attack on Thomas Friedman's laptop metaphor in The New York Times, with a swipe at Malcolm Gladwell's "fascinatingly obvious" Outliers thrown in for good measure. I used to sympathize with Harlan Ellison, who felt that we read was more important than what we read; but he used to make that point before the Internet had opened so many reading possibilities for us. These days I feel that life is too short to waste on rubbish; and, while I do not always agree with their editorial decisions, I find both The New York Review and Book TV to be rather good at helping me steer clear of the sort of rubbish that shows up all to often in Newsweek and The New York Times.

This morning I watched a Book TV video that was recorded last May at the Sunflower County Public Library in Indianola, Mississippi, which had hosted Chris Myers Asch to talk about his book, The Senator & the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer. This was a case in which the audience was as interesting as the author, since both Eastland and Hamer were from Sunflower County and have descendants who are working in the County. However, even more important was the way in which Asch framed the conservative thinking of the segregationists for whom Eastland became a major champion in the Senate, particularly when he became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Asch's critical point was his decision to view Eastland more as a planter than as a politician. From this point of view, plantation life embodied "the natural order of things." As Anthony Giddens would have put it in his more elaborate terminology of social theory, plantation life legitimized a structure of domination, which determined who got to exercise authority over whom and how that authority was exercised. From this point of view, the civil rights movement was less about whether blacks should have the same rights as whites (or, for that matter, whether the abolition of slavery had been a great mistake) and more about how it had challenged that "natural order." The underlying struggle, in the words of Kenneth Burke, was the "challenge of change" imposed by the civil rights movement on the assumed permanence that Eastland and other segregationists were determined to maintain.

Needless to say, the scope of such opposition to permanence by change extends far beyond the history of the civil rights movement. Political conservatism is basically grounded on the virtues of permanence, whether or not that permanence is justified by rhetorical invocations of "natural order." Change is perceived as dangerous; and, to the extent that it entails a volatility that undermines the predictability of "life as we know it," it is dangerous. On the other hand, as Isaiah Berlin would work out for himself about a quarter of a century after the material in Burke's Permanence and Change first appeared, "permanence" is just another word for "stasis;" and stasis is fundamentally opposed to the dynamics of life itself and the social interactions that establish our very humanity (an insight developed by another of Berlin's predecessors, George Herbert Mead, who, in turn, had been preceded by Karl Marx, whose influence is clear in both Burke and Berlin).

I make these points because, as we approach Inauguration Day, it is important to recognize that change is far too complex a matter to be reduced to an election-winning buzz word. My guess is that Obama appreciates this, as he appreciates why the stability of permanence is so important to all of us. What we need is a subtle negotiation of a course between permanence and change; and I fear that the subtlety of that course is too much for consideration by the likes of journalistic hacks like Zakaria and Friedman.

Another Narrative Genre

Colm Tóibín has a fascinating piece in the latest New York Review of Books, which explores parallels between James Baldwin and Barack Obama. Tóibín's "home turf" is in fiction; and thus his investigation has more to do with text analysis than with politics and ideologies. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions; but, as should be clear from many of my own posts (as recently as yesterday), I sympathize with his method and appreciated the opportunity to see him exercise it. Nevertheless, regardless of where that matter led him, I found in his study a new light to throw on that claim by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek that "We don't have a narrative," which seems to have gotten under my skin.

I am still willing to grant Žižek's point within the limited domain of ideological narratives; but last Wednesday I tried to push the point further by arguing that we had abandoned all forms of "sensemaking narratives" (not just the ideological ones) in favor of narratives of the supernatural, most likely because a predominant preference for faith over rationality is still with us. Tóibín reminded me that there is at least one other narrative genre that is still going strong (even to the point that it has its own cable channel), which is the "narrative of identity," usually cast in the form of a "life story," either autobiography or biography composed by a third party. Just about all of the texts, from both Baldwin and Obama, that Tóibín examines are narratives of identity; but he seems to have missed a critical difference in the motives of the two authors of those texts. Baldwin was primarily interested in his "aesthetic identity," probably first for the sake of focusing his own creative priorities but possibly to provide context for those reading his fiction and essays. Obama, on the other hand, seems to have been interested in his "political identity," probably from the time he first started to work on Dreams from My Father and definitely through the whole process of writing The Audacity of Hope. From this point of view, a literary comparison with John McCain's "narrative of identity," Faith of My Fathers, would probably serve us more in our efforts to make sense of the current Presidential campaign than any study of Baldwin (although I suspect that Baldwin would not be surprised at the extent to which Sarah Palin has roused the rabble to the point that they cannot tolerate McCain's recognition of Obama's basic decency as a human being).

The cautious reader, however, is the one who recognizes that, particularly in the political domain, identity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand a sense of identity that we do understand will carry far more weight than any number of policy statements, which often never leave the lofty heights of abstraction and address the real problems on the ground. Unfortunately, politics has a long history of fabricated narratives of identity, skillfully crafted fictions designed for no other reason than to attract public support. For example, Suetonius (and later Robert Graves) provided us with some nice examples of Julius Caesar's talent for such fabrication; but today we know that Suetonius himself was not above such fabrication for his own political purposes! Determining whether or not a narrative of identity is authentic is no easy matter. The good news is that the news media seem to be rediscovering the extent to which fact-checking is part of the job. The bad news is that political strategy now seems to have embraced the postmodern principle that, if the facts do not serve your ends, you can always fabricate the identity you want through rhetoric! If we are aware of this hazard, we may recognize that even a writer like Baldwin may have been doing the same thing with his rhetoric, even if his motives were aesthetic, rather than political.

CLINTONDÄMMERUNG?

The last primary polls have barely opened; but the "Hillary death watch" seems to be well under way. Huffington Post political editor Thomas B. Edsall may have kicked things off in the blogosphere yesterday afternoon with a post that began:

Hillary Clinton has summoned top donors and backers to attend her New York speech tomorrow night in an unusual move that is being widely interpreted to mean she plans to soon suspend her campaign and endorse Barack Obama - not tomorrow night but within a day or two.

As of my writing this sentence, that post has amassed 3264 comments. On the other hand the Truthdig article that links to this post has not yet attracted a dozen comments, but I have found that far less mud tends to get slung over at Truthdig. So I have been more interested in their lower level of activity, which seems to exhibit a somewhat higher level of reflection.

This morning I was most struck by the latest comment submitted by "cyrena," who described Clinton's campaign as "a campaign of terror, the kind that results from any orchestrated instability or chaos visited upon a population or an individual…that same terror of not knowing what you will be greeted with when you get home, or to wherever it is that you’re going." Of course there is nothing particularly new about "a campaign of terror." It has been stock-in-trade in our political system for quite some time. We can still remember what the Republicans did with Willie Horton, and I am sure we can find plenty of examples as we dig further back in history. Furthermore, this is far from an American phenomenon. Unless I am mistaken, it was a pre-Thatcher Conservative Party in the UK that ran on the slogan, "If you want a [N-word] for a neighbour, vote Labour!"

In terms of our own historical origins, I was glad to see that one of the talks scheduled on Book TV (still the best alternative to "mainstream media news") this past weekend was given by Edward Larson on his book A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign. This was a useful historical reminder, particularly since the HBO John Adams series tended to keep itself above the fray of all that tumult, probably because Adams himself had tried to do the same. However, this election turned out to be modest compared to the one in 1824, which had five candidates (as opposed to the four in 1800). In this election no candidate had a majority of either electoral or popular votes; and Andrew Jackson, who had the plurality, was beaten through some horse-trading between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay (putting an end to what historians now call the "Era of Good Feelings")!

Personally, I do not think that "good feelings" ever last very long. The real lesson of history is that the American electorate (not to mention those in the United Kingdom or, for that matter, Nepal) is a contentious lot; and we should leave the uniting-not-dividing cant to those who choose faith to shield them from not just terror but reality itself. After all, even the "characters" in Plato's dialogs had some pretty contentious personalities. As I have previously written, what matters is not that our social system unites us but that it is robust or resilient enough to sustain our natural inclinations to divide.

Thus, while I agree that we can't "expect reason and sanity to prevail," which seems to be the "consummation devoutly to be wished" in cyrena's comment, we should still be able to expect the "social system as a whole" to cohere (unlike the "center" of Yeats' "second coming"). From that point of view, faith-based thinking has probably been the greatest threat to our resilience; and it may well be the threat of greatest concern to all sectors of the rest of the world, regardless of political or economic status. Thus, I take some comfort in the rejection of faith-based positions that have come from both Democrats and Republicans. For what it is worth, I also am inclined to see Obama as the best guarantor for the resilience of our social system; but who knows if I shall still feel this way at the end of the two Conventions?

Superstitious about Language

Paul Reynolds, world affairs correspondent for the BBC, has written a useful think piece for the BBC News Web site on the role of foreign policy in the coming Presidential election, contrasting the current position statements being delivered by John McCain and Barack Obama. He structured the piece in terms of McCain speeches directed to attack Obama and Obama responses that, in turn, attack McCain. Unfortunately, one of the Obama quotes invoked a haunting memory from my high school history days:

The American people are going to look at the evidence. We don't get a sense that this has been a wise foreign policy or a smart foreign policy or a tough foreign policy.

The memory was of a Democratic candidate who lost a Presidential election. The candidate was Al Smith; and he gave a famous (at least still in my high school days) speech attacking the policy of Prohibition. He is best known for the first sentence of that speech (to the extent that more people remember the sentence than remember that the speech was about Prohibition):

Let's look at the record.

He then confronted the American people with evidence (choosing my words from Obama's text) to demonstrate that a Constitutional Amendment that had been motivated by what may be called a "War Against Sin" had actually led to a significant increase in violent crime, much of which was directly related to the trafficking of goods that had been declared constitutionally illegal.

My point is that, compelling as Smith's speech was, the American people didn't look at the evidence. They were more preoccupied with fear. Prohibition was escalated to Constitutional authority through the zealous efforts of Protestant evangelists, who knew precisely how to cultivate fears, not only of sin and hell-fire but also of those who did not embrace their particular breed of Christianity. Smith was victimized by those fears not only by opposing Prohibition but by being Catholic. (In 1884, long before Prohibition became a Constitutional Amendment, the Republicans had already classified the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.")

One lesson from Reynolds' analysis is that things have not changed very much. The Republicans still know how to cultivate fear of rebellion and have reaped considerable political gain from transforming their predecessors' "War Against Sin" into a "War Against Terror." Romanism, on the other hand, has been replaced by Islam, particularly as embodied by the new linguistic barbarism of our culture, "Islamofacism." (Invoking The New Oxford American Dictionary, Wikipedia uses a less extreme characterization than I do, calling the word a "controversial neologism!") Thus, Reynolds offers a simple example of McCain's skill at fear-mongering:

The McCain campaign circulated this comment: "We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad."

In one sentence, John McCain linked three American foreign policy fears - Hamas, Iraq and Iran - and tried to isolate Mr Obama as unreliable on all three.

However, if good slogans come in threes, then the Republicans have been very careful about manipulating the third element. I would suggest that the issue of rum has now evolved into the issue of race. This is particularly evident in a post written last week by Doug Feaver for his dot.comments blog for The Washington Post. The post is a reflection on a report that had recently appeared on the front page of the Post's print edition, summarized by Feaver in his first paragraph:

Kevin Merida wrote a front-page story earlier this week reporting that Sen. Barack Obama's "phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president."

The Web version of that story accumulated 3300 comments in the time between its appearance (last Monday) and the time of Feaver's post (last Thursday). Feaver used his post to reproduce what he felt was a representative sample, neither offering any critical observations nor trying to draw any conclusions.

Reading his selection reminded me of the sorts of calls placed to C-SPAN's Washington Journal (which I listen to on XM, rather than watch on television). While this program gets its share of "oddball calls," it has a high proportion of listeners who deserve attention; but, what I like most is that C-SPAN provides separate call-in numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. This provides an approximation (which, of course may be disguised) of the background of any caller who chooses to make a comment about race, whether it involves Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, or racially divisive language in political advertising. The Washington Post made no effort to identify the backgrounds or persuasions of the authors of all those comments it received; but we have already been exposed to accusations (which may or may not be valid) of Republican involvement in cultivating fear of race.

My point is that the Republican rallying standard of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" may now very well have been transformed into "Race, Islamofacism, and Terrorism" (even if it is no longer alliterative); and this new standard draws just as much strength from cultivating fear as the old one did in 1884. If Obama really believes that this standard can be pulled down because "The American people are going to look at the evidence," then he may be lacking sufficient respect for how formidable the force of well-cultivated fear can be. I would suggest that he and his strategists set aside some time to examine what were the most critical factors in Smith's loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and make sure that they do not find themselves bitten once again by those same factors.

On Not Being a Passive Observer

This morning Linda Milazzo used the bully pulpit of her blog post on The Huffington Post to call out an indignity that should not go unnoticed:

On Friday's Larry King Live show, Republican strategist and owner of The Polling Company, KellyAnne Conway, stated that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were

"arguing about whether she should let him sit on the back of the bus of her presidential ticket."

Even by CNN standards, with its ample chicanery and spin, Conway's remark was brutal. Larry King's nightly program, usually more schmooze than news, was plunged to a Limbaugh-like low.

Milazzo then made note of how Obama supporter, Jamal Simmons, who was also on the program, immediately challenged Conway without sacrificing the moral high ground; but, from my point of view, the more important aspect of her account had to do with King's relative passivity in the face of such offensive linguistic manipulation:

Larry King was clearly disturbed by Conway's 'back of the bus' assault. He asked her if she had actually used the term and what she had meant when she used it. But King's simple question was not a true rebuke. Conway's racism deserved a strong on air condemnation from the host -- not the off-camera chiding that was likely to come. At 74 years old, Larry King should have witnessed the inhumanity and disgrace of Jim Crow throughout his youth and adult years. There was institutionalized racism in Larry King's native New York, and in Florida where he worked early on. White Americans weren't blind to the injustice. They just didn't suffer its pain -- at least not directly.

Actually, King is of an age that should have witnessed enough anti-Semitism to match the level of prevailing racism and may well have experienced it rather than just witnessing it. This would add fuel to Milazzo's fire against his passivity.

Unfortunately, her idea of an active response in this case leaves a bit to be desired:

If you are disturbed and appalled by KellyAnne Conway's racist tactics, please let CNN know. Racism, particularly on the public airwaves, must not be permitted to occur. Call the CNN comments line at: (404) 827-1500 or click here to e-mail the Larry King Live show.

Without trying to sound either defeatist or futilitarian, I have to say that the idea of employing the "usual feedback channels" to either Larry King Live or all of CNN reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Walt Kelly's Pogo: "I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor if he could only read!" Milazzo's strategy is unlikely to lead to anything more than a gratuitous thank-you letter. The only way to protest is in the marketplace. In this case the way to do that would be through a mass boycott of King's program. This would quickly devalue the slots for commercials in his program, and that is the only language that CNN executives understand! (Needless to say, if you can pull that off, think of what you could do for those other CNN broadcasters who claim to offer something more substantive than the sort of schmoozing that draws audiences to King!)

Golden Parachute Chutzpah

The bad news about subprime lending has been with us for almost a year. I took my own first serious look at it last year on March 16, when I first explored framing it as the new generation of Triangle Trade: racism to greed to subprime lending. Since then I have broadened my scope of impact beyond racism to an all-out War Against the Poor. Of course every war needs its commanding generals; and, since ours is not a culture that views acts of war against the economically disadvantaged as crimes against humanity, the only alternative to bringing such generals before a world tribunal seems to be to assign them Chutzpah of the Week awards. Fortunately, I can thank the Center for American Progress (CAP) for bringing three of the most damaging of those generals to my attention. I present them to you as the CAP presented them to me: who they are, the institutions they represented, and the severance agreements concluded with those institutions. All hyperlinks were provided by the CAP:

Countrywide’s founder and CEO Angelo R. Mozilo

$704 million: Countrywide Financial Corp. net loss in 2007.
11,000: Number of workers Countrywide laid off between July, 2007, and January 29, 2008.
$37.5 million: Approximate value of cash severance payments, consulting fees, and perquisites (including private airplane use) that Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide, gave up after Countrywide’s merger with Bank of America.
$23.8 million: Estimated value of Mozilo’s company retirement plan in December 2006, the last year for which data are available. Mozilo did not forgo these benefits.

Merrill Lynch’s former Chairman and CEO E. Stanley O’Neal (ret. Oct. 30, 2007)

$161.5 million: Value of securities and retirement benefits that Stanley O’Neal walked away with from Merrill Lynch when he retired. O’Neal did not receive a traditional severance payment.
$7.8 billion: Merrill Lynch net loss for all of 2007.

Citigroup’s former Chairman and CEO Charles Prince (ret. Nov. 4, 2007)

$17.4 billion: Citigroup write-downs on subprime related direct exposures in 2007.
$9.83 billion: Citigroup’s 2007 fourth-quarter loss.
$40 billion: Approximate value of Prince’s retirement package, shares, and options in Citi stock upon his retirement in November, 2007.

It is not often that we can put a price on chutzpah, so CAP should be thanked for compiling these data points. Needless to say, these Chutzpah of the Week awards will provide little comfort to all those victims now littering the battlefield of this War Against the Poor; but, if they raise any awareness that this military engagement is as grievous a fault as our "adventures" in Afghanistan and Iraq, then it will have served its purpose.

Will any Words Remain?

It was almost exactly one year ago that Senator Joseph Biden got himself into big trouble by describing Senator Barak Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Beyond the way in which the entire phrase reflected a condescending tone, the single adjective "articulate" provoked a flood of commentary for carrying a particularly disparaging connotation. However, if the problem of what D. L. Hughley called "the last vestiges of racism" can really be folded into the usage of a single adjective, modern Germany apparently has to deal with a far more complicated problem concerning the vestiges of Nazism. This latter problem is so complex that, as David Gordon Smith has reported on SPIEGEL ONLINE, it can only be negotiated through an entire dictionary:

The "Wörterbuch der 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung'" ("Dictionary of 'Coming to Terms with the Past'") examines around 1,000 words and phrases -- everything from "Anschluss," used to refer to the 1938 "annexation" of Austria, to "Wehrmacht," the name of the Nazi-era armed forces -- looking at how the meaning and usage of the terms have developed since the end of World War II.

As the introductory summary to his article puts it, the terminology of the Third Reich has created a "linguistic minefield" for ordinary discourse in the German language.

There are two consequences of having to weigh the negative connotations of every word you utter. One is that you cease to speak altogether. (This reflects the joke about the ant asking the centipede how it coordinated all its legs. Upon stopping to think about how to answer the ant, the centipede was unable to take another step and died of starvation.) The other consequence is that you get tongue-tied whenever you do speak. I experienced this problem on my first trip to Germany to attend a workshop in Munich. On my way back to the airport, the cab driver asked me which flight I was taking; and I replied, "Luftwaffe." We both quickly recognized my embarrassment, he was willing to grant me no-harm-no-foul, and he dropped me off at the Lufthansa gate. Another auditor might not have been so generous.

What I enjoy most about German is the way in which complex and subtle concepts can be packaged into just the right word. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" is not about simplistic classification in the four-legs-good-two-legs-bad style of Animal Farm (whose author probably had one of the deepest understandings of connotation in literary history); as the lexical unpacking of the word explains, it is about "coming to terms" with some of the ugliest memories that any culture has experienced. The present generation of German speakers is sufficiently remote from that past that, at the very least, they need to be aware of connotations that invoke such memories, particularly when speaking to those for whom those memories remain vivid and haunting. The question, however, is whether differentiating between an innocent mistake (as in my cab ride) and intentional malice must always be a matter of negotiating a "linguistic minefield."

There is also a related question about the basic project behind this dictionary. In general the primary function of a dictionary is to provide denotations. Connotations are rarely ignored entirely, but they tend to be of secondary interest. However, in this particular dictionary, the primary function is to provide and explain those connotations. The result is that the reference work can be used as a double-edged sword. While the intention was to provide a reference work for those who wish to be conscientious about dangerous connotations of the words and phrases they choose, the dictionary can also be used as a code-book for those who intend to provoke (functioning somewhat as a "dictionary of hate-speech"). Furthermore, even the provocations can cut two ways, as a "guidebook" for both neo-Nazis and those seeking rhetorical devices to ridicule those same neo-Nazis. One might say that the dictionary has made it harder to make "an innocent mistake" any more, just as too many Americans would no longer tolerate the use of the adjective "articulate" as "an innocent mistake."

This brings us back to those two alternatives: capitulating to silence or tongue-tied fumbling. Neither serves the social necessities of communicative actions, the primary actions available to us for trying (whether or not we succeed) to understand each other and thus manage in the life-world. This is not to say that this Vergangenheitsbewältigung is making a bad situation worse; but it is reminding us of how bad the situation is, which should be taken as a challenge to do something about it!