We did a database search of all the articles from the New York Times published before the year 1880, using the terms “Christmas” and “Shopping,” and got a measly 40 hits on 2 pages, a good number of them tiny classified ads. The first article, written in 1870, was titled, The Enemy of the Family, and was a complaint about “middle men” running up the prices of goods at Christmas time. Other titles included:

PERU.: How Christmas was celebrated in Lima—Peruvian Ladies—Their Lack of Refinement—Political Matters.

COMMERCIAL AFFAIRS.: Sales at the Stock Exchange Dec. 16.

THE SPECTRE SHIP

And, lumbering in at #24:

CURRENT ENGLISH TOPICS: POLITICAL AND GENERAL NOTES. THE MAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING THE EASTERN QUESTION BRAGGING JOHN BULL COCKNEYISM IN LONDON TWO PUGILISTIC WAR CORRESPONDENTS THE PRIVILEGES OF PROTECTION AND THE IRON TRADE.

This last one very nearly crushed her spirit. We were stymied.

Then I remembered that I’d recently read Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, by the historian William R. Leach. According to Leach:

Before 1880 business like department stores did not exist…In the next twenty years, however, cities throughout the country would be filled with large retail establishments–multifloored, multiwindowed buildings of great concentrated selling power.

These huge department stores were the result of a deliberate, concentrated culture of shopping,

unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and its moral sensibility.

In the case of Christmas,

when the large department stores first began to overshadow retail districts, Santa Claus’s status also started to metamorphose. The big merchants laid claim to him and to the imagery of the Christmas holidays. Urban merchandising began to give substance and form to the Christmas rituals.

So, on a hunch, I suggested to the student that we change the search criteria to articles published between 1880 and 1900. A few clicks of the mouse later, and we had 406 citations on 21 pages. The title of the 1st article was:

MUCH CHRISTMAS SHOPPING: The Season of 1898 Has Been the Best in Many Years. THE FINAL RUSH LAST NIGHT Belated Buyers Crowded the Stores—A Great Year for Mistletoe and Other Greens.

Some others were:

CHRISTMAS STREET SCENES.: JOSTLING CROWDS OF SHOPPERS IN THE RETAIL STORE DISTRICTS. (1888)

FOR THE COMING HOLIDAY: Suggestions to the Christmas Shopper and Home Worker. THE SEASON’S RARELY LAVISH DISPLAY What a Round of the Shops Offers — Prices and Quality Most Satisfactory — Designs for Home Work. (1895)

STORE THIEVES AND DETECTIVE: Both Have Already Appeared in the Mass of Holiday Shoppers That Crowd the Big Shops. (1899)

And, of course:

Killed After Christmas Shopping Trip. (1900)

Thank you, Santa! The student left happy, if a little over-burdened, and now I’m looking forward to reading a fine essay.

And to Bill O’Reilly and all the other commentators who complain yearly about the government and the forces of political correctness storming the Christmas gates, I offer this line from The Odyssey:

But come now, change thy theme, and sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena’s help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile, when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilion.

Christmas lost the war a long time ago, taken from within before it even knew it was vulnerable.

***

The dramatic photo of a young woman getting a blast of pepper spray on her face during a mostly peaceful Occupy protest in Portland is destined to become an enduring image of the national movement.

I agree. Although the details surrounding the actual incident are in dispute, the photo, taken by Randy Rasmussen at OregonLive.com, depicts an iconic, almost mythic encounter between two forces, forever frozen in time.

It reminds me of a question Kenneth Clarke asked in his book, Looking at Pictures:

Can the instantaneous become permanent? Can a flash be prolonged without losing its intensity?

And his answer was: Sometimes.

Almost the only affirmative answer in painting is Goya’s picture of a firing squad, known as The Third of May.

Here are the two images:

Randy Rasmussen, "Occupy Portland N17 Pepper Spray," 2011

Francisco Goya, "The Third of May," 1814

The similarities are striking. In both pictures, there is an implicit sympathy for the figures on the left, making the viewer complicit in the artist’s political position. For one thing, according to Rudolf Arnheim, in Art and Visual Perception,

an observer is subjectively identified with the left, and whatever appears in that part of the picture assumes greatest importance…The left side of the stage is considered the strong one. In a group of two or three actors, the one to the left dominates the scene.

The eye reads from left to right. If the pictures were reversed, the image would become subsumed by the drama in time. As it is, however, this dramatic motion runs counter to the movement of the eye, so that the two forces meet just left of center. The result is a kind of stasis, a self-contained image that enshrines a moment of contact. There is no before and after—there is only now, endlessly revealed in a cycle of intensity.

Also, the figures on the left are brighter, and more colorful. Their poses are diverse, bordering on chaotic, and display a very human range of defiance, acceptance, and shock. Faces are exposed. Palms are turned outward. All are vulnerable.

On the right side of the images, however, individuality disappears into a dark mass of anonymity. We see only backs. Goya has the French soldiers bent over and taking aim beneath heavy caps. In Pepper Spray, the riot gear features something particularly modern—numbers—and faces are covered by visors. These can also be seen, oddly enough, in Picasso’s pastiche of Goya, Massacre in Korea:

Pablo Picasso, "Massacre in Korea," 1951

There are some important differences between the images, though. In The Third of May, the victim’s arms are thrust upward into a V, which also becomes a reflection of the Crucifixion. In fact, a closeup of one of his hands reveals a distinct hole. In Pepper Spray, there’s also a V, but it has quite a different connotation:

Also, the face of the young woman getting sprayed (identified as Liz Nichols, a “soft-spoken 20-year-old who’s only about 5 feet tall”) has, in the photograph, a fierce look of archetypal female vengeance. If the blast of pepper spray was slightly lower, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine her breathing it onto her enemies, instead of the other way around. Ms. Smith may be a lovely person in real life, but when I look at this…

…I’m immediately reminded of this…

Caravaggion, "Medusa," 1596

…a creature of outraged fury that, even after supposedly being slain, still has lethal power. Just when you think you’ve decapitated it by gazing into your riot shield, the head pops out of the bag, then flash!—stone where once was life. Or the semblance of life, anyway.

And this flash, as Kenneth Clarke said, can be prolonged, as long as there are the right images to keep it going:

Egypt, 2011

Where in time is this? Does it matter? It could be Troy, or Gaul, or perhaps a future Zuccotti Park. A dark, faceless mass…riot shields…a flash of color…a solitary, defiant figure…

No wonder they’re sending out the troops again.

***

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

The main difference between then and now, of course, is that JS/07M378 most likely does not work in a car factory, he tends to get fired, and, once he does, owning that frigidaire suddenly makes him a Communist. Just ask Fox News. So today he is certainly making himself heard, and, before long, he might make himself felt. After all,

When there was war, he went.

And he’s going.

*****

• A 62% decline in the number of people serving time for drug crimes today compared with 2000.
• Nearly 7,700 fewer black people incarcerated in state prison in 2011 compared with 2000.
• Among the 50 states, New York charted the biggest drop in its prison rolls from 2000 to 2010.
• In 2000, the most common top crime for which inmates were incarcerated was third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance—with almost 10,000 people sentenced. That’s now down to about 3,000.

At first blush, this seems to be a positive step in the drawdown of the “PIC,” or Prison Industrial Complex, and it has a lot of experts very happy, as well.

“The drop itself is really quite extraordinary,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the Manhattan-based Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit center for justice policy research. “This is very intriguing stuff and encouraging,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that has criticized sentencing policies as racially biased and counterproductive.

What’s causing it? According to the Journal, the trend is the result of, among other things, better drug treatment programs and the ongoing challenges to the Rockefeller Drug Laws. So far, so good. The report then goes on to cite lower crime rates, especially in New York City:

There, aggressive “stop-and-frisk,” zero-tolerance and computer-driven anti-crime programs have been employed, some say, with remarkable results.

Granted, “stop-and-frisk” is highly controversial, with “600,000 people…frisked in 2010,” and “90 percent of them minority,” but, says the article, “there’s little doubt of the city’s mighty contribution to the state’s prison reversal.” A lot of studies have been done of this particular “mighty contribution,” and they all find pretty much the same thing, which can be seen here and here.

One thing the Journal article does not mention, though, is the increasing use of the city’s SkyWatch platforms, 2-story mobile towers that allow police to watch an entire area of the city from one spot. The towers are made by FLIR Systems, Inc. According to the company’s web site,

SkyWatch™ mobile observation towers provide a high level platform for an array of surveillance options. Every portable tower includes the basics for the comfort and safety of the officer inside through adjustable heat and air conditioning, tinted sliding glass windows and comfortable seating. And no matter the application, only one person is required to set up and deploy a unit.

There are 2 models of tower: the Frontier, which is designed for military deployment, and the more basic Sentinel.

The SkyWatch Sentinel facilitates a completely customized surveillance platform. This unit provides the additional line of sight and command and control capabilities necessary to high-level, impermanent security ventures. Compared to a mobile force, the SkyWatch Sentinel provides constant deterrence with nearly unlimited location flexibility. The SkyWatch Sentinel is ideal for commercial and civilian security operations.

http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com

Jeremy Bentham, who first created the idea of the Panopticon in the 1700′s, would undoubtedly be very proud.

So here’s another “mighty contribution” that the Journal article failed to point out. What with all the corrections officers on the streets, who have the power to stop anyone at will, and the strategic placement of guard towers on various corners of the city, New York may have simply realized that, instead of sending people to prison, it’s a lot cheaper to bring the prison to them.

Ever since Occupy Wall Street began, conservative commentators have been obsessed with the protesters’ bodies, particularly their smell. The most recent such prissy attack is by Ted Nugent, of all people, who, in a Washington Times column, called them “stinky hippies.”

Whence comes this obsession by Nugent, Bill O’Reilly, P.J. O’Rourke, and so many others? Well, I think I found the source.

In 1787, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

 The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. – Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of Superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.

This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep…

Etc., etc., etc.

Now, as Jefferson is one of the main freedom fighters of the the Conservatives, and as he is generally believed to have enjoyed some, for lack of a better phrase, Liaisons dangereuses with one (at least) of his many slaves, this obsession with body odor by Nugent et al. takes on a whole new angle, one which I’d really rather not pursue any further.

Or, as Shakespeare said, “Methinks they doth protest too much,” if you kow what I mean.

*****

I read up on iPads for months before actually making a purchase, and one of the things I learned, besides the fact that iPads were great for educators, was that 3 workers at the Chengdu plant in China died recently when explosive dust that is created by the polishing process collected in the air vents and…well…exploded.

According to InformationWeek, the plant is the property of Foxconn/Hon Hai Technology Group, which had set a new record in its construction (76 days). On its web site, Foxconn boasts that they “provide the lowest ‘total cost’ solution to increase the affordability of electronics products for all mankind,” a rather grandiose goal, to be sure, made a bit more achievable now that the All Mankind List is 3 people shorter than it used to be. Foxconn doesn’t want it to get much shorter, though: they recently starting requiring employees to sign a pledge promising they won’t commit suicide at work.

Anyway, when I first read about the explosion, I became concerned. The iPads, I knew, were scarce, driving demand to a fever pitch, and the last thing I wanted to do was order one, and have to wait 2 or 3 weeks, when there’s an Apple Store at the Eastview Mall, just a few miles down the highway. But, I needn’t have worried. As Brian White, an analyst at Ticonderoga Securities, quickly reported,

Our current view is that this tragedy is likely to have some impact on iPad 2 production; however, we believe Hon Hai has the flexibility to shift manufacturing back to the Shenzhen facility if necessary…As such, we currently don’t expect a material impact to Apple’s iPad 2 shipments, but we will continue to monitor the situation.

Problem solved. Or is it? According to a report that came out shortly before the explosion, by a Hong Kong-based group called SACOM–Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour–the Chengdu plant was dangerous, workers were not trained properly, they suffered from a variety of health problems that were ignored, and, “even though they have worn gloves, their hands (were) still covered by dust and so (was) their face and clothes.”

historyplace.com

To anyone even remotely aware of American labor history, all of this seems terribly familiar, an almost nostalgic look back at a time before unions and federal safeguards made manufacturers pack up their locks, stocks, and barrels, and flee to hungry nations that had never heard of minimum wage and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. It’s like the Gilded Age all over again, for them, and they know that as long as the Eastviews are full, the newspapers empty, and the oceans wide, people like me won’t ask questions.

In these terms, a trip to the mall is a little bit like the King Cotton diplomacy that the Confederacy tried on Great Britain back in the day: help us break the Federal blockades, convince your textile workers to stop complaining about slave labor, and we promise not to cut off the supply of cotton that keeps your mills running. As South Carolina’s James Hammond said, in 1858, “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with it.”

The Confederacy, not known for rhetorical subtlety, overplayed its hand. But what if no iPads were furnished for three months? The question is moot, of course; very few people are screaming about factory conditions in China, and neither Apple nor Foxconn has to browbeat anyone into silence by withholding electronics. They know that there are many people out there like me—saps who claim to care about workers’ rights, but, occasionally, are ready to slip into a little hypocrisy, covered up with red leather.

It really is a beautiful machine, after all, polished to a fine, lustrous black. As I type, parts of my face become reflected in the frame, and, if I turn my gaze just a tiny bit to the right, the light bouncing off the thing is positively blinding.

ipad2a1395.com

Their attitude was infectious. One day, while telling them one of my favorite stories from history—the arrest of escaped slave Anthony Burns in 1854, and the massive protest by around 50,000 Bostonians—I said, “Don’t you wish you’d been there?” Out of the silence that followed came a single, quiet,

“Nope.”

I knew immediately what I’d done. By “you,” of course, I had meant “we,” while there was actually only an “I.” By projecting myself into an idealized past, enjoying the benefits of free expression and political agency, I had been indulging my political fantasies, reveling in the possibilities of my historical narrative, and the fact that the story had 50,000 characters meant nothing to the students in front of me; they couldn’t see themselves in a single one of those other faces.

It was my powdered-wig-and-tricorn-hat moment. Self indulgence by pronoun.

Here’s another example. It’s a book that was recently used during a unit called “Colonial Days,” at my son’s school:

Now, I’m sure the history in this book is sound, as far as it goes, although it is interesting to compare the cover art with this passage from the site, slavenorth.com:

In statutes enacted at various times between the 1720s and 1750s, slaves in Boston were forbidden to buy provisions in market; carry a stick or a cane; keep hogs or swine; or stroll about the streets, lanes, or Common at night or at all on Sunday. Punishments for violation of these laws ranged up to 20 lashes, depending on aggravating factors.

But the book does take certain liberties with its title. Who, as they say, are “you”? My own child isn’t a very good antecedent for that second person pronoun. (He once told me that his skin is brown, while mine is “silver.”) And, no, I’m not going to say a word to him about it. No doubt he’ll come to some kind of conclusions on his own, sooner or later.

There’s nothing wrong with historical narratives. Every nation has them: The Aeneid, Arminius, King Arthur, Colonial Days. Whether or not the stories correspond to actual history is not really the point. Like all living myths, they are maps of the present and the future, not the past, at once assuming and solidifying cultural unity. In a fractured and jittery society, though, they can get told with a kind of nervous energy, in either an unconscious or a deliberate attempt to uphold cultural hegemony. They have work to do, and pronouns do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Take, for example, this passage from Mike Huckabee’s book, Simple Government, which touches on Obama’s replacement of the bust of Winston Churchill with that of Abraham Lincoln (emphasis added):

Every president is the keeper of our American narrative, “our story.” He is the commander in chief, yes, but he is also our commemorator in chief. Our wartime partnership with Winston Churchill and the British people is part of our story; the Mau Mau rebellion is not. When we elect a president, we entrust to him not just our security but also our story. These two are inseparable because our security depends on the story we believe in, that inspires us, that we teach our children, and that we, as a nation, are willing to fight for…President Obama’s emphasis on his story rather than history has become symptomatic of his tenure.

This is a virtual pronoun tsunami. And what, exactly, is the antecedent? Huckabee says it’s “all Americans.” Really? I wasn’t insulted, and I’m an American, so that really ends the argument right there.

But lets keep going: when I brought the subject up in class, my American students weren’t insulted about the statue thing, either. In fact, many of them knew nothing about it. Winston Churchill? Our partnership with Britain? Sorry. World War II? World War I? The Boston Tea Party? Nothing much there, either. The Civil War sometimes gets a response, but it’s not the one Huckabee would probably expect, and it’s certainly not the usual narrative that culminates in the feel-good climax of the 13th Amendment.

Does this mean they’re clueless when it comes to American history? Nope. I’ve been given essays on Presidential Reconstruction, General Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15, the Pig Laws, and the Civil Rights Era. (Links are provided for those of us who are unfamiliar with these parts of our history.) My favorite so far was titled,

Here’s to John Wilkes Booth, the Bastard who Freed the Slaves.

And, of course, they’re interested in the President, and know a lot about him.

Huckabee, by so deftly switching from the collective to the singular pronoun, reinforces the story told by most conservatives that Obama stands alone, that he’s un-American, not one of “us,” and the story weaves a complex plot involving Kenya, Islam, urban activists, and basketball. I can see why they want to erase the other narrative, though: they’ve been terrified of it ever since the last election. First they brought in a D’Souza to dismiss it, to declare it dead, historically irrelevant. Then they tried to swallow it, to Disney-ize it, in a way, by quoting Martin Luther King, and pointing out that the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass (who actually makes Rev. Wright sound like Ronald Reagan). And they become enraged whenever anyone suggests that their motives are anything other than an allegiance to “our” history, and “our” country, like when Sean Hannity said, in response to questions about birtherism,

“Don’t bring up race. Do not bring up race. Do not bring up race. It is a constitutional requirement.”

Of course it’s about race. It’s part and parcel of the movement to portray Obama as the alien, the “other”–the singular pronoun, that lives outside the communal narrative. But the President is not alone; he’s more American than they realize. It’s a kind of blindness, really, a cultural ignorance just like I displayed in front of my class. And if they want to believe in their American narrative, become inspired by it, and teach it to their children, that’s fine.

However, whenever someone puts on the tricorner, metaphorically or otherwise, and says “we,” and “us,” and “our,” he is indulging in a narrative delusion. When he does so in a political attempt to erase the entire 20th Century, he becomes actively hostile to those Americans who have no part in that exclusive narrative—the Golden Age of “our” glorious freedoms—and for whom it is both meaningless and dangerous.

*****

These inmates, and the prisons where they live, provide economic benefits to many upstate towns and villages. Even though the incarceration rate is falling, and the state is trying to save money by closing some of these facilities, they are not going down without a fight. History, and specifically the 19th Century, might be able to tell us why…

Why urban minorities make up over 75% of the prison population

Today:

“Rockefeller demonstrated his newfound commitment to law and order in 1971, when he crushed the Attica prison uprising. By proposing the harshest drug laws in the United States, he took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the nation’s political agenda. In his State of the State address Rockefeller argued not only that all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life but also that plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile offenders should receive life sentences…The Rockefeller drug laws, enacted a few months later by the state legislature, were somewhat less draconian: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen years to life.” —Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic Monthly

The 19th Century:

“On the local level, most southern towns and municipalities passed strict vagrancy laws to control the influx of black migrants and homeless people who poured into these urban communities in the years after the Civil War. In Mississippi, for example, whites passed the notorious ‘Pig Law’ of 1876, designed to control vagrant blacks at loose in the community. This law made stealing a pig an act of grand larceny subject to punishment of up to five years in prison. Within two years, the number of convicts in the state penitentiary increased from under three hundred people to over one thousand.” —Ronald L. F. Davis, California State University

The crime rate may be falling, but…

Today:

“My colleagues and I have worked diligently to keep these critical facilities open. They provide employment for hundreds of people and are vital to the economic health of these upstate communities. As I have said all along, this Senate Majority cares deeply about the needs of upstate New York, and will continue to work with its residents to ensure that their education and skills are properly utilized.” —Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D-Mt. Vernon)

“Ogdensburg and Moriah Shock are economic engines for the North Country, not only meeting our public protection needs, but also sustaining hundreds of local jobs…From the start our priority was to save these two facilities and keep these jobs in the community.” —Senate Democratic Leader John L. Sampson

The 19th Century:

“While most believe that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a loophole was opened that resulted in the widespread continuation of slavery in the Southern states of America–slavery as punishment for a crime…The Southern states were generally broke and could not afford either the cost of building or maintaining prisons. The economic but morally weak and incorrect solution was to use convicts as a source of revenue, at least, to prevent them from draining the fragile financial positions of the states.” —Digital History

“It was (the Pig Law) that turned the convict lease system into a profitable business, whereby convicts were leased to contractors who sub-leased them to planters, railroads, levee contractors, and timber jobbers. Almost all of the convicts in this situation were blacks, including women, and the conditions in the camps were horrible in the extreme.” —Ronald L. F. Davis, California State University

The Compensation Option

Today:

“We understand your situation and your problem: a community that is going to deal with the loss of a prison will receive a $10 million economic transformation program grant.” —Gov. Andrew Cuomo

The 19th Century:

“I recommend the adoption of a joint resolution by your honorable bodies, which shall be substantially as follows: Resolved, That the United States ought to cooperate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State, in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.” —Abraham Lincoln

The real issue…?

Today:

“Those people don’t deserve college. Three-hots-and-a-cot is too good for them. Education never reformed anybody. Why should my tax dollars be wasted on educating prisoners? They’re just trying to get something for free.” —miscellaneous comments from people when I tell them I’m teaching a class in prison

The 19th Century:

“The movement to end convict leasing in Mississippi resulted in the creation of Parchman Farm, and the man behind it was the ‘White Chief,’ Governor James K. Vardaman. Using race-baiting and fears of black lawlessness and criminality to gain power, Vardaman was convinced that a prison farm, ‘like an efficient slave plantation,’ was necessary to provide young African-Americans with the ‘proper discipline, strong work habits, and respect for white authority’ that the end of slavery had eliminated.” —Robert M. Goldman, reviewing David Oshinsky’s book, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

www.houstonculture.org

*****

The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and, I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows…I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect.

We-e-e-ll, so far, so good, I suppose. In fact, I couldn’t agree more about the “major wide spread problem” part. But then the whole “nonpartisan” label falls off the Hudson Institute faster than a dirty Post-it Note®, as O’Beirne goes on to say:

You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally…ah…criminally negligent with respect to raising children. And yet, that’s the kind of program that has huge bipartisan support with very little thought about why we’re now feeding children. Talk about a fundamental parental responsibility. In what sense can we begin asking the “more of ourselves” piece to go with this less government?

That’s an excellent question, and O’Beirne may want to ask the parents of the 43% of Black American children who live in poverty.  Since that’s not really possible, however, and since they might not appreciate being called morally deficient criminals (go figure), she could ask more of herself in a literary way, by turning to the words of Jonathan Swift, who actually wrestled with this same problem almost 300 years ago:

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

This seems silly, I know. After all, Swift was writing about the problems the British gentry class was having with the destitute Irish, while our current version is waging war on its own citizens. But no matter. He quite clearly gave an American the credit for his idea, which leads me to believe that his anonymous gastronomic comrade may well have been one of Kate O’Beirne’s ancestors. Given that, and her comments at the Hudson Institute, she might just have a taste for this sort of thing.

What’s more, another of the O’Beirne clan appears to have been friends with the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote about him in Epitaph On A Tyrant:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

So O’Beirne’s family seems to have good roots. I just hope she has an appetite to match: economists tell us those children aren’t going away anytime soon.

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DARLING: Old English deorling, “favorite minion.” —etymonline.com

All writers love their children, I suppose.

Lewis Carroll had his portmanteau words, like vorpal, manxome, and frabjous. Robert Frost used what he called “the sound of sense.” Truman Capote once said, “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” And both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King used rhythm, repetition, and other tropes to great effect in their speeches.

Even Pam Geller, of the blog Atlas Shrugs, has a kind of parental affection for some of her pet phrases. According to a recent article in The New York Times:

Like many writers, Ms. Geller is fond of what she calls her “little darlings”—rhetorical flourishes, such as accusing the imam behind Park51 of “totalitarian Khomeinism.”

Other Geller darlings have included the recent “stealth jihadist” and  “monster mosque,” and, my personal favorite, “Find the ho, give her a show,” about a crack whore whom Obama supposedly slept with several years ago. “I have an interesting play on words, sometimes,” Geller says. “If people like it, I think that’s great.”

And like it they do: Her darlings often get picked up by admiring media outlets, where they promptly start to burrow into the public rhetorical corpus. Take the furor over what she termed the “monster mosque” in New York. In the words of the NYT, “if many people have a general unease over the idea of a mosque downtown, Ms. Geller has provided a vocabulary to express it and a framework to understand it.” What writer wouldn’t want that kind of power for her creations?

One Geller admirer is Robert Spencer, of Jihad Watch:

Mr. Spencer worked with Ms. Geller on her book “The Post-American Presidency,” published this summer by Simon & Schuster for what she described as a six-figure advance. He helped her sober up her tone, she said, by removing those “little darlings,” in hopes of bolstering the credibility of her argument that Mr. Obama is “not only presiding over but actively promoting the decline of America.”

I hope the publisher knows about this. A Geller book without the darlings is a decidedly risky (and boring) proposition. If she ever were to “sober up her tone,” Simon & Schuster might be forced to ask for their money back, just as Random House once did to Joan Collins.

It’s tempting to think of Geller as a kind of Darth Vader of poetry, tapping into the Dark Side of connotation. But Vader respected The Force, and even loved it, in his way. I’d even like to be able to see her as a modern-day Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with enough power to start the broom walking, but not enough to control it.  Geller, however, has only a dim sense of where her darlings are coming from, and even less sense of the external world that they’re supposed to refer to. (Remember that darling, “jihad tool,” which was once hurled at Rachel Ray because she wore a kaffiyeh in a donut commercial?)

Being denotatively challenged often goes along with Libertarian politics, and really isn’t surprising coming from someone with a privileged past and a fairly work-free present. The NYT article describes Geller’s current home as a “full-floor unit in a high-rise on the East Side of Manhattan,” which was paid for by her husband, who “made certain that she had sufficient support to buy a co-op in the city and survive there without having to work.” And it ends with this head-slapper:

Just last week, Atlas called on readers to boycott Campbell’s soup after the company announced that it planned to certify some products as halal — the Muslim equivalent of kosher — with the supervision of a group that Ms. Geller considers a front for terrorists.

“Warhol,” she wrote, “is spinning in his grave.”

Warhol, of course, didn’t give a shit about what was inside Campbell’s soup, any more than he cared about what was inside a Brillo box, or inside Elvis. And if he is spinning in his grave, it’s because he’s happy to find that the endless duplication of meaningless sparkle, both visual and verbal, still hypnotizes much of America.

Appropriately enough, the article includes a graphic of Geller herself getting Warholed:

So if Geller’s not Lord Vader, and not sane, then what is she? I like to think of her as Nola Carveth, the charming female lead in David Cronenberg’s 1979 gorefest, The Brood. As played by Samantha Eggar, Carveth lives alone in a kind of high-end psychiatric office, where she spends the movie quietly and spontaneously producing an army of deadly offspring that ooze from her hate-infested body like flies. According to fandango.com, they’re “a progeny of sexless, dwarflike mutants who are born for the sole purpose of acting out her violent fantasies of revenge.”

Sure, they look like children, at least from a distance, but if their mommy hates you—which is probably a given—then you wind up like this guy.

Film critic Anton Betel says of The Brood, “Even those who can see the end coming will be unprepared for the triumphant grotesquery of its spectacle, in what is one mother of a climax.” Here’s what he means:

Hello, darling. Welcome to the world, a world where your mom’s entire persona is built on a 50-year-old work of fiction, where everyone who wears a scarf is a murderer, and where your sibling, “Find the ho, give her a show,” can grow big and strong if enough people chant its name in unison.  Now go wield your vorpal blade against the Jabberwock.

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