I think it’s true, what the historian Nancy Isenberg says (I’m paraphrasing): Aaron Burr, known today mainly for killing Alexander Hamilton and being a character in a musical, had an unusual susceptibility in real life to serving as a screen on which people projected their fantasies, some of those fantasies pretty wild. During his lifetime, people eithe…

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A recent story in The New York Times Magazine got my attention by showcasing one of my pet peeves. The online headline was “Ode to the New York Dive Bar: Is the Beer Cheap? Is the Bathroom Scary?” Online subhead: “Dive bars have a rich history, but they face an uncertain future with rising costs and changing social patterns.”

Print headline:…

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[UNLOCKED]

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik discussed the historian Danielle Allen’s new book Radical Duke, under the headline “Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution?” The answer to that question is a firm “No.” And yet, while I find it hard to believe that Danielle Allen’s thesis is “Yes,” Gopnik’s certainly seems to be.

So I’m going to have to read the book. I have a longstanding interest in the radical Whigs of Britain, less because they influenced the American revolutionaries, though of course they did, than because I find the fantasies they engendered about the supposedly ancient and exceptional rights of Englishmen at once kind of admirable and kind of crazy, and I think those fantasies have had a major impact on modern ideas about rights.

I also have a longstanding interest in the thinking of Thomas Paine—for me, he’s the missing link among radical Philadelphia, radical London, and radical Paris (“missing” in that the great E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, left out Philadelphia). Paine is a major factor in both Allen’s book and Gopnik’s article.

According to Gopnik, Allen frames Paine’s thinking as entirely derivative of the thinking of one Charles Lennox, the Third Duke of Richmond (1735-1806). Which a Paine fan can only call huge if true.

I’ll do more with Allen’s book another time, when I’ve found out if Gopnik’s description of it is correct, but what I’m interested in now are Gopnik’s views of the American Revolution, the U.S. founding period, and Thomas Paine. A veteran New Yorker staff writer, and maybe the most adept, engaging, and intellectually fluid among them, Gopnik has attitudes that inform and are informed by a particular liberal political sensibility, which is reflected in his essays at what has to be the highest level. For many years I’ve admired those essays, especially on literature. Whenever I finish a famous 19th or 20th Century novel for the first time, or for the first time in a long while, I hope to find that Gopnik has written about it.

When he applies his engaged, gently sardonic, judiciously passionate riffing imagination and his mastery of prose to the national founding, usually by reviewing a new book, he can seem to be confronting, at least to a degree, certain gritty, not always edifying historical realities. And yet he persistently manages to avoid acknowledging—or manages to remain unaware of—any notion of an inherent conflict between the famous founders, who were members of the traditional American governing elite of the day; and the social and economic working-class American radicalism of the day, a kind of populism, at odds with the traditional American governing elite. I see that conflict as decisive to the founding of the country and the politics of the Federalist period.

So, OK—Gopnik and I disagree. Big deal. But he doesn’t argue that the founding class conflict didn’t exist, or wasn’t historically decisive. Instead, everywhere the conflict seems to me to pop undeniably up, he blanks it out, and into that blank disappear a lot of objective facts.

Gopnik does the blank-out thing in his essay on Allen's book, and there he’s even talking about radicalism. And the radicalism of the Third Duke of Richmond is indeed very interesting. So is the Duke’s relationship with Thomas Paine, if you’re interested in things like that, and I am. Allen has written on the subject before, in article form. She discovered, among other things, a pamphlet pre-dating “Common Sense,” published in Britain, dedicated to the Duke and written, she thinks, at least in large part by Paine, well before he came to North America. That’s cool.

Gopnik, however, tries to place the influence of the Duke, and British origins generally for American thinking about liberties and rights, in a context of correcting what he rightly calls Americans’ wanting to “Americanize the American Revolution”—the misguided desire to believe everything about our origins as a people occurred here for the first time. There can indeed be great benefit in placing the Revolution in larger geopolitical and intellectual contexts, but the story Allen’s telling doesn’t do what Gopnik wants it to. He says that Allen states, more aggressively than it’s ever been stated before, the “view that the American Revolution was forged by others and began elsewhere.”

It’s very old news—some of the oldest—that English thinking, emerging especially from the English Civil War, had a major impact on the English-speaking North Americans who began resisting what they cast as British violations of colonials’ rights. It’s also anything but a revelation that some of that thinking can be called radical, and that some of it was expressed by aristocrats. Ignoring those contexts, and yet excited by Allen’s exploration of the particular intellectual and political relationship of Richmond and Paine, Gopnik takes a deep breath and makes this long, strange leap:

Paine, then, was not the political innocent he claimed to be when he left for America, in 1774. He was what today might be called an “outside agitator,” sent specifically by Richmond to bring the new doctrines of democracy to the outer edge of empire—an Enlightenment Lenin sent to the Boston Harbor.

Just in itself, Gopnik’s implication that Paine is generally understood to have been disengaged from politics before his arrival in North America is strange. Everybody who reads about Paine knows that he’d been involved in political protest in Britain. What’s flat-out absurd, though, is characterizing Paine as a mere operative of Richmond, dispatched “to bring the new doctrines of democracy to the outer edge of empire.” If that statement truly reflects Allen’s argument, I’ll have more to say after I’ve read the book, but the interesting question, to me today, is why Gopnik wants to view Paine in a way that reframes the origins of American democracy by ascribing them to Richmond. What work, as the academics used to ask, does his almost unbelievably faulty description of Paine’s efforts in America do for the liberal New Yorker sensibility I mentioned above?

I find a hint in one of Gopnik’s trademarks: the truly clever flourish. He says Paine was sent to the Boston Harbor. Because, you know, Lenin was sent to the Finland Station (hello?! is this thing on?!). As a New Yorker reader presumed by a New Yorker writer to catch a ref, I chuckled, but as everybody who knows Paine knows, and as I’m sure Gopnik knows, Paine arrived in 1774 not in Boston but in Philadelphia, and that’s not a minor difference. While Boston had, of course, been in a longstanding state of particularly active resistance to royal government and parliamentary acts, Philadelphia’s resistance was more recent, drastically different from Boston’s, and undergoing important changes right when Paine showed up. I’ve written endlessly about all that, so I won’t rehash it. Suffice it to say that the Philadelphia resisters who took up Paine on his arrival hadn’t been waiting around to learn about democracy from some secret agent of the Duke of freaking Richmond. In real life, the Duke could have learned a thing or two from them. Paine did, especially about democracy as a mode of action on behalf of the political equality of labor. Gopnik’s Lenin reference is more apt, in the real historical context, than he may know.

It’s by no means uninteresting that the Duke of Richmond, as Gopnik points out, made a motion in Parliament in 1780 for manhood suffrage—removing most property qualifications from the right to vote—because it’s true that the Duke’s position was an advanced position to take, for a member of the ruling elite, in 1780, anywhere; the Adams cousins of Massachusetts, for example, remained dead set against democratizing the vote. It’s unfortunate, therefore, to see Gopnik quoting Allen to the effect that the Duke’s motion “was the first such motion in British history. . . quite probably the first in the modern world.” Gopnik runs away with that idea to make the Duke’s democratic motion the first of its kind in all of Western history, but the original error is Allen’s, not Gopnik’s, and it’s an error not just about Paine and revolutionary Pennsylvania but also about the history of democracy. I still have to see it in context. But the statement as quoted undermines a lot of what Gopnik, anyway, says Allen is saying.

It’s well-known that in a famous series of debates in Putney, England, in 1647, the Levellers called, unsuccessfully, for manhood suffrage, and their stifled demand became a critical element in the Anglo-American heritage that Gopnik rightly thinks we ought to be bringing to our public discourse about the American Revolution. As early as the North Carolina Regulation, which began in the 1760’s, expanding suffrage was made an explicit issue by those who were protesting corruption of American and British government and wealth concentration by American and British landlords. Paine’s Philadelphia cohort already had manhood suffrage well in mind when Paine landed. Most importantly—and most embarrassingly, for Gopnik’s elaboration on Allen’s statement—in the great year of 1776, in the new Pennsylvania constitution, Paine and his cohort made manhood suffrage not just a demand, and not just a motion, but a legal reality.

And that really was a first. Overnight, not only could ordinary men in Pennsylvania vote; they could stand for office, and when they did, the state assembly became a tense mix of working-class and financial interests. The new government also gave a lot of immediate power to local committees, which mingled ordinary people and traditional elites, sometimes explosively. Based in part on ideas about government that Paine set out in “Common Sense”—ideas far more radically democratic than those of the Radical Duke—Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution scandalized John Adams by its “democratical” excess and was overturned, in 1790, by upscale Pennsylvanians who thought like Adams.

And thought like Gopnik. Radically democratic ideas, coming not from a kooky duke imagining democracy emerging at some point in the future, but from ordinary people taking action in the immediate present, can be unsettling—not just to Adams and Gopnik but to me, too. And yet, like it or not, that’s how we got the Declaration of Independence on July Fourth. A mass movement, on the street, overthrew the legitimately elected government of Pennsylvania and put in a new government that not only reversed the mighty province’s position against declaring independence but also undid the “ancient” tie between rights and property for the first time since that tie was established. Anti-Paine revolutionaries like Adams said they were fighting the British to defend the ancient tie, against British violations; Paine-friendlier revolutionaries like Jefferson said so too. But when Paine and the Pennsylvania radicals untied the tie, they were bringing the old, long-frustrated Leveller demand to fruition and casting the revolution against Britain as a populist revolution against privilege in America. That’s what I mean by a class conflict inherent in the U.S. founding.

It’s also an intellectual conflict. Some would call what happened in Pennsylvania’s revolution mob rule; Adams did. Some have even called the results proto-Maoist—not me, but I take the point. “The chatter of cosmopolitan elites is the most reviled of all discourses right now,” Gopnik writes. “But, by reconciling opposing practices,” he goes on to assure his embattled, cosmopolitan-elite readership, “it has often proved the most reliable ally of liberty.” That’s as if persuasive argument ever had anything to do with making America independent—almost as if world-changing events are best brought about by writing for and reading magazine essays (or blogs). Working toward his article’s conclusion, Gopnik expresses with perfect clarity what it all comes down to, for New Yorker politics in general. “Today, some writers eagerly ascribe the shortcomings of America’s founding documents to the treason of the educated elite,” he says, “while refusing to acknowledge that it was only an educated élite that could ever have produced them.”

So I think it’s the educated elite of today that Gopnik and his editors are forever (or “eagerly”) leveraging the national founding to defend. A tactic in that defense is to frame the founding solely in terms of ideas, not action, and to endow the founding elite with all of the important ideas. If you make Paine—that self-taught, peripatetic dropout from the artisan class—nothing but the mouthpiece of a highly educated duke, “Common Sense” finally makes common sense. If you choose to believe that agitation in opposition to colonial elites wasn’t going on in the Atlantic colonies long before Paine and the Duke of Richmond met, if you evaporate the Philadelphia activists’ removing property qualifications for voting, if you erase the Levellers, whom the Adams types were still freaking out about 150 years later, and instead credit the Duke with bringing up manhood suffrage for the first time ever, then you’ve shifted the historical focus back onto the right sort of people. The more relatable sort, from some points of view. All it takes is leaving things out and making things up. If leaving things out and making things up is what’s needed to save an educated elite that supposes itself to be the last bulwark against leaving things out and making things up, then the educated elite really is in trouble.

_________________

Further Reading

The Gopnik article (paywalled).

This is what founding US democracy looked like, sometimes.

The real action is all in this book.

As you may have heard, there’s a high-end movie adaptation of The Odyssey on the way, directed by Christopher Nolan, with Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, who, in the poem, and in the mythology the poem is based on, is the most beautiful woman in the world. Helen is not a major character in the Homeric epic now under adaptation (she’s not all that major even in the other one), but a few weeks ago, Nolan’s casting choice was subjected to some heated online discussion. Now, having waited a decent interval to be sure the topic is no longer hot (BAD HISTORY policy), I’m reporting some of the things I gleaned from observing and occasionally engaging in that discourse.

At the crudest level, a lot of people are offended by the casting because Helen of Troy was, as they put it, white. Nyong’o is black.

I’m not talking here about the criticism that this casting choice is a little on-the-nose, a tad show-offy and self-congratulatory. To the extent that people have any picture of Helen in mind, it would be based on illustrations, and for that matter movies, where she’s ranged from Nordic to Mediterranean, but not until now Kenyan or African American. “Ooo, how bold, how game-changing, how of-the-moment, how controversial” might seem to be the intended response to the casting, and sure, that might be annoying, in a Hollywoodish way.

On the other hand, how would you cast the most beautiful woman in late-prehistoric Europe? or for that matter in the much later period, maybe around 800 BCE, when the epic was probably composed? Go out of your way not to be bold and game-changing? That would be annoying too. If we could travel back in a time machine, every single person from that time would look utterly unexpected to us. Add the fact that these are supposed to be mighty heroes and demigods, and wow. In their presence, the tops of our heads would blow off from the sheer surprise.

And yet Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus in the upcoming movie, seems quite familiar. Quite unsurprising. Kind of all-American. If you’re going to be offended by a lack of verisimilitude, maybe start there?

The most beautiful woman in the world can’t be depicted anyway. Even Homer barely describes her. Which gets into the question of why adapt The Odyssey to film at all. Maybe don’t.

But the people I’m talking about take these issues a lot more seriously than that. It turns out that the kind who like to nerd out publicly about Homer and want everyone on the Internet to know (or believe) they read Ancient Greek overlap with and form a kind of brain-trust division of the larger Great Replacement type—those white people who, while not always totally up on Homer, see themselves, their kind, and their heritage being destroyed by forces dedicated to erasing the exceptional greatness of Western Civilization, here defined as white.

Defined, one might say, as Aryan—a concept that has tracked neatly with certain longstanding fantasies about the myths and legends of the Achaeans, as Homer called the people that others call the Mycenaeans—the Bronze Age people who came to dominate the Aegean region. They were Indo-European migrants, related to the people who also migrated into the Indian subcontinent and into Scandinavia. 19th Century scholarship glorified those migrations as imposing superior organizational discipline, military ambition, and patriarchy on supposedly cute and interesting but supposedly physically shorter and darker, less developed, more goddess-worshipping peoples, and thereby beginning to establish what 19th Century scholarship constructed as Western Civilization.

We know some of what that kind of thinking led to. The hoopla over the Helen casting gives me the feeling that some people, in the 21st Century, believe that in Homeric epic and its forebears, “the most beautiful woman in the world” means “the whitest woman.”

Another batch of critics came out swinging against the casting choice because the actress isn’t one particular subset of white: Greek. Matt Damon, as noted, isn’t Greek. Anne Hathaway, who plays Penelope, isn’t Greek. Like Mary, there’s something about Helen—but do people really view the ancient Mycenaeans as in some fundamental way nationalistically Greek? Pursue these notions to their illogical conclusions and you’ll have to cast a late-Bronze-Age Spartan as Helen. You’re not going to find her sitting at Schwab’s lunch counter. No movies could be made. We’d have nothing to argue about.

There was also this (manifestly idiotic) angle: So then I’m going to make a movie where Martin Luther King is played by a white actor, how’s that!

Also: You wouldn’t cast a white actor as Othell—Oh. Never mind.

I made up that last one.

Online pushback to the online objections to Nyong’o took some obvious forms. One was That’s racist!

Which in some cases was manifestly true, not even denied. Those accusations never have any impact.

Other pushback tried to remind those who demand faithfulness to the original character that the original character didn’t exist. (Odysseus didn’t exist either—who am I to say Matt Damon isn’t good casting?) In the old stories, Helen’s father was Zeus, who took the form of a swan in order to have sex with—in many tellings, to rape—her mother, Leda, Queen of Sparta. Leda hatched an egg. Out popped Helen. Does anyone see all this as essentially . . . white? Santa Claus was originally and is still most often depicted as an old white dude. He also lives at the North Pole with elves and delivers toys on Christmas Eve—so how culturally important and essential is his whiteness? or even his maleness, or even his long marriage to Mrs. Claus? The Ancient Greeks may not have imagined a black Helen. Their culture also didn’t contemplate the category of whiteness that postmodern self-appointed saviors of Western Civilization obsessively contemplate. The Ancient Greeks had other things to do. The saviors have nothing to do but tap tap tap on their phones, in hopes of saving a heritage they don’t have any real understanding of, any real sympathy for.

I do get, though, that “she wasn’t real” isn’t perfectly germane. Helen is really in the poem and the mythology, and it’s the poem and the mythology that some people insist should be depicted what they call authentically. This is where we get into the notion, startling to me, that a film adaptation of The Odyssey is a period piece, and should be treated as such, with period accuracy.

The problem for me with discussing this period-piece critique is that it involves Professional Smart Guy (PSG) Charles Murray, and I recently made fun of him in another post, so this might seem like piling on, but it’s not my fault. Murray weighed in on the casting controversy with the period-piece angle, beginning here:

The goofball idea here is “dammit, I came to watch an 18th Century classic,” which just can’t help but bleed right into “I came to watch an 18th Century classic—in the 18th Century.” Nobody in Goldsmith’s time would have cast a black actor or used electric lights. For the classic experience, you really want a white actor and smoky tallow candles and stinky open-flame gaslight, the whole place lit up, no distinction between the audience and the action. You also want to make sure the audience knows to mill about, talking and eating and drinking throughout the show. The text was in fact written to accommodate those conditions. It makes less sense without them. Push this idea back to Shakespeare’s time and casting gets particularly challenging. The classic experience means men in the women’s roles. …

Murray then developed his theme (with a touch of TMI):

PLO means pot-limit Omaha. I don’t know that if I were at the casino playing pot-limit Omaha, I’d enjoy having to listen to one of the regulars gabbing with his favorite dealer about stuff like this, just me, but if we tiptoe past that distracting glimpse into the personal life of a PSG, we encounter the notion that when watching “period pieces,” “perfect authenticity” can be achieved, and is something to be prized.

This a silly idea to have, even about a period as recent as the 1950s, say, and it’s come up before on BAD HISTORY with reference to, among other things, the Napoleonic Wars. When you’re talking period authenticity, ideas about perfection and imperfection range from techniques for stitching military uniforms to degrees of cannon kickback to conquering Egypt; to evaluate perfection, you’d have to be up on all that, and much more, and Murray isn’t, because nobody is. Like the social historians who prefer to focus on and approve or disapprove the stitching, and like the military historians who prefer to note the kickback, his standard for perfect authenticity amounts to nothing more than his personal feeling for perfect authenticity. As with other things, he presents something subjective as if it were something objectively measurable.

The silliest idea of all, though, is thinking of movies based on the Homeric epics as period pieces at all. Period does exist, when movies are set in the past. Certain anachronisms can be jarring. Excessive authenticity can be jarring too: What’s the right amount of shit on the street? The real issue with period is always flavor, a conjuring of confidence that another world once existed, a world different enough from ours to transport us, and not so different that we’re so overwhelmed by the difference that we can’t care about anything else, like characters and action, as we would be, if we suddenly showed up in the past in real life.

The Odyssey is categorically different, though. What period would we even be talking about here? The period when gods involved themselves in the affairs of human beings and directed the day-to-day course of human events? But wait, OK—set aside the influence of the supernatural. As somebody pointed out online, with a vampire movie set in Victorian London, we still want to feel that it’s authentically Victorian London. (I don’t think that’s universally true—I’ve enjoyed recent period TV shows, like “Death by Lightning” and “The Great,” that revel in anachronism—but I get the point.)

The more important issue, as you might expect these Western Civ fanboys to take into account, is that Homer (or whoever) was singing the epics long, long after the events, real and unreal, they describe; in the interim, everything had drastically changed. Is the demand for period authenticity a demand for an authentic 8th Century BCE? Or an authentic 12th or 13th Century BCE? If you wanted to be true to the earlier period, the period of the Trojan War itself—if that even happened, so let’s just say the period when there was a Troy-like city state—then you’d have to face the fact that the Homeric poet is by no means the ultimate authority. Modern archeological research is. But if you decide to replace Homeric description with archeologically accurate info, then you’re not being true to the poem, which is supposedly what’s being adapted.

With anything like this, it’s all about choices. They have nothing to do with period authenticity.

You can even cast Matt Damon as Odysseus. There’s a choice.

One of the most interesting things about the epics is the degree to which Homer was and was not faithful to the period described, and how that issue was and was not managed via centuries of oral transmission (“was accurate” is amazingly interesting). And yet a lot of the people who present themselves as hyper-committed to the sanctity of Western Civilization seem to have no interest in any of that, so shen I gaze into the distant past, I discern an ancient ancestor of Charles Murray. He’s sitting around the fire, listening to the song, and complaining about the inauthenticity of the blind poet’s story. There’s one in every crowd.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative from New York, is getting dumped on by the right-wing press, and by commentators of various kinds on social media, for claiming, in a discussion at the Chicago Institute of Politics, that the American Revolution was fought against “the billionaires of their time,” meaning against aristocratic and royal elements in British government that American colonials felt oppressed by. Readers of this blog and my books will know that I see such characterizations as naive, given the overwhelming degree to which the Revolution was led by upscale Americans who were resisting what they felt were British obstructions to their own efforts to consolidate wealth, monopolize resources and finance, and to become the billionaires of their time, but what’s interesting to me is that the responses that reject Ocasio-Cortez’s claim are more simplistic than the claim itself. I think that says a lot about the crapper that our debates about history and current politics are being flushed down, in this, the grand semiquincentennial year of our independence from Great Britain.

What’s notable to me about AOC’s capsule description of the Revolution is that it’s more or less what I thought, when I was watching the Disney adaptation of “Johnny Tremain” on TV in the early 1960’s, and indeed when reading the 1944 Newbery Medal book by Esther Forbes that the adaptation was based on. What I learned then was that the American Revolution involved an alliance of standup artisanal working people and enlightened members of the merchant and professional classes, joined in opposition to a rich, effete, necrotic, corrupt, malevolent, coddled, lazy, ignorant, militaristic British and Loyalist aristocracy bent on the suppression of freedom and opportunity.

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Robert Altman’s movie “Nashville” came out in 1975, but it was set a year later, during the Bicentennial, and served as a comic dystopian vision of a future only a year away. I saw the movie maybe four times in ‘75, on the big screen, of course, because that was the only way to see it. “Nashville” was my introduc…

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For some reason, references to Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech have been crossing my screen recently, even though there’s no semiquincentennial hook, since the speech was made on March 23, 1775. Maybe this happens every March, and I’m just picking up on it this particular April? I don’t know, but in the context of explor…

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Nobody’s been able to mount a viable alternative to the notably well-organized No Kings rallies, which, possibly because of an absence of specific demands, are drawing increasingly impressive numbers of people out to protest Trump and Trumpism. It’s a bit shocking to me that an overwhelmingly unpopular and manifestly illegal war of choice against Iran, managed more incompetently than any previous U.S. war (high bar!), with almost unbelievably dangerous ramifications for the safety and stability of the globe hasn’t triggered everything from permitted marches to nonviolent civil disobedience to direct action against government installations, with an explicit demand for ending the hostilities yesterday. But spontaneity at the scale I’m imagining is rare—and what am I doing about it, anyway? Nothing. Truly mass protest takes truly mass organizing. The No Kings organizers have that.

One of the things that makes the slogan so effective is its combination of specificity and meaninglessness. “End the war on Iran” would cause trouble in a way “No Kings” doesn’t. If you want to pitch a tent big enough to hold all of the people who oppose the current administration, you can’t exclude the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats, who don’t, really, oppose war on Iran but instead complain, somewhat, and sort of, about Congress’s being left out of the decision to make war. That type, reflexively anti-Trump, sees Iran, correctly enough, as an avowed threat to the existence of Israel, and so they remind us, also correctly, that Iran is an oppressive theocracy.

Another oppressive theocracy is the U.S. major non-NATO ally Saudi Arabia. So is our less major ally Oman. And those allies have kings. They’re not fake monarchies, like Denmark, but absolute monarchies. Before the Islamic revolution, so was Iran. As everybody already knows, in the 1950’s the U.S. collaborated with Britain to bring down Iran’s constitutionally elected prime minister and reinstate the absolutism of the Pahlevi family. Some of the Iranian citizens who recently, with great bravery, came out to protest against the theocracy want the Pahlevi shahdom back. So do some of their supporters here.

Or: We’ve been pretty OK with kings.

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Up front, and just so you know where I’m coming from, I think “Sinners” is a very bad movie on every level, and having said that, I know some readers will want to drop off right here. Fair. I’m writing about something related, which even if you loved “Sinners,” might be of interest, or not. Just avoiding surprises!

The movie’s mood is conjured by its opening pronouncement, in voiceover:

There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land, they called them Firekeepers. And in West Africa, they're called Griots. . . .

That’s true. There are indeed a zillion such stories, stretching back into the prehistory of human life on every inhabited continent. I don’t know if the next part, which is what the movie’s about, is true:

. . . This gift can bring healing to their communities. But it also attracts evil.

… but it doesn’t matter. The idea of death’s being separated from life by a veil, which some musicians can pierce, serves the movie as a premise for a fiction based on an allegory in which black music attracts a white form of evil in the Mississippi Delta, around Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930’s. The blues styles of that region, associated by the movie with the deepest, most essentially authentic experience of black Americans’ preservation of ancient African traditions and wisdom, are sniffed out by an ancient vampire who wants to drink up that music, take its blackness, the deep authenticity of it, wants to own and meld and homogenize it with his own music, which appears to be Irish, as suggested by the stomping slip-jig “Rocky Road to Dublin,” sung and danced with great intensity by his vampire crew.

As I’ve understood the situation, vampires normally need fresh blood—both literal blood, drained out of humans by biting them on the neck, and new vampires, recruited by also biting humans on the neck. This vampire and his recruits, by contrast, need to batten on the Delta blues. They think they can get it by biting and thereby recruiting the whole Clarksdale black music scene, as an avenue for getting to the most gifted of the local musicians.

The head vampire at one point suggests that his non-normal desire originates in having experienced the suppression and loss of an ancient, pre-Christian, pagan people’s culture—so can we gather the beef goes all the way back to the Romans? And yet one example of his music is the beautiful “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which a lot of people think of as a traditional Irish song, though it’s based on a composition in a Scottish, not an Irish vein, written by professional English composers and published as sheet music in London the late 18th Century. The Irish musician Francis McPeake recorded the version he titled “Wild Mountain Thyme” in the 1950s, which is after the action of the movie, so maybe the head vampire too can conjure spirits from the past and the future. [UPDATE: I’m reminded by Dermot O Connor, in the comments, that “Rocky Road to Dublin” too of course was written by a pro, in the 1840’s (you can tell, just from the lyrics, that it doesn’t emerge from some ancient pre-Christian collective volkness).]

Maybe Anglo cultural cannibalization—a minstrelsy of its own, where nothing’s authentic—is what’s been bugging the head vampire all these centuries. On the other hand, he and his band go out of their way to demonstrate to the Delta crowd that they’ve already made solid headway in taking in and homogenizing other styles in black music, like that of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” and he claims that all he wants to do with Delta blues is make everybody eternally happy, in a fellowship of what sounds to us, though not to him, like a zombieland where individuality and intensity disappear in a vapid cultural process that we might call racial integration.

Even the two white people whom we see him recruit lose their cultural individuality once he’s chewed their necks. When he met them, they were avowed racists. Now they’re … hell, I don’t know, I find this allegory confusing, as you can see; for all I know, I have it completely backward.

Building a cogent allegorical social satire, about good and evil in America, on the eternally tangled history of African, Anglo, and Celtic vernacular music in America (with some quick references to the Asian and the Native American), and dovetailing it with a realistic story, though a thin one, about some guys opening a juke joint, plus a horror movie about vampires, which is where the depth is supposed to come from, was always going to cause certain problems with clarity.

Ambiguity? That can be good. Nuance too. Allegories are rarely good, because they require nothing but clarity of the most rigid kind; everything has to symbolize something else, and nothing else but that. An ambiguous allegory? Forget it. A horror movie with no sense of humor (and no horror plot developing even at the forty-minute mark)? Forget that too.

What interests me is the connection of white vampirism to Delta blues. Because there’s truth to that.

Ironic truth. The notion of Delta styles as a distinctly, exceptionally authentic kind of blues, with especially deep ties to ancient griot and other African traditions, contrary in some ways, but not in all ways, to Christianity, was developed by white record collectors and writers and promoters, beginning not, as is often said, in the mid-1960’s blues revival but in the early 1940’s. The term “Delta blues” itself is a product of that construction. It’s a big, fascinating story, which I’m not going to tell here. The great book on it is In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton. Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta also makes some good points. Contra the Wald viewpoint is Ted Goia, whose views on these issues I mainly disagree with, but who adds to the discussion a lot of texture that needs to be taken account of.

Those white guys of the ‘40’s who suddenly latched onto 20’s and ‘30’ records of rural blues, as opposed to the glitzier, big-band early blues records of Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and others, fell especially hard for blues styles prevalent in the Mississippi Delta, probably first heard on recordings by Charley Patton, but also by Son House and of course Robert Johnson, styles that would develop, in the 1950’s, into electrified Chicago blues. And those collectors of then-obscure records were quite weird. Like the head vampire in the movie, they hungered for roots driving deep into Mississippi mud, for ancient Yoruba spells, for authenticity stolen by modernity (to the vampire, that’s Christianity; to the 1940’s blues nerds it was industrialization). Unlike the vampire, however, they were projecting the thing they were looking for onto the music they were hearing. You could say they were trying to hear some elemental magic. You might even call that magic a piercing of the veil between life and death, a conjuring of spirits from the past and the future.

They never saw any Mississippi mud, any cotton fields; they heard what they were seeking, as so many of us have, on recordings, in their case 78-rpm shellac. As Marybeth Hamilton puts it, when describing the revelatory discovery of a Charley Patton record by a thirty-something collector in Brooklyn named James McKune: “It was there at the Williamsburg YMCA, in a single room sometime in the mid-1940’s, that the Delta blues was born.”

You think you know music nerds? Until you’ve read about these guys, you really don’t. As a group that hung around Indian Joe’s record shop on West 47th Street in Manhattan, they became obsessive enthusiasts, as Hamilton puts it, and they do impress me. From their reverent attitude and weird fantasies came such things as the widely retailed vision of the career of Robert Johnson, whom we know from 41 brilliant tracks he recorded in 1936 and ‘37. You can get anything you want out of any music. For what it’s worth, I don’t hear in Johnson’s blues the piercing of a veil between life and death or a magical power regarding past and future; I don’t hear a griot. (When the musicologist Sam Charters went to West Africa in search of “the roots of the blues,” as his book is titled, he came up empty.) I hear delicacy balancing drive, a riveting interplay between playing and singing, and the rough textures of a certain man’s daily life in this world. Which, sure, sometimes involves walking with the Devil, or seeing the blues walking like a man, or outrunning a hellhound.

That’s me: What’s actually important is that all we have of Johnson are those blues recordings. In real life, the guy played country music, kids’ songs, goofy radio pop hits, religious songs, and everything else there was to play. Blues was just one modality, not exceptionally deep or ancient or “African”—a modality that record companies, which were run, of course, by white men, were then trying hard to sell to black audiences, not with a lot of success. Blues is just one modality, and Johnson was a real person. Those facts don’t fit the image that many people—mainly it’s been white people—have ever wanted to have of Johnson or the blues.

One of the cool and useful thing about blues is that almost anyone can play it. A very cool thing about Johnson is that he was unusually good. That affects how the movie handles the music itself—the thing we’re invited to care about. Our main character is supposed to be a new Johnson or Charley Patton or Son House. Onscreen, he’s manifestly not that, not even close, so whenever he plays, other characters have to come off totally mindblown by what they’re hearing, which puts a strain on the acting and writing (and that’s in the realistic part of the movie). This was an issue in “A Complete Unknown” too. Even the real young Dylan, let alone Timmy, though he’s a brilliant actor, wasn’t knocking everybody out every time he opened his mouth and struck a chord. (The young Robert Johnson wasn’t good at first either; he had to go off by himself and sell his soul to the Devil practice practice practice.) Watching the early part of the movie, I wondered why certain famous songs heard in the background, like “Wang Dang Doodle,” are covers, since the originals are so immediate and compelling and can’t be hard to get the rights to. Maybe it’s because the originals would point up how poorly the music that the actors perform in the scenes compares to the models.

Those white NYC record nerds of the 1940’s really were vampire-like. They sucked the humanity out of an entire musical culture, remade it in the image of their own dreams of intensity and blackness and southernness, and bit a lot of our necks in the process. So did the lefty field-recording guys who worked for the Library of Congress (if the vampire were Alan Lomax with a big reel-to-reel, I’d think the joke was funny). I find that trying to let go of the raft of preconceptions those guys laid so decisively on the music, which did develop into the essentializing of Chicago blues by white players and fans, makes it easier for me to hear the true intensity of a Son House, or for that matter of a Buddy Guy, but the way the movie works, the vampire isn’t projecting. In the movie, that deep-folk authenticity, that pre-modern, pre-Roman, pre-Christian Africanness, which the vampire yearns to slurp up and then, though he may or may not know it, mingle with everything else he’s slurped up and then just boringly fart out, is supposed to be, within the rules of the movie, such as they are, real.

We know the authenticity is supposed to be real, because it’s right there, in 1930’s Clarksdale, as painstakingly depicted by the movie. The irony is that the 1930’s Clarksdale depicted by the movie is the unreal product of a fantasy projected by white people on African America, a fantasy of a time and place when griots still walked the modern earth, a fantasy that got so worked into our pop culture that it may be impossible to pierce the veil and see what might have really been there. Thanks to a notably corrupt and racist music business, though—and thanks to those vampire record collectors—we do at least have some of the music.

Part Two
The CEO’s

Sam Altman, owner of Open AI, has reportedly said that when users of his chatbot, ChatGPT, use terms like “please” and “thank you” during interactions with the bot, it costs his company tens of millions of dollars in annual electricity costs. At first I thought he was trying to ge…

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I’ve now seen some of last night’s highlights—lowlights—and like every other Trump event, with the full fawning complement of his party in attendance, along with excitable stars of the MAGA base, it’s clear that the thing was blatantly nothing but a full-throated celebration of the cult of his personality, replete with a steady stream of lying about what’s been done and what will be done, along with baiting the opposition and sheer rambling lunacy. The tinpot-crackpot-dictator style, as well as the response of the fans, deserves the comparisons to Nazi rallies it’s been getting. It also evinces a carny goofiness that feels to me pretty deeply American.

So a perfect storm. A horror movie.

Key to the horror: Trump keeps forcing us to see how bad some of our national political traditions have always been. We’re looking in the mirror, seeing the monster, and screaming into eternity. Fade to black, roll credits.

The televised annual joint-session State of the Union address was always a bad thing. Trump’s parody of it is a parody of a parody. The tradition should never have existed.

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In the first half of the 1990’s, I began a career as a professional freelance writer. I don’t mean I finally started to get paid regularly for my ongoing work as a playwright, screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist. All of that was a manifest washout, professionally. What I started getting paid for: various kinds of writing that everybody encounters every day and doesn’t think of as writing.

Like when you’re wondering what a warning light on your car’s dash means? and you fumble around in the glovebox? and haul out the manual and look it up? (OK, you might find the answer on your phone, or by asking some robot assistant, we’ll get to that—but this was the ‘90’s.) Somebody has to actually write that stuff.

And write it so that you can understand it, and write it economically enough to fit in the book. That might sound fairly easy, but the key considerations make it not as easy as it might sound. Many people don’t write clearly and economically. Even most of the people who write more or less OK are writing something that only approximates what they mean. Few are able to fulfill the number-one requirement of writing manuals: Say exactly what you mean. Which can take a good bit of thought.

Not only does someone have to write your car owner’s manual; someone has to organize it so you can quickly and intuitively find what you want while you're sitting there bewildered behind the wheel (parked, hopefully). You’ve no doubt used indexes, tables of contents, the alphabet, running page headings, sub-heads on pages, etc., etc., for years without thinking much about exactly how they get built into reference work. You notice the quality of the apparatus only when there’s a glitch and you can’t find what you want.

And even then, when people bump up against a failure like that, instead of thinking “this thing is horribly organized,” or “this thing is horribly written,” they often assume they’re missing something that should be obvious. Usually the real failure is on the production side. It’s not so easy to get these things right.

Thanks to people who think about it all the time, however, a lot of manuals are pretty good. People who do this kind of writing the best are operating in a condition of obscurity, where being taken for granted is the biggest win. Since the entire purpose is to deliver a result, the user’s relationship to the writing is largely unconscious. Success is defined by nobody noticing the success.

I didn’t write car owner’s manuals. I wrote a series of manuals for entering data in a mainframe system used by hundreds of people, every day, throughout the five boroughs of New York City, in order to document and track the referral, evaluation, and placement of special-education students in the largest public school system in the country. That process, and the computer system itself, were court-mandated, involving significant compliance issues, with major investment by class-action lawyers, and real penalties, and yet the process was so complicated, and the system so hard to operate, that “the field”—personnel in all of the school districts in all of the boroughs, and their bosses, responsible for the all-important data-entry—were up against it on a daily basis. A training unit was therefore crammed into an office at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. The field would come to 110, in small groups, and sit in a training room next door to that office to learn what were, effectively, the known workarounds for defeating the system’s tendency not to function as expected.

This was my first experience of office work, and the training unit was a lively bunch: I look back with fondness on the whole experience. I may be exaggerating the mainframe system’s kludginess, but it’s true that in my memory, anyway, everyone who knew the system well took it as given that the system sucked.

Return with me, if you will, to a very particular moment in tech. These were the later days of the flashing DOS prompt and the ugly green letters and numbers against a dark screen. “Personal computing” was just coming into city offices; ours had IBM PC or clone desktops—not, at first, intra-networked, so software was installed and stored locally, on each machine, disk by disk—with a wired connection to the off-site location where the citywide computer system ran (maybe at Brooklyn Metrotech). When using the system, we were treating the PC’s as terminals, but I think the field still had a mix of dedicated terminals and PC’s.

I wasn’t one of the trainers—thank God. Some trainers knew the system very well. Others struggled with it. During trainings, the field could get rowdy, thanks to the many annoyances presented by the system, and the weaker trainers came staggering out of training sessions as hollow-eyed and pale as first-year teachers.

I was assigned to write user manuals to be distributed to the field. They’d never had manuals, which meant I had no specific models, not even negative ones. It was all new to me. I had to learn to do at least some data-entry on the system, which meant picking the brains of the trainers who actually knew the system and figuring out some things on my own. Writing those manuals taught me a lot about writing, and about organizing writing, and about the intensive complexity, in general, of public systems that serve mass ends, and the automation of such systems.

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This is a kind of Part Two, following up my most recent post, “Lame and Useless US History Parallels,” on Ted Widmer's faulty analogy between the Trump administration’s egregious abuse of Immigration and Border Control (ICE) and the British occupation of Boston in the 1770’s. This one is about an Atlantic article by Tyler Austin Harper, responding to the killing of the protestor Alex Pretti by a group of ICE agents and arguing for the essential importance to the Constitution, and to liberty in general, of the Second Amendment.

For Harper, the connection between the killing of Pretti and the Second lies in the fact that when Pretti was killed, he was carrying a concealed handgun, which he was licensed to carry, a fact that seems to have had nothing to do with the agents’ decision to tackle him and pin him to the ground. The gun seems to have been discovered by the agents only when Pretti was already down. The discovery may have served as some sort of incitement for the agents to shoot the prostrate man, repeatedly, causing his death.

Harper begins his piece by reporting that as part of his own effort, as a Black American, to reduce the chance of being ICE-profiled and harassed, he not only got an early haircut but also stopped carrying the handgun that, after receiving death threats in response to some of his writing, he’d been carrying concealed for about a year, in compliance with his state’s gun laws. Pretti’s killing confirmed for Harper a pre-existing concern: In the event that he was searched or roughed up by agents, and his gun was discovered, the agents would be unlikely to respect or even understand his right to be carrying it, and might, in the heat of the moment, take the gun as a reason to shoot him. Given other actions taken by ICE agents, I think that even before Pretti’s killing, that concern was pretty reasonable.

Harper goes on to link his concern to a familiar line of constitutional thought. “The core purpose of the Second Amendment,” he says, “[is] to prevent government tyranny”; “the Second Amendment is a uniquely American freedom, and in fact is the very thing that makes possible all the others.” The connection between those ideas about the Second and the Pretti killing is that Pretti was killed after, and probably because, agents found the gun on him (and removed it). Pretti was killed in that sense for exercising a right protected by the Second.

If that’s true, and I think it probably is, then constitutionally protecting an individual right to keep and bear arms clearly doesn’t prevent the tyranny that Harper frames as the protection’s core purpose. He approvingly quotes a public statement from Gun Owners of America: “[the] Second Amendment protects American’s [sic] right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.” That’s a perfectly responsible and reasonable complaint against government overreach. It might as well refer to the infringement of any constitutionally protected individual right, and yet Harper’s notion that an individual right to keep and bear arms makes the other rights possible rests on the belief that a demand like the one made by Gun Owners of America—a demand that government stop being tyrannical—is backed up, thanks to the Second, by a threat of armed popular resistance; that’s what makes the Second, in this line of thinking, the sine qua non of the Bill of Rights. In the heritage culture of gun rights that Harper is invoking, the implicit demand on government goes something like: “You’d better respect our right to keep and bear arms, so that in the event that you become tyrannical, we can overthrow you.”

An armed confrontation with government is not, of course, what Pretti was seeking by coming armed to an obstruction of ICE operations (Vice President Vance to the contrary). Such a confrontation is also not the tone of the Gun Owners’ statement. It’s not even the tone of the Atlantic article, despite Harper’s very explicitly invoking the traditional belief that the Second, and only the Second, puts teeth in the whole Bill of Rights by enabling, supposedly, an armed public to be ready to defend those rights. Neither Harper nor anyone else in serious public discussion is raising the scenario that gun-culture people like Harper imagine is embedded in the Constitution: armed popular resistance to tyranny.

I think that’s because the whole idea makes no sense, and never has made any sense—not in 1689, and not in 1791. A government in the process of violating constitutional rights has already gone well past the point where it’s likely to be receptive to a demand that it change its ways or suffer consequences at the hands of a public that’s been allowed by law to collect firearms. No industrial-strength government is afraid that the public is well-armed enough to effectively fight an industrial-strength government. I used to think “What’s your Glock going to do against tanks and nukes?” But now I also think “What was your blunderbuss going to do against a cadre of dragoons?”

Lexington and Concord was a one-off surprise. Achieving independence required a regular army, and General Washington, anyway, found militia participation a headache at best. An armed citizenry, unless it’s armed like a government and organized like a government, is powerless against a government.

I’ve written elsewhere and often about the cognitive dissonances involved not only in gun-culture thinking about the Second but also, maybe more importantly, the cognitive dissonances in the founders’ writing and ratifying the Second, so I won’t belabor them here. I’ve also leaned on the writing of Garry Wills when pointing out that while a right of insurrection against a government that you’ve decided is tyrannical may in fact exist, that right cannot feasibly be enumerated in the constitution which establishes the government. Envisioning the founders, as Harper does, as constitutionally enshrining in the Second a right to rebel with force of arms against the federal government adds up to nothing but an exercise of historico-sentimentality, of exactly the kind that Ted Widmer also indulges in, regarding the unrest in 1770’s Boston.In response to the coincidence that Pretti was legally carrying a gun when federal agents killed him, Harper, Gun Owners of America, and others mainly seem to want to frame those who legally carry as a newly oppressed minority. To give their complaints a glow, they elevate the Second.

But that’s only to give their complaints a glow—only rhetoric. If they were serious about the role supposedly played by the Second—if they really believed that the guns they’ve been allowed to collect and carry give them an opportunity to exercise a constitutionally protected right to take up arms against tyranny—why wouldn’t this be exactly the time to start exercising that right? How do the current federal government’s actions not rise to the level of the tyranny they believe the Constitution contemplates our resisting, via the Second? If not now, when? But like every other iteration of gun-rights discourse, going all the way back to the 17th Century, it’s all talk.

I recently saw an article published in a legacy outlet, linking the current violent crackdown on the citizenry, by the lawless federal paramilitary known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to the British military response to the resistance in Boston in the 1770’s. I saw another article, also published in a legacy outlet, linking Alex Pretti’s decision to carry a gun to a protest, where ICE agents killed him, to the intentions of our national founders regarding essential liberties. Both of these callbacks to the U.S. founding period are steeped in a drastic, revealing error that I think matters.

The protesters are not like Bostonian resisters, ICE oppression not a revived “Lobsterback” occupation. Modern gun rights do not fulfill a founding intention to enable us to resist the tyrannical intent of those who are now deploying ICE on our streets. The error emerges not from seeing Trump’s use of ICE against the people as tyrannical—it obviously is—but from troping back to the nation’s founding in a mood of nationalistic fantasy that makes us, at best, collectively stupider than we should be, at worst less genuinely resistant to oppression.

Not that the authors of these articles are themselves stupid. They’re just bedazzled by sentiment.

The first is by Ted Widmer, who has had a long and successful career in both academia and government: Clinton speechwriter, doctorate in lit, history prof, Library of Congress, etc., etc.. His article, which ran in The Boston Globe, is headlined:

Boston in the 1770s. Minneapolis in 2026. Our current leaders have forgotten that the essence of America entails resistance to heavy-handed occupation.

Writers rarely do headlines, but that one pretty neatly sums up the point Widmer wants to make. His idea—far from unfamiliar—is that we were born, as a people, in a resistance, concentrated in Boston, to a tyranny; those origins, a kind of DNA, now determine public behavior in response to a return, in the form of Trumpist authoritarianism, of the very forces that we came into being to fight.

In the end, of course, we overturned those forces in a revolution. So the analogy works fine—if you’re Stephen Miller.

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