cheese it, the cops!

History as Loop Spiral(tm)

 

important theories of history that broke too late to make the piece.

 

 

The loop spiral is an attempt, for one thing, to get rid of the still-whiggish simple loop structure, which presses forward even as it turns back. The loop spiral 'blooms' rather than progresses. 

At every moment history becomes more complex, because it accumulates or accretes and never loses events and entities; that is, whatever has happened will never not have happened; history is cumulative. Even if the universe were to collapse into a single point, its history would still be expanding.

art jane irish

Yes it's true; the loop spiral^TM also resembles a net, or history as an entanglement. Plus the merchandising possibilities are myriad.

 

recent items

NYTimes: How Would You Draw History?

SpliceToday: How Much Distance?

Why They Suck: Richard Serra, Tear Down This Wall

(and the why they suck hall of fame)

Fuck Me, I'm Going to Vote Democrat Tomorrow

America, There is Hope (for Country Music)

  

All together now...Traitor! Poltroon!

New post over at Veterans News Report. We probably should be getting the petitions ready for Trump after his return from Helsinki. Will he withdraw from NATO? WTO? Insult Finland? Give Alaska back to Russia with apologies? Piss on the covers of his bed if they put him in Buckingham Palace? 

Look, Russia invaded our country by interfering the election and has been engaged in information and cyber warfare against us and our allies for at least a decade. Trump is doing everything possible to cover that up and let them have an expressway into the next election. It's treason in effect; it certainly violates the espionage act and a variety of other things. We need to start saying that out loud. 

Look, the things that made America a world wide power weren't an isolated economy and military power. It was when we stepped up in 1941 through 2012 and tried to lead the world through a leadership based on principles of liberal democracy as opposed to Realpolitik, selfish national interest, and greed. When we violated those principles, we ran into problems…and on a world stage, problems tend to play out over generations if not centuries. So, if you are crafting an overarching policy for governing a great world power, "don’t do stupid things!" would be a great first principle. This administration instead has an overarching policy of "Abe Lincoln was a Republican...I bet you didn't know that!"

So if you are wearing a MAGA hat, I suspect you’ve already stopped reading my stuff, where ever I link it or post it, so read some history of the US involvement in Iran, Cuba and Latin America, and Mexico instead. Read Mark Bowen’s “Blackhawk Down” and “Tet.” Read Ralph Peters’ series of US civil war novels. Get some perspective that doesn’t include ditto signs. Read some collections of George Wills’ writings, some Ralph Meacham, Sandberg’s Lincoln. Read the history of the US constitution. Get a bit more knowledge and maybe even some perspective. If nothing else, try to be an informed, loyal and situationally aware American.

Kissing the collective asses of Putin, Xe, and Kim probably is certainly not the way to make or keep America great.

it's true! i'm in the nytimes today, developing my brand-new theory of history. 

fuck! it's world-history on horseback. 

i wonder who you think are world history's greatest dumbfucks and fuckwads. perhaps i'll write a book.

in a similar vein from the latimes 2005 or so: my explorer, hernando de soto.

Go to Sodom and Gomorroh, what do you care, aint nobody there'd want to marry your sister!

I was working on a different piece, wanting to segue from Trump into some recent books about how generally awful war and diplomacy are when you have no idea as to what you want tor an outcome. However, I began by wondering if I was the only writer on the staff who wondered when the woke daily "what the hell has that idiot done now?" Tapped a vein...

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/07/04/dispatches-from-wolf-country-round-and-round-stumble-on/#1

There is some related, kind of, Mothers of Invention. 

Here is some always related Allison Moorer-Shelby Lynn from a joint project...

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/15/532936594/songs-we-love-shelby-lynne-allison-moorer-not-dark-yet

 

Marshall Tito Puente: A Biography

This was in the LATimes circa 2003, also did some kind of bit on it on NPR.

By Crispin Sartwell

The other day my fifteen-year-old son needed to complete a homework assignment at the very last minute for his Spanish class. From a list of topics he chose to write a biography of Tito Puente. I asked what he knew about Tito Puente, and he told me that he'd googled and found that Tito Puente was a musician and also the leader of a European nation. It came to me that he'd confounded the King of Mambo with the Chair for Life of Yugoslavia.

But the biography would be richer in detail and more coherent if it conflated these eminent lives and so I resolved not to disabuse him. Here, word for word, is his report, for which, with a faith that touched me deeply, he depended on me for the research.

Marshall Tito Puente was that rare combination: political strongman and mambo percussionist. He played the timbale and the vibes as perfectly as he played the political winds that blew through Eastern Europe in the wake of World War 2, riding them to an ecstatic synthesis of absolute power and worldwide pop superstardom.

Indeed, he anticipated the astonishing political/pop crossover acts of our own era, displaying simultaneously the political acumen of a Barbra Streisand and the irresistible pop hookcraft of a Richard Gephardt. He purged his political rivals with the same improvisational megalomania that he employed to dominate the luxurious New York ballrooms of the fifties He'd beat you to death, as it were, with the same sticks he used to make you slither drunkenly around the dance floor in your best outfit.

Marshall Tito Puente was born Josip Broz in 1892 in the tiny village of Kumrovec to a peasant family. He made his name as a salsa agitator in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes between the wars, and was at first an enthusiastic ally of Stalin. Around the same time, he and his sister joined the "Stars of the Future" neighborhood arts organization, where young Tito was noted for his precocious cha-cha. Stalinism served as the model for Tito's "iron irritant of bureaucracy," as well as for his uproarious stage antics, imitated in turn by everyone from Desi Arnaz and Sheila E to Saddam Hussein.

But after leading the Puerto Rican resistance to Hitler - with his death camps and obsession with Patti Page - Tito Puente emerged as the primary figure in the newly constituted Leninist music fad. He served an apprenticeship in some of the finest Latin bands of the period, including those of Juan Peron and Fidel Castro, whom Tito always credited for teaching him the music business.

Finally, he led a fiercely independent Yugoslavia to its break with Charo, whose control of communism on the American airwaves was sagging even as her behavior became more erratic and Diva-esque. At the decisive moment, he issued the classic Dancemania, named in one critics' poll as one of the 25 most influential political manifestoes of the twentieth century.

A newspaper review of the period referred to Tito's "ability to literally drive a crowd crazy with his spicy heat from south of the border," a skill that served him well in international diplomacy, as well as in his efforts to confine political opponents to psychiatric facilities. Later he was to train that seductive beat squarely on Richard Nixon and a series of other American presidents, who invited him to perform at the White House even as they attacked his brand of Marxism. As Watergate broke over a shocked nation, Tito moonlighted as the eldest member of the Jackson 5.

He was declared President for Life in 1976, and in his career recorded about 120 albums, more than almost any other dictator in history. He won five Yugoslav Grammies. His influence is still felt today among members of the current generation of Latin music stars, such as Selena, Enrique Iglesias, and Pervez Musharraf.

So when someone tries to tell me I can't, I tell them right back about Marshall Tito Puente. Anything you can dream of being - tap-dancing firefighter, incredibly stupid professor of physics, white NBA star, or sweet and sour pork - you can be. Be it all and - like Tito - be so much more.

Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives"

Monday will be great but Sunday Never Ends

 

Coming to know something about history, intellectual or otherwise, would seem to be a matter of uncovering and mastering facts and setting them into structures or narratives in which they become comprehensible. But it is also a set of decisions to wave things away, to dismiss or ignore them. --Sartwell

I was just going through the Times Literary Supplement, and was dumbfounded by one thing - the incredible price of books. I'm pulled Crispin's tail recently about the cost of his new book Entanglements which will clock in at about $95.00 according to Amazon. But, that price will probably come down as they generally do, at least a bit, and will be re-published in paper and who knows may even have a Kindle version as well. But, $95 for a book seems to bring out the frugality usually sublimated by the curiosity in my slightly-Scots / mainly Irish soul. I'm having to think again when I think about pre-ordering. 

Text books have always been overpriced, as anyone with an Associate's Degree can attest. It would be nice if they had some other value, but except for classics and primary sources, who needs a copy of the 3rd edition of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe's Textbook on Ethics in the Auto Industry when the current edition, number 22, is available? 

Anyway, TLS had other interesting reviews but I finally got around to reading Crispin's review of Benjamin Fondane's Existential Monday from October 2016. I've had a copy of Fondane sitting on my to be consumed soon table for a while, prior to Crispin's article. In my defense there's a lot of stuff on the table, and often I just pick up my Kindle Fire and read some Lovecraft mythos or Gothic Noir mystery because I've just watched some political thing and I have a desperate need for context, narrative and declarative sentences. Phillip Marlowe battling Cthulhu in 1950s LA is an marvelous cure for what ails you ("Ailes"you?) after listening to the Orange Orangutan and Kelley Anne What the Fuck for an hour or so...

I've had a subscription to TLS for a while, and meant to read the review so I stumbled on it today and decided that no time like the present. Since the TLS is parsimonious to its non-subscribers as to what they'll let you see, I've attached the file here Download Sartwell TLS Review Existential Monday. Crispin was in excellent form when he wrote it; it's encouraging me to say "Screw email and newspapers, I want to read Fondane's now." It may be Thursday, but it's really Sunday and Monday will never get here if I don't drive on. 

philosophy and insanity

many of you have expressed concern about my cognitive and emotional condition, on the grounds that i am reading alexandre kojeve's introduction to the reading of hegel. when they see you with that book, people interpret it as an act of desperation, a cry for help. (kojeve's lectures on hegel were fundamental for heidegger and sartre. the influence was not necessarily entirely salubrious, as benjamin fondane observed.) kojeve defines history as follows: "That universal process that conditioned the coming of Hegel." hegel thought so too! and actually, when i start claiming that i myself am the purpose and culmination of all human history, you can involuntarily commit me. hegel does really run deep. boy he also really really runs crazy, though. evil too.

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.

Of talking llamas and Caesar and Rick and Vivian

 

I've been reading Mary Beards, SPQR-AHistory of Rome and it is fantastic. Imagine that you are public intellectual and on TV a reporter asks a little girl "Who do you want to be when you grow up?" and the girl just beams and smiles and says, "Mary Beard." Not Duchess Kate? Somewhere, a unicorn may have died, but I think the English Women's Rugby Team will continue to put the Men's Team to shame. 

I was having a bit of writer's block and came upon a piece on Premier Guitar. Their Chief Content Officer, whatever the hell that is that's different from Managing Editor, Shawn Hammond had a great piece about shoulder devils and guardian angels and what to do when you are hearing a constant refrain of "You suck..."in your head. He recommends watching "The Young Ones" which might work for most people...especially if somehow you missed Rick and Vivian and Alexi and the Boys raising hell on BBC or PBS. 

Anyway, I went through a couple of re-writes -- I never re-write; Crispin gave me a C- on a post just to get me to proof-read and edit, and produced this - part review of Beard's really good book; part discussion of her most key point, at least for me -- Rome provides a context and a model for us, but don't look there for solutions. We're on our own here, and trying to do a double envelopment like Hannibal at Cannae won't help with DAESH. 

 

our long national trauma is over!

as you know, i am opposed to generations as explanatory entities, on multiple grounds. i've been in a comment-swap on this on aeon. so, we pretend to treat whole twenty-year-or-whatever cohorts as individuals with personalities. then, we pretend that these pretended individuals have experiences. mattmark, the anti-me in the comments, makes some pretty usual moves: 'we' were 12 when kennedy was shot; we knew hope and aspiration when we landed on the moon, then lost our simple faith in authority with watergate. my view is that this fantasy of identity needs pseudo-experiences because pseudo-persons can't have real experiences. so the pseudo-individual baby boom lost its innocence when kennedy was killed. lord knows how americans had any innocence in 1963, or any faith in authority in 1973. honestly, we didn't. with kennedy, our daddy died. people actually did cry, but it was a pseudo-trauma: a person you never met bit it. you 'knew' him entirely from television, where he inspired you with words written by someone else. it was not a real loss for almost anybody; it's quite like watching king rob bite it on game of thrones. i think what matters in both cases was that he was so pretty. be an actual person with actual connections to actual other people, not part of a giant pseudo-person with quasi-connections to fictional characters.

i think it's fair to say that one thing that irks me in some of these cases is the fact that the state is the actual imaginary individual involved; that is who or what is constructing the narrative by which we become one thing: the story we tell of losing dad when we were twelve, blasting off to the moon together when we were 18, and so on (i was born in 1958, btw, not '50 as in the example). i guess dad was a philandering, pill-popping dad, but you know that's pretty par for the course, and must be what we wanted or something. but actually, i don't like the narrative as the essence of collective identity in any way shape or form. what our generation is is just what the tv special tells, running beatles songs in the background. the times they are a-changin! the story is insanely superficial, but also fundamentally fictional, and i think the music sucks. instead of thinking about the incredible power of stories to be our identity, individual and collective, think about their incredible limitations. it's elisions all the way down, man. and it's so false.

 

well, that's better than dylan, anyway: more self-aware, more ironic, a little bit funny.

the right sort of politics

here's an encyclopedia-type article on 19th century american anarchism, intended eventually for a 'companion to anarchist philosophy.' i'm proud of this, which i think is a pretty definitive account, reflecting decades of engagement with the topic. there are people i love inordinately in here, like william lloyd garrison, lucretia mott, josiah warren, thoreau/emerson, voltairine de cleyre, emma goldman. one thing i will say: until you get to the very end, with people like goldman and berkman, the left-right spectrum makes no sense of these positions at all.

Who would want to be "that guy?"

Haven't written a lot, lately. Lots of reasons but generally I'm just fairly disgusted. Anyway, I sent a piece off to my other publisher last week, the Templar Times and Loch Ness Review, but they've been busy doing other things. I happen to think this is reasonably important to understanding the decline of the west and why Derek Jeter made the right decision. 

I first encountered Campbell's "Hero of 1000 Faces" in one of Michael Moorcock's books, an introduction I think to one of the later Elric things where he talked of both the hero and Nietzsche's myth of the eternal recurrence or return. We desperately seek these guys, and they just as desperately elude us. As Americans, we expect them to arise -- when they do, great. When they don't, oh well...

Recently ecountered this where the artist seems to confuse Mencken with Hunter S. Thompson.  Oh well, they both were bald. Mencken, by the way, was a mysogonistic, bigoted, racist misanthrope, and I think that both Crispin and I would enjoy sitting down for coffee with him. Given his coverage of the Scopes trial, I'd like to get his take on intelligent design, Sarah Palin and the Creationist Museum and Theme Park. 

My piece has Washington, John Wilkes Booth, Maureen O'Hara and DickCheneythatmotherfucker make cameos. It contains a classic early rock song by a teen idol from the late 50s, early 60s who actually collaborated with Al Kooper, though not on like a rolling stone. I hope you enjoy it. If not, pogue mahone, which is appropriate because two Irish mythological heroes, one early 20th Century and one contemporary make appearances.

Part II is going to look at our mideast adventures or eastern misadventures from the point of view of why that guy would be a really bad idea. We need a coalition of those who want to help that guy...when John McCain who has always yearned for his "that guy" moment starts in on "this president," don't you just want Cindy Or Meegan to change him and give him his bottle?

Oh, and here's a heroic piece, I guess...

 

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keep it burning

i think what is most disgusting about marxist communism and related developments is the idea that thinking independently, or for example listening to the deliverances of your own conscience, is the merest bourgeois individualism and must be crushed. well, any power-mad ideologue or self-deluded fanatic might recommend that you believe all and only what he tells you. individual conscience is indeed a a barrier to collective action, such as genocide. but what is really amazing is that millions of actually bourgeois people, and maybe a few others, decided that made sense and tried to destroy their own independence of thought, and overcome all conscientious individual qualms. it was like they performed lobotomies on themselves, using steak knives from down at the rustler. it's a mindless endorsement of mindlessness. even if it wasn't in the service of a farrago of jive, that is a formula for astounding doltishness, profound evil, and non-stop mass murder for no reason at all.

those who remember history are condemned to simulate it

meanwhile, hillary, zbig and many others are using hitler in the 30s to understand putin now, or rather to pursue some propaganda aim that is rather hard to fathom. surely the only possible idea in going all hitler/appeasement is to mobilize europe for war. is that your idea? because if not what you're saying is idiotic. now, it's easy to think that if you want to deal with the present you have to know the past, if you forget it you'll repeat it, you have to learn the lessons of history, and a dozen other cliches. but really history blinds as much as it reveals: some dude on al jazeera was saying putin's stuck in the 30s, but he was himself just doing that 30s hitler thing. people pull out things like 'sudentenland' first of all to establish their credibilitty by bewildering non-historians, and second to have various manipulative propaganda effects. you think if you place what's happening now in 1937 or 1856 you'll understand it. no, you'll just be talking about 1937, and not even that. you'll blind yourself to what is happening in the unique now. you want a slot to stick it in, no matter how badly it fits: you're trying to understand what's happening now a priori without engaging it at all. it's all ideological blinders; it's all digression, distraction, misdirection. 

The River and the Thread

Rosanne Cash's newest release, The River and the Thread approaches masterpiece status. I know I included it on my latest list of albums I'd like to take to the other side...one of the troubling things for a lot of us is that we realize the South in a lot of ways represents the American Id and as such is part of all of us. We have to find out how to deal with it before the Id slaughters us all -- is it the food, water, reliance on religion, in-breeding or what the hell is going on there? Who wants iced tea so sweet and treacly it rots your teeth as you chew it? Who has NASCAR drivers tatooed on their private parts? Who would elect Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and the newest dingbat who things homosexuals should be purged from the Republican party? 

 

Well Rosanne doesn't really try to answer those questions, but she might have some insights. 

45 years later, I see that this matches the brilliance of "Ode to Billy Joe..." The album cover was a picture taken by Rosanne's husband and music director John Leventhal standing behind her looking down at the Tallahatchee River from the Tallahatchee bridge. 

 

 

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ponder well the word 'overseer'

on the anniversary of the gettysburg address, i want to point out the completely obvious fact that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has perished from the earth. that concept is from an entirely different set of political commitments than, say, an effective government program of universal surveillance. but it is obviously, breathtakingly incompatible with the idea that such a program is a state secret. this is the thread that connects obama with lincoln: the first black president has participated enthusiastically in everything lincoln fought the civil war, by his own account, to destroy. were lincoln around now he would, unlike daniel day-lewis, be raising a rebel army, possibly in the south and west, to resist the enslavement of everyone directly by the government of the united states. thoreau and douglass got a little pissy about the fugitive slave law: they thought this meant that, for example, the government of massachussetts was implicated in slavery, and hence that they were themselves implicated as citizens and taxpayers. the dred scott decision is being enforced, now, on us all: we have no rights that the government of the united states is bound to respect. we're all niggers, baby.

universal surveillance, again, is not every aspect of totalitarianism. but it entails, if you also have overwhelming police or military force, every other aspect of totalitarisnism. obviously, the government is inside the internet and the companies that run it etc to the tune of being able to control media and communications much more thoroughly if they want. indeed, we have no idea to what extent they actually do; they are certainly already monitoring such things in every respect. they know where you are if they need to grab you, and it is extremely unlikely that you could evade them for long if they wanted to catch you. they have enough on you to throw you in jail, i predict, if they are in the mood, or blackmail you into doing what they say, including saying what they tell you to say. put it this way: much active totalitarianism is actually in place, and every possible aspect of it is implied by the powers these people claim and the means they have to exercise those powers. plus resistance is futile. it is. perished from the earth, y'all.

in terms of a comparison to american slavery itself, the current situation does not feature very common officially-sanctioned rape, for example, or routinely break up families or literally work people to death, usually. but first off, american slavery depended absolutely fundamentally on surveillance: ponder well the word 'overseer.' it depended on a system of surveillance that basically included as agents all the white people of america who wouldn't go to heroic lengths to violate the law. every white community in the south was mobilized to watch the slaves, and they were twisted to monitor each other. but the degree of surveillance operated by the united states government today would give a plantation-owner an orgasm: if he knows what they're doing at all times, he can take steps to control them completely. no escape.

one thing to focus on in the text of the address is the relative roles of liberty and equality. on the anniversary and for the last x decades, the equality part has been relentlessly emphasized. and equality is certainly one good reason to try to emancipate slaves. but i think that any purported opposition or tension between these concepts forces you into extremely unfortunate political orientations. so, first of all, lincoln's and founder's basic vision of equality is equality precisely of liberty, and any plausible vision of human equality has to include that. where many or most people are subordinated politically, and even if that subordination is used to try to level incomes, for example, you have a profoundly unequal society. (also, in such a situation, incomes overall are extremely unlikely to move toward equality, because the subordinating power is actually a bunch of people, operating this subordinating power at least in part for their own benefit, and inevitably constituting a frozen economic as well as political hierarchy.) and i do want to suggest that people read that address again and see the extent to which it really does crystallize on liberty, or consider that as the central message of america.

why were abolitionists, including, very eventually, lincoln, opposed to slavery? because they were advocates equal basic rights, because they were committed to human liberty. they were individualists, even. but surely you can see that this is itself an egalitarian position. it is not every aspect of egalitarianism; it is an imprtant aspect, and the rest is nonsense without it.

it lives: a very brief counterfactual history

i don't blame john kennedy for being a pretty party boy whose biggest legislative priorities were pills and poontang. no one's really in control of stuff like that about themselves, and he did what the best and brightest do do in such a situation: he hired good writers and delivered their woolly hooha with remarkable pseudo-sincerity. no, i blame us, the idiots, for following someone like that around drooling and throwing money. basically, all anyone wants is to find a model and do what he says. there's a thin line between politica and erotica. 

what would kennedy have done if he had lived? how would history have been so very different? as it turns out, he made sgt. pepper two years before the beatles and revolutionized world pop. then he nuked hanoi. then he gave everyone everything on their christmas list. finally he died in a freak chimpanzee attack. the chimp's digestive tract was the only remaining source of dna, so when we cloned kennedy to be our pres again, we had to clone him from chimp shit. chimpshit kennedy exuded so much charisma you could smell him in central asia from the white house. then, in an unholy conspiracy of edward snowden, pope francis, and oliver stone, he was gunned down in the streets of his beloved hohokus. when chimpshit jfk bit it, a nation lost its innocence.

but what if chimpshit kennedy had lived?

my contribution to counter-factual history

what if kennedy had lived? one conclusion we can definitely reach: he would have fucked everything by now. one thing the warren commission didn't fully explore was the possibility that the grassy knoll was crowded with cuckolds.

Muttering about strange places and dragons...

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the nature of valor, heroism and the waste thereof. Interestingly, I had a comment pulled on this at the site where I read the original article for my foul language. I referred to the evil bastards and ignorant fools who got us into Iraq. It was a veterans linked in site for Veterans. I'm actually miffed but mainly amused...the point of a polemic is to be polemical. I'm sure Crispin agrees. 

momo

sorry i seem to have lost interest in the world for the moment, and can concentrate only on college basketball and early-19th-century american radicals. so the pantheon continues to grow. i'm linking to some texts, and i've uploaded a pdf of the lucretia mott sermon from 1843, which was certainly the sort of thing thoreau heard the same year, according to his own description.

mo pantheon

i've created the pantheon as a web page, adding emerson, thoreau, margaret fuller, and the quite amazing lydia maria child. i will begin to add links to texts by these folks and other materials, some of which i'll be typing in.

meanwhile, the paper keeps growing. in connecting the radicals to the transcendentalists, i've got emerson, from the journals, approving non-resistance and its attendant anarchism.

Of 'the principle of non resistance,' he says "Trust it. Give up the Government without too solicitously inquiring whether roads can be still built, letters carried, & title deeds secured when the government of force is at an end" (vol 1 711). He too saw Mott preach. He praises her courage and says "she makes every bully ashamed (vol 2 508-509).

 

 

scholarly score

you know, research can be amazingly stimulating and fun. just had a nice moment with regard to the new pantheon (see entry immediately below). so, one thing i am doing is putting emerson and thoreau (as well as alcott and fuller) in this group as a single political movement. now i think my best score up to this point has been documenting lucretia mott's anarchism; she is emerging as an important inspiration and directly linking figure. i think you could say that anarchism arises out of feminism as well as vice versa (cf. godwin and wollstonecraft). i notice that a number of thoreau's formulations in 'civil disobedence' resemble mott.

as it happens, we can document that thoreau saw lucretia mott preach, and can even more or less know the sermon she preached. he actually calls her a transcendentalist. she was born a decade before emerson.

from the emerging paper:

Indeed, the influence was direct. Thoreau saw Lucretia Mott preach in 1843, and wrote to his sister about it.

I believe I have not told you about Lucretia Mott. It was a good while ago I heard her at the Quaker Church in Hester St. She is a preacher, and it was advertised that she would be present on that day. I liked all the proceedings very well. . .  At length, after a long silence, waiting for the spirit, Mrs. Mott rose, took off her bonnet, and began to utter very deliberately what the spirit suggested. Her self-possession was something to say [see?], if all else failed - but it did not. Her subject was the abuse of the Bible - and thence she straightaway digressed to slavery and the degradation of woman. It was a good speech - transcendentalism in its mildest form. (July 21, 1843, The Correspondence, 128)

'Mildest' here I believe is used in a somewhat Christian, lamb-of-God-type sense, because there is no doubt that Mott's preaching was fierce; we have a fair example of what Thoreau heard in her sermon of the same year "Righteousness Gives Strength to its Possessor" (Complete Speeches and Sermons, 35-52). But it is certainly significant that he regards her as preaching transcendentalism, throughout.

i am going to try to type in part of mott's 1843 sermon and post a link.

 

 

a new pantheon

"It is always unsafe to invest man with power over his fellow being. Call no man master - that is the true doctrine." -- Lucretia Mott

ain't been blogging because i have been working on this paper about abolitionist saints, feminist ass-kickers, and anarchist freaks, essentially emerging out of abolitionism and post-puritan protestantism, say 1810-1840. these figures are unimaginably - incomparably - radical. they are anti-sexists, anti-racists, freaks for peace, anti-statists, and opponents of animal cruelty, for example. and i think you can associate them with emerson and thoreau - they were all well-known to one another - and with american anarchists such as josiah warren and lysander spooner, as soon as you don't let the fact that they are extremely christian blind you to the massive commonalities.

the figures listed below are anarchists in the sense that they are opposed to all forms of hierarchical power, including the state and capital. they are radical individualists: this is the most individualistic political movement in human history. but 'individualism' here does not at all mean self-seeking (indeed, all of these people conducted lives of tremendous self-sacrifice in service to oppressed people); rather it picks out a sense of the sacred inviolability of each human person and the source of moral authority in each human conscience. this is invariably represented as a condition of real union among persons, which is voluntary and incompatible with coercion. the abolitionists and non-resistants such as garrison and may, the transcendentalists such as emerson and alcott, the feminists such as mott and stanton: they all draw their conclusions from individualism.

one thing greatly to the credit of this group: it is the origin of american feminism. i am documenting that in the paper. figures as lucretia mott, sarah grimké, and maria weston chapman emerged out of this movement: these are the very earliest american public proponents of feminism, and they are among the first american women to insist on a voice in public affairs. but they are no less anarchistic than garrison or thoreau. this is where feminism and transcendentalism come from.

if i had to flourish one text to epitomize this group's political philosophy, it would be thoreau's 'civil disobedience' (1849), also the best statement of my political philosophy. this text also has the little advantage that it was written by the best american prose stylist of the 19th century. i believe the entire orientation is influenced by lucretia mott and other radical reformers.

but what i want to emphasize is that we should regard the feminists, abolitionists, pacifists, transcendentalists, and anarchists - whether religious or secular in orientation - as a single political movement, one of the most radical and inspiring in world history.

Anti-Authoritarian American Reformers, active circa 1820-1850

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) Transcendentalist, educational reformer, non-resistant, anti-capitalist, proponent of a vegan diet, and abolitionist. Lionized as a genius by Emerson and Thoreau, his reputaton has been waning since before he died. Samuel J. May's brother-in-law and Louisa May Alcott's father. Highly influenced by the feminists of his era. including Chapman, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Lucretia Mott. Co-founder with Garrison of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1830.

Adin Ballou (1803-1890) Universalist/Restorationist minister, abolitionist, absolute non-resistant. Ballou founded the Hopedale religious Community in Worcester County, Massachusetts in 1842. His book Christian Non-Resistance is an under-read but fundamentally influential scriptural argument for pacifism. Ballou corresponded with Tolstoy on this subject. One of the few abolitionist non-resistants to condemn John Brown's raid unambiguously and to remain a pure pacifist through the Civil War.

 

Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1887) Radical abolitionist, feminist, non-resistant, and educational reformer; opposed to all coercive social arrangements. Editor of a number of radical periodicals, including the Non-Resistant and The National Anti-Slavery Standard. Later reversed course on some issues and supported political abolitionism and freeing slaves by military force. Grandmother of the writer John Jay Chapman.

 

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880): Pioneering author, feminist, abolitionist, advocate of Indian rights, and non-resistant. Associated in many of these capacities with Maria Weston Chapman, Angelina Grimké, Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. Wrote perhaps the first book urging immediate, uncompensated emancipation in 1833. Helped Harriett Jacobs compose one of the most extreme and moving slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Like Chapman, Angelina Grimké and others, qualified her non-resistance and associated anti-statism in the 1850s as Kansas exploded and John Brown geared up for a paroxysm of violence.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1886) Unitarian minister, like his father, and then beloved essayist, lecturer, and sage of transcendentalism. Like Thoreau, he despised fanaticism and stood to some extent aloof from reform movements. Yet he was certainly an abolitionist. He saw Mott speak and expressed his admiration. He endorsed (at least on occasion) non-resistance, and drew anarchist conclusions immediately. Knew and admired Garrison, though also worried about his tendencies toward fanaticism. Connected also to other figures through Samuel J. May. "Self-Reliance' and 'Politics', among many other essays, show his development of the radical individualism and vision of freedom common to al these figures, religious and secular.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850): Central figure of transcendentalism and pioneering feminist. Wrote the key text "The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Woman" in the early 1840s (later expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)), secularizing the individualist feminism of Mott and the Grimkés. Supporter of a variety of reforms. The first professional book critic in America. Connected to the Italian and European revolutionaries of the 1848 wave, such as Mazzini.

William Lloyd Garrison (b. 1805-1879):  Garrison was the leader of the radical wing of American abolitionism, arguing from a radical Protestant Christianity for the immediate abolition of slavery and the secession of the non-slave from the slave states. He was also an advocate of feminism and non-resistance, the latter on Biblical grounds. From his radical pacifism, Garrison concluded that human governments, all of which rest on force, are entirely illegitimate. Publisher of The Liberator, America’s anti-slavery and anti-war conscience. He burned copies of the Constitution, calling it “a pact with the devil.”

 

Sarah (1792-1873) and Angelina (1805-1879) Grimké: Sisters raised in South Carolina in a slaveholding family (their father was the Chief Justice of the state), but Sarah found herself disgusted by slavery. Converted to Quakerism on a trip to Philadelphia in 1819 (especially by Woolman's writings). The sisters' abolitionist lectures of the late 1820s were among the very first acts of public advocacy by American women. Sarah's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1837) is among the earliest American feminist texts, approaching the matter from a deeply religious individualism. Angelina married Theodore Dwight Weld in an egalitarian ceremony in 1838.

(sarah)

 

Samuel J. May  (1797-1871): Schoolteacher at Concord, MA and then an eminent Unitarian minister. Preached reforms  - including peace, feminism, and abolitionism - from Emerson's pulpit in 1831. Educational reformer advocating racially integrated and co-educational classrooms. Converted to the cause of peace by Noah Worcester. Founder with Garrison of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the Non-Resistance Society. His Rights and Condition of Women in 1846 advocated total equality of the sexes. His sister married Bronson Alcott, so he was Louisa May's uncle.

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) Quaker minister and pioneering feminist, Mott preached a host of reforms, especially total non-resistance and anti-statism. From the pulpit or in early public speeches, she was incredibly devout, direct, and uncompromisingly radical. She was an individualist very much in the same spirit as Emerson and Thoreau. Inspired and with Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848. Called a transcendentalist by Thoreau, who saw her preach in 1843.

 

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846), radical abolitionist and anti-statist or even 'no-organizationist', publisher of the New Hampshire abolitionist paper Herald of Freedom, subject of essays by Thoreau and Whittier. Began as a Christian non-resistant (and an anarchist on those grounds), but expressed more and more religious skepticism as his life went on. “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.” nathaniel peabody rogers site

 

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887): Spooner was a deist, abolitionist, and individualist anarchist. His work The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846) was an amazingly accomplished exercise in legal interpretation, taking a position rejected by the Garrisonians, who held that the Constitution recognized slavery, and thus that the American government was illegitimate (Spooner agreed with the l;atter bit on independent grounds). In his time, he set up a private competitor to the Post Office, and tried to organize an incursion to free John Brown after the Harper's Ferry raid. Such works as No Treason (1867-70) and Vices Are Not Crimes (1875) are classics of libertarian thought. The central idea (as it was not for Warren or the transcendentalists) is concept of natural rights. lysanderspooner.org

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American ecccentric, radical, naturalist and genius. I would suggest that 'Civil Disobedience' (1849) is the best statement of this movement as a political philosophy. Saw Lucretia Mott preach in 1843, an experience which I believe is reflected in that essay and elsewhere. He expressed anti-statist sentiments in many places, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Life Without Principle," and so on. Cooperated with Garrison in helping escaped slaves hide and make their way to Canada.

 

Josiah Warren (1798-1874) Often held to be the founder of individualist anarchism, but also an anti-capitalist. Warren joined Robert Owen’s New Harmony Community (probably the first secular American ideal community) in the 1820s, rejected what he called its “communism,” and spent the rest of his career setting out and founding communities based on a radically individualistic metaphysics, in some ways similar to Thoreau and Emerson’s. He rejected the profit motive and yet insisted on the sanctity of property and conscience. Published “the first anarchist periodical” – The Peaceful Revolutionist – in 1833. Projects included the Time Stores; Utopia, Ohio; and Modern Times, New York, perhaps the wildest Temporary Autonomous Zone in American history. the josiah warren project 

Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895) Weld served as assistant pastor to Charles Grandison Finney in the revivals beginning in 1825 that became known as the Second Great Awakening. Leader of the "Lane Rebels," a group of young radical preachers advocating free speech, free inquiry and abolitionism originating at the Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio. Advocate and agitator and preacher of abolitionism, feminism, temperance, and peace (but not anti-statism). Assisted John Quincy Adams in the petition controversy before Congress. Married Angelina Grimké in a ceremony without a clergyman, in which she did not promise to obey him. Author of American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839).

 

Noah Worcester (1758-1837) A fifer in the Revolutionary Army, he fought at Bunker Hill. Worcester was a Unitarian minister in New Hampshire and founder of the American peace movement. Published A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, a fundamental text in the history of pacifism and opposition to war, in 1814. Founded the Massachusetts Peace Society in 1815.

Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870) Associate of Garrison’s for much of his career and among the most unequivocal anarchists of the period. Co-Founder of the New England Non-Resistance Society. Began as a Christian non-resistant and wrote such tracts as Ballot Box and Battle Field, which condemned all human government as violence and claimed that voting itself was an act of violence as expressing cooperation with the state. Later at least qualified his Christianity and advocated a host of reforms.

 

Historical treatments

Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Cornell University Press, 1973)

Valerie Ziegler, The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America (Indiana University Press, 1992)

Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (Pantheon, 1969)

   

Some primary texts

Lucretia Mott, Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, Dana Green, ed. (Mellen, 1980)

Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, Gilbert Barnes and Dwight Dumons, eds. (De Capo, 1970)

The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren, Crispin Sartwell, ed. (Fordham, 2010)

oops we kicked your ass

i have been doing research and working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather, herman bernstein (he's my mother's mother's father). what an unbelievable life! i thought i wrote fast. for one thing, the dude was super-jew. for example, henry ford, with whom he locked horns for a decade, called him 'the messenger boy of international jewry.' he was rolling across russia during the revolution, interviewing john reed and leon trotsky.

even a superficial skim of the list of his correspondence (housed at the yivo center for jewish research at the center for jewish history) reveals letters to and from Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem,Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour,Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.

as herman might have put it: jesus a vehicular christ.

herman bernstein as a sensitive young poet

 and as a mature ass-kicker

 

when my mother (joyce abell, b. 1925) was 5, she was sent by her parents, alone, on a ship to albania, where herman was the ambassador. she still remembers the spectacle, the dresses etc., at the court of the magnificently attired zog, king of albania. 

here are a few of the other writers in my lineage, on both or all sides, whether they arrived with the puritans in 1637 or came to ellis island from the russo-german border in 1893. some were protestants, some were catholics, some were jews (100% on my mom's side). most were atheists, though, whatever their heritage. some were communists and some were republicans and some (well...) were anarchists. novelist and short story writer grace sartwell mason (my great great grandfather's sister; one of her books is women are queer); herman's brother hillel bernstein, novelist and new yorker contributor; novelist etc murray gitlin (my grandfather and herman's son-in-law); my grandfather franklin sartwell, columnist for and editor for the washington times-herald and the washington post; my father franklin sartwell, jr., reporter and editor at the washington star, national geographic, science news, and defenders magazine; herman's son david, writer and editor for, and owner of, the binghampton sun. there are others!

nude pics of abe lincoln!

watching spielberg and kerns-goodwin again on morning joe on lincoln. they're helping me to a formulation of my political orientation: with regard to anyone who might think or say, like the god of israel, 'i am clothed in immense power': i will strip your ass naked and show it to the world. power is an outfit, a uniform, a disguise, a shroud, a photoshopped self-portrait. what kerns-goodwin and spielberg are expressing - and really they just almost say this straight out - is the continuing cult of political power = our continuing need to be subordinated. it is literally idolatry: the god on his throne in his temple in our capital. lincoln the film is just that. on the other hand, it's hard to deny that lincoln had at his disposal a very large army, capable of burning your city in a pinch. so i suppose he was clothed in immense power. of course, there's the part where spielberg or k-g or kushner point out rather perfunctorily that lincoln was a flawed human being, not a god or a myth. well, they're right there, only they are being entirely disingenuous. isn't there a moment in the film where someone says to lincoln, speaking for all the auteurs involved: you've reached semi-divine status. maybe they have a half-conscious idea of connecting mythologies: the cult of political power and christianity: god is...human. but infinitely more. lincoln of course gets the christ treament routinely. and on kerns-goodwin's own account, this material, also central to obama's understanding of himself and his role, is a defense of politics as a transformative enterprise. well, the message of the book/film is 'compromise,' or as sesame street would put it: share. ok. but in her centralization of that quote, k-g shows what she really means: a super-powerful person can transform us: find someone and do what he says. then we will be as one.

Tell me, Crispy, of what philosophical school is Krampus an alumni?

In which Crusader AXE explores Musicology, Existentialism, Mysticism, and several beautiful girls with marvelous voices, a couple of Texans, a Geezer or two and recommends some Bing Crosby as angst producing and reflective poetry. 

oh shit i know i left it around here somewhere: songs of indolence and expedience

anytime someone identifies the moment when america lost its innocence, just snicker. it's absurd. and if what they mean by 'innocence' is that americans used to 'trust their institutions,' or love the authority exercised over them, or whatever, then just figure the person who's saying that for an oppression-enthusiast with no acquaintance whatever with american history. perhaps we can recover our innocence as we recover our subservience, or perhaps they meant the same thing right up til 1973. it's very biblical or edenic: innocence = enthusiastic self-subordination to arbitrary authority. and no one questioned that until march 3, 1989 or something.

look, did samuel adams and thomas jefferson trust their institutions? how about the whiskey rebels? did nat turner, william lloyd garrison, and john brown trust their institutions? how about victoria woodhull and emma goldman? did ambrose bierce, mark twain, and h.l. mencken trust their institutions? thoreau, emerson, and fuller? what do you think about tecumseh and crazy horse? john l. and sinclair lewis? richard weaver, milton friedman, and murray rothbard? w.e.b. dubois and malcolm x? anyone who ever testified before the house unamerican activities committee? and ask yourself this: should they have? dude, whatever.

Flashing the fascist fandango in South Florida...

Hey, baby, Crusader AXE here. I know I owe a follow-up and I'm working away at it in between playing the guitar poorly and corresponding with my Russian ballerina stalker from the Kalashnikov factory, but somethings take precedence. Allen West has gone the full McCarthy down in Florida, claiming that he's heard that 80 members of the Democratic Congressional Delegation are card carrying communists. How quaint...while duelling pistols would have been in order back in the day these clowns long for, West should remember that Burr and Jackson won their duels. Anyway, congratulations to Crispin on winning the coveted Duns Scrotus Award for Philosophical Magic and enjoy. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that the Defeatists did endorse Gus Hall, long time chair of the American Communist Party, back in 2008. Mr. Hall was very pleased, but couldn't make the nominating convention because Satan wouldn't let him out of hell, where he'd resided since 2000. Previously, we had endorsed a ticket of Cthulhu and Crispin. I'm kind of thinking Allen West and Levi Johnson's mom for this year's ticket, but we're open as always for suggestions. I gotta say, as I get older, Roger Miller gets A. Deader and B. Far More Profound...

Two of Crispin's favorite Renaissance thinkers collide...kinda, sorta, maybe

Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...

Civilized costs more than hard, brutish and short...

The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on  as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. 

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More

 

 

Can you say AN/PDR-27R?  ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?