We've Got People

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States delivers as promised. A passionate and compelling account of American history from the point of view of its peoples: the indigenous and not the invaders, the enslaved and not the slavers, the working class and not the governing class, the minorities and not the majorities. Without glossing over the fractures, contradictions, and limitations of mass movements, yet Zinn offers a glimpse of their power and achievements. America has always had its radicals, much as it has always had its oppressors. I will be returning to this book again and again for its understanding, compassion, and outrage.

Ryan Grim's We've Got People is an exciting journalistic account of the rise of the American progressive movement from Jesse Jackson in the 1980's to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2010's. In Grim's account, Rahm Emanuel emerges as the arch-villain who led the Democrats astray by taking money from big corporations in order to fight the Reaganites. Not only did this program disconnect Establishment Democrats from the ground, but it also delayed the alignment of the Democrats with their natural constituencies, i.e. the working class and the rainbow coalition of various minorities, thus producing Trumpism. Grim describes his book as a second draft of history, but to my mind it is very close, perhaps too close, to journalism's first draft. It is impossible to tell history's verdict on the current progressive moment. Grim's optimism makes me feel anxious.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more