Life is not a game. We don’t take turns. There are no turns. I’ve always been partial to the Buddhist concept of life as a flowing river. We might delude ourselves into thinking that we can freeze, understand, a moment but in the time we take to declare the moment now! the moment is gone. Decisions are like that.

Every decision we ever made, every decision we’ll ever make, began forming with our first breath; maybe before. Joshua Rothman, writing in The Art of Decision-Making for The New Yorker, tries to decide how he feels about all that.

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Steven Johnson, author of Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most thinks he can help us with that Johnson, writes Rothman:

examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. Did I, though?

My answer would be sort of. I like how Rothman rings Leo Tolstoy into the frame:

In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. Still, like Kutuzov, I’m at a loss to explain it: it’s a momentous choice, but I can’t pinpoint the making of it in space or time.

For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity. Johnson means to offer a way out of the Tolstoyan conundrum.

I don’t see the problem. We are the sum of all that we have lived. No decision can be made in a vacuum and that is mostly because what we think of as Free Will is a conceit, a chimera, assembled by our ego. If you want to hear gawd laugh, share your plans.

Toward the end of the article, Rothman switches gears a bit and begins to talk about ambitions vs. aspirations through the lens of Agnes (my mother’s saint name) Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. We, according to Callard, aspire to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess, just as we might strike a pose in the mirror before heading out on a date. In place of a moment of decision, Rothman writes, Callard sees a more gradual process: “Old Person aspires to become New Person.”

That makes much more sense to me. I see this all the time with my students who seem capable of shifting from 10-year-old self to 30-year-old self in a blink as they try on personas. Rothman continues:Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.

Aspiration, however, is not the same as ambition. Callard makes this distinction.

Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” [I like that, JH] Callard notes.) The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Aspiration is all well and good, but I like myself now and all that go me here. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Bonus No. 1: I write good messages/letters/emails. Amy Cunningham does too: How to Write a Condolence Letter.

Bonus No. 2: That Time In 2005 Paul Hackett Got Sherrod Brown To Let His Mask Slip—Here We Go Again.

Bonus No. 3: Australia Day! Our sacred day many depraved leftists are calling Nazi Christmas

I tell my students that each morning I celebrate my ignorance because being ignorant means I get to learn more about my world that day. Until this week I was ignorant of Nick Drnaso and his graphic novels: Beverly and Sabrina) D. T. Max, writing in The Bleak Brilliance of Nick Drnaso’s Graphic Novels for The New Yorker, began to ease my ignorance on Drnaso.

I ordered copies of Beverly and Sabrina—I’m 94 pages into the former—and the book is not a leisure read. Max explains partly why that is, but I also think there is a bit of generational hurdle that I have to get over.

The first passage that I marked caught my attention because I was reminded of our own John Derf Backderf and the work that he is best known for: My Friend Dahmer. Max writes:

Drnaso, who lives in Chicago, has spent many hours in the darker corners of the Internet. “I have a morbid curiosity in me,” he said. But Sabrina is not autobiographical. He told me that he had followed the advice that the celebrated graphic novelist Chris Ware once gave to aspiring cartoonists: throw out your yearbooks. “They are not reference material,” Ware warned.

I don’t know if Derf ever recieved the same advice, but if he did, I’m very happy he ignored it.

The next passage that gave me pause concerned Drnaso’s work satisfaction.

He told me that, in 2012, soon after graduating from college, he was asked to paint a mural for an art opening in Chicago. That month, as a member of a maintenance crew at a local concert arena, he was also staining a fence. He finished the two jobs on the same day, he told me, recalling, “The feeling of satisfaction was exactly the same between when I looked at the finished fence and when I looked at the mural.

I don’t know quite what to make of that. At one level I can say that an hour of writing a blog post gives me much the same satisfaction as the same time writing an email or a novel chapter. There is a kind of Solzhenitsyan-Socialist satisfaction in a job well done—whether in building wall in Siberia or writing a novel in Moscow—but still, oughtn’t Art provide a higher satisfaction than toil or even craft? I’m not sure.

The final line to catch my attention—coming as it did after my reading The Art Of Fiction No. 240–was this:

He had depicted the murder as a four-page sequence. In the first three pages, the men’s-rights activist rants about how society has wronged him. On the fourth page, the man methodically stabs Sabrina to death, with a detachment consistent with the rest of the book. Drnaso had been able to draw Sabrina’s murder only after getting drunk. [Emphasis mine, JH] He wondered if reading these pages would be any different from going online and watching an isis murder video or, as he had once done, looking at forensic photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. As a teen-ager, he had watched “Faces of Death”—a video compilation of beheadings and electrocutions—at a friend’s house, and he had never forgotten it. Now, with “Sabrina,” he concluded that he had created a poisonous book out of our poisoned times. “It’s not going to be healthy for anyone to read this,” he told himself. He e-mailed his editor and said that he did not want “Sabrina” to be read by the public.

I have to think that we, the artists and writers, are the last people—think Kafka and Brod—who should be trusted with what the public ought to see and not see of our work. If we have to resort to alcohol or herbals or pharmaceuticals or witchcraft to create, what do we know?

Bonus No. 1: For another fascinating aspect of art and creation, read Julie Belcove’s Marking Time with Yuji Agematsu.

Bonus No. 2: Ohio Reduplicate Senator Rob Portman gets a nod in Amy Davidson Sorkin’s The Republican Test at the Border

Bonus No. 3: The government is literally doing nothing, call the election now Scott Donald Barnevelder Morrison!

The great words of great individuals encourage great acts. In my early life there were great speakers, but none as great as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was yet an ignorant 8th grader in the year that he was assassinated, and while I am yet still profoundly ignorant nearly 50 years later, I have constantly chipped away at my deficit.

I move ahead, in part, by recalling my heroes.

On this Martin Luther King Day I would first recall a message that Dr. King wrote in a cold jail cell and then a message he delivered before a rapt audience. The first—Letter From a Birmingham Jail—is from 16 April 1963, :

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle–have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Second is what has been called Dr. King’s seminal address, his —Beyond Vietnam—delivered delivered precisely one year before he would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1967.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the most distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it’s always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this great magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization that brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954—in 1945 rather—after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China—for whom the Vietnamese have no great love—but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed and Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there was nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only real party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western worlds, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led this nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a unified Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be considered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Surely this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroy, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increased in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause] Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment do decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]

*King says “1954,” but most likely means 1964, the year he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The man is 50 years gone, but his words still burn bright.

Bonus No. 1: Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on MLK Day. You should pay particular attention to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Amazon is a digital Walmart comment at timemark 38:06. While the whole event(and the video) lasted more than four hours, this segments ends at timemark 1:05:40.

Bonus No. 2: Of course the response to the interview was at times vicious.

Bonus No. 3: Aaron McGruder brought Dr. King back 40 years later to deliver a different speech.

I have learned, and continue to learn, much of what I know about writing from the long list of writers who have sat down for an Art Of Fiction interview for The Paris Review. Frankly, I subscribe to the quarterly for these interviews. The whole journal is wonderful, but I would not subscribe if this feature were dropped.

TPR also greatly expands my vocabulary. In the first paragraph, alone, I had to look up three words to be sure I truly understood their meaning.

These novels, with their giant accretions of language, global ­erudition (he’s as familiar with the classics of Buddhist philosophy as he is with the European intellectual tradition), obsessive characters, and rain-sodden landscapes, might give an impression of hardened late-modernist hauteur, but they are also pointillist, elegant, and delicately funny.

I’m always interested in what writers have influenced the subjects of the interviews.

ADAM THIRLWELL: Let’s talk about your beginning as a writer.

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: I thought that real life, true life was elsewhere. Along with The Castle by Franz Kafka, my bible for a while was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

Of course, Krasznahorkai has to make what I now have come to believe is the obligatory reference to Feodor Dostoyevsky.

AT: What kind of jobs were you doing?

LK: I was a miner for a while. That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me. Then I became a director of various culture houses in villages far from Budapest. Every village had a culture house where people could read the classics. This library was all they had in their everyday lives. And on Fridays or Saturdays, the director of the culture house organized a music party, or something like it, which was very good for young people. I was the director for six very small villages, which meant I always moved between them. It was a great job. I loved it because I was very far from my bourgeois family.

What else? I was night watchman for three hundred cows. That was my favorite—a byre in no man’s land. There was no village, no city, no town nearby. I was a watchman for a few months, maybe. A poor life with Under the Volcano in one pocket and Dostoyevsky in the other.

And of course, in these Wanderjahre, I began to drink. There was a tradition in Hungarian literature that true geniuses were total drunks. And I was a crazed drunk, too. But then came a moment when I was sitting with a group of Hungarian writers who were sadly agreeing that this was inevitable, that any Hungarian genius had to be a crazed drunk. I refused to accept this and made a bet—for twelve bottles of champagne—that I would never drink again.

AT: And you haven’t?

LK: And I haven’t.

I suppose there are those who can, but I’m a writer who cannot write if I’m not sober. And yes, I’ve tried. The mandatory Dostoyevsky reference is not enough.

AT: And Dostoyevsky?

LK: Yes. Dostoyevsky played a very important role for me—because of his ­heroes, not because of his style or his stories. Do you remember the narrator of “White Nights”? The main character is a little bit like Myshkin in The Idiot, a pre-Myshkin figure. I was a fanatical fan of this narrator and later of Myshkin—of their defenselessness. A defenseless, angelic figure. In every novel I’ve written you can find such a figure—like Estike in Satantango or Valuska in Melancholy, who are wounded by the world. They don’t deserve these wounds, and I love them because they believe in a universe where everything is wonderful, including human existence, and I honor very much the fact that they are believers. But their way of thinking about the universe, about the world, this belief in innocence, is not possible for me.

For me, we belong more to the world of animals. We are animals, we are just the animals who won. Yet we live in a highly anthropomorphic world—we believe we live in a human world in which there is a part for animals, for plants, for stones. This is not the truth.

Then back to Kafka.

AT: No, tell me more.

LK: Franz Kafka is a person. He’s Franz Kafka, with his life story, with his books. But K. is there, in a heavenly space in the universe, and perhaps some characters from my novels live there, too. For example, Irimiás and the doctor from Satantango or Mr. Eszter and Valuska from Melancholy> or, from my new novel, the Baron. They are absolute—they live. They exist in the eternal place.

Can you argue that Myshkin is only fictional? Of course. But it’s not the truth. Myshkin may have entered reality through someone else, through Dostoyevsky, but now, for us, he is a real person. Every character in so-called eternal fiction came through ordinary people. This is a secret process, but I’m entirely sure that it’s true. For example, a few years after I had written Satantango, I was in a bar, and somebody tapped my shoulder. It was Halics from Satantango. Really! I’m not joking! That’s why I’ve become more careful about what I write. For example, the original text of War and War was quite different from the version I published. The first hundred pages originally dealt with Korin’s self-destruction, but I was afraid that I would meet him in that condition later on and wouldn’t be able to help him. I was afraid of the possibility that he might never leave his small town. That’s why I chose to get him out of there—with his wish to go just once, at the end of his life, to the center of the world. I hadn’t decided that this would be New York, but that was how I freed myself of the story where he lived forever in this provincial place. [Emphasis mine, JH]

In rapid succession Krasznahorkai makes these observations:

LK: We don’t have any idea what the universe is. Wise people have always told us that this is proof you shouldn’t think, because thinking leads you nowhere. You just build over this huge construction of misunderstanding, which is culture. The history of culture is the history of the misunderstandings of great thinkers. So we always have to go back to zero and begin differently. And maybe in that way you have a chance not to understand but at least not to have further misunderstandings. Because this is the other side of this question—Am I really so brave to cancel all human culture? To stop admiring the beauty in human production? It’s very difficult to say no.

AT: You still write novels, though.

LK: Yes, but maybe that’s a mistake. I respect our culture. I respect high ­human articulation in every form. But the root of this culture is false. And if we do nothing, everything continues anyway. And maybe this is the most ­important thing. Everything must go on without any thinking about essences, about what it is, and other such questions.

AT: As if writing, and every art form, should become a ritual without a theology?

LK: Maybe it’s possible to think of writing as a ritual to be performed—­something repeated, word after word, sentence after sentence. Not in the sense of the classic avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century, like Dada, say, which led great artists nowhere because they neglected content and that was, poor geniuses, their mistake. But if you think of writing as a ritual you perform, and if you are able to see yourself at the same time, that you are down there on Earth and you write word after word after word .?.?. and then you have a book. You stop. You close the book. And you open another one, with empty pages. And you write again, write again, write again. [Emphasis mine, JH] Word after word. Sentence after sentence. Close the book. The next one .?.?. This is a ritual. Maybe it’s not how you think of your writing, but maybe it is what you do.

But this is the point at which we should remember our readers. Because readers need, I hope, our writings. And in this small space—where we write books, novels, poems—there is also a place for our readers. This sympathy, this feeling is very important—finding a common essence between writers, who create form, and readers, who need what we do. This also makes some sense of this small space, which from the higher level we see is absolute nonsense. So maybe the universe is full of small spaces—each with their own time, essence, characters, creation, events, and so on. Different ideas of time for different spaces. Just as we are here, in the universe, inside our small human space.

Then another new word: Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived. My grandfather was very wise, and he changed our name to Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai was an irredentist name.

In the penultimate exchange that I marked, Krasznahorkai circles back to ritual.

AT: …the sculptor and the restorer are the same thing. And when someone is a true poet, it means they know that the word has power, and they can use words. If you have that ability, you only need to deal with technical questions.

AT: So you mean, the only true artistic questions are questions of technique?

LK: An artist has only one task—to continue a ritual. And ritual is a pure technique.

And finally:

LK: Do you remember what Buddha told us about the circle?

AT: No.

LK: If you follow a circle, after a while you will understand that a circle doesn’t exist. It’s simply a point that doesn’t exist. There is a big difference between the infinite and the uncountable finite. After all, what do you think happens when the Sufi dancer dissolves into nothing?

I don’t know what happens, but I have watched the it happen at The Cleveland Museum of Art on some 18 years ago. While not the venue I witnessed, the performance is the same. Watch the master stage right dissolve.

Finally, for today, two bits of poetry. First, from Aeternitas by Szilárd Borbély:

The Eternal is flawless,
like the in-
decipherable Secret
of the Perfect Crime.

And last, a single word—retronym—found in Self-Reliance by Maureen N. McLane:

become self-driving car
is a retronym. Everybody’s
autobiography too. We share

Ain’t American amazing…?

One of the great advantage of reading literary journals such as The Paris Review is that you may read works by writers you’ve never heard of. In my case this is far more likely that the average reader and I’m always delighted when I discover someone new. This was the case in No. 225 when I read Diaries, a selection from Welsh writer and historian Jan Morris.

Morris kept her diary for 188 days and published her observations and thoughts in In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary Here are the bits [all emphasis mine, JH] that caught my attention:

DAY 33: Do we not know them—the dedicated teachers without pupils, the ­builders without orders, the lawyer without a brief, the shopkeeper without a shop, the doctor without a patient? Of course many of them enjoy worthwhile retirements, with family responsibilities or creative hobbies, but it seems to me that only one intangible, religious faith apart, can be relied upon to see us happily through our last years. It is Art, which is infinite in itself, which can be creative or comforting, active or passive, which comes from nowhere, which goes everywhere, which is omniscient, which is laughter and pity and puzzle and beauty, which is equally available to all of us, practitioners or recipients, and which can satisfy all our senses while the going is good.

And…

DAY 79: Wordsworth, bless his heart, seemed to conclude that if there is a God, Nature is the breath of it, and Art its language. If so, then one of the divine messengers must surely be the Poet, even when he writes in blank verse, and in three hundred pages of iambic pentameter.

Capital ‘A’ Art is an elusive concept. A Socrates Café that I took part in for some 10 years—and facilitated for eight—once spent an evening attempting to distinguish between Art and art. We failed. Ultimately we much accept that art is what we say.

DAY 113: When I got home I sought out a poem I vaguely remembered by Thomas Hardy. It begins very gloomily, concerning the poet’s lugubrious thoughts about the miserable state of everything, but toward the end of the piece
he is cheered up by the ecstatic sunset song of an “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.”

It was just one word in the poem that I sought out this evening. Hardy tells us that the poor old bird, so gaunt and frail, “flings” his soul against the prevailing gloom.

That’s my thrush! There’s another aspect of irony—its magical instructions! Stop moping about, Jan, said I, as I put the book back, and get flinging!

The idea of a command to get flinging just made me smile.

DAY 16: As it nears the end of its career, to be replaced by cleaner, more environmentalist successors, I would like here and now, with a poisonous black burst from my exhaust and a vulgar toot upon my horn, to express my gratitude to the internal combustion engine, which did some dreadful things in its time and is leaving some dire legacies behind, but which has given me and countless million others, Toads and all, the freedom of the open road.

Amein.

DAY 153: But lo! Look! The sun comes out, and after a quick breakfast I sit down at my desk to switch the computer on; and after exercising my fingers like a pianist, as I always do as a matter of form, I find myself settling down with all the old delight to the day’s composition.

What shall I write about today, dear friends? Good or bad, virile or senile, there’s no life like the writer’s life. Bugger that pedant!

Love and laughs to everyone, JAN

I would dearly love to see a video of those expercises. And, finally…

DAY 163:

Try I will; no harm in trying:
                        Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
                        On the bed of earth”

’Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
                        But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
                        Before I die for ever

From A.?E. Housman, lad—who else?

I’m uncertain where I wish to begin with Norris. Suggestions anyone?

The first work of fiction in No. 225 is Wayétu Moore’s Gbessa. Beyond the short story itself, what always interests me are the turn of phrases that a writer uses. For instance: baroque drummers (p. 35) taken from :

Khati grabbed the frame, hoisting her body until she saw the baroque drummers outside. Salt and dust stained the drummers’ palms. The Ol’ Pas marched around the drummers as their necks sunk into robed shoulders.

Or, pendulum swinging (p. 39) found in:

It seemed to everyone that she had decided to spend the rest of her days alone, pendulum swinging in an old hammock in the back of her house.

Or, snailed (p. 47) as used here:

She snailed ­toward the back door of her house.

And willowing (p. 51) which she inserts into:

And when loneliness exhausted her soul, when her echoes grew tired of keeping her company and she cried, the trees wept for her also, willowing back and forth during breezeless afternoons.

Finally, there is this proverb: Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh. (p. 50) translated in:

She returned to the cave and sat wondering what action to take. Nothing came to mind but an appeal for more tears, and she lay there as the sun, tired of looking for her, went down. Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh—We have nothing but we have God. We have nothing but we have each other. She sang until her voice swallowed the moonlight and the shrill sounds of the forest, and she opened her eyes in the morning with a stain of tears on her face.

More tomorrow…

Bonus No. 1: How Would A President Sherrod Brown Run The Democratic Party? Like A Corporate Clown Act.

The New Yorker republished All Rivers, a 1963 short story by Amos Oz in its 14 January issue without comment. Oz died on 28 December of last year. His obituary in The Guardian began: A child of European Jewry, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who has died aged 79, became the father of a Hebrew literature where the personal and the public overlapped.

I don’t know his work, but I liked the story and here are the passages that spoke to me starting with this parenthetical:

(You see, I’m getting mixed up again: What I did in the Army came before what I told Tova, obviously. And what I told Tova now also belongs to the past, and just now I promised to tell in the future what I’ve already told in the past. Strange, how it’s almost impossible to write or say anything without distortion or, to put it plainly, without telling lies.) [emphasis mine, JH]

Yes, that’s true. We are not stenographers. Our brains make speaking or writing absolute truth nearly impossible. We should not pretend otherwise and pretending that we’re pseudo Vulcans cripples our humanity. Oz touches that in this next passage.

Girls. Sometimes they come to my room in a group, bringing cakes with them, and I pour the drinks. It was I who introduced to Tel Tomer the custom of drinking a glass of liquor on winter nights. This caused a lot of gossip, but earned me some praise as well. I tell these girls about life in the Army. It sometimes happens that one of them stays behind after the others have gone, and sometimes in the morning I receive a nice compliment. All these dalliances are short and superficial because, actually, there’s no burning passion in me. And if one of them starts blubbering, that’s always and invariably the beginning of the end; tears I can’t stand. Everything can be explained quietly, and you should try to persuade with logic. If you can’t raise sensible arguments, then what use is weeping? [Emphasis mine.]

Oz dives deeper into this theme in these two paragraphs.

Memory distorts everything.

Really, it was nothing. She with her coughing, I with my nausea and fascination. All the other details have attached themselves to my memory and they give me no peace, though it makes no difference if they were there or if they weren’t: the sounds of the city, the smell of the sea on the wind, the smell of sweat. A thin and unshaved man who came in to buy cigarettes and, as he was going out, told us with a silly grin that we should hurry, hurry, time was passing and it wouldn’t come back. And a little girl who came in and tugged at the Hungarian waitress’s sleeve and kept telling her, “You’ve got to come quickly. Helena says she’s going away once and for all.” And the flies that I’d killed, still dead and redundant, on the tablecloth.

All these details add nothing and subtract nothing. The story needs to move forward, but memory doesn’t move forward; it moves backward, from the end to the beginning, like a crab, like someone waking up from a nightmare and trying to remember what it was, and going back from the nightmare to the unimportant details that preceded it, to try to reconstruct how the dream began, and how it reached the point where fear woke him up.

Finally, this line made me smile: All the old women in deck chairs stretched out their turtle necks and looked at me in Yiddish. You either get that image or you don’t. I can’t think of a sensible explanation.

The factual captured me in Jerome Groopman’s review of Nine Pints by Rose George, beginning here:

George charts the distance that our blood (as her title suggests, we contain, on average, between nine and eleven pints of it) travels in the body every day: some twelve thousand miles, “three times the distance from my front door to Novosibirsk.” Our network of veins, arteries, and capillaries is about sixty thousand miles long—“twice the circumference of the earth and more.”

I did the math. To travel some 12,000 miles in 24 hours, our life’s current is rushing at 500 mph., faster than a commercial jet liner and far, far faster than the water from a fire hose, which makes me wonder if The New Yorker threw another celebrity fact checker into the breach. So, I fact checked the fact check and found that the actual velocity of our blood is about walking speed—3-4 mph.

The story may be factual, but clearly Groopman failed to make his point here clear. Whenever I find an error (or poor writing) of this magnitude—should 12,000 have been 120?—I’m forced to question the rest of a piece, but I kept going.

As a reader might expect, humanity’s historic attitudes on menstruation was a topic.

In some cultures, blood loss is perceived as a danger not only to the individual but also to the larger community. George journeys to a remote Hindu village in western Nepal, where she finds Radha, a sixteen-year-old chau, which means “untouchable menstruating woman” in the local dialect. During her period, Radha can’t enter her family’s house or her temple, and she can’t touch other women, lest they be polluted. If she so much as consumes buffalo milk or butter, the buffalo themselves will get sick and stop producing milk. She can be fed only boiled rice, thrown by her little sister onto a plate from a safe distance, “the way you would feed a dog.”

Customs that denigrate women during menses are widespread. George notes that our word “taboo” is believed to derive from one of two Polynesian words: tapua, which means “menstruation,” or tabu, which means “apart.” Not long ago, in America, it was thought that “the curse” could cause women to spoil meat if they came in contact with it. But menstrual blood is not always seen as harmful, and menstrual segregation at its most benevolent can take the form of communality. Some three hundred miles northwest of where Radha lives, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, menstruating Kalasha women “retire to a prestigious structure called the bashali, where women hang out, have fun, and sleep entwined,” George writes. “In this reading of menstrual seclusion, the woman is prized for her blood, because it means fertility and power.”

There is more, but I’ll leave you to read the rest and finish with this factoid:

People who say they like their steak “bloody” are actually responding to myoglobin, a red-pigmented protein that stores oxygen in muscle and brightens when exposed to air.

I knew that one, but I noted it because I wanted to share it with one of my students.

When President Donald John Trump named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—who, not incidentally brought along Stephen Miller—we thought the bar was on the ground. Ralph Nader thinks the bar is lying in a trench so that William Barr, Attorney General under President George Herbert Walker Bush, can enjoy an encore performance.

Nader, in Bar Barr or Regret this Dictatorial Attorney General, writes:

Many Senate Democrats are throwing in the towel on the nomination of William Barr for Trump’s Attorney General (a prospect assured by Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, declaring his personal vote against Barr). Let’s ask why?

One would think that Senate Democrats would be appalled at Barr’s long-time unyielding conduct and writings asserting that the President can start any wars he wants even if Congress votes against it! An example of this is the constitutionally undeclared criminal invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush. Barr was also George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General and has been a long-time defender of executive branch lawlessness.

One would think that Barr’s insupportable drive for more corporate prisons and more mass incarceration would upset these Senators.

One would think that Barr’s view of the separation of powers, which has meant separating Congress from its constitutional powers and handing them over to the “unitary presidency,” would alarm these Senators. (Didn’t James Madison believe that Congress would jealously guard its authority vis-à-vis any new emergence of a modern King Continue Reading »

So, as a break from James Baldwin, I’m riffing through my notes on the 14 January The New Yorker. First up is the lead piece in that issues The Talk Of The Town where Margret Talbot explains why House Democrats should not react to our President but rather, writing in The House Democrats’ Best Path Forward, Talbot suggests that:

…the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder.

I agree. Moving on to ancient Greek, Mary Norris—heralded as The Comma Queen—has a piece, Greek To Me, on the pleasures of a different alphabet. My knowledge of the Greek alphabet is restricted to a bit of physics, maths and Greek life on campus. I enjoyed all of Norris’ deep dive, but this bit of editing trivia caught my attention as a writer.

In the early eighties, when I was working as a sort of scribe in the collating department of The New Yorker, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, would sometimes pencil an X with a circle around it in the margin of a galley proof to indicate a query that he wanted us to carry over to the next version of the piece. The query might be important, but he did not yet have enough information to address it. We scribes would circle it in blue and copy it onto the next day’s proof, to remind Mr. Shawn to ask the author about it. If the collator put the query directly into the piece, or if the editor tried to make a fix without being sure what the author meant, there was a danger of corrupting the text.

More than a little inside baseball I admit, but I still smiled. Moving on, Norris introduced me to the part of speech I had never hear of: The Particle. She writes:

It was enthralling to see the meaning emerge, to observe the subtle uses of tense and aspect and mood, and feel the force of the small, indefinable, not strictly necessary words that linguists dryly call “function words” and which are known in Greek grammar as particles.

Particles help make a language a language. They give it currency and connect you to the person you’re speaking with. English is loaded with particles, words and expressions that float up constantly in speech: like, totally, so, you know, O.K., really, actually, honestly, literally, in fact, at least, I mean, quite, of course, after all, hey, sure enough . . . know what I mean? Just sayin’. Some people deplore the extra words as loose and repetitive, and complain that kids today are lazy and inarticulate and are destroying the beauty of the language. But we have relied on such little words since antiquity. Reading Plato’s Apology in my second semester of Elementary Greek, I was amazed at how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates’ speech—they act like nudges, pokes, facial expressions.

I wrote my own bit of marginalia here: Particles are the Emojis of Ancient Greece.

Have you ever noticed that when you learn a new word that you seem to notice it used again and again? I have. Such is the case with Orangery. I first came across the word earlier this week in reading David Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. I next came across the word in Jake Halpern’s The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist where he writes:

One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. It was the Musée de l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

I do love how that works. Later in the piece—which was also featured on The New Yorker Radio Hour—Halpern inserts this little factoid:

Tomic, who was sentenced to eight years, was far more collected as he left the courtroom. Many observers felt certain that he knew exactly where the paintings were. Franck Johannès, of Le Monde, told me, “Legally, nothing can be done, even if Tomic knows the truth. It is up to the prosecution to prove that he lied. In France, one has the right to lie at one’s trial. There is no offense of perjury.” [emphasis mine, JH]

In the Trump Era I think that Elisabeth Zerofsky’s Viktor Orbán’s Far-Right Vision for Europe is a must read. (There are many reason for Americans to read her piece, not the least of which is that Steve Bannon plays a role in the narrative.) Then there’s George Soros.

Under Kádár, Bibó was a place where dissenting ideas were somewhat protected. One source of its freedom was the support of an unlikely figure: George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier, who, in 1984, set up a foundation to promote democratic activity in Hungary. Soros had made a fortune at his hedge fund, Quantum, by predicting systemic instabilities, and he thought that Hungary’s regime was near collapse. As Soros told The New Yorker in 1995, the ideas of what he called the “open society” were meant to counter both Communist dictatorship and the nationalism that he feared would reappear after Communism fell.

Soros visited [Bibó István College, a school in Budapest that opened in 1983] in 1985. Gábor Fodor, Orbán’s roommate at Bibó, recalled that Soros said, “This is what I want to support. They have the best upcoming young generation. They are very clever, they are full of energy, they want change.” Fodor, Orbán, and some of their friends founded the Alliance of Young Democrats, or Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, the reformist youth organization that became Fidesz.

You’ll have to read the whole piece to understand who all the players are, but this bit made me spew my coffee:

Scheppele has shown how Fidesz gerrymandered districts and introduced election laws that distorted proportional representation. In 2014, the Party received fewer votes than it had in 2002 and 2006, when it lost elections, but it ended up with a supermajority in parliament. Scheppele used the term “constitutional coup” to describe Orbán’s regime. “It’s absolutely ingenious,” she said.

Do you see where this is going? No? Then consider this:

Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party, and eighty per cent of Hungarians who listen to the radio or watch television hear only news that comes from the government. When investigative journalists in Hungary unearthed the Matolcsy scandal, most Hungarians never heard anything about it.

Just how familiar are you with Sinclair? Or, for that matter Paul Joseph Goebbels? He couldn’t have written a better soundbite for Orbán than this:

Members of Fidesz categorically deny that their campaign against Soros is anti-Semitic. But, Orbán said, “we must fight against an opponent who is different from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view. They do not fight directly, but by stealth. They are not honorable, but unprincipled. They are not national, but international. They do not believe in work, but speculate with money. They have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.”

And then there’s this explanation that would warm the heart of our vice president and his homophobic spouse:

Orbán offered a critique of Western liberalism: he believed that the idea that one could do whatever one wanted as long as it didn’t infringe on the freedoms of others had resulted not in justice but in the strong dominating the weak. “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized,” he said. “And so, in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

Four years later, Orbán had refined his idea. “There is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy,” he said at this summer’s gathering. “And we must show that the liberal élite can be replaced with a Christian-democratic élite.” Orbán offered some clarification. “Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”

And the only way to fight liberal democracy and an international problem is, of course, build a wall fence.

One morning, I took a train south across the flat countryside to Szeged, a university town of cheerful Habsburg architecture. Following the Treaty of Trianon, which, after the First World War, divided up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Szeged found itself at the intersection of Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. Now the town center is about twenty minutes from the thirteen-foot-tall electric razor-wire fence that runs along the Hungarian border with Serbia. The fence, which is monitored by drones and by soldiers, is equipped with heat sensors and loudspeakers that issue grave warnings in English, Arabic, and Farsi that attempting to cross the border is a crime. [Emphasis mine.]

That’s a lot. Tomorrow I’ll highlight the late Amos Oz’s All Rivers and Jerome Groopman’s critic of Nine Pints by Rose George.

Bonus No. 1: The New Yorker Radio Hour is now in my weekly rotation. (You can also catch the show on WCPN at 10 a.m. on Saturdays.)

So, yesterday I decided to split this post about James Baldwin’s 1984 The Paris Review interview for The Art Of Fiction No. 78. There is so much there and I felt that a week might go by before I felt ready to hit the publish button. I, that is Elgrably, loops back to the idea of when does a writer know that the work is right? Elgrably asks:

ELGRABLY: When do you know something is the way you want it?

BALDWIN: I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it. In fact, the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country. I always knew that Rufus had to commit suicide very early on, because that was the key to the book. But I kept putting it off. It had to do, of course, with reliving the suicide of my friend who jumped off the bridge. Also, it was very dangerous to do from the technical point of view because this central character dies in the first hundred pages, with a couple of hundred pages to go. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light on Ida. You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death—the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.

ELGRABLY: Is that the way a book starts for you, though? Something like that?

BALDWIN: Probably that way for everybody: something that irritates you and won’t let you go. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that.

ELGRABLY: Does it purge you in any way?

BALDWIN: I’m not so sure about that. For me it’s like a journey, and the only thing you know is that if when the book is over, you are prepared to continue—you haven’t cheated.

ELGRABLY: What would cheating be?

ELGRABLY: Avoiding. Lying.

I think a lot of writers cheat today, specially script writers. They’re under pressure and, fuck, it’s not Shakespeare, so get the pages done, collect your pay and dive into the next episode or feature. I think that is true for even the best shows. Rarely do I see a movie or a television series that doesn’t have plot holes that can swallow a Winnebago. I can count on one hand the shows where the writing was so tight that I didn’t edit as I was watching. (That doesn’t mean that the scripts were perfect. No writing is ever perfect. But the writing was so good as to make any slips forgivable, even forgettable. Elgrably continues, making the shift as Baldwin jumps to nonfiction, to essays:

ELGRABLY: So there is a compulsion to get it out?

BALDWIN: Oh yes, to get it out and get it right. The word I’m using is compulsion. And it is true of the essay as well.

ELGRABLY: But the essay is a little bit simpler, isn’t it, because you’re angry about something which you can put your finger on . . .

BALDWIN: An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something. In a novel or a play you’re trying to show them something. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same.

I’m struggling just now trying to think of writers who write both fiction and essays and manage, somehow, to not have their fiction read like an essay and their essays not read like a novel. As I immerse myself in Baldwin, this is one of the aspects of him as a writer that I want to explore. Elgrably next asks about minor characters.

ELGRABLY: It’s frequently been noted that you are a master of minor characters. How do you respond to that?

BALDWIN: Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is you’re trying to convey. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom which the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight, or intensity.

ELGRABLY: You mean to say their actions are less accountable?

BALDWIN: Oh no, if you fuck up a minor character you fuck up a major one. They are more a part of the decor—a kind of Greek chorus. They carry the tension in a much more explicit way than the majors.

Ah, once again The Russians! If I were to go back through my notes from The Art Of Fiction pieces I’ve read over the years I think I would that nearly all, if not all, of the writers interviewed at some point mention The Russians. I haven’t taken a survey, but in my memory Fyodor Dostoyevsky is the most often mentioned.

In writing minor characters the struggle, for me, is to not make them plot devices. While I don’t dive as deeply into their history, motivations, character as deeply as I do with major characters, I’ve found that once a minor character walks onto my stage, I am drawn to know more about them than I will ever explicitly reveal on the page.

Elgrably next question that grabbed my attention is one that is also common in these interviews, but remains a vital point of inquiry: What does the writer read?

ELGRABLY: I’m going to presage my own question. Most of the novelists I’ve spoken to claim they read exceedingly fewer contemporary novels, but find themselves drawn to plays, history, memoirs, biographies, and poetry. I believe this is true for you as well.

BALDWIN: In my case it is due to the fact that I’m always doing some kind of research. And yes, I read many plays and a lot of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship. You are fascinated, I am fascinated by a certain optic—a process of seeing things. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, and others who are quite far removed from one’s ostensible daily concerns, or obligations. They are freer, for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. They may also be a source of strength. Contemporary novels are part of a universe in which you have a certain role and a certain responsibility. And, of course, an unavoidable curiosity.

Elgrapbly waits a measure, appears to go down another path, but then circles back to Baldwin’s mention of Emily Dickinson:

ELGRABLY: What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?

BALDWIN: Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She isn’t solemn. If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous. That is the turn of the screw. That solitude is practically insurmountable. Years ago I thought to be famous would be a kind of ten-day wonder,and then I could go right back to life as usual. But people treat you differently before you realize it. You see it in the wonder and the worry of your intimates. On the other side of that is a great responsibility.

Baldwin’s response to this next question might seem to a non-writer (or a new writer) to be self-effacing, but I found his words to be spot on.

ELGRABLY: As a writer, are there any particular battles you feel you’ve won?

BALDWIN: The battle of becoming a writer at all! “I’m going to be a great writer when I grow up,” I used to tell my mother when I was a little boy. And I’m still going to be a great writer when I grow up.

ELGRABLY: What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?

BALDWIN: Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

ELGRABLY: Can you discern talent in someone?

BALDWIN: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

ELGRABLY: Would you suggest that a young writer from a minority consecrate himself to that minority, or is his first obligation his own self-realization as a writer?

BALDWIN: Your self and your people are indistinguishable from each other, really, in spite of the quarrels you may have, and your people are all people.

This question caught me by surprise and I was deeply interested—given my current project, in Baldwin’s response.

ELGRABLY: Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly?

BALDWIN: Yes, though I have no overwhelming evidence in hand. But I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.

This is how Elgrably chose to end piece:

ELGRABLY: How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?

BALDWIN: I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

We do what we do and, if we’re very, very lucky, someone notices.

The work is, always and forever, The Work.

At the risk of turning Have Coffee Will Write into Have James Baldwin Will Write I decided to go back and see what Baldwin might have had to say in The Paris Review. Jordan Elgrably traveled to Paris and Baldwin’s poutres-and-stone villa in St. Paul de Vence for The Art Of Fiction No. 78, which was published in the Spring, 1984, issue of the quarterly.

From the beginning—Issue 1, 1953, with E.M. Forster, the Art of Fiction has mostly stayed true to the implied mission: to talk with an author about how they write, but there is always a bit of personal and professional discussion that, for me, while interesting, is not what I’m reading for. In Baldwin’s case there is also the political and the historical which I was intensely fascinated by and which anyone should read, but that is for another post. So, with that caveat, here is what piqued my attention in the dialogue between Baldwin and Elgrably.

ELGRABLY: Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?

BALDWIN: No, you can’t have that.

ELGRABLY: So it’s quite unlike preaching?

BALDWIN: Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

ELGRABLY: Is that one of the reasons you decided to be a writer—to find out about yourself?

BALDWIN: I’m not sure I decided. It was that or nothing, since in my own mind I was the father of my family. That’s not quite the way they saw it, but still I was the oldest brother, and I took it very seriously, I had to set an example. I couldn’t allow anything to happen to me because what then would happen to them? I could have become a junkie. On the roads I traveled and the streets I ran, anything could have happened to a boy like me—in New York. Sleeping on rooftops and in the subways. Until this day I’m terrified of the public toilet. In any case… my father died, and I sat down and figured out what I had to do.

Repeatedly in these Art Of Fiction interviews (and elsewhere when I read writers’ thoughts) I see this trying to find out what you don’t know meme, which runs counter to the advice given by so many to neophytes directing them to write what you know. Perhaps writing what you know is akin to learning your scales before tackling The Moonlight Sonata, but I think writers should be honest that writing what you know will only take the newbie a few steps, perhaps as far as the first turning, on their journey to becoming a writer.

ELGRABLY: If you felt that it was a white man’s world, what made you think that there was any point in writing? And why is writing a white man’s world?

BALDWIN: Because they own the business. Well, in retrospect, what it came down to was that I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black. It was beneath me to blame anybody for what happened to me. What happened to me was my responsibility. I didn’t want any pity. “Leave me alone, I’ll figure it out.” I was very wounded and I was very dangerous because you become what you hate. It’s what happened to my father and I didn’t want it to happen to me. His hatred was suppressed and turned against himself. He couldn’t let it out—he could only let it out in the house with rage, and I found it happening to myself as well. And after my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So—Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

Having the courage—or the ignorance—to make such a leap (one I was never able to bring myself to do) is stunning. That, perhaps, may be one of the hallmarks of greatness.

Elgrably circles back to where the words comes from and Baldwin clarifies the links between life experiences and the written word.

ELGRABLY: Wasn’t it after your first two novels, which were in many ways extremely personal, that you introduced more of the political and sociological counterpoint (evident in your essays) into Another Country?

BALDWIN: From my point of view it does not quite work that way, making attempts to be merely personal or to bring in a larger scope. No one knows how he writes his book. Go Tell It on the Mountain was about my relationship to my father and to the church, which is the same thing really. It was an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us, what had happened to me—to John—and how we were to move from one place to another. Of course it seems rather personal, but the book is not about John, the book is not about me.

ELGRABLY: “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience,” you’ve said.

BALDWIN: Yes, and yet one’s own experience is not necessarily one’s twenty-four-hour reality. Everything happens to you, which is what Whitman means when he says in his poem “Heroes,” “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” It depends on what you mean by experience.

Experience is the only filter we have. To discover what we wish to know we must peer down the tunnel of what we believe we do know, and sometimes the view is blocked and we must deal with what we have. Baldwin touches on that when talks about finishing a work.

ELGRABLY: Are you, or do you remain, very close to your characters?

BALDWIN: I don’t know if I feel close to them, now. After a time you find, however, that your characters are lost to you, making it quite impossible for you to judge them. When you’ve finished a novel it means, “The train stops here, you have to get off here.” You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get. I’ve always felt that when a book ended there was something I didn’t see, and usually when I remark the discovery it’s too late to do anything about it.

ELGRABLY: This occurs once it has already been published?

BALDWIN: No, no, it happens when you are right here at the table. The publication date is something else again. It’s out of your hands, then. What happens here is that you realize if you try to redo something, you may wreck everything else. But, if a book has brought you from one place to another, so that you see something you didn’t see before, you’ve arrived at another point. This then is one’s consolation, and you know that you must now proceed elsewhere.

I think this is a problem for artists—knowing when to stop. I remember reading about Leonardo da Vinci’s obsession with La Gioconda (what we call The Mona Lisa). He carried the painting with him for more than 20 years, adding and subtracting from the work between other projects. (Or, perhaps, the other way round.) I also think that writers’ who come from journalism, where deadlines count, have an advantage. We know that a piece is not perfect, is not done, but that the words are as done as they are ever going to be. Having your editor rip the page from your typewriter can be an amazingly clarifying experience.

This post is a perfect example of that. I have been working on it for four days now and I’m only about halfway through Baldwin’s interview. So, time to rip the paper out of the platen and move on. More tomorrow.

Bonus No. 1: In Episode Three of The Paris Review Podcast—beginning at timemark 4:56—LeVar Burton, reading as James Baldwin, recreates portions of the 1984 interview.

Bonus No. 2: You can find all of James Baldwin’s writings in his bibliography.

James Baldwin is boring into my brain and I don’t know why. This is more than just you notice what you pay attention to. Baldwin first appeared on Have Coffee Will Write back in 2007 when I posted this quote: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…

Baldwin got nods here from Elmore Leonard in 2010, David Bowie in 2013, Toni Morrison in 2015, Matt Taibbi in 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2017; drumbeats, the bird pecking at the window, telling me to wake up, pay attention.

Then, that the end of last year, the message got really, really loud with posts on 181114, 181120 (where I wrote in a footnote: So many books, so little time, but I do need to read Baldwin.) and 181213 followed by my reading of Letter from a Region in My Mind. Finally I came to last week where I wrote about Baldwin’s 1962 essay: As Much Truth As One Can Bear where I added a bonus link to Coates’, Is James Baldwin America’s Greatest Essayist?

In 2013, Coates began:

I finished The Fire Next Time on a plane to Greenville, South Carolina. I am here to give a talk tonight about the legacy of the Civil War. I probably should not have read Baldwin before coming into the backyard of John Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I’m all on fire and resolved to bring some of that fire forth tonight. I have come to places like this before. I have never shrunk from speaking my piece, but I dislike making people directly uncomfortable and have a tendency in person to complicate things that I know are not complicated at all. I am resolving to move away from that. Manners have their place. I should not conflate them with cowardice.

I want to thank everyone who pointed me toward how much Baldwin really does embrace love. I am remembering what I, myself, loved about him as a young man. I came to college a total Malcolmite. I kind of still am. But Baldwin was among a set of influences that talked me out of my younger self. He is tough to pin down, because he understands the anger in black people, he feels it himself, and fears it. There is something of the atheist about him, though he does not directly say it. His encounters with racism leave him on the edge of violence and hatred, but The Fire Next Time is all about why one should walk back, all about why you should never judge yourself by the standards of the owner of the boot presently on your neck.

That is how Baldwin got me. He revealed to me that black nationalism is, itself, a kind of philosophical integration. If you listen to any of Malcolm’s speeches they sound like they are straight out of the Enlightenment, and Malcolm himself uses the American revolution and the nationalism of whites around the globe as a model. Baldwin’s reply is not to interrogate black nationalism in isolation, but to interrogate nationalism—and the nation—itself. He hates the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of white liberals and though he loves hard, though he deeply understands that race is a creation, he is never blinded by love:

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

So much and he’s only some 800 words into the piece.

Morrison forevermore rightly bound Coates and Baldwin together in 2015. Go. Read the rest of Coates’ article and then, as I’m doing, pick one of Baldwin’s books—I’m starting with The Fire Next Time—and keep on reading.

Bonus: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Barry Jenkins talk James Baldwin.

A year ago I wrote five posts—180107, 18011, 180127, 180211 and 180219—about the prose stylings and philosophies of James Lee Burke as found in his novel Robicheaux: A Novel. Dave Robicheaux is back in Burke’s latest: The New Iberia Blues and he takes his skills and thoughts up a notch.

This first bit reminded me of a joke my father told me:

What’s the difference between a redneck and a good ol’ boy? On Sundays, a redneck drives around in his pickup, drinking longnecks and tossing the empties out the window. A good ol’ boy, now, drives around in his pickup drinking longnecks and drops the empties in a litter bag.

My father, being an ‘Eer, knew plenty of both types. He had one friend, a real good ol’ boy, who was as racist and misogynist as they came, but who would stop on a dark country road to help a motorist in distress with all the care and kindness you can imagine, regardless of who that person was or what group might claim them.

These are the subtleties that too many in politics dismiss and doing so had a profound effect in 2016. An important lesson I learned from a wise school psychologist was that if you know one person in Category X, then you know one person in that category. With humans, extrapolation is seldom safe.

With that caveat, meet Alex Devereaux:

Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash, you will not understand the following: They are a genetically produced breed whose commonality is a state of mind and not related to the social class to which they belong. Economics has nothing to do with the origins of their behavior. You cannot change them. They glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz. That’s not hyperbole. When I looked in Axel’s eyes, I knew my slap across his face had been a slap across his soul and that one day I would pay for it. p. 78

I’d give you 10-1 that Mr. Devereaux is eagerly anticipating his wall.

This next bit deserves to be a meme.

There are lessons you learn in the military or jail or any other institutional situation where survival is dependent on your ability to think more clearly than your enemies or the people around you. Here are a few admonitions from the bottom of the food chain. They can be interpreted literally or metaphorically, depending upon the situation.

1) Don’t silhouette on a hill.

2) Get rid of your jewelry, particularly civilian junk. Ostentation can put you in a box.

3) Don’t make enemies with anyone in records.

4) Don’t threaten anyone who knows your location when you don’t know his.

5) Never piss off the people who prepare or serve your food.

6) Be aware that secretaries and clerks run the world and own rubber stamps that can turn your life into a broken pay toilet.

7) Never sass a hack or a drill sergeant or any dull-witted white Southerner who has authority over others.

8) Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives the bad guys up the wall.

9) Get the right people on your side. Who would you rather have covering your back in a back-alley brawl, an academic liberal or a hobnailed redneck?

10) Never buy into the acronym FEAR (fuck everything and run). Swallow your blood and don’t let other know you’re hurt. If that doesn’t work, spit it in their faces.

11) Even in the most desperate of situations, stay away from the Herd. Situating yourself between loud oinking sounds and the trough is a surefire way to get trampled to death.

12) Burn this list before anyone catches you with it. P. 171-2

As I read Dave’s admonitions, my mind went back a couple of days to the Friar Richard Rohr (via Oliver Burkeman) and Living in Deep Time.

What Burke (through Dave) is talking about here is his understanding of the rules for being a Man. Dave Robicheaux is a former U.S. Army officer who served in Vietnam where he learned, was initiated into, I’m sure, many of his 12 points. Rohr, as best as I can tell, did not share those experience, nor did he stack time, but he understands from his 14 years as a prison chaplain, the importance of mature men initiating young men and what happens when they not.

In his interview with Krista Tippett, Rohr talks about what he calls father hunger, and the great damage done when no initiation takes place.

Tippett: You used the language of “father hunger.”

Rohr: Yeah, father hunger. It’s driving so many things in our culture, even this whole corporate world of the younger male’s need to please the big daddy and get his pat on the back or his promotion.

Tippett: …in some place you describe someone speaking to you about this father hunger and kind of in the middle of their life and realizing, calling it, saying they realized it was a chasm, a canyon, the emptiness and pain left of a relationship with the father that wasn’t there. And the mystery that we can get very old, and that can still be with us. That this is not something that you just outgrow.

Rohr: Yeah, I’ve had men older than me weep with me, still wanting a daddy, because they never had a father figure. It’s heartbreaking, really.

Tippett: You say something that I just want to understand, where you say that “when positive masculine energy is not modeled from father to son, it creates a vacuum in the souls of men, and into that vacuum demons pour.” And you say among other things, they seem to lose the ability to know how to read situations and people correctly. Why is that? Obviously, that can be crippling professionally, personally, but why—what is that connection?

Rohr: Here’s the answer that comes to mind now. I don’t know if it’s the best one. But young men who haven’t been validated by an older male—because we look to our same-sex parent for validation—and when dad doesn’t tell me I’m a man or a good man or acceptable son, I think your first 30 years of life are so frantic, you don’t have time to read inner emotions. Your emotional life—there’s no subtlety to it, there’s no nuance, there’s no freedom, there’s no grace, there’s no time.

I often see it in airports. In 46 years, I was on the road, and you’d see these people rushing through airports, neither looking to right or left, like a deer caught in the headlights. When you’re a deer caught in the headlights, trying to survive, I don’t think you develop an inner world. Do you understand? It’s just the whole life is externalized, and the soul is not born. And that’s why, again, suffering for so many becomes the only path because it’s the only thing strong enough to lead you into the world of grief, for example, or sadness or pain. And those tend to be the holes in the soul that awaken the inner world.

And so an important part of every initiation rite was grief work, letting men get in touch with their unfinished hurt and begin to talk about it with other men. That’s when the floodgates opened, and all of this success that they shined with externally they finally could admit was all a charade. Everything changed after that.

Listening to Rohr, I began to think back to a conversation I had with a friend maybe five years ago or so about the concept of failure to launch. Probably 75 percent of my students are young men who are struggling academically, who have been suspended or expelled (most typically for fighting) and a few who are on parole. I’ve made a difference with a few—and have the thank you cards to remind me—but not enough. When I think of retirement I think of the ones I won’t have a chance with. That’s part of what keeps me going.

Blame the Benedictines. At least that’s the case that Jeremy Rifkin made in his 1989 book Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. Before the Benedictines neatly divided the day into eight prayer periods: Matins or Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline all we had to mark our days was sunrise, noon and sunset.

The Benedictines got all anal and we began our descent to clocks, chronometers, time zones digital watches and nanoseconds.

There is another way. A natural way. A way of returning to sunrise, noon and sunset. A way for feeling the rhythm of moon, sun and stars. A way of tracking phases of our moon. A way of dividing our annual circuit around the sun beginning with Winter Solstice, passing through Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox and inevitably back to Winter Solstice.

Linda Geddes, writing in her long read:Why we should be watching the sun, not the clock, for The Guardian, begins to make her case this way:

The tourism brochure for the German spa town of Bad Kissingen features a photograph of a young woman on its cover. Dressed in white shorts and a pink vest, the woman is perched peacefully on a sunny rock overlooking a river, reading a handwritten journal. Emblazoned on the top left of the page is the slogan Entdecke die Zeit–Discover Time.

Not a time to discover, but rather to literally discover time. What a lovely thought.

Located in the sparsely populated region of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Bad Kissingen was once a fashionable resort for the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie. They came for rest and relaxation; soaking up the classical architecture and fragrant rose gardens, and taking the mineral-rich waters, which were reputed to cure all manner of ills. Today, Bad Kissingen has rebranded itself as the world’s first ChronoCity–a place where internal time is as important as external time, and sleep is sacrosanct.

Most of us are not free to choose our work or school hours; we have little control over the lighting in our public spaces and external environment; and we are even forced to reprogramme our internal clock twice a year because of daylight saving time. The question that the idea of the “ChronoCity” raises is what changes could society make to better accommodate our body clocks?

I want to live there. I think that is a bit of what Henry David Thoreau lived during his two years on the shore of Walden Pond.

Becoming a ChronoCity makes a lot more sense for Cleveland than nattering on about becoming the Blockchain Capital.

Take your time. Read the rest. Set your own pace. Hear your own drummer.

President Donald John Trump actually tied a real record today and appears to be ready to coasting past that record and setting a real one for himself, his administration and the United States of America. Today we entered Day 21 of the government shut down, matching the record set during President William Jefferson Clinton’s first term in office.

George Packer, writing in The Suicide of a Great Democracy for The Atlantic, looks at the shutdown through the lens of our 16th president. Packer ledes:

A constant theme runs throughout Lincoln’s writings, from his years as a young Illinois politician to the last great speeches of his life: the supreme value of self-government. Everything depended on this idea, “our ancient faith,” which itself was “absolutely and eternally right.” But its endurance was never guaranteed. From the start of his career, Lincoln foresaw how American democracy might end—not through foreign conquest, but by our own fading attachment to its institutions. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in 1838. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

President Abraham Lincoln’s central message was that we can only defeat ourselves, no power from the outside can lay us low. Packer continues:

During the Civil War, the government never shut down—not even when the capital was threatened by Confederate troops. A shutdown would have undermined the foundation of Lincoln’s cause, which was the ability of free people to rule themselves. The paralysis and dysfunction would have told the world that the government he led was no longer fully devoted to the cause for which other Americans had given the last full measure of devotion. A shutdown would have looked like the beginning of the end that Lincoln always knew was possible.

As a nation we are exactly where Trump wants us. We are all contestants on his greatest reality show, all eyes focused on the man behind the desk, waiting for his pronouncements. Packer concludes:

It makes sense that Donald Trump is indifferent to the paralysis of the government he leads, and that he welcomes a shutdown of months or even years. If shutdowns become routine, if politicians view the government in which they serve as a disposable tool, if we’re no longer capable of governing ourselves, this only reflects Trump’s contemptuous attitude toward democracy itself. Shuttered museums, federal workers who can’t pay their bills, national parks with stinking toilets: This is what Trump thinks of American republicanism. This is what the suicide of a great democracy looks like.

President Trump isn’t suicidal. He believes, correctly in my assessment, that his wealth will shield him from the harsh realities of a government shutdown in much the same way that his empire will allow him, and his family, to weather the ravishes of global warming as the rising Atlantic sucks Mar-a-Lago under the waves. (You know he has the best insurance policy.)

What is the simplest, most basic image that everyone has of the fall of the Roman empire? Nero playing his lyre as Rome burned. Few people can tell you anything else about the man born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus or even have any idea of when he lived (37-68 CE), but his name is second only to that of Julius Caesar our memory.

Frankly America, our president doesn’t give a damn for anyone or anything except himself. He will be happy tweet while America burns.

There is no greater stain on our nation’s character than the 87 years of slavery institutionalized in our Constitution and the century of Jim Crow laws passed following the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Five years of Black Lives Matter remind us that, to quote William Faulkner, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

While the Confederate States of America certainly seceded from the United States of America—an act not prohibited by our constitution—to preserve their slaves and their wealth, the United States did not, regardless of what you learned in American History class, go to war to end slavery. The U.S. went to war to guarantee that the cotton would continue to flow to the northern textile mill. The industrial north could not allow the cotton to go to competitors in England. (A sidenote to the story is that Americans had used industrial espionage to steal British technology to build those New England mills.)

No clearer indication that slavery was never the issue for the North can be found by looking at recruiting posters and editorials at the time encouraging the enlistment of individuals and the forming of companies and regiments. Men were encouraged to enlist to fight to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.

I first began to understand this as an undergraduate at Ohio University during President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s first administration when I was introduced to an economic analysis of the American Civil War in Karl Marx And The Civil War edited by. (Tim Russo recently recommended a version of the book edited by Andrew Zimmerman.)

All of this introduction to The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done from On The Media. (The show first aired on 1 June 2018, but was repeated in an encore broadcast—where I heard it—on 28 December.)

On The Media teased the show this way:

After World War II, Germany and the Allied powers took pains to make sure that its citizens would never forget the country’s dark history. But in America, much of our past remains hidden or rewritten. This week, Brooke visits Montgomery, Alabama, home to The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new museum and memorial created by the Equal Justice Initiative that aim to bring America’s history of segregation and racial terror to the forefront. [In Part 1.] Brooke talks to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson about what inspired him to create The Legacy Museum and memorial and to historian Sir Richard Evans about the denazification process in Germany after World War II. [In Part 2.] Brooke visits The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. [In Part 3.] Brooke speaks again with Bryan Stevenson about his own history and America’s ongoing struggle to confront our racist past and present.

As we peer into 2019 and the challenges we face as a nation, I can’t think of a better introduction to what lies ahead.

Bonus No. 1: Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations.
Bonus No. 2: Listen (via Oliver Burkeman) to Richard Rohr, Living in Deep Time.

I know that Ralph Nader can have a bit of a downer reputation when the topic of discussion involves corporations and the people who guide then every day, but occasionally he will point out people and organizations that show vision. In Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher–One of a Kind!, he honors one such individual. Nader writes:

When Herb Kelleher, the joyous, fun-loving Founder and retired CEO of Southwest Airlines soared past permissible flight levels for passenger aircraft on his way to heaven last week, the accolades in the exuberant obituaries were also sky-high.

Listen to former American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall: “He was a man of great imagination. He was a man of diligence. He paid careful attention to the details. And he was a man of integrity. I think we will look back on Herb Kelleher as an example of the kind of people who ought to be our leaders.”

Herb (everyone called him Herb), was much more than a super-successful creator of a low-fare, no-frills, high-pay, unionized, constantly profitable airline (since 1973) that never laid off any workers, with consistently high customer-approval ratings, and the most solid financial stability in a boom-bust, managed industry. In overturning the stagnant, brusque ways of the industry, he challenged his industry, with four Boeing 737s in 1971 flying between Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston, and overcame a cartel-like industry. After beating back numerous lawsuits by other airlines trying to stop his Continue Reading »

In the mid-90’s I helped to launch Crain Communication’s Waste News. In the same Akron office was the staff of Plastics News. When that publication launched in 1989, it used the famous clip from the 1967 film, The Graduate, where Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) gives Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) a bit of career advice encapsulated in a single word: Plastics

While that might have worked out well for Ben, more than 50 years later, plastics have not worked out all that well for Earth for two reasons: first, plastics are made from fossil fuels, the central culprit in global warming and climate change; and second, plastic, while technically recyclable, present a terrific load on our waste disposal capabilities.

The revelation that Texas-sized islands of plastic have formed in our oceans has heightened awareness, but industry, with billions of dollars invested in the continued production, is doing little of real significance to provide meaningful solutions.

Nosheen Iqbal, writing in Life without plastic: pioneer families show how it’s done, for The Observer, how only consumer pressure has any hope of forcing industry to change. She ledes:

Bettina Maidment hasn’t emptied the kitchen bin since the beginning of November. The time before that was in August. “You can reduce your rubbish a lot,” she insists, pointing to her recycling and food compost bins. “I have two kids and they’re pretty anti-plastic–I am their mother after all–but it is do-able.”

Maidment, 38, is the founder of Plastic Free Hackney, a campaign to rid the east London borough of single-use plastic and has been serious about committing her family to plastic-free, zero-waste living for two years now. First to go was milk cartons. “That was an easy switch, we got a milkman.”

Starting from my 10 years in scouting—bobcat to eagle—I’ve thought of myself as an environmentalist on many levels, but I didn’t really get deeply involved with solid-waste and recycling issues until I became an inaugural citizen member of Cleveland Heights’ plan to roll out a curbside recycling plan in the late ’80s. That gig led me to a post as editor of Recycling Today’s Municipal Edition (and later executive editor of GIE’s Recycling Media Group) and finally to senior editor at Waste News.

From that I experience I learned that recycling is a big part of the problem. Not that recycling is bad. It isn’t. But most people—and certainly most manufacturers—want us to focus on the third arrow, recycle, in the chasing-arrows symbol and ignore the first, and far more important, two: reduce and reuse. They want us to ignore the first two because they can’t make money, in fact they lose money, when we don’t.

Beginning with the new year (but not as a resolution) I began sorting out all the plastics that North Royalton does not take as recyclable into a separate bin. Yesterday when I took out the trash, there was a single, half-filled, 13-gallon bag of garbage and my recycling bin was only about 1/4 full. On a typical week, there are four or five bags of garbage. Not including all non-recyclable plastics: polyvinyl chloride, No. 3; low-density polyethylene, No. 4 (my single largest category); polypropylene, No. 5; polystyrene, No. 6; and all-the-other stuff, No. 7, made the difference. Clearly I’ve sucked of late at reducing.

Iqbal continues:

As public anger grows over the environmental impact of single-use plastic, trying to live plastic-free and more sustainably has become a mainstream concept. “There was a huge uptick in the conversation after Blue Planet about how to reduce plastic use and it remains, by quite a margin, the single biggest topic area people call us for,” says Julian Kirby, lead campaigner on plastics at Friends of the Earth. “In my experience, the amount of public concern for this environmental issue is unprecedented,” he says. “It’s been phenomenal.”

Maidment admits that her gradual awareness of the amount of plastic and litter in the street has become an obsession. Now, everything that can be is reused, recycled, bought on eBay or sourced from a charity shop. The family have had their second “buy nothing new” Christmas. Maidment’s husband works as an engineer in sustainable design but she didn’t tell him about her project at the beginning.

“My interest was piqued online and I saw how other people were doing it and slowly started reducing my waste.” She opened an Instagram account to document the process of going plastic-free. “It was very much a secret at first–I thought people would think I was mad–but I couldn’t reconcile the idea that so much of what we buy is designed to be thrown away. It’s insanity.”

Yes it is, but it’s actually worse: it’s suicidal it’s planetcidal.

Bonus No. 1: Watch Katharine Hayhoe’s Global Weirding videos.

I found James Baldwin’s 14 January 1962 New York Times essay—bearing the kicker To Speak Out About The World As It Is, Says James Baldwin, Is The Writer’s Job—via a piece in The New Yorker. I am woefully ignorant of the vast majority of Baldwin’s works, but, as I tell my students, ignorance is easily correct through learning.He may be, see below, our greatest essayist.

Baldwin, in As Much Truth As One Can Bear, presents a path for his contemporaries in American letters. He writes:

Hindsight allows us to say that this boyish and romantic and inflated book [For Whom The Bell Tolls] marks Hemingway’s abdication from the effort to understand the many-sided evil that is in the world. This is exactly the same thing as saying that he somehow gave up the effort to become a great novelist.

I myself believe that this is the effort every novelist must make, in spite of the fact that the odds are ludicrously against him, and that he can never, after all, know. In my mind, the effort to become a great novelist simply involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more. It is an effort which, by its very nature—remembering that men write the books, that time passes and energy flags, and safety beckons—is obviously doomed to failure. “Success” is an American word which cannot conceivably, unless it is defined in an extremely severe, ironical, and painful way, have any place in the vocabulary of any artist.

There is much more in the essay, but these passages leapt out at me:

The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking: How is America to become a nation?

snip

The younger American writers, then, to whom we shall, one day, be most indebted—and I shall name no names, make no prophecies—are precisely those writers who are compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are.

snip

The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation—we will never establish human communities—until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.

snip

Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.

snip

Obviously, one must dismiss any hopes one may ever have had of winning a popularity contest. And one must take upon oneself the right to be entirely wrong—and accept penalties, for penalties there will certainly be, even here.

“We work in the dark,” said Henry James, “we do what we can, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

And finally, this conclusion:

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

As a writer, I ponder how what Baldwin wrote before my 6th year applies to me in my 63rd.

Bonus No. 1: How James Baldwin’s Writings About Love Evolved. and
Bonus No. 2: Is James Baldwin America’s Greatest Essayist?

America, for reasons we do not need to discuss, did not have a good year in 2018. We’ve had far worse, of course, but we lived through this one and, well, this was personal, on our watch. We could take Bluto’s advice, but there is also the need cocoon a bit. To seek a little poor little bunny comfort. Comfort food will make us fatter, but how about comfort culture?

Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon invited Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson, the hosts of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour to talk about how we find our comfort culture. Simon begins:

SIMON: When I think of comfort food, I think of guacamole or cheesecake – not and – or cheesecake. But what about comfort food to feed your soul, your feelings? We’re talking about pop culture comfort food – the books, TV shows, movies, podcasts, board games that get us through dark and lonely winters. Who better to tell us about their favorite pop culture comfort food than Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson? They are the hosts of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. I’m so glad both of you could be with us. Thanks very much. And help us with the definition.

THOMPSON: Pop culture comfort food is what you consume in order to feel better. It is the cultural medicine of TV shows that you can binge watch to kind of settle your blood, music that calms you down.

HOLMES: That’s a very good definition. Mine is more selfish in that pop culture comfort food is what I take in when I don’t want to hold up my part of the artistic bargain.

The whole five minutes is a good time investment, but this was the exchange that caught my attention:

SIMON: So what are your—some other examples?

HOLMES: Well, one example that I always give is a game that you can play semi mindlessly. So one that I really like on my Nintendo Switch is I play Stardew Valley in which you build yourself a farm. And you plant some parsnips. And they come up. And you take them to the store. And you sell them. And you plant some more plants. And you water your plants. And that’s the game.

SIMON: Aren’t there trade tariffs or something like that that you can…

HOLMES: There really aren’t. You just have to make sure that you go to the store when it’s open.

SIMON: Yeah. Stephen?

THOMPSON: It’s very hard for me to find something that everyone in my family can agree on. For comfort food, my girlfriend would watch The West Wing. My son would watch old seasons of Survivor. My daughter would watch grizzly horror movies.

Ah, The West Wing. That is my comfort culture. Particularly since we started calling Donald John Trump Mr. President. Over the winter break I watched all seven seasons for the umpteenth time just to enjoy the fantasy of what it could be like if adults were in the White House. There are many great moments in the show, but none quite so great as the time fictional President Josiah Edward Bartlet taught a lesson to Dr. Jenna Jacobs (standing in for Laura Catherine Schlessinger) about the Christian bible and White House protocol.

Bonus No. 1: The West Wing could also be incredibly educational.
Bonus No. 2: In 2001, Charlie Rose interviewed Sorkin and four of the cast members of The West Wing.
Bonus No. 3: There is chance that the cast of The West Wing could be coming back.

I understand the broad strokes of Brexit, but I haven’t really gotten down into the weeds. There is an aspect of the story, however, that I haven’t thought of before—and now can’t unthink—revealed by Nick Cohen writing in Brexiters ache to dish out a severe spanking, whether we like it or not for The Guardian. Cohen ledes:

Wide-eyed foreigners long ago concluded that masochism was le vice anglais. Impressed by the volume of Victorian spanking pornography, the Italian critic Mario Praz wrote in the 1930s: “It seems to be an assured fact that sexual flagellation has been practised in England with greater frequency than elsewhere.” Or as a successful lawyer once declared on the theme: “Most people probably think S&M–spanking, bondage, whipping, role play like doctors and nurses, sheikhs and harems, guards and prisoners – is harmless and private and even funny.”

The next graph, however, was, please excuse the euphemism, the money shot.

The late Christopher Hitchens, who claimed with pride that Margaret Thatcher once “smote me on the rear with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper”, explained it thus: “There is almost no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot be instantly improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.”

After I read that my mind snapped back this side of the pond and to ponder the significance of Stephanie Gregory Clifford wielding an inaugural copy of Trump magazine in her encounter with President Donald John Trump. (Then there is that special relationship between Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan which has to make you wonder.)

Trump’s ancestry, of course, is German, not British, but then the Germans have more than there share of national kink.

Don’t let Cohen’s lede get you off track, however. He has a very serious angle on all this.

The values of the spanker have triumphed. As long as adults consent, most believe no one should complain. Less harmless, private or funny, is the more dominant (in all senses of the word) national trait of proclaiming the cleansing power of suffering as long as the suffering is endured by others. “Sado-monetarism”, as my colleague Bill Keegan called it in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe cut government spending and whacked up interest rates at the height of a recession. The millions who lost their jobs in Scotland and Wales, the Midlands and the north of England were not consenting adults as they were not on the whole Tory voters.

The story today’s right tells about Thatcher reflects none of this asymmetry of suffering. She was the outsider, it runs, who defied the experts; in her case, 364 economists wrote to the Times in 1981 to warn, quite accurately, that her policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability”.

She went on to prove the pain was really a pleasure by conquering inflation, destroying the unions and restoring British greatness. The essential question of who received the pain and who escaped it is forgotten, assuming that today’s Thatcher admirers registered it in the first place.

The same regions that suffered most in the 1980s will be hit hardest by Brexit.

Just as the pro-Trump parts of these United states—like Lordstown, Ohio; Hazard, Kentucky or Indianapolis—will be hit by the economic chaos wracked by our presidents economic snake pit formerly know as the oval office.