cheese it, the cops!

decline and fall

i would be interested in what other phil-heads think about this. as hinted in my nytimes piece on arthur danto, my sense is that philosophy is in a period of decline, at least in terms of generating transformative or fundamental figures. the generations leading to today's oldsters and the people who have died in the last fifteen years or so - analytic and continental - have not, overall, been succeeded by their equals.

so i might say: cavell, davidson, kripke, kuhn, rorty, rawls, nozick, quine, rorty, gadamer, danto, deleuze, walzer, nelson goodman, baudrillard, derrida, foucault (early death of course), nagel, macintyre, etc. who, like in their 50s and 60s, is really doing work on that level? i don't just mean good work that makes a contribution to a sub-field, but work that constitutes a fundamental re-thinking and a fundamental challenge.

now, if that's true, how might one explain it? i would focus on the nature of academic training and institutions, where there is much less tolerance for eccentrics and oddballs than there once was and much less relish for disagreement. basically these are bureaucracies now of a very similar sort as the dmv or microsoft in which you rise by representing or embodying the regulations and norms. if some of the people i've listed were starting out now, they'd find a much less receptive atmosphere in academia for their intellectual ambition and distinctiveness. and then the social interpretation of 'the professor' has shifted a bit: a professor is a professional: similar to dentists, lawyers, and such. a new 'legitimacy.'

 

well some candidates: timothy williamson (60), judith butler (60), peter singer (69), bruno latour (68), robert brandom (66). still.

anarchism and terrorism

roughly, anyway, it's true that the first global terrorists were anarchists. i think that's when the word was introduced widely, though you may find earlier examples, coming off the french revolution 'terror' etc. but i also want to say that many let's say anti-statists, were pacifists, or reached opposition to the political state through their opposition to war, violence, imprisonment, slavery. i'd mention lucretia mott, william lloyd garrison, and leo tolstoy.

as i've often written, in the late 19th c communist anarchism and marxist communism (or 'authoritarian socialism' as anarchists called it), were squared off pretty equally in the labor/radical intelligentsia movements. many factors led to the ascension of the marxist tendency over the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. but primarily these.

first, 'propaganda by the deed': that string of assassinations and bombings was unbelievably useless and counter-productive. i don't know why they thought that was good publicity; i guess isis sort of shows that you might get popular curiosity a bit or something out of that. it wasn't going to help overthrow anything, and it turned all sorts of people against anarchism and led to almost-universal vilification and repression. it was a terrible moral and practical mistake. kropotkin was the best theorist anarchism produced; sad that he went in this direction. but so did emma goldman and alexander berkman, e.g.

second, the first few decades of the 20th century were perhaps the period of the most ferocious rise of the nation state, which had monopolized the whole world and armed up unbelievably. it was an important moment in the merger of state and economy, as well. anti-statism, beautifully confirmed by the wars and genocides, also became a mere pipe dream.

the revolution in russia finally channeled the whole world left into various intensities of the marxist model. also its progress showed all the horrors inherent in that model, but people didn't seem to care, and bourgeois intellectuals the world over enthused about the liquidation of the bourgeoisie.

in short, we anarchists fucked up, and the world fucked us up. on another occasion i'll try to say why i still want to be an anarchist.

crispy's brief guide to academic publishing

over the decades, many a grad student or professor has said to me: oh, little crispy, what shall i do? i need to write! to which i offered various softened-up versions of my daddy's advice: then sit your ass down and start typing. but i should have responded like this: why do you need to write? for on the answer to that question turns the matter of whether you should write or not. maybe you should skip it.

 

i'm thinking that might be the best singer in the history of popular music.

 

 

throwing down

alright alright it's true! soren kierkegaard is my favorite philosopher. i guess my various screeds against academic philosophy, academia in general and so on are my attack upon christendom. admittedly i've been more melancholy than scathing of late, but lord that sk could rip you a new one - all in the name of universal love, of course. same grounds, by the way: philosophy these days still pretends to love of wisdom, or witness to truth, but it's going to get there through rampant careerism and obsession with social prestige and rising through the institutional hierarchy and suchlike. your theory of truth depends on what'll generate recommendations or tenure or the endowed chair. either/or, baby. anyway, this is very beautiful, if - as often in k - too intense not also to be disturbing.

no that wasn't me with the suicide vest, panda suit, and new theory of the sun. thanks for your concern!

truer

if i had one wish for academia, it would be that the interactions there would be more fully human, that more people - professors, students, administrators, staff, all - could be and show more fully who they really are, what they have been or are going through, what they want. i think that people there in general do not fully connect with one another, or show themselves; they are hedged about by conventions and rules and norms and constraints designed to preclude that. i think this misunderstands and harms learning.

i've often experienced the whole thing as an artificial pseudo-environment, like a pseudo-happy virtual reality written by programmers, a zone insulated in imagination even from the human things that are being researched or theorized. any outbreak of the personal or the urgent seems impertinent or transgressive. i sort of don't see how people live or think like that.

you know, professors or more are less just like factory workers or whatever it may be. they fall in love and split up; they struggle with addictions or obsessions or depressions; people they love die or are otherwise lost; they've got problems with their kids or their parents; they're badly in debt, and so on. you'd never know this at all, most days, unless a crisis breaks out, and i think among the auto mechanics or maids or something, people are more into facing the realities of human life and have the language to express them.

and then, while i'm hoping, i hope the writing that emerges becomes more fully human in all these dimensions, that it comes to more frankly acknowledge its human origins and human audience, that it comes to more fully express the real thoughts, real emotions, real experiences, real suffering and real joy, of the people who make it, and finds those things more fully in the people who read it. the people i love to read the most - montaigne, for example, or emerson, or pascal, or kierkegaard - really did that, each in his own way. we still can if we resolve to. and particularly in philosophy: if the reality of human life and the life of the author or teacher aren't connected to what is expressed, our subject-matter has been lost.

the place often seems unreal to me, and that is what makes it untrue. there are many models; what if you heard a professor say something like this?

 

i just wish we talked more like humans living in this world: to students, to one another, at the watercooler or in our books. i don't see why we shouldn't.

better than dimaggio

having lost access to jstor and such, my awareness has been renewed of the vast distance between how people talk about the ideals of academic research and the miserable realities. they want $40 for a one-time view of a review of my book political aesthetics in the journal mind. but i use academic databases all the time for all sorts of research.

see, academic research would supposedly be directed toward truth, or fallacies and falsifications detected, by wide public scrutiny. plus it could be in a wide sense collaborative, so that i can use what ideas and scholarship i can use (with credit, of course) to build toward new ideas or approaches or elaborate old ones, and others can build with mine. not if they're systematically restricting access.

there are multiple layers in which people are claiming ownership of strings of words or of ideas or of the results of research: jstor charges, oxford u press charges, etc. your university or your government 'own' the ideas they gave you health insurance in exchange for.  i still insist that the notion that such things can be owned at all is incompatible with their ontology: you can't sell real estate in the abstract realm; it is literally impossible to own strings of notes or words, for example. why are people generating or doing research at all? (a) because they want health insurance (to which they will sacrifice their own freedom to think), (b) so people can take that research, more or less for free, and then commodify it and sell it to people. i think intellectual property has fundamentally distorted human knowledge.

where have you gone, aaron swartz? 

back at the ranch

meanwhile, the petition put up by joel pust and jeff jordan has gathered over 200 signatures, and i must say it's quite a lineup. by all means sign if you can be plausibly described as an academic and if you haven't already.

notes

the first hummingbird arrived back in latimore township this morning after his fantastical journey.

many people on television, such as nicolle wallace on morning joe, are offended (or perhaps merely anxious) because trump does not use campaign consultants, speechwriters, or teleprompters, making people like her otiose. i just want to say that the fact that he doesn't is extremely impressive and could have a transformative effect on the political process, which has seemed irremediably inauthentic. i wish his reality were a different reality than it is, but at least it's reality, and the model can be applied to other parts of ideological spectrum if anyone has the skill and the courage and the chops. last night he gave a victory speech and then just started taking questions from reporters right there at the podium.

no health insurance. looks like obamacare is kicking me to medicaid, seeing as how i'm showing no income. my sudden tumble into the underclass should increase my political cred, i feel. on the other hand, applying for unemployment and medicaid etc is awfully incompatible with my anti-statism. somehow i'll eventually try to bring my actions and my principles together again, i hope. 

let's see, what else? farfisa! farfisa?

farfisa

farsifa? farfisa.

 

 

ok, ok, maybe augie's playing a vox.

 

 

[joe 'king' carrasco and the crowns]

fly like an eaglesmith

my fred eaglesmith playlist at this point consists of 202 songs, albums stretching from 1983 to 2013. I'm shocked i wasn't aware, actually, before i was martyred to miranda lambert's version of his 'time to get a gun.' it might be the greatest body of songwriting in a country vein in that period, and one of the greatest of recording artistry. over and over and etc he is just an astonishing lyricist: these songs are so beautifully and poetically crafted, and yet so connected to country and blues traditions, with a rare combination of skill and simplicity.

though the songs have some things in common across the whole body - especially a melancholy-to-devastated mood - the work is remarkably varied. it's hard to believe listening to his recent stuff, but in the '80s he could do a classic bluegrass tenor, with excellence and also rough authenticity, and plus he could write bluegrass/acoustic country songs that sound like classics from the late 1940s and '50s, that could have been recorded by the stanleys, for example.

 

the combination of simplicity and subtlety makes him sound classic to me. stuff like this is framed in a more electric country vein:

 

what a beautiful piece of writing. fucking perfect.

several of the albums, such as 'cha cha cha' have really very distinctive sonic approaches, and whatever he gets into, eaglesmith handles beautifully; the instrumental and production frame comes out intrinsic to the lyrics and singing.

 

for example, i'm always a sucker for that farfisa/texmex thing, which he pulls out on tambourine.

 

the oeuvre is too vast to really do justice to without really going long, but i'd urge you to explore. rarely has someone so great been so underappreciated.

  

that's audrey auld on the duet, i believe. he does often return to guns, one way or another. of course, that's very traditional in country music (as hip hop, for example), and i would urge the police and academic administrators even in oklahoma not to construe the songs as death threats. 

 

i'll say again that this one is just an astonishing composition:

 

sometimes he sounds like ralph stanley, sometimes like prine or dylan, sometimes like steve earle or vice versa, often only like himself.

 

a golden age of wimpery

henry draws my attention to this story, which has a shape remarkably similar to mine: people repress your song instead of trying to deal with your content. it can happen to a high school student, or to a professor, or to you. there are a variety of factors that have taken us into this new golden era of american censorship, authoritarianism, and breathtaking stupidity: the mass shooting phenomenon has everyone - especially anyone running any sort of institution - pissing in their depends, just pouring all day. the 'anti-bullying' obsession, possibly the only decently-funded educational initiative of the last decade, is boiling up into every aspect of society, so that people pretend to experience a nasty comment on the internet as an act of violence. war on terror, universal surveillance, and so on: no one wants to be free or wants anyone else to be free because they are too scared to be free. people wonder why the right is angry etc: the only thing any leftist ever said about trump. i'm asking instead whether we really want to live scared of our own shadows and out of our wits, live a life of cravens, and use that to motivate morbid censorship and insipid totalitarianism. everyone just wants to be protected by the authorities, while the authorities tremble like they've got parkinson's. 

support!

so amazed and pleased that the gofundme campaign has exceeded its goal! i am leaving it up, for legal expenses are likely to well exceed this. but thank you so much, folks. you're on the right side on this one. also, a petition is circulating for academics to express their...misgivings about dickinson's actions. 

rural america now

like i say, my very andrew-wyethy bit of rural pa is about 50% mexican. (i'd say 'latino', except it really seems to be almost all-mex). my favorite spot out here is tania's mexican restaurant (and jewelry), down near the big canning plants in aspers. when i moved out here four years ago, it was all-mexican in staff and clientele; it was hard to order if you didn't speak spanish. one time i saw some boys in a truck drive by, flying the rebel flag, honking the whole way and flipping the bird at the place in general. also it's kind of a community center.

but it has dawned on people. man it is good; you've never had good mole, i bet. some of the staff seems to have intermarried with the anglos, and there are babies. this evening, there were a couple of different groups of mennonites in there, and quakers i recognize from meetings. there was an asian dude, as well as a bunch of folks looking all-mayan.

i don't know how trump will really play out here; you do see signs and stickers. but if we know what's good for us, we'll roll down there and tear down any wall that may arise, for this area was dying - culturally and economically - before the influx. there are many abandoned old houses and stuff; a number are being rehabbed and inhabited by mexican families with small children. i think the whole situation is paradigmatically american, actually.

prince

geez, what happened? i must say, i think prince compares extremely favorably to michael jackson, for example. also david bowie. i reviewed his albums early and through the eighties, including at his apex moment, with 'when doves cry' and 'purple rain.' i finally saw him around 2000 at the meadowlands; we were up in the rafters. it was one of the best shows i ever saw: so clean, so propulsive: he was really throwing down the funk with maceo parker and stuff on that tour. he had many great songs; maybe i don't need to do the playlist, even. every few months 'raspberry beret' starts playing on repeat in my mind, e.g. i particularly liked the whole aesthetic of 'kiss': so stripped down to the essence; one of the great pop singles of its era.

now, there were problems too, very often. you don't really want to watch the movie purple rain now, except for kitsch-value and to watch morris day and the time get down. the movie after that (i've repressed the title) was far worse. he wrote some great riffs, but many songs were built on boring, repetitive or unattractive little figures; i think he had a bit too much faith that everything was genius. even listen to '1999': now whistle or hum the riff; it's just boring. and as he went on, his music got less interesting i feel, though i stopped listening at a certain point. but i don't think i would recommend a marathon of all his albums; there's a lot of non-good or just puzzling stuff.

still, as his appearance in baltimore last year and many other things showed, he stayed so much sharper, saner, and more relevant than michael or a lot of other people who reach that level. i don't actually think it's good for anyone to get that level of adulation, and no one quite deserves it anyway. but lord that boy could get it.

michael and prince (and madonna and me) were all born in 1958; the attrition rate is rather disconcerting.

the moral duty of insurrection

there were many different sorts of abolitionists during the era of slavery. but there were not many like nathaniel peabody rogers. around 1840, he committed himself to total non-resistance. but in 1838 (seven years after nat turner and a year before amistad, which he also wrote about), he argued that slaves not only should rebel, but that insurrection was their moral duty, and it was every person's duty to join them. he opposed capital punishment, but finishes by arguing that, if hanging is permissible in any case, it is morally obligatory for slaveholders. so grapple with the fact that an american was publishing that in a newspaper in 1838.

   The enslaved of the country are as much entitled to their liberty as any of us, by the law as it is. They have a right to throw off all violation of it by force, if they cannot otherwise. Nay, it is their duty to do so, if they can, for it is not injury merely, that they are submitting to - not wrongs. They are rendered incapable of suffering injury, incompetent to endure wrong. The accursed system, that preys upon them, makes things of them - exterminates their very natures. This they may not submit to. They ought to prevent it, at every expense. They ought to resist it, as the Christian should the devil, for it wars upon the nature of man, and devours his immortality. If they could heave off the system by an instantaneous and universal effort, they ought to do it. Individually we wish they could do it, and that they would do it. We may be wrong in this opinion, but we entertain it.

   If our white brethren at the South were slaves, we should wish them instantaneous deliverance by insurrection, if this would bring it to them. We wish our colored brethren the same. We do not value the bodily lives of the present white generation there a straw, compared to the horrible thraldom, in which they hold the colored people, and we value their lives as highly as we do the colored people's. But insurrection can't effect it. It must be done by the abolitionists. They must annihilate the system by force of their principles, and as fast as possible. To the work then, and Heaven abandon the tardy! If you wish to save your white brethren and yourselves, we commend you to this work, in sharp earnest. We tell you, once for all, there is no time to be lost!

   There is no end to the theme - there must be to this article. The people collectively have the power to declare slavery a crime in the slave states. Congress has the power to do what amounts to the same thing - by direct action. Lex talionis would enslave the perpetrators, but that would be devilish, and ought not to be inflicted. But if hanging is lawful in any case, it is in this.

["the constitutionality of slavery"]

speech is not violence. but sometimes it is an amazing act of courage, physical as well as intellectual and social. the slaveholders of the era and their representatives in washington certainly argued that abolitionist speech far milder than that was indeed violence. they banned it, confiscated it, burned it, etc., and killed some of the people who uttered it, such as elijah lovejoy, a newspaper editor burned out and killed the year before rogers published this.

be fruitful and multiply

the prospect of a hillary-donald matchup in the fall is unbelievably depressing, and i must say that i still cannot reproduce in my mind the structure of motivation that gets someone to vote for hillary clinton. she's meaningless, is one problem. and contrary to some, i think trump will destroy her in a two-person general election. she's the only candidate who approaches his numbers for 'disliked,' and lord there is infinite twitter ammo.

at any rate, what i'd hope for now is a free-for-all that breaks the two-party system. that's definitely not impossible, and it's a wee bit hard to imagine reince preibus and john mccain coming around at this point after the trump takeover of the party. it would have to happen fast; it almost has to happen now; but it is not impossible that they'd use whatever machine they still control to run someone else: kasich or rubio, maybe. i hope that they've gotten realistic: trump is almost certain to be nominated at the convention on the first ballot, i think. they need to be meeting today to develop an alternative.

sanders is in burlington, reflecting, and what i hope he is reflecting on is that hillary clinton is in fact the very essence of what he most opposes: a straight representative of the oligarchy. she's as 'progressive' as the poll numbers at any given moment, and her words mean nothing about her policies. she serves the super-rich. so then i hope that he feels duty-bound to run as a third-party candidate.

and then i'd like to see rand paul look squarely at all four of the candidates and realize that they agree extremely on one thing: the state should control every aspect of everyone's life, and feel duty-bound as well. if the two-party system breaks, party loyalty this time is going to lose its value for the long haul. but if rand doesn't hop, i think in that situation gary johnson could do pretty damn well; he'd have my vote, for sure.

i'd love to see a situation in which timothy egan or hillary clinton or michael tomasky can't just mechanically vilify republicans all day with the broadest brush and call that a strategy, in which the hypersimplistic partisan identity of these people faces a complex situation. i'm telling you that if it sticks to two parties each spending all day talking to themselves about how insane and evil and stupid the other one is, we'll head toward a partition in this country. a more complex politics where you have to vilify in multiple directions simultaneously, confusing yourself, would be the only route to the kind of contentious unity that could hold a democracy together.

meanwhile...

the fruit trees are in blossom here in northern adams county.

and they're trucking in the beehives.

it's a blooming buzzing confusion i tell you!

 

not even jackson browne

couldn't find this version of the profcrispy story on youtube, so i put it up.

 

insults

i just want to say to such folks as george yancy (whose work, again, i have long admired and participated in) and jessica valenti: people have a right not to be threatened. but no one, not even a member of an oppressed group, has the right not to be insulted. there are no illegal words in contemporary english. also, once more: speech is not violence, under any circumstances. if you think it is, i will say once again, i don't think you have experienced actual violence.

the reasons people like that - and whole movements on college campuses, and the american philosophical association, and so on - want to lose that distinction is because they want state control of the media in order to impose an ideological agenda. that is much, much worse than the conditions it is designed to ameliorate. they just want to shut people people up so that they themselves are never exposed to anything not themselves; they want to live in an hallucination of unanimity, in a world where everyone is forced to pretend to agree.

if you think that would be a substantive blow against racism or sexism, you haven't been watching the last few decades, in which people learned to talk right, but the society continued right on with its structural inequalities. you are very, very confused about the relation of language to reality, and if you want to argue this out on that level, i am very ready. yapping does not construct reality. you know this very well, though people can all play 'let's pretend' together, using words. that's what you're demanding. a prison is not a paragraph nor a paragraph a prison; surely you don't actually need me to give arguments for that?

like hillary clinton raising wall street money, you advocate oppression and inequality (or as rogers says below, slavery) in order to mitigate oppression and inequality. that is the whole structure of this sort of leftism for a century and a half. i don't know how you thought your way to this, but you are the conditions you're supposedly attacking. people like valenti and yancy aspire to be oppressors, which admittedly is one of the traditional reactions to being oppressed. and within the institution from which i just emerged, they are achieving their purpose extremely effectively. ain't no liberation down this alley, though.

once more i'm giving you some actually american values, as expressed by nathaniel peabody rogers, who, let me say again, was an advocate of absolute equality of the races and sexes. jessica valenti would agree with all his positions, and try to shut him up anyway, i presume.

 

Speech

     We speak of the "freedom" of it, and of "liberty of Speech," as though it were even to be claimed that the human voice should not be regulated at all times and under all circumstances, by the arbitrary caprice of tyrants. The human voice is free of course. It is as naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase freedom of God than by such expressions as Liberty of Speech. Who should think of regulating a man's speech but himself? What has he got it for, but to use at his discretion, and what has he discretion for, if not to govern himself with, in speech and thought? If a man has not discretion enough to govern his own utterance, how can he govern his neighbor's? How can any number of men, each and all incompetent to regulate themselves, regulate others? Those others meantime competent to regulate them, though incapable of bridling their own tongues - or rather of guiding them without bridle, as the Parthian manages his unreigned steed.

   Human speech is sovereign. Nobody can govern it but the individual it belongs to. Nobody ought to think of it. Every body has his hands full with his own, which he can manage and ought to, and which he cannot innocently commit to the management of another. It can be done. Speech is good for nothing unless it be done. Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.  

physical

sometimes it's amazing what comes from abebooks. i once got a 1948 edition of the meaning of words by the hyper-obscure american genius alexander bryan johnson. it says 'max black' on the flyleaf. i recently got a copy of felix g. rivera's book suiseki: the japanese art of miniature landscape stones inscribed by the author, but maybe that's not that surprising. but how about this little inscription on a lovely copy of acts of the anti-slavery apostles (1883) by parker pillsbury (which includes a stirring tribute to nathaniel peabody rogers): "This book was presented by the author to me personally in my office of the Buckeye Vidette [that's a newspaper], Salem Ohio." then it's signed pretty illegibly, then "Editor and Publisher." 

i find things like this moving. i tried to migrate to kindle a while back, but keep coming back to the physical book for numerous reasons.

stoned

more adams county suiseki. double click to expand.

[that one's about 5 inches across.]

 

it rains

i've republished the nathaniel rogers book, in a more competent form. 6x9 size, correctish pagination, and justified margins at little extra cost to you! it's a miracle. looks better on kindle too, and is set up to match american defiance. sorry to anyone who might have bought the first version, which was not many. but the text is there either way, which is what does matter.  

gonna say it once again until someone shows me i'm wrong: the most radical writer in the most dimensions alive in the first half of the nineteenth century. other candidates whose lives overlapped: william godwin and mary wollstonecraft, tom paine, percy shelley, pierre-joseph proudhon, robert owen, fanny wright, fourier, marx, william lloyd garrison. not going to cut it, though, i think! on the other hand, there is a lot of the world that isn't england, france, and the us.

anyway, nathaniel peabody rogers was a lovely transcendentalist nature writer to boot.

 

It Rains

[From the Herald of Freedom, July 4, 1845]

   While I am writing, it is raining most magnificently and gloriously out doors. It absolutely roars, it comes down in such multitude and big drops. And how refreshing! It waters the earth. There has been but little rain, and our sandy region had got to looking dry and distressed. Every thing looks encouraged now, as the great strainer over head is letting down the shower bath. The grass darkens as it drinks it in, with a kind of delicate satisfaction. And the trees stand and take it as a cow does a carding. They hold still as a mouse, while they abide by its peltings, not moving a twig, or stirring as leaf. The dust of the wide naked street is transmuted into mud. And the stages sound over the road, as if they rattled on naked pavement. Puddles stand in all the hollows.

   You can hardly see the people for umbrellas, and the clouds look as if they had not done with us. The prospect for the Canterbury meeting looks lowery. Let it rain. All for the best. It is extraineous, but I could hardly help noticing the great Rain and saying this word about it. I think the more mankind regard these beautiful doings in Nature, the more they will regard each other, and love each other, and the less they will be inclined to enslave each other. The readier abolitionists they will become. And the better.

   The Rain is a great Anti-Slavery discourse. And I like to have it pour. No eloquence is richer to my spirit, or music. A thunder shower, what can match it for eloquence and poetry! That rush from heaven of the big drops - in what multitude and succession, and how they sound as they strike! How they play on the old home roof and on the thick tree tops! What music to go to sleep by, to a tired boy as he lays under the naked roof! And the great low bass thunder as it rolls off over the hills and settles down behind them - to the very centre, and you can feel the old Earth jar under your feet - that is music and poetry and life. And the lightning strikes you - what of that? It won't hurt you. "Favored man," truly, as uncle Pope says, "by touch ethereal slain." A light touch, compared to Disease's, the Doctor's - or Poverty's. I am no trifler with human destiny, but nothing that naturally happens to a man can hurt him.

on the other hand

total pacifism and resulting anarchism from william lloyd garrison:

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government; neither can we oppose any such government by a resort to physical force. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. We are bound by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world, the subjects of which are forbidden to fight; which has no state lines, no national partitions, no geographical boundaries; in which there is no distinction of rank, or division of caste, or inequality of sex; and which is destined to break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms.

(amdef 152)

i'll just remark again that no matter who drew the conclusion (tolstoy, for example) or who did not, anti-statism follows obviously from pacifism, because the political state rests on force.

garrison was a big hero of my step-father, richard abell, who was a beloved teacher at sidwell friends in dc and walt whitman in montgomery county, md. of granite new hampshire stock, like nathaniel rogers, he was a quaker on and off, a conscientious objector in world war 2, and a draft counselor during vietnam. during his co service, he contracted polio and used a wheelchair after that. also, like garrison, he was a free speech fundamentalist: a lifetime supporter of the aclu, among other causes.

[richard and my son samuel abell sartwell, rolling around the farm in rappahannock county, va on the 'richmobile'. a handicapped-accessible organic vegetable farm. my mom still lives there.]

he took me to a few quaker meetings. silence is hard when you're 14 and known informally as 'the mouth.' well, 50 minutes of silence is still hard for me as an adult. i've had some influxes of spirit, though, in such circumstances. one thing that's helping in my time of trial is the beautiful quaker document a testament of devotion, by thomas r. kelly.

 

 

the real hip hop

amdef, p. 99:

Who are the white people that we should fear them? They cannot run fast, and are good marks to shoot at. They are only men; our fathers have killed many of them. We are not squaws, and we will stain the earth red with blood.

--Tecumseh (1812)

mo def

amdef, p300.

In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

--Thoreau, "Life With Principle"

another expression of

american defiance:

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

--Sarah Grimke, 1837

more defiance

i think the paperback of american defiance came out beautifully.

the essay by douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," given as a commencement address at Western Reserve College in 1854 (!) - is one of a number of little-known treasures.

The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the vital question of the age. In the solution of this question, the scholars of America will have an important and controlling part. This is the moral battlefield to which their country and their God now call them. In the eye of both, the neutral scholar is an ignoble man. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold. The lukewarm and cowardly will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy. The cunning man who avoids it, to gain the favor of both parties, will be regarded with scorn; and the timid man who shrinks from it, for fear of offending either party, will be despised. He that is not for us, is against us.

Call no man master -- that is the true doctrine..

--Lucretia Mott

god will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

[emerson]. introduction to american defiance, now also on kindle.

   I would like this book to remind Americans, and whomever else might be interested, that our cross-section of this continent has a great anti-authoritarian history: a history of religious individualism, revolution, anti-slavery, anti-gender-oppression, anti-statism. It is a tradition of looking skeptically at all forms of political and economic hierarchy.

   I intend to do a companion volume on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but one thing I very much like about the history I'm presenting is that it occurs before and outside the left/right spectrum, which only became current in the US in the very late 19th century. The question of whether an anti-federalist like Robert Yates, or an agrarian like John Taylor, or a radical individualist such as Emerson or Spooner is on the left or the right is ill-formed. At any rate, they were skeptics about state power and unbridled capitalism, opponents of slavery and exploitation. Nor do feminists such as Sarah Grimké or Lucretia Mott fit comfortably in the later political spectrum: they are extremely religious and also radically individualist, and yet they supported all the progressive reforms of their era.

   Several of these documents are famous, but a number of the figures are far too little known and their texts far too little available. I also hope that this volume is an exercise in canon-formation.

[not to put too fine a point on it: the political left is authoritarian, elitist, thoroughly dedicated to hierarchy. it ain't freed nobody from nothin, and it never will. judged by the values it itself professes, it is evil; it is precisely what it professes to be dedicated to destroying.]