Wednesday, March 19, 2008 - Posts
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In a newsroom, you see right away that a high percentage of people who would like you to write about them—people with serious grievances of all kinds, against the cops or the city or the hospital or whatever—are at least a little bit crazy. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for them to get any action, because they're written off: "Guy's a nut.'' Which is especially unfortunate, because in a lot of cases, if the story is even half-true, of course he's a nut; that's what injustice in the long term tends to do to people. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if the generation that ran into more brick walls of sexism and racism than is currently necessary has some post-concussive issues as a result; they are entitled to their tirades—and to our respect, though I don't think we honor their sacrifice by refusing to see that they actually did accomplish something.
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Judith your In Treatment post calls to mind another dim cultural memory—of Clarence Thomas’ stunning autobiography (I reviewed it here) and the ways in which Justice Thomas both worships the grandfather who raised him and is scarred by him. Thomas painstakingly catalogues the man’s endless cruelties, from throwing him out when Thomas dropped out of the seminary to skipping his weddings and graduations. But despite all this, and despite his grandfather’s paradoxical message—work harder than whites and you will succeed/success on “white” terms is not true success—Thomas reveres the man as the "one hero in my life.” The book is titled My Grandfather’s Son, after all. He believes his grandfather’s cruelty shaped and tempered him.
Thomas’ grandfather, like Wright, and like your Glynn Turman character, Judith, suffered horribly and survived. But what they passed on to the next generation was this double-edged wish: I want you to have it better than me, but I know you never will.
I often feel that’s what Gloria Steinem and Co. feel about us: We’re kidding ourselves if we think life is any better now, and we're insulting them or in denial if we disagree.
One other insight from My Grandfather’s Son? Thomas writes that when he met his second wife, Virginia, he was astonished to encounter anybody who still "thought it was possible to make the world a better place.” Thomas’ sense that repairing the world is impossible echoes Obama’s criticism yesterday of Jeremiah Wright. If Thomas teaches us anything, it’s that if you glorify your father's cynicism and hopelessness along with his heroism, you will never get "past" race.
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Does anyone at XX Factor watch "In Treatment"? I watched last night's episode immediately after watching Obama's magnificent speech on YouTube, and was struck an echo of the speech in the show. It had me thinking about something like the point you made, Dahlia, about having to apologize for one's crazy elders.
Here's the echo: As you all know, every day of the week, Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) sees a different patient, and we see the session. Well, over the weekend, his Tuesday patient, a black Navy pilot (Blair Underwood), died. He had been struggling to unpack a suitcase full of anguish--guilt over having bombed a madrassa full of teenage boys, gay impulses, the legacy of his father, a harsh sometime civil-rights activist. Then his plane crashed during training exercises. He was considered one of the Navy's best pilots, and it is unclear whether his death was accidental or suicidal. And the father (Glynn Turman), who had emerged during the sessions as not just as a harsh man but as a soul-destroying monster, arrives on Dr. Weston's doorstep. He wants to understand what has happened to his son.
Turman gives a menacing, heart-breaking performance,well worth watching [http://www.hbo.com/intreatment/tuesday/], but his accomplishment per se is not what made me think of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That came at the moment when he makes us see the father's side of things. He draws himself up, this thin, erect, bitter man, aware that the doctor partly blames him for the son's death though is too professional to say so, and he narrows his eyes and says (I'll have to paraphrase and make it sound more banal than it was): "I saw terrible things as a child. I understood that only the strong could survive this world. I wanted my son to be strong." And the doctor gently chides him, saying, "Couldn't you see that the world your son was born into was not the world you were born into?" And the father looks around at Dr. Weston's gorgeous office, with its deep sofas and mahogany furniture and picture windows full of leafy views, and says, in effect, "How can you, who know nothing of where I come from, of my culture, dare to judge me?"
The scene volleys our sympathies back and forth many more times before it ends, but I found myself thinking about some of the same people Dahlia did, Robin Morgan and Jesse Jackson and yes, Hillary Clinton, and all those other public figures who saw terrible things and fought bitter battles and said things we couldn't possibly agree with today and may not have agreed with even then--with the result that, as Obama said, and as Dahlia repeated, we can now afford to see things differently. What felt so new about the speech was not that he apologized but the degree to which he refused to, as well as the extent to which--and this was REALLY new--he eschewed derision and ridicule and the very American sin of presentism, of seeing the past through the lens of the present. Like Glynn Turman, he changed the way we see these people. They're not drooling on the sofa. They're battle-scarred, and so will we be one day. Hillary has a deep historical understanding of such matters, I have no doubt, but I am afraid she may lack the political courage required to articulate such complicated thoughts in the heat of a campaign, as well as the eloquence to make us understand them.
PS I have been told that the show reenacts with shocking fidelity its Israeli model, and I can't help wondering whether in the original, the pilot was in the Israeli army and his father survived the Holocaust. It's the only thing that would make sense. Anyone who has seen the original, please let me know.
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Sorry to be late to Obamapalooza, but I didn’t get to watch his speech until late last night. Isn’t it fascinating to hear Obama apologizing for Rev. Wright in almost the same terms we at XX have used to apologize/make excuses for Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and some of the other second-wave feminist heroines who now seem frozen into some rictus of '60s outrage? One of the ways Obama tried to humanize his pastor was by describing what Wright saw and experienced before the demise of legal segregation. It was that experience that, according to Obama, made it impossible for Wright to imagine change, just as Morgan, et al., can’t seem to conceive of a world that isn't consumed by perpetual gender warfare.
Hanna, you once made this same point about watching the video of “Germaine Greer and the rest of the feminist street poets take on Norman Mailer in that 1971 town hall”—that these women were sexy and ferocious and inspiring but also, in today’s terms, a little hysterical and cartoonish. Greer and Wright were on the front lines, and, as Obama explained yesterday, there is honor in having endured what they did, surviving it, and hacking down the barriers for those of us who came after. But Obama was also reminding us that we can be deeply grateful to that generation and also acknowledge that their stark language and relentless, perhaps terminal, anger also created massive divisions that need to be healed.
I find it fascinating at this new turn in the conversation—where we have to publicly apologize for our civil rights and feminist icons because, at least rhetorically, they’ve turned into Crazy Aunt Tessie, who gets drunk and drools all over the ottoman. I didn’t see it coming.
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While we're on the topic of race, I happened onto something quite difficult to watch on MSNBC this morning, something my husband saw as "a wake-up call for white guys everywhere.'' Right there in front of God and all of America, Chris Matthews was trying to get down with Ellen DeGeneres. At least, I think that was the drill ... (After watching several times, I think I can state with confidence that he did not, as it first appeared, inadvertently grab her boob. Though, in the wrong kind of shoes, she would surely have fallen to the floor.)
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I'm with Maureen Dowd today: The Obama who talks of grays and of complicated legacies and long evolutions, not just of high hopes and change, is my kind of guy. See, there's a reason the campaign isn't over yet—we need to see this man dealing with more than adoring crowds. And he's clearly thinking not just narrowly and strategically about the superdelegate count, but broadly about what the pattern of his primary successes and failures so far tells us about the country. This speech was a response to more than a flap over Rev. Wright, I would say. It was Obama's admirable effort to speak to an electoral puzzle that Matt Bai pointed out in a fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. "To put this simply," Bai wrote, "Obama wins in major urban areas but can't seem to win in urbanized states, while Clinton wins in rural communities but consistently loses in rural states. Why?" Bai proposed a counterintuitive answer that says something important about race in America: Obama does well in areas with the least racial diversity—where there are either lots of African-American voters or very few (Wisconsin and Vermont). The actual experience of racial diversity—of living side by side, feeling hard-pressed, struggling, and competing for "a piece of the American Dream," especially during an economic downturn—may not build enlightened racial unity, but instead fuel skepticism about facile promises of harmony. It was exactly that sobering reality that Obama addressed head on in his speech. I call that audacity.
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