Protest, Uprisings, and Race War

Protest, Uprisings, and Race War

by TIM WISE

The moralizing has begun.

Those who have rarely been the target of organized police gangsterism are once again lecturing those who have about how best to respond to it.

Be peaceful, they implore, as protesters rise up in Minneapolis and across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd. This, coming from the same people who melted down when Colin Kaepernick took a knee — a decidedly peaceful type of protest. Because apparently, when white folks say, “protest peacefully,” we mean “stop protesting.”

Everything is fine, nothing to see here.

It is telling that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the evils of violence, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we claim possession solely as a result of the same. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others. We are here because of our insatiable desire to take by force the land and labor of others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Instead, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it, we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

Even in the modern era, the notion that we believe in non-violence or have some well-nurtured opposition to rioting is belied by the evidence. Indeed, white folks riot for far less legitimate reasons than those for which African Americans might decide to hoist a brick, a rock, or a bottle.

We have done so in the wake of Final Four games, or because of something called Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire. We did it because of $10 veggie burritos at Woodstock ’99, and because there weren’t enough Porta-Potties after the Limp Bizkit set.

We did it when we couldn’t get enough beer at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, and because Penn State fired Joe Paterno.

We did it because what else do a bunch of Huntington Beach surfers have to do? We did it because a “kegs and eggs” riot sounds like a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Albany.

Far from amateur hooliganism, our riots are violent affairs that have been known to endanger the safety and lives of police, as with the infamous 1998 riot at Washington State University. According to a report at the time:

The crowd then attacked the officers from all sides for two hours with rocks, beer bottles, signposts, chairs, and pieces of concrete, allegedly cheering whenever an officer was struck and injured. Twenty-three officers were injured, some suffering concussions and broken bones.

Twenty-two years later, we wait for academics to ruminate about the pathologies of these whites in Pullman, whose culture of dysfunction was taught to them by their rural families and symbolized by the recognizable gang attire of Carhartt work coats and backward baseball caps.

Back to the present: To speak of violence done by black people without uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black communities against which those who live there are now rebelling.

Let us remember, those places to which we refer as “ghettos” were created, and not by the people who live in them. They were designed as holding pens — concentration camps were we to insist upon plain language — within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. Generations of housing discrimination created them, as did decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. They were created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. Zoning laws, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all are violence, however much we fail to understand that.

As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works,” especially when it does. We are, after all, here, which serves as rather convincing proof that violence works quite well. What is worse is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have caused the current crisis and that we need not even know about those conditions. It brings to mind something James Baldwin tried to explain many years ago:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

White America has a long and storied tradition of not knowing, and I don’t mean this in the sense of genuinely blameless ignorance. This ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness honestly, but in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. It’s not as if the truth hasn’t been out there all along.

It was there in 1965 when most white Californians responded to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles by insisting it was the fault of a “lack of respect for law and order” or the work of “outside agitators.”

The truth was there, but invisible to most whites when we told pollsters in the mid-1960s — within mere months of the time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault. Only one in four thought white racism, past or present, or some combination of the two, might be the culprit.

Even before the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, whites thought there was nothing wrong. In 1962, 85 percent of whites told Gallup that black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education. By 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good-paying job. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better opportunity for a good education than whites did.

Even in the 1850s, during a period when black bodies were enslaved on forced labor camps known as plantations by the moral equivalent of kidnappers, respected white voices saw no issue worth addressing.

According to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th century, enslavement was such a benign institution that any black person who tried to escape its loving embrace must be suffering from mental illness. In this case, Cartwright called it “Drapetomania,” a malady that could be cured by keeping the enslaved in a “child-like state,” and by regularly employing “mild whipping.”

In short, most white Americans are like that friend you have, who never went to medical school, but went to Google this morning and now feels confident he or she is qualified to diagnose your every pain. As with your friend and the med school to which they never gained entry, most white folks never took classes on the history of racial domination and subordination, but are sure we know more about it than those who did. Indeed, we suspect we know more about the subject than those who, more than merely taking the class, actually lived the subject matter.

When white folks ask, “Why are they so angry, and why do some among them loot?” we betray no real interest in knowing the answers to those questions. Instead, we reveal our intellectual nakedness, our disdain for truth, our utterly ahistorical understanding of our society. We query as if history did not happen because, for us, it did not. We needn’t know anything about the forces that have destroyed so many black lives, and long before anyone in Minneapolis decided to attack a liquor store or a police precinct.

For instance, University of Alabama History Professor Raymond Mohl has noted that by the early 1960s, nearly 40,000 housing units per year were being demolished in urban communities (mostly of color) to make way for interstate highways. Another 40,000 were being knocked down annually as part of so-called urban “renewal,” which facilitated the creation of parking lots, office parks, and shopping centers in working-class and low-income residential spaces. By the late 1960s, the annual toll would rise to nearly 70,000 houses or apartments destroyed every year for the interstate effort alone.

Three-fourths of persons displaced from their homes were black, and a disproportionate share of the rest were Latino. Less than ten percent of persons displaced by urban renewal and interstate construction had new single-resident or family housing to go to afterward, as cities rarely built new housing to take the place of that which had been destroyed. Instead, displaced families had to rely on crowded apartments, double up with relatives, or move into run-down public housing projects. In all, about one-fifth of African American housing in the nation was destroyed by the forces of so-called economic development.

And then, at the same time that black and brown housing was being destroyed, millions of white families were procuring government-guaranteed loans (through the FHA and VA loan programs) that were almost entirely off-limits to people of color, and which allowed us to hustle it out to the suburbs where only we were allowed to go. But we can know nothing about any of that and still be called educated. We can live in the very houses obtained with those government-backed loans, denied to others based solely on race, or inherit the proceeds from their sale, and still believe ourselves unsullied and unimplicated in the pain of the nation’s black and brown communities.

As much of the country burns, literally or metaphorically, it is time to face our history. Time to stop asking others to fight for their lives on our terms, and remember that it is their collective jugular vein being compressed. It is their windpipe being crushed. It is their sons and daughters being choked out and shot and beaten and profiled and harassed.

It is their liberty and freedom at stake.

But by all means, white people, please tell us all the one again about how having to wear the mask at Costco is tyranny.

EAST OF EDEN By John Steinbeck

EAST OF EDEN By John Steinbeck

Chapter One

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. 

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich. 

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucia's stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucia's. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains. 

From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came, the river drew in from its edges and the sand banks appeared. And in the summer the river didn’t run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew back, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches. The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast. 

The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill came up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with white sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone. There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot. Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And those things had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it. 

On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupine's and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lurins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color— not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies. When their season was over the yellow mustard came up and grew to a great height. When my grandfather came into the valley the mustard was so tall that a man on horseback showed only his head above the yellow flowers. On the uplands the grass would be strewn with buttercups, with hen-and chickens, with black-centered yellow violets. And a little later in the season there would be red and yellow stands of Indian paintbrush. These were the flowers of the open places exposed to the sun. 

Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell, and under the mossy banks of the water courses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and goldy-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long. 

When June came the grasses headed out and turned brown, and the hills turned a brown which was not brown but a gold and saffron and red—an indescribable color. And from then on until the next rains the earth dried and the streams stopped. Cracks appeared on the level ground. The Salinas River sank under its sand. The wind blew down the valley,picking up dust and straws, and grew stronger and harsher as it went south. It stopped in the evening. It was a rasping nervous wind, and the dust particles cut into a man’s skin and burned his eyes. Men working in the fields wore goggles and tied handkerchiefs around their noses to keep the dirt out. 

The valley land was deep and rich, but the foothills wore only a skin of topsoil no deeper than the grass roots; and the farther up the hills you went, the thinner grew the soil, with flints sticking through, until at the brush line it was a kind of dry flinty gravel that reflected the hot sun blindingly. 

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

DAF: Not one false word, absolute poetry in plan words and a literature made of magic.

The Very First Pandemic Blogger

The Very First Pandemic Blogger

By Andrew Sullivan New York Magazine

If you need a role model for life in a plague, it is hard to beat Samuel Pepys. Pepys (pronounced Peeps) was a man about town in the London of the late 17th century, a member of Parliament and of the Royal Society, and an official in the Royal Navy as the British were fighting the Dutch. But his true claim to fame is that he wrote a personal diary for ten years of his life in the 1660s. Kept private in his lifetime, and much of it in code, he used it to tell the story of his days and nights, with disarming frankness and occasional hilarity, charting his thoughts and feelings, ups and downs, love affairs and marital woes. His diary is now one of the richest accounts of what life was actually like for an aspiring social climber in the period in England when the monarchy was restored. And he lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665 — and, as we might say, blogged about it. 

Pepys’s jottings have been a tonic to read in lockdown — fascinating and, with the perspective of time, oddly calming. Unlike Daniel Defoe’s later semi-fictional work A Journal of the Plague Year, Pepys wrote with no knowledge of what the future might bring, and in that way, he was just like us now, as a plague summer beckons in 2020, but with far less information. He had the means to move to the countryside, where most of the elite decamped during the crisis to escape infection, but he opted to stay in London. He had work to do at the Admiralty, organizing and handling logistics for the second Anglo-Dutch war, and he had a quirky curiosity about most things — so he lingered, moving about the city, night and day, noting what he saw and heard. 

Some of it is horrifying. He witnessed family members deserting each other and fighting over who would get their own grave. He marveled “how everybody’s looks, and discourses in the street, is of death, and nothing else; and few people going up and down, that the town is a place distressed and forsaken.” Some of it is eerily familiar, even down to the question of whether it was too risky for his wife to hire a cleaning maid, or the great haircutting question: “Up, and after being trimmed, the first time I have been touched by a barber these twelve months.” But what you glean most from his plague diary is that he continued to live his life as fully as he could and maintained an astonishing amount of poise throughout. 

The plague enters the diary in the spring of 1665, but never dominates it. The disease had, after all, ravaged London periodically throughout the 17th century, coming and going, and when an outbreak began, the dread was familiar. But Pepys is busy celebrating new wealth in April: “I end the month in great content as to my estate and getting.” That was the case even as he heard the first rumors: “Great fears of the sickness here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all!” In June, he notes how the plague had finally moved into the city, and struck “my good friend and neighbors, Dr Burnett, in Fenchurch Street.” Burnett had already “caused himself to be shut up of his own accord, which was very handsome.” 

But Pepys is mainly interested in a new suit he had bought, which did not arrive on time. He’s irritated by his wife’s dislike of it — their bad marriage is one of the subplots of the diary — and arranges for her to be shipped out of town to a friend’s place (which “I think will be very convenient”). He has dinner with relatives and dryly observes that he was “as merry as I could be in such company.” After dinner, he goes out “to show, forsooth, my new suit.” 

Only slowly does the plague nip at his heels, but when it does, it gets very real. He finds two of his favorite pubs suddenly boarded up, “and more than that, that the person was then dying of the plague when I was last there, a little while ago, at night. To hear that poor Payne, my waiter, hath buried a child, and is dying himself. To hear that a laborer I sent but the other day to Dagenham’s, to know how they did there, is dead of the plague; and that one of my own watermen, that carried me daily, fell sick as soon as he had landed me on Friday morning last … is now dead of the plague.” 

All those familiar faces suddenly gone, and new ones faltering in front of him. Taking a ride in a carriage one day, Pepys notes that suddenly the coachman who was driving “easily and easily, at last stood still, and come down hardly able to stand, and told me that he was struck very sick, and almost blind he could not see; so I ‘light and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man and for myself also, lest he should have been struck by the plague.” 

Before too long, “I find all the town almost going out of town, the coaches and wagons being all full of people going into the country.” He sends his mother away, but stays to deal with war business, court gossip, meetings with officials, and royal news. And the number of dead rises. By July 5, still in the city, he begins to fear the worst: “The season growing so sickly, that it is much to be feared how a man can escape having a share with others in it, for which the Good Lord bless me! Or make me fitted to receive it.” He seems to be preparing himself for either eventuality. And his only precaution is avoiding certain streets and neighborhoods. 

There’s a certain Monty Python Black Knight vibe to Pepys’s equanimity. Does he think he is immune? Even when the plague reaches his own parish, with 40 suddenly dead, Pepys stays up and about, with “a pleasant going and a good discourse … But Lord! to see in what fear all the people here do live. How they are afraid of us that come to them, insomuch that I am troubled at it, and wish myself away.” Even in his bedroom, as he works “undressed all day long,” the plague cannot be avoided: “It was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll and ring so often today, either for deaths or burials; I think five or six times.” Nonetheless, he attends a wedding — getting there late — and has a blast in the middle of it all: “Thus I ended this month with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life, because I have spent the greatest part of it with abundance of joy, and honor, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments.” 

I’m a little dumbstruck at the stoicism of it all. In the middle of a nightmare, he’s having the best month of his life! He’s not in denial. He’s somehow capable of finding an equilibrium so that even in the face of mass death, he can let himself go and enjoy a massive party. Here in the 21st century, we’re finding that not so easy. And Pepys faced horrors far worse than ours. His friends endure terror: “And poor Will, that used to sell us ale at the Hall-door, his wife and three children died, all, I think, in a day.” The press of corpses gets so great, there’s a citywide decision to carry them to burial at night, “the town growing so unhealthy, that a man cannot depend upon living two days.” 

And then just a little moment that gives us a sense of how lucky, in comparison, we are: “It was dark before I could get home, and so land at church-yard stairs, where, to my great trouble, I met a dead corpse of the plague, in the narrow ally … But I thank God I was not much disturbed by it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.” Maybe it’s just the English stiff upper lip as far back as 1665, but the tenacity and composure of the man are impressive, even as he passes by mounds of corpses lying out in the open, piled up against the walls of houses in the streets, dumped into mass graves, and all the doctors dead in Westminster, leaving the dying to fend for themselves. 

Historians now rank the 1665 plague as the worst of that century (though much less severe than the Black Death of 1348). By September, as it peaked, there were 7,000 deaths a week. In COVID-19, the fatality rate is around one percent. In London in 1665, in a matter of seven months, around a quarter of the population perished. The number is vague because so many records were destroyed by the Great Fire of London, which broke out a year later. But it’s still staggering. A rough equivalent today would be 4 million deaths in the New York City metro area this year alone — with no real medical care, and people dropping dead on the streets. Now imagine that after the deaths of those 4 million, much of Manhattan were to be burned to the ground by a massive and uncontrollable fire. That’s what Londoners had to handle in just two years: a pandemic of far greater scope than ours, and a conflagration that amounted to 9/11 several times over. And it was not the end of the world. 

In fact, in just a couple of years, the population of the city had rebounded. The massive fire had killed much of the rodent population that had been spreading the fleas behind the plague. London was rebuilt, stone replaced wood, and Christopher Wren was brought in, to design and replace the old Saint Paul’s Cathedral and over a dozen other landmarks of the city to this day. 

What must have felt like an apocalypse of plague and fire became, with astonishing speed, a new city, forged anew by communal trauma, and soon to be the most powerful capital in the world. And somehow, Pepys lived through all of it, face-to-face with death, and never stopped living, maintaining a stoic cheerfulness and humor throughout. And today, in the richest country on Earth, with medical technology beyond Pepys’s wildest imagination, and a plague killing a tiny fraction of the population, some are wielding weapons in public to protest being asked to stay at home for a few more weeks and keep a social distance. Please. Get a grip. 

What We Are Not Seeing 

There’s a strange similarity between the casualties of a plague and those of a war in modern America: we never see the bodies. I have yet to see a Covid19 patient in the terminal phase of the illness; I’ve never seen one being forcibly intubated; I haven’t seen video of the coughing fits of the victims; we never absorb why some are strapped to their beds, so they don’t rip out their ventilators in their desperation to breathe. There are no photos of the dying; and very few that even show the toll of survival. These human beings, old and young, are being shrouded by understandable medical privacy, but also hidden from us. 

This week, a friend texted me four photos of a gay man in his 30s. In the first there was a beaming, tanned, bearded face, with a solid chest, and a good tan in a tank top, muscles bulging, eyes twinkling. Next up was the same muscled dude, ripped abs, boulder-like shoulders, and a sleeve tattoo covering the bicep, taken at a gay club. In the third and fourth, taken only a few weeks later, it was as if he were a completely different man. 

He looked, in fact, more like the classic AIDS patient from my past: His face was now skeletal, his neck shrunk, traps disappeared, eyelids half-shut as he selfied himself holding a Coke classic bottle in a hospital bed. In the fourth, there is hardly an attempt at a smile, and on his withered neck, a gauze pad is taped to his throat, following a tracheotomy. 

I have to say it hit me hard. I’d seen that transformation so many times before, the swift and brutal theft of health and life among young gay men, and the faces haunt me still. I can close my eyes now and see them all, and the terror they evoked, and the courage they often displayed. “Walked for the first time in over a month today,” the COVID-19 survivor told his Facebook friends. “It was a very dizzying, humbling experience.” He thanked his boyfriend for his love and support, but he had not been able to see him for several weeks. He’d been struggling for his life in that hospital bed, for over a month, alone. 

That last was a sucker punch. With AIDS, for far too many gay men, an admission to hospital meant that their legal next-of-kin alone had visitation rights, and, without the right to marry, their partners and husbands were often barred from qualifying. In many awful cases, homophobic family members threw boyfriends out of their shared apartments, barred them from the hospital and kept them from the funeral. Some families even blamed the husbands for the infection, deepening the injury. And all this meant that the act of dying of AIDS was not only agonizing but solitary, unmediated by the love of those who were closest to you, a final, hideous marginalization. 

But how different is it now? When and if your parent or grandparent falls ill, and is taken to the hospital, you cannot visit. You cannot comfort or hold; you cannot be there when they panic or lash out at a nurse; you cannot hold their hand as they struggle to breathe; you cannot stroke their head as they die. You cannot ask the questions they cannot, or just hold their hand in the night. There are good reasons for this, in containing the virus, and I fully understand them. But the unintended cruelty of it all is the mark of a plague death. With the elderly, who make up a disproportionate share of the death toll, the isolation can just be an intensification of where they already were: left in nursing homes, segregated from the young, waiting to expire. But the final loneliness must be terrible. 

Everything we hear about the impact of this virus is technical. All the dead are abstractions. We chart graphs. We predict curves. Our president cannot bring himself to offer anything but minimal empathy, his cold, disturbed soul only able to understand this grotesque event in so far as it might affect the stock market or his reelection chances. The numbers mount and we do not really understand what they mean. In The Plague, Camus proposed thinking about the numbers of the dead in terms of how many movie theaters would be filled up. It was a way, he thought, not to become numb to the enormity of a plague. But we are becoming numb to this thing, denied the ability to look it in the face as it really is, just as we are shielded from the broken bodies and smashed skulls and torn limbs of the wounded in our endless, pointless wars. 

I hope we can find a way for journalism to show us these images, however searing and difficult that process might be; and that patients can give permission for their bodies to be shown and their battle for life accurately depicted. If the victims can face their deaths alone, we can surely face the reality of what exactly they are enduring. And regain our focus and energy in fighting this thing till it’s gone. 

The Simple Good of Masks 

I’ve been wearing a mask outside now since early February. I do so not because I’m some kind of saint, or communist, or hypochondriac, but simply to protect myself and others from the small chance of being infected by a new and dangerous virus. It’s not that cumbersome to wear; it’s easier to put on than a tie; it stops you touching your face; and while it doesn’t guarantee safety, it adds some odds in your favor, and suggests a little solidarity with one’s neighbors. I’ve been banging this drum for quite a while now, and it still befuddles me why some experts, even Tony Fauci, have not made a bigger deal of it. 

But the active campaign against wearing them? That completely stumps me. Some of the rhetoric on the religious right is simply unhinged: “The media have been accompanied in their work of diabolical disorientation by a political establishment that permits the cowed masses to venture forth from their cells only under the condition of donning the current yellow Star of David: the face mask.” Sure. Popping on a N95 to take the dog for a walk is the equivalent of being herded to Auschwitz. 

And here’s the editor of the more mainstream First Things, a leading conservative religious journal, Rusty Reno: “Look, let’s face it. There are those who are terrified and those who are not. Where do you stand?” Here’s where I stand: neither in terror nor in denial, just in favor of prudence. But Reno is having none of it: “Now we know who wants to cower in place. By all means rage against those who want to live.” But I don’t equate putting a mask on with cowering, and I feel no rage for those who want to live, just for those who make it more likely that others will die. 

In fact, I equate masks with the opposite of cowering. They’re one way of actually being able to get out there, live, work, with much less risk, and help end the epidemic, as The Atlantic pointed out: “Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease.” If you want to get back to work and reopen the economy, you should actually be the most fervent supporter of a simple measure that can help get that done. Reopen without masks, and you massively increase the odds of having to close everything down again. 

Is mask-wearing some kind of signal of effeminacy? That appears to be Trump’s moronic assumption, which is why his vanity prevents him from wearing one. But taking advice on manliness from an obese president who cannot directly confront someone, lobs insults from a distance, shrinks from any criticism, dodged the draft, cheats at golf, and walks around with a ridiculous bouffant hair-do and an absurd orange fake-tan, is not something a real man would ever do. 

If a mask is effeminate, then so is a hard-hat on a construction worker, a visor on a welder, and a helmet on a combat soldier. Which is to say it isn’t in the slightest way effeminate as anyone who has actually built a house, forged some steel or fought a battle would know. Trump’s loathing of masks is like a gay man in the late 1980s loathing condoms. Sure, most of us prefer our sex not sealed in a numbing rubber wrap; sure, we’d rather fuck unsheathed. But the masculinity lies in restraining oneself from such acts, not giving in to them. Being a man is defined by not being a child. It is something of which this whining winny of a president has no inkling of understanding. 

Sure, there’s evidence that some men are uncomfortable in masks. So we need to persuade them that they should wear them with manly pride. What we need is not the woke left’s rank misandry, and its view of maleness as a form of socialized toxicity; nor the right’s championing of a crude and dumb machismo that is a caricature of actual manliness. We need a model for men that prizes restraint and courage, prudence and pragmatism, and enfolds this in a model of maleness that is rooted in the defense of our societies from carnage. Looking around, I see plenty of this at work: men with calm and dignity and common sense protecting their families, friends and country. The only place where it obviously isn’t happening is in the White House. 

See you next Friday.

 

Little Richard the revolutionary

Little Richard, the Great Innovator of Rock and Roll

By David Remnick The New Yorker 

The core of Little Richard’s music career was brief, but his influence was, and is, everywhere.

One of the most foolish things that you can do is to begin the day by checking the news. This Saturday morning, the news came that Richard Wayne Penniman—Little Richard—had died. He was eighty-seven and had been in failing health. A different President might take the time to commemorate the passing of a great American, one who shaped the culture and its national sound. Don’t hold your breath. But please do play his music and watch his performances: “Tutti Frutti” will lift your heart. “Rip It Up” will get you out of the chair. And isn’t that what you need?

The core of Little Richard’s career was brief—he recorded an incandescent string of hits in the mid-fifties and then went off to rediscover his faith. In the years that followed, he’d dip in and out of show business, and there were some inspired moments, but he was a comet, not a planet. The trail of light that he left behind was, and is, everywhere. Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger (“I am the King!”). Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, “I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!”

Rather than watch the news–––it can wait––go to YouTube and watch Little Richard’s performances of “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “She’s Got It,” “Lucille,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Good Golly Miss Molly.” Banging boogie-woogie time with his right hand and singing miles beyond anyone’s idea of a “register,” he is a human thrill ride. There is more voltage in one of those three-minute performances than there is in a municipal power station.

One of the underrated books in the pop music library is “The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock,” an authorized biography/oral biography, by Charles White. Calling on multiple voices, it tells a revolutionary, ecstatic, sometimes heartbreaking story. Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. “They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine,” he once told Rolling Stone. “The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.”

As a boy, Richard was raised in the Pentecostal Church and sang gospel on Sundays with a family group called the Penniman Singers and another group called the Tiny Tots Quartet. His earliest musical influences included Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Brother Joe May, the “Thunderbolt of the Middle West.” Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club.

Richard was a poor student but, musically, he was a fast learner. He first learned to play the piano in church, but after hearing Ike Turner’s recording “Rocket 88,” and studying the style of S. Q. Reeder, Jr., better known as Esquerita, he adopted a pounding, mesmeric style. Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show. He was serving his musical apprenticeship in the last days of these minstrel shows; he also inhabited a world of strippers and drag queens and brash comedians. He studied the flashy showmanship of Atlanta-based performers like Roy Brown, who had a hit with “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and he adopted the pompadour and pancake makeup of the jump-blues singer Billy Wright. He played the Dew Drop Inn, in New Orleans, where the m.c. was a famous female impersonator and performer named Patsy Vidalia.

Little Richard signed with RCA Victor in the early fifties, but his career didn’t quite ignite. He was still washing dishes in a Greyhound bus station to make a living. Things changed in 1955, when Art Rupe of Specialty Records put him together with some stellar New Orleans players, including the drummer Earl Palmer and the saxophonist Lee Allen. On September 14th of that year, they recorded “Tutti Frutti,” a bawdy boogie-woogie that Little Richard had been performing in countless drag bars. It included lewd verses such as “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy.” At the instruction of the producer Robert (Bumps) Blackwell, a songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie worked with Little Richard to tone down the lyrics. But it wasn’t so much the lyrics as the beat and the ecstatic yowl—“A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!”—that made the song a hit. The record sold widely to blacks and whites. (And it did even bigger business among white listeners when Pat Boone recorded it.) For the next couple of years, Little Richard was a star at the highest level of the new art of rock and roll.

In the late fifties, while touring Australia, Little Richard said that he saw a powerful vision in the sky that caused him to give up rock and roll, come home, and enroll in Oakwood Bible College, in Huntsville, Alabama. In the years to come, he made forays back into music, secular and religious, but he was always torn. When Little Richard played the Star Club, in Hamburg, the Beatles were his opening act. “He used to read from the Bible backstage, and just to hear him talk we’d sit around and listen,” John Lennon told an interviewer.

Despite Little Richard’s own ambivalence about rock and roll, his influence spread quickly, and it ran deep. In the Iron Range town of Hibbing, Minnesota, a high-school kid named Robert Zimmerman listened all night to faraway radio stations playing country music, blues music, and the first rock-and-rollers: Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Bill Haley, and, the one he loved the most, Little Richard. In his high-school yearbook, he wrote that his ambition was “to join ‘Little Richard.’ ” His high-school band, the Golden Chords, played Little Richard covers. At a talent show in Hibbing High’s unaccountably ornate auditorium, the principal yanked the curtain shut on the Golden Chords and their cover of a Little Richard tune. Zimmerman wore his hair in a high, poufy pompadour, just like his idol. “I was trying to look like Little Richard, my version of Little Richard,” he told an interviewer years later. “I wanted wild hair, I wanted to be recognized.” He left town and became a star in Greenwich Village with a new name: Bob Dylan.

It seemed evident that Little Richard both thrived on his sexuality but suffered terribly from the time that he had been cast out of his own home as a boy. Despite the flamboyance of his performances and his carriage, he never quite settled, publicly, on a sexual identity. Sometimes, he would say he was gay, sometimes bisexual, sometimes “omnisexual”; there were moments, feeling the weight of his religious background, when he even denounced homosexuality. As recently as 2017, in an interview with a Christian broadcaster, he talked about “unnatural affection.”

Chuck Berry, in his autobiography, recalls performing on the same bill as Little Richard at a school in Connecticut in the sixties. Little Richard, according to Berry’s account, asked Berry to come to his hotel room to “party.” Berry asked him if that meant just the two of them.

“Chuck, I’ve always wanted to perform with you since the first time I saw you on television and have thought about it ever since.”

To make love? Berry asked.

“You’d love it; it’s like no other performance in the world,” Little Richard replied.

Berry recalled, “I tried to match his smile, and then I suddenly excused myself in a rush to get ready for the show, but he bade me farewell in a contented voice, and that was that.”

In the seventies, Little Richard struggled mightily with a consuming cocaine habit. By the eighties, he was starting to suffer from a variety of health problems. Sometimes he would show up to receive an award, sometimes not. He turned down interview requests, played rarely onstage, and gradually faded from public view. But the recordings, the legacy, is there to pick you up, even in the hardest times. “You can’t keep still when you hear the great Little Richard,” as Buddy Holly put it. “He’s the wildest act in rock and roll.”

Or, as Little Richard himself described his effect on body and spirit, “My music made your liver quiver, your bladder splatter, your knees freeze—and your big toe shoot right up in your boot!”