Selma

Ava DuVernay’s Selma could be subtitled “behind the scenes of a hagiography.” Apart from the stock footage of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery it’s not cinema verite in the style of say The Battle of Algiers. Despite the graphic depictions of violence, it’s just too slick; DuVernay’s paints her Guernica on Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge and it’s almost beautiful. But the strength of the movie lies in its depiction of nonviolence as strategy. “Our lives are not fully lived until we are ready to die for those we loved,” King (David Oyelowo) says. He possesses a sculpture of Gandhi, yet it’s plain non-violence is as much a weapon as a principle for him. Jim Clark (Stan Houston), the sheriff of Selma is a perfect foil for the protests as Bull Connor was in Birmingham. In Albany, Georgia the sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, had removed the demonstrators on stretchers and that was not what King wanted. It didn’t create either sympathy or headlines. Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), making a cameo appearance, tries to employ the idea of another kind of strategy. He’ll incite violence in order to make the authorities regard King as the lesser of two evils. It’s a form of gamesmanship that King isn’t ready to buy. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let history put me in the same place as the likes of you,” Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) tells George Wallace (Tim Roth). But it’s not surprising to see one of the greatest politicians of the 20^th century or all time adding to the chorus of realpolitik that’s the movie’s recurring leitmotif. Neither the tensions in King’s marriage nor his infidelities are glossed over and they in turn are exploited by yet one more power player, J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker)—who unsuccessfully tries to use them to throttle King’s charismatic drive. The real march of the movie is towards the passage of the Voting Rights Act of l965 with Lyndon Johnson lamely proclaiming “we shall overcome.” Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), the conflict between John Lewis’s (Stephan James) SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee) and King’s SCLC (South Christian Leadership Conference) are all part of the tableau—which, on the basis of recent headlines, poses the troubling question of whether much has really changed?

Holiday In

Monday May 26th is National Blueberry Cheesecake Day

Today is Memorial Day and we have the old standbys Christmas, Easter, Passover, New Year’s, Thanksgiving Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Veterans Day. But what will the future bring? Over the past 5000 years mankind has moved from the edge of hunting and gathering to the point where it’s gained the capability to depart from the habitat in which it came into being. When the sun dies humans will be forced to leave the earth for good and it won’t necessarily mean a migration over centuries in which mini worlds become stop off points to a final destination—say one of the planets amenable to human life, circling Kepler 186f. Indeed by that time human consciousness would have long found a home in its own safe and eternal cybernetic ether, with the body turned into a relic of a past way of life. When it comes to holidays, man in whichever form he’s manifest will be confronted with a whole new range of civilizations whose triumphs, struggles and mythology of survival will be commemorated in ways that it’s almost impossible to conceive today. Remember the Pilgrims came to the colonies in the 17^th Century, making Thanksgiving only four hundred years old, Christmas celebrates an event which occurred only a couple of thousand years ago, as does Easter and the contributions that made Martin Luther King someone whom we celebrate occurred in the lifetimes of a good portion of the extant population. Who will be the new  Christ, the new father of the United States of the World or whatever entity exists in another one or two millennia? Will we be celebrating those who gave up their corporeal forms and settled in cyberspace the way we commemorate the pilgrims? Will there be a day to celebrate the first space travelers who defied time by way of a wormhole? And what will happen to our old holidays? Will it come to pass that in a far off time January 1^st will no longer be New Year’s Day?

Mandela’s Evolutionary Politics

It can be hard to identify with the goodness of the great. The bar is set too high. Figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela are almost superhuman. And there are those who  even attempt to find flaw in them if only to make them more fallible and hence human. Gandhi tested the temptations of the flesh by sleeping next to young girls, Martin Luther King was a rake. Nelson Mandela liked violent sports like boxing. Mother Teresa befriended dictators. But following the recent eulogies for Nelson Mandela one is likely to be caught up short, recognizing the extent of his achievement. Even among names like King and Gandhi, he stands out due to the revolutionary nature of the legacy he left. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the way that South Africa dealt with horror of Apartheid. And what was it? An attempt to replace retribution with memorialization. But The Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be looked at not only as a revolutionary phenomenon, but an evolutionary one to the extent that its legacy demonstrates how natural selection finally favored altruism as a survival mechanism. There are those like the South African writer T.O. Molefe who point out that the significance of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s is overshadowed by that economic inequality still plaguing South Africa’s blacks (“Mandela’s Unfinished Revolution," NYT, 12/13/13). However, imagine if there had been a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as opposed to the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War and imagine if murderers like Eichmann were allowed to walk among us? It’s a horrifying prospect and yet one that South Africans have lived with ever since Apartheid fell and Mandela came into power.

World Historical Figure

Kimberly White/Reuters

In its coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez the Times used the following statement from Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst as the quote of the day: “In regimes that are so person-based, the moment that the person on which everything hangs is removed, the entire foundation becomes very weak because there was nothing else supporting this than this figure.” (“Chavez Dies, Leaving Sharp Divisions in Venezuela,"NYT, 3/5/13) This is the theory of Hegel’s “world historical figure” par excellence. Under this idea there would have been no Third Reich without Hitler, no Gulag without Stalin or, for that matter, no modern day India without Gandhi. The latter is belied by the fact that while Gandhi plainly played a huge role in helping his people to achieve independence, his spirit is scarcely visible in a country where the right wing Hindu, Baratiya Janata party plays such a huge and regressive role in the country’s inflammatory religious and racial politics today. Under this theory the killing of Osama Bin Laden as documented in Zero Dark Thirty is the equivalent of a manichean fairytale, like the Knights of the Round Table where the forces of light conquer darkness. As a litmus test it will certainly be interesting to see what new forms of political life are spawned in the petrie dish of post-Chavez Venezuelan politics. But what about the individual as an expression of historical forces? What about history as a pressure cooker in which idealogues appear at the moment when the cup runneth over. Wasn’t National Socialism a franchise, as much a Leninism, and even the pacifism of Gandhi which found itself on the stage of American history in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King? History might be handed to great men or women on a platter, but without a mountain of circumstance (which inevitably defies the will of any single individual), there would be no revolution, right, left or center.

Ordinary Pain

You are speeding along by yourself on an Interstate when a really great song like Stevie Wonder’s Love’s In Need of Love Today comes on, and you turn the sound up as loud as it will go.

    

What is a nice guy or girl? Cordelia wasn’t nice because she didn’t say what Lear wanted to hear. Goneril is definitely not nice. Oracles are not nice. Soothsayers like Calchas are not nice. The Sphinx is not nice in Oedipus because it only proposes riddles. You have to go through hoops to answer what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

  

Lionel Trilling dealt with this subject in a series of essays called “Sincerity and Authenticity.” But what do these terms really connote? Are the Cordelias of the world better than the Gonerils, or are they merely seeking another kind of gain, i.e., martyrdom and moral superiority? One way to get ahead in the world might be to ask for things, another might be to propose self-deprivation. Though Augustine repudiated earthly desires, he made it (by the worldly standard of fame). Gandhi had a good run of success, as did philosophical kindred like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used passive resistance to achieve their aims. Is the man of peace better than the warrior? Is Mother Theresa saintly in comparison to Clausewitz, who argued that war was merely “the continuation of politics”? We are all imperialists, both on ontogenic and phylogenic levels. We all want to control and dominate, whether it’s a person, a class, or a society of people. Was Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik fundamentally more evil than the politics of conciliation that might be advocated by organizations of doves?

   

So is it all a matter of presentation, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life that Erving  Goffman described in his famed sociological tome. Is it all public relations? Is personality a series of conscious and unconscious decisions with a pubic face, but no moral scorecard?

   

Now you are speeding down the same highway and Freyda Payne’s disco classic Band of Gold comes on the oldies station.