apologizing for whiteness is not the worst idea
resounding: the bellamy brothers (first of a series, reaching back and re-appreciating)
mass shootings as a kind of nihilism (perhaps ideology and, like, social media, are not the problem)
go ahead and have babies if you want (prediction, in 30 years the world will still be beautiful)
how to write an executive order on free speech (a new title ix)
hunting the ultimate game (on campus and congress)
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Me in the WSJ on the "resignation" of a trustee of Gettysburg College due to a yearbook pic of him at a Hogan's Heroes costume party at the college in 1980.
What it's like on campus: everyone is surreptitiously watching everyone else, hoping to catch each other in a lapse (while also rummaging all the yearbooks, old school newspapers, instagram feeds &c, looking for victims). When we fancy we have something, we turn on one another, snarling, and try to mobilize the college to extrude or permanently discredit one another. Students turn on students. Students turn on faculty. Faculty turn on students. Administrators turn on students. Faculty turn on faculty. [I will link or describe all these sorts of cases if you like.] And, unbelievably, presidents turn on trustees, driven to that point by the general snarling. Also the things they're catching people doing are, in many cases, insanely trivial, and the theory underlying the whole thing about the relation of representation to reality is baldly ridiculous. Look, obviously all of this is incompatible with these institutions' stated purposes. The average college campus right now is just precisely the opposite of a community.
Believe it or not, I take myself to be telling people to come together, and back to the basic institutional mission.
I like to imagine what the discussion has been like about the situation at the development office at Gettysburg, and comparable institutions, as they contemplate handing money back for no reason at all. Ringring: "I'd like to endow your new building, but if I do you'll mobilize the whole campus to rummage through every snapshot of me ever taken, pitching me eventually into the dunk tank/septic system. Going with Doctors Without Borders this year."
'Hogan's Heroes' ridiculed the Nazis. To do that, it needed to depict Nazis. I'm thinking that #gettysburgcollege might well have a literature professor or two who could run the students and admin through the rudiments of textual interpretation. Punching Nazis was sort of popular a couple of years ago. And since 1930, ridiculing and parodying them has been a central dimension of attack. Now, evidently, ridiculing and parodying Nazis is verboten, as it were: it's anti-semitic. The approach is puzzling.
Let's say that many people at GC are having thoughts along these lines, and not only in Development. Can they express them? If you were an untenured prof, would you express your reservations? (Unfortunately, timidity does not wear off with tenure.) What would happen to you as a student if you objected to this whole approach strongly? What would people call you? Now, you are creating an atmosphere where everyone pretends to agree. Look around you. I say you don't know whether any of these people agree with you or not, no matter how vociferously they may be nodding along. Meanwhile, the only means you have to address things like this is to provide 'opportunities' for frank, honest, open dialogue. Are you sure you're not just trying to lure people into a misstatement or inadvertent self-revelation, so you can gasp? I might not be attending.
['The sign of the Double Cross']
I'm a bit concerned that y'all aren't fighting oppression or injustice at all, just pictures of it. Quite the waste of energy.
The offending image is very much in the same genre as those above, I feel. Many people, thinking about this, are comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good. Like, why am I having to point this out?
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They Both Did Fine
Crispin Sartwell
There was no physical altercation. Each of them, the young man and the old, exercised his right to be there and express his political and religious beliefs peacefully. Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips both did just fine.
As I absorbed the invective coming from both sides, or watched the interviews and different slices of the videos, my sympathy wavered from one protagonist to the other. Slowly it dawned on me: I don't think either of them did anything wrong. Not in the slightest, really. It would not take much to re-see this event as something squarely and decently American.
As many have observed, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are an iconic public space, and you have the right to assemble there and express yourself, so long as you do so peacefully - that is, without physical violence. You have the right to wear a MAGA hat there, or to beat a drum. You have the right to express the traditional spirituality of your group, whether it is a group of Native Americans or of Roman Catholics. You have a right to move around, and you have a right to stand still. You have a right to chant, and a right to smile.
I think Phillips found the MAGA hats of the callow youth offensive, and I think he conceived of his rhythmic response as a way to teach a lesson or even bring healing. I think Sandmann thought that if he just stood there smiling, Phillips would not experience him as threatening. Together, they might have prevented a bit of a wider melee: I see the pair of them as the still eye of the conflict, drawing everyone's attention, and serving in part to keep the various hostile groups apart.
Now, perhaps this is too generous an interpretation, and as many have remarked - and as Phillips and Sandmann have remarked about each other - it is hard to know what is in someone else's heart, harder still on video, harder still after everyone has expressed an opinion about it. But finally it doesn't matter what was in their hearts: they behaved peacefully and expressed themselves directly. One could conceive that simply as a matter of decent citizenship or as healthy public discourse, conducted by drum and by hat.
We should all pity both Sandmann and Phillips for the firestorm they are reaping now. In the familiar fashion of the internet-to-cable-news sensation, their lives are getting ripped apart; they're liable to be more or less in hiding, along with their families and friends. Any discreditable thing that either has done or said is liable to be laid open to scrutiny. The sensation has narrowed both lives down to the image of the stand-off, which everyone reads for their own purposes. Phillips and Sandmann are being used, and perhaps used up.
One of the most frightening things about our ever-growing political polarization is that it limits and shapes our empathies. One side can't possibly sympathize with what Nicholas Sandmann is going through. The other can't possibly sympathize with Phillips. That is an arbitrary and irrational limitation on the humanity of the partisans, and a premonition of future oppressions.
I hope they do get a chance to meet and talk, which they've both indicated a willingness or even a desire to do. Or on the other hand, if they want never to think about this thing again, I understand that too. Meanwhile, we former Americans seem to be scared of political expression, even as we engage in it maximally. People are confused as between hats and weapons, smiles and violence. I'm not sure how you'd make a mistake like that, but I do know why you'd make a mistake like that: just yapping in unison with your demographic, for no discernible reason, toward no constructive goal, bashing your opponents with fiction.
Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann did better.
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.
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I didn't post part 1 of this, but Part II is very stand alone.
I kind of like this one. I'm 90% or so through Nussbaum's book and about 70% through Woodwards, and they're both interesting. Toss in the new one by Gelfand, and I may begin to understand.
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here's a bonus splicetoday column on the death of free expression in contemporary america. it's the one thing that left and alt right can really agree on.
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[how donny did the eclipse]
alright, i'm going to tell you, guiltily, what i like about trump, why i keep returning to a seemingly sympathetic tone, or why i sometimes 'relate,' though i utterly reject his politics. on the charlottesville weekend, i wrote this on saturday. (on saturday a counter-demonstrator was killed by a white supremacist, trump gave a lame reaction or a 'both sides do it' sort of thing. then on monday he said exactly what everyone demanded he say. then on tuesday he went off, in the disastrous way that finally convinced me that he actually is sympathetic to white supremacism.)
through my life, i have done a lot of saying what i was not supposed to say, from the slightly continually inappropriate to the in-your-face transgression. i have calmed down a lot through the years, actually, but i definitely have an impulse, in any given situation, to feel for the verboten position, word, line of jive, and then find a way to deliver it, perhaps with a slant that makes it a bit hard to interpret. when i feel that people are telling me what to say, i have a vivid physical sensation of constraint; i might comply for awhile; ultimately it won't go well. the peeceer the people around me, for example, the more i talk wrong, or work on ways to undermine the constriction.
this impulse, i feel, has stood me in good stead many a time, and if you ever want a counter-consensus position, i am the wholesale outlet. it's led me to important moral insights, i believe, including that the political state is completely incompatible with any decent ethics whatsoever. but it will also tempt me toward the dark side, toward, for example, the views that are the opposite of the pc views. but that they're not pc, of course, does not entail that they are not evil, and so on. i sort of sometimes end up on the wrong side even by my own lights.
trump has that same set-up, which is more or less why i connect with him. whatever his views on race, etc, his very being was rebelling at the notion that everyone was writing a script for him, that they didn't care what he thought as long as he said a pre-rehearsed set of words that anyone could write in their sleep. that press conference tuesday was his whole being just saying 'fuck you'; he was chomping at the bit; he had the sensation of a release from physical constraint, of selfhood and self-respect and defiance. but he also expressed considerable sympathy with fucking neo-nazis, alright? you cannot have that in a pres of the united states, however he got there.
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what disturbs me more than anything about the current situation is that the left and the alt right seem to agree that free speech = fascism and white supremacism. that's ironic, etc, but it certainly portends disaster for the future of free expression. when i say that, i hope not to be expressing nazi sentiments. maybe you think the nazis were big advocates of free speech, har har.
i doubt that neo-nazis are free speech advocates when push comes to shove, for they are totalitarians. but i don't doubt that the left of this moment is more or less entirely opposed to free speech in any form at all. they are totalitarians too. i feel that overall this is not a good moment politically.
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one thing about 'science': surprisingly, the word seems to turn off all critical reasoning faculties. but of course you have to like the conclusion; then any argument is a good enough argument, as in this tissue of strange fallacies by lisa feldman barrett in the new york times, arguing that speech can be violence and that she has a scientific basis for distinguishing speech that is from speech that isn't.
If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?
the argument runs like this: what causes physical harm is violence. stress causes physical harm. words can cause stress. so words can be violence. as usual, the neurology does nothing at all, especially if you already knew that stress can cause physical harm. but it describes the harm: stress = violence shrinks telomeres. so i wonder what else shrinks telomeres; it's all violence.
seriously, boiling down the argument, it's this: doing anything that stresses someone out is assault. think about that for just a minute, alright?
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This thing on my face? It's my mouth. That one on yours is yours. I'm in charge of this one; you're in charge of that one. I know you'd like to jam your arm up my ass and operate my mouth like I was your sock puppet. Perhaps that's your sexual orientation, so I guess it's not your fault.
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true, i'm in the wall street journal today, talking about 'linguistic constructivism' and campus speech repression.
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privileged readers of this blog will be familiar with this week's splicetoday riff on offensive numbers. god i hate them.
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The invocation to prayer in the new religion - or ancient superstition - goes like this: 'words have power.' What that means is that you ought to be silenced, or, you answer to us for what you say. I'd call it voodoo, but that's unfair to voodoo. It asserts that words are supernatural weapons that can be wielded to commit assault at a distance. It asserts that I can reach out and 'literally' commit violence against whole groups of people and the individuals in them (if we can indeed distinguish any individuals in them), by sitting here in York Springs typing. While I do appreciate the supernatural powers you are attributing to me, I am not actually a witch, and I can't actually harm you with incantations, spells, or writing a word of power on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. You think you can control reality as a whole by silencing people; and you're gearing up to impose your superstition by an authoritarian regime. You have already verbally cleansed America's colleges, which at this point are the merest re-education camps. Simulated unanimity and continual self-censorship, produced under massive social pressure and by policy, are incompatible with education in a free society, obviously. I don't think you are any more democratic, rational, or decent than Trump, and I'm beginning to wonder where I can go to escape you both. I don't think you're doing anything substantive for social justice, just trying to achieve the impression or illusion of it. I do think you should turn your attention to the math department and work on suppressing oppressive numbers.
It would be hard to deny that numbers have power, if abstract things like words can have power. It would be hard to argue that, if words are the sort of thing that could oppress people, numbers are not. Indeed, you are being oppressed by numbers right now, even as we reduce your ass to statistics and your personality to your membership in some demographic segment. You're oppressed by your SAT score, by the balance in your bank account, by the numbers on the bills in your mailbox. You might want to think about the historical role of numbers in racism, for example: all those ledgers and bills of sale. And what if i call you a 0, or put a minus sign before the name of your group? We are very oppressed by our divisions, which are multiplying. Delete these things from public space and your personal idiolect. Do it now. You're also being oppressed by fictional characters, mythological beings, sense impressions, logical entailments, Platonic Forms, and by the very concept of injustice, which should, along with the word 'injustice,' be ruthlessly suppressed. Anyway, of course, many actual numbers have been regarded as taboo or have been suppressed: that is, some numbers have been and are really offensive in the same sense as many words. So do to the number-line what you're trying to do to the language and delete delete delete!
To be fair, you also do want to ban, with regard to members of certain groups, particular hairstyles, hats, shoes, accents, musical styles, and so on (for example, because of 'cultural appropriation'). So it's not just words, but all kinds of signs and symbols and identities and expressions and arts. You want control of public space and people's self-presentations and expressions within that space. You demand control of my body in more or less every respect; you want to operate me like a marionette. You demand micro-control of my body to address possible micro-aggressions that could emerge from it. You want to rearrange my legs because i'm manspreading or whatever it may be. That's your cure for oppression, yes? That is the liberation you offer.
I have some news to break to you. We are not the stories we tell. This world is not a narrative. We did not construct this universe or ourselves or one another by weaving a tapestry of words. We do yap ceaselessly, but it usually amounts to next to nothing. We cannot make a new world by re-narrating or getting control of the signs; we can only make a collective delusion, and not even that, because the thing is too flimsy to delude. Words have power indeed in this account: the power to create worlds! a power not even Odin or Zeus could claim. Wait remind me how you reached this conclusion? because I never could quite figure that out even when I heard Richard Rorty do the schtick.
My view is that racism became unconscious when white people started thinking that racism was a matter of what words we use. We ditched all the bad words, and were innocent, and the structural racism of the country just went right on, or even intensified. You have got to learn from that, alright? Making people talk in some prescribed way just makes reality and representation, the real deal and the narrative, come apart completely. That is what you are demanding.
Remember when you were going to ban fake news? It was right-wing propaganda that was destroying our very concept of truth, blahblahblah. It took 30 seconds for 'fake news' to be appropriated by the right. Your enemy took your gun and pistol-whipped you with it. In general, all the mechanisms of social control, formal and informal, that you are instituting and want to institute can be reversed on you suddenly, and make you an enemy of the people, a traitor, etc. Your goals are different than your opponents'; your procedures the same. They will be visited upon you.
You might think that all this continues the beautiful legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, of James Baldwin, of Malcolm X, of Ralph Ellison, of Zora Neale Hurston, of Richard Wright, of W.E.B. Dubois, of Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells. Now I have a challenge for you: show me where any of these people advocated speech repression as a way to address racism. This is new, y'all: a distortion, a falsification, a disaster in which the oppressed seek to become oppressors, imitate their oppressors. This is where these movements turned from the physical reality of oppression to the symbolic reality of symbolic oppression, which can be addressed only by oppression.
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berkeley in 1964:
berkeley now:
they are indeed at war. i hope those kids don't think they're anarchists, for anarchists are on the side of free expression. ask fucking emma goldman, alright? headline: "Berkeley Students Demand Unfreedom, Mario Savio Writhes in his Grave"
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i am telling you that the average american school is run like an eastern bloc dictatorship. i assert this flatly and seriously. i would ask the administrators, those grotesque little martinets: in virtue of what do you think you have the right to tell human beings how to dress, what to say, where to gather, and so on? and i'd just point out that attendance is compulsory. and then i'd gesture at the standardized testing regime, for there is nothing else left in american education. we are brainwashing people in a totalitarian system designed by authentic idiots. and then i would add also that the baby authoritarians are rocking the colleges now with their unthinking intolerance and their constant appeals to authority, and that this is incompatible with citizenship in a democracy, or with any of the ideals that america has ever professed. i do recommend a rebellion, within each of these interment camps, if there is anyone left in them who is capable of experiencing their own continual, palpable oppression. resistance is a moral obligation.
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where's mario savio when you need him? dunno, but we've still got the great camille paglia.
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sorry, d. watkins, but i can use whatever words i please. you can try to stop me i guess.
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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.
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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.
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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"
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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.
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[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.]
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american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."
there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented.
this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.
in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.
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i've just published a new book to kindle:
Herald of Freedom: Essays of Nathaniel Rogers, American Transcendentalist and Radical Abolitionist
i'm telling you this is a discovery: someone's going to have to convince me that a more important straight-to-e book has been published.
A great and almost unknown American writer from New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) was the most radical American political voice of the antebellum period. He is also an undiscovered American Transcendentalist, at his best comparable to Emerson and Thoreau. Both men acknowledged Rogers' influence on them, and Thoreau published one of his first essays - collected here - on Rogers' work, recognizing his excellence as both a political and a nature writer. Anti-slavery drove all his thought, and as an abolitionist writer, only Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips are his rivals. Rogers was an anarchist, a pacifist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious heretic, an individualist, an anti-capitalist and an advocate of animal rights.
His writings are collected here for the first time since 1849, along with Thoreau's essay "Herald of Freedom" and other materials about Rogers and American radicalism of the early 19th century.
nathaniel rogers was an amazing radical and an amazing writer, and if you want to see someone in 1840 who speaks up for animal rights, against capital punishment, against slavery, against the state, for environmentalism as that came much later to be understood, for indian rights, and so on, and did so with extreme clarity, creativity and vigor, you've got to check this out. he was a decade emerson's senior, and he is a fundamental american transcendentalist.
boy kindle does still mangle a word document. here is a clean, free pdf
Contents
Preface, 3
Introduction by John Pierpont, 7
Writings
I. Manifestos of Liberty and Infidelity, 20
Speech, 21
Authority, 22
Church and State, 26
Infidelity, 27
Politics, 28
The Great Question of the Age, 29
Rhode Island Meeting, 31
War, 38
Reply to a Correspondent, 41
II. Anti-Slavery, 46
Constitutionality of Slavery, 47
The Amistad Case, 52
III. Against Hierarchy, 56
Osceola, 57
Color-Phobia, 60
The Rights of Animals, 62
Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 63
Aristocracy, 65
Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, 67
Address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 69
IV. Capitalism, 72
Labor, 73
Against Property, 76
Anti-Slavery and Capital, 79
V. Nature Writing and Personal Essays, 81
It Rains, 82
Bell-Ringing, 83
The Ground Bird, 85
Cobbett's American Gardener, 87
Tilling the Ground, 89
Trees, 91
"Herald of Freedom," by Henry David Thoreau, 99
Appendix A: William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Society, 108
Appendix B: American Radical Anti-Authoritarians of the of the Early Nineteenth Century, 113
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Speech
[From the Herald of Freedom of Dec. 30, 1842: Miscellaneous Writings, 247]
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 manage 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. How it must look to spectator eyes - tenanted by hampered immortality, with clipped wings and hand-cuffed wrists and fettered spirits. What angel would ever light upon it but that dragon-pinioned one who as John Milton has poeticized - lighted once from Hell on its "bare outside." Better have them kept bare to this day, than peopled by a tongue-tied race of men.
Rogers was a radical abolitionist/pacifist/feminist who edited the New Hampshire paper Herald of Freedom. I've done a lot of work on him; I'm gathering it up into an e-book which I'll put up in the next few days on amazon and googledocs.
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right, donald trump has got to go. but not because he sort of made nasty cracks about john mccain. his rivals are saying things like 'that disqualifies him for the presidency'. pretty soon we'll be publicly flogging people for failing to refer to all who who have been in the military - timothy mcveigh, e.g. - as "america's heroes." 'i will say what i want to say': that should be a slogan for everyone. we have really reached the maximum of pc pall and the correlative cowardice: you wouldn't think we could have a safer, emptier, more dishonest presidential campaign than the last few, but we are going to. the supernatural power of phonemes and abstract designs (rebel flag) is self-evident to everyone, especially young people. both with your mouth and with your ears: show some fucking guts, little bitches. we'll never address race in this country, e.g. we'll just mutter pablum in unison and intern anyone who says...anything.
you're going to need to generate a list of all the things no one is permitted to say. sadly it's going to require infinitely many of you little monkeys and infinitely many typewriters, because there are infinitely many things we are not permitted to say.
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you'd have to say that this and this are promising, though relatively small, smackdowns of the surveilance state. nothing has ever been more obviously unconstitutional. nothing would more obviously make george washington go fetch his flintlock, raise an army, and engage in violent insurrection, as he did in the good ole days.
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if you are not an anarchist, your are in favor of this: thousands of police killings done with impunity. killing with impunity is the very essence of state power, or a good definition of 'government'. say you cannot picture human life as possible without police. well, what you are thinking is that human life is impossible without arming some people heavily against others and authorizing them to commit what would be crimes for others or, looking at it another way, giving some people rights that others do not enjoy, including the right to control those others' bodies or damage them: that is what a policeman is. you think it's the rule of law but by your own account it is the rule of crime: these people can kidnap you and hold you for cash, for example, or tase you, or just beat the shit out of you or kill you. if you think that a total asymmetry of power like that is necessary, then just accept all its inevitable results. one thing you should absolutely expect, one thing you are practically endorsing: this asymmetry will mirror all the others: if you are a statist, you practically endorse beating those on the bottom of whatever hierarchies there are: economic, racial, etc. also, power of the sort you are enthusing about or regarding as a baseline necessity of human life is, given what human beings are, always abused. and also, given what human beings are, it is resented, and will be violently resented. admit it: this is what you want. so stop whining about it or hop off this state jive.
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