The Books of My Life: In the Name of God and Country

 

There is nothing really new in Michael Fellman’s monograph In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). But then there doesn’t have to be. It is an excellent and much needed work of historical, sociological, social psychological, and historical synthesis on the history of terrorism in the United States.

Everything in Fellman's book, as I said, scholars have known for some time. Practitioners of the social sciences and the humanities, for instance, have long recognised that humans can be nasty and brutish bullies, rapists, pillagers, burners of villagers, cleansers of others, and even genociders of themselves. They have long known that history is filled to the brim with examples of each of these, too many, in fact, to note and so many that it boggles the mind to realise that there remain Enlightenment progressivists out there who still harbour dreams of a radiant utopian future. The depth and breadth of what some might call human depravity has increased thanks to technological inventions like the cannon, the machine gun, and the atomic bomb. These marvellous technological innovations, when allied with bureaucratic efficiency, for instance, gave us the Holocaust (an event which convinced me once and for all about the fallen nature of human beings), and have given us several more holocausts since including the one in progress (pun intended) as I type. So much for the hollow rhetoric of never again. 

Practitioners of the social sciences and the humanities have long known that in order for humans and human groups to create identities they have to mark themselves off against other humans and other human groups. By doing so they created and they create an identity for themselves. They create, thanks to this process, an us. The human identity groups in which humans have been embedded from the very beginning of their existence have taken various forms across time and space. They have taken the form of, for example, clans, bands, tribes, cliques, social and cultural movements, extended families of blood, and chiefdoms or monarchical states and nation-states. 

Practitioners of the social sciences and humanities have long recognised that meanings are at the heart of human groups and human identity construction, and that consequently culture is at the heart of human groups and group identity construction. They have long recognised that these human groups often if not generally classify their culture as sacred and the culture of them, of the other as profane (evil, despicable, weird, inferior). In the process, these meanings provide specific humans in specific human group with a sense of who they are and a notion of purpose not only within the group but in relation to other groups and in relation to their broader environments. It gives many if not all of these groups a sense of specialness, a sense of chosenness, and a sense of mission.

Practitioners of the social sciences and humanities have long known that human groups are dynamic. Max Weber, for instance, noticed that groups had within themselves the possibility if not inevitability of conflict, whether hot or cold. Human groups, particularly those in larger and more complex societies, are characterised by cultism, the process that occurs when a social and cultural movement such as Christianity throws off, at least rhetorically, the garments of its past, in the case of Christianity its Pharisaic Jewish origins, instituting, in the process, a new movement that develops its own organisational form, new wine in old wineskins. These new social and cultural movements are initially, as Weber notes, generally led by charismatic figures to whom followers ascribe authority and special power. I give you Jesus, Muhammed, Baha’u'llah, Joseph Smith, Jim and Tammy Baker, Huey Long, Milton Friedman, etc., etc., etc. These charismatic figures don’t, as this list makes clear, have to be what we call religious figures. They can be politicians, economists, salesmen and women, and so on and so forth. These new movements, in turn, thanks to organisational fossilisation, are invariably sectarian as some in the movements feel that something was lost in the transition from charismatic to traditional and bureaucratic forms of organisation and authority.

Fellman’s book brings this social scientific and humanities wisdom on identity construction, the manufacture of the other, charismatic figures, and social and cultural movements together in order to explore five case studies which foreground the history of the role revolutionary terrorism and reactionary terrorism, including state sponsored or state enforced reactionary terrorism, in American history. Fellman begins his epic tale of the history of terrorism in the United States with John Brown who used revolutionary violence to try to end slavery in the 1850s and was met, as Felllman notes, by the reactionary terror of the state of Virginia which brutally put down Brown’s attempted revolution. He also notes that this same state reactionary terrorism inadvertently gave Brown a platform which he used to turn himself into a Christ-like martyr of a holy cause at his trial, something that, as Fellman notes, was a major factor leading the US into civil war with itself. 

In subsequent chapters Fellman deals with other forms of revolutionary and reactionary terrorism. The next chapter of the book explores the revolutionary terror of the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas and the US and Confederate response (reactionary terror) to that revolutionary terrorism. Next Fellman explores the reactionary terror brought against Blacks and White Republican scallywags and carpetbaggers in the post-Civil War South, a terror that, for Blacks, lasted from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s and some might argue beyond. Fellman follows this chapter with a chapter on the revolutionary terrorism of workers and ideological radicals in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, a revolutionary terrorism, that we who have been closely reading Fellman’s book should know by now, was met by even stronger state reactionary terrorism and the terrorism of the masses, a form of reactionary violence and terrorism one might want to distinguish from state reactionary violence and terror at least for analytical purposes though clearly they are related given the role the state plays in socialisation for fear. Fellman closes the case studies chapters of his book with an analysis of the twentieth century American imperial adventure in the Philippines, the revolutionary terrorism of those trying to evict the American invader, and the terrorism of torture, the killing of non-combatants and surrendering combatants, and mutilation unleashed by American soldiers in the Philippines with the tacit approval of its military and political leaders. If all of this seems like deja vu for many of us today it should for as Fellman notes when talking about the reactionary terror unleashed by the Bush the Second administration on global revolutionary terrorism in the early 21st century. 

So what, asks Fellman, can we learn from these case studies of revolutionary and reactionary terrorism? Beyond the fact that earlier forms of revolutionary and reactionary terror influence later ones, Fellman argues that history shows again and again that there has been a cycle of revolutionary terrorism met by reactionary terrorism and, I would add, reactionary terrorism met by revolutionary terrorism at least since the advent of the modern world. Whether this cycle will continue within modern and postmodern societies given the use of sophisticated surveillance technologies by the state is a question worth asking. I would argue that given the increasing power of the state and its elite allies, the increasing socialisation power of the state, the use the powers that be make of new digital bread and circus technologies, and the surveillance power of the state there may be diminishing opportunities for revolutionary terrorism as a reaction to state terrorism. As for cycles of revolutionary terror and reactionary terror and reactionary terror and revolutionary terror outside of core nations and between core nations and peripheral societies, I suspect those will continue for some time.

Fellman’s In the Name of God and Country does an excellent job of exploring this cycle of terrorism that has impacted a world of radical ideologies, religious ideologies, state centralisation, state power, and class and racial inequalities. He does an excellent job of exploring the religious and religious like bedrock of both revolutionary and reactionary terrorism. He does a nice job, in a chapter on defining terrorism, of exploring the difficulties associated historically with how to define “terrorism". Everyone interested in the social sciences and humanities should read this book, a book that shows that when it comes to the use of terror the US is not exceptional in any way, shaper, or form. It nicely shows that like the imperial powers of yore the US has had no trouble sweeping its ideology of political, economic, and cultural exceptionalism under the rug and its ideologies of freedom of speech and devotion to liberty and freedom under the rug when necessary, something that has often been necessary in dealing with First Peoples and cultural and ideological dissidents, native or not, for instance. In the end Fellman’s book convinced me even more of two things, first, that with humans, while capable of “good” are also simultaneously capable of “evil” and, second, that American exceptionalism is exceptionally fictional just like it is in every other nation-state across time and over space that believes that it is exceptional. But then humans do like their myths.

The Market 32/Le Price Chopper Kiada

 

It never stops. Let me preface this jeremiad with a few empirical facts. I am a 71 year old male who has asthma; I have had it since I was a Dallas twelve year old. I have arthritis. I have irritable bowel syndrome. I have fibromyalgia. 

I try to keep in “shape”, whatever that means when one is in the autumn of his life. What it means to me is that I do yoga and I walk around Lincoln Park across the street from me when the weather permits. I also walk to the Market 32, also known as Price Chopper, popularly known as the Ghetto Chopper, about a mile from my house on Delaware Avenue in Albany, once in a while, when the weather permits.

Well today I walked up to the Delaware Chopper and boy was it an experience. I took some PRICE CHOPPER brand seltzer bottles to return at the wonderful full of nasty odours automated bottle, glass, and can return centre at the Le Chopper. It is one of the biggest and one of the nastiest of these things I have ever encountered. When I put a Price Chopper seltzer bottle into the return tunnel it, at first, popped back out and the machine said that they did not take these plastic bottles back. I tried again—it was a bloody Price Chopper product after all—it ate the bottle. It did not, of course, give me credit for a nickel. Weary of this crap I through the other bottle away. Perhaps someone who needs it more than me will make use of it.

This wasn’t the only joy I experienced at the Delaware Chopper today. While shopping I discovered that one of the things I came for—Noosa strawberry/rhubarb yoghurt—was not in stock on a MONDAY though it was on sale. They did have the Lay’s crisps/chips at $1.99 a package if you purchase three, the other thing I came for. 

I learned several lessons at Market 32 today. I learned that the Chopper will have salt regularly but not necessarily sugar. Let’s take a moment to marvel at the brave new digital world distribution and stocking system. I learned that automated bottle, can, and glass return systems are sometimes crap. All hail new digital age lets lower labour cost capitalism, a capitalism that is mediocre at best.

On another what the bloody hell matter, we have a replacement postperson for awhile. He/She delivered the mail for us 236, to 234 and the mail for 238 to us, 236. I delivered the mail to the right address. Isn’t modern life wonderful?

The Books of My Life: Comic Visions

I am not a huge fan of sitcoms, American, British, or wherever. Nor am I a big fan of stand up comedy television shows, political comedy television shows, or comedy variety shows on television. I find most of them far too obvious in their targets and far too lowest common intellectual denominator stupid in their form and content. That said, there are some sitcoms I do really love. I love, for example, Fawlty Towers, the first three or four series Absolutely Fabulous, The League of Gentlemen, the first two seasons of Chapelle's Show, the television work of Julia Davis, some comedy sketch shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and some stand up comedians in the raw such as George Carlin. 

Rather paradoxically, I suppose, I do like some books on the history of television comedy. I quite liked, for instance, a book I recently read on. American television comedy, David Marc’s Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 1997), a book I found to be an excellent introduction to the history and culture of American television comedy of the sitcom and stand up variety.

Marc’s introduction to and synthesis on American television comedy in its sitcom forms (domesticoms, ruralcoms, magicoms, ethnicoms and racecoms, litcoms and the coms that mix and match those various subgenres), comedy variety (the product, as Marc notes, of music hall and vaudeville), and stand up, is grounded in almost a lifetime of studying and writing on American television and it shows. Marc does an excellent job of placing American television comedy and American television in general in their economic contexts (its commercialism, for example), their political contexts (censorship), their demographic contexts (ratings, market segmentation in the post-network era), and their cultural contexts (its structure; forms; political, economic, ideological, and identity correctnesses). He nicely explores the dominance of the sitcom in American TV land, something he attributes, in part, to its political, economic, ideological, and ethnic correctness and its, unlike much stand-up comedy, tendency toward the vanilla. 

Marc does a nice job of exploring the terrain of the history of American television comedy. He takes us from the ethnicom (The Goldbergs, for example) in the early days of TV, to domesticoms (Father Knows Best, for example), to magicoms (a variation on the domesticom, see Bewtiched for example), to litcoms (the short and brief dominance of shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show All in the Family, and M*A*S*H, all of which are historically important but, in my opinion, aesthetically bland), to the return of the not so repressed domesticoms like Family Ties in the 1980s, to chosen family domesticoms that celebrate American diversity such as Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and to the parodic and satiric contained by economic and ideological correctness domesticoms like Married...With Children and The Simpsons, both of which seem more daring than they really are as Marc notes. Marc nicely explores the decline of the American television comedy-variety show and its banishment to late night TV (The Tonight Show). He does an excellent job of exploring the impact of cable on American network television, one that led to audience declines for the big three of CBS, NBC, and ABC, and the advent of “real” stand up (the daring comedy of George Carlin on HBO, for example) on premium cable channels like HBO and the endless reruns of old sitcoms on basic cable channels and commercial channels. He nicely explores the standard structure and form of American sitcoms. They began, as he points out, with the familiar status quo, followed by a ritual error, the ritual lesson learned, and the return of the familiar status quo. Most viewers do like their rituals of repetition after all.

There are some missing pieces in Comic Visions. Marc does not explore how viewers read television comedies, something that is multiple and quite complex, and the multiple ways viewers use television in general, which is quite complex as well. He does not explore dramedy “sitcoms" such The Wonder Yeare. He does not explore a sitcom, a teencom which some, though not me, find innovative (example: Square Pegs). These absences will not please everyone but then we should remember that all history is selective and Marc’s history of American television comedy is no different. 

All that said, Marc’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of America, the history of American culture, the history of American television, and the history of American television comedy. It is made even better by the fact that not only is the book grounded in sound exegesis and sound exegetical context analysis, but it is also, unlike many contemporary crystal ball textualist works on American literature, film, and television with their fetishisation of psychoanalysis, and sound hermeneutics, grounded in sound contextual analysis, in other words. Finally Comic Visions is—and I love this in particular—wonderfully acerbic in its homiletics. Very recommended.

The Books of My Life: Jesus and John Wayne

 

I, of course, have long known that Christianity, like other monotheistic “religions” or bureaucratised meaning systems such as theocratic Judaism and its predecessors and theocratic Islam, had and has a dark and intolerant side. I know about the Crusades, the execution of heretics, and the persecution of Anabaptists and Quakers, to choose three of the many instances of theocratic Christian paternalistic holier than thou intolerance. 

I also know Christian theocratic intolerance because I have experienced it in my life. One day, for instance, when I was walking through the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington I ran into one of the seemingly innumerable groups soliciting for ideological purposes in the Union. In this case the group soliciting for attention was, if memory serves, the theocratically oriented Catholic group, Opus Dei. I struck up a conversation—or perhaps better they forced a conversation on me—with them after they hooked me in. It was impossible for innocent me to avoid talking to them thanks to their tactics. The subject of abortion came up at one point. I told them that I was for a woman’s right to choose. As I stood there they lectured me in their tried and true paternalistic way on the evils and dangers of my pro-abortion ways as if I was a dangerous child because I was pro-choice. At one point during our “discussion" one of the female members of this group got as close to me as she possibly could. As our conversation continued she continued to yell at me and move closer and closer to me. In response I instinctively put my hands in self defence and pushed her back very lightly when she was literally almost upon me. 

Despite rare occasions like this in the 1970s, occasions during which I experienced the dangers of theocratic Christianity, I really didn’t grasp how dangerous theocratic Christianity could be and was until the 1990s when I moved to Utah and later to South Dakota. I had moved to Utah to study and research Mormonism. There were several things that struck “Gentile” me after I arrived in the Mormon Zion, things that clued me into the prominent presence of theocratic and right wing populist intolerance in the United States. There was, for example, the popularity of the book None Dare Call it Treason by the “born again” fundamentalist Christian, John Bircher, and Republican John Stormer, a book I repeatedly ran across in Provo’s used book shops. This book, which one of the city’s used bookshop owners told me was a popular seller, argued that America was being betrayed by pro-communist elites whose mission was to take over America by growing an activist American state. Sound famiiar? I soon discovered to my horror that a significant number of Mormons, including several of the Mormon elite, had ties to the John Birch Society including its president and prophet from 1985 to 1994, Ezra Taft Benson and his son Reid, who taught religion at BYU.

My next lesson in right wing theocratic Christian intolerance involved one James “Bo’ Gritz. Gritz was popular in certain circles in Utah and in the Mormon culture region (Utah, southern Idaho, parts of Arizona and even Southern California). Gritz, a retired US military special services officer who converted to Mormonism, had ties to the anti-US government Christian Patriot movement and right wing militias, militias that shared the anti-big government and anti-communist ideology of the John Birch Society. I later learned that Gritz had tried to mediate the dispute between Randy Weaver, a Christian separatist and survivalist who had ties to the White identity group Aryan Nation in Idaho. In 1992 Gritz ran for president (shades of Joseph Smith) of the United States on a platform of opposition to the New World Order, a populist rightwing catchphrase for the supposed one world government that some believed elite others were trying to secretly foist on unknowing and unaware Americans; opposition to US foreign aid, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the federal income tax, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank, still another populist rightwing favourite; and non-opposition to the reestablishment of a "Christian America”, yet another populist rightwing favourite. Gritz received 2.13% of the vote in Idaho, a state with a significant population of Mormons. In that election year Gritz garnered 10% of the vote in Duchesne County, Idaho and Oneida County, Idaho and 23% of the vote in Franklin County, Idaho where he almost pushed the Democratic Party nominee Bill Clinton into fourth place. He did even better in heavily Mormon Utah (Mormons constituted over 70% of the population of the state when I lived there in the early 1990s) where he received 3.84% of the vote or almost 30,000 votes. He received 7500 votes in Utah County, the intellectual capital of the Mormon version of the Bible Belt, home to Brigham Young University and seat of a goodly number of Mormon apologists and polemicists. I heard rumours, in fact, that Gritz actually did better than Clinton in several BYU wards where he finished second behind the Republican nominee and eventual president George Herbert Walker Bush.

After I left Utah with a friend in order to travel and hike our around the US and Canadian Wests I ended up living in Rapid City, South Dakota for three months while my touring and hiking companion worked at the Indian Health Service hospital in Rapid. With time on my hands I decided to do ethnography at a local Mennonite Church, a Mennonite Brethren church, a fact to remember since there is a great diversity theologically and ideologically among American and Canadian Mennonites. The Mennonite Brethren are Mennonites who immigrated to the US and Canadian Wests from Russia and who have since been heavily influenced by pietism and later evangelicalism and fundamentalism, both of which tend to make Mennonite Brethren politically conservative and less enamoured of historic Mennonite pacifism or non-resistance. The pastor of the church, apparently feeling that I needed to know what a real man was, urged me to attend the Promise Keepers meeting at the church. The Promise Keepers were then and are now an evangelical men’s group founded by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney—something that points up the links between football, evangelical Christianity, and the Christian manhood movement (we haven’t gotten to the links with the US military yet and won’t)—dedicated to “traditional values” and to melding masculine strength with the what have traditionally been the female values of nurturance, churchgoing, and marital fidelity.

What I saw of the radical populist religious right in Utah and beyond frankly ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. In fact, the fear I felt as I moved amongst the radical populist right and the radical Christian populist right in the Intermountain West (see also Alberta) was akin to the fear I felt as a Jew when I lived in blood and soil nationalist Russia where Jews could not really be blood and soil Russians save by dispensation, usually fame, and where I heard on several occasions statements that were clearly anti-Semitic. By the way, the Russia I lived in was not only a place of anti-Jewish prejudices, it was home to anti-Gypsy sentiments. One day while I was at a market buying food to eat near the Universitet metro station I witnessed an attack on Gypsies by the militsia, the police. 

My experience of Russian blood and soil nationalism made me sensitive to the similarities and differences between blood and soil nationalism like that of Russia and other Eastern European and Western European nations and American White Christian nationalism. Like blood and soil Russians (and their kin in other parts of Europe and across the known universe) the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right in Utah, South Dakota, and beyond delineated and delineate between the elect or chosen, those with the right mentality, themselves, of course, and those who were not one of them, whoever the them might be—heretics, communists, socialists, New Dealers, liberals, you fill in the blank. For the radical populist right the US was and is their nation, not the nation of liberals, socialists, communists, or recent immigrants (paradoxically they, of course, are the children of immigrants themselves). Like much blood and soil nationalism the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right was and is militantly patriarchal and misogynist thanks to their patriarchal cult of domesticity ideology, a cultural system in which males were leaders and women were groomed for marriage and hence the domesticated helpmeets of their husbands. Like blood and soil nationalists the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right were and are nationalist and even fascist, seeing the nation, their nation, as a extension of their chosen church. For the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right the US was and is the promised land, a promised land charged with a messianic mission not only to the nation itself but to, in a very parochial form, the world (something remarkable given that Christianity in its infant form was internationalist), a world that, they believed, must be a mirror image of the US economically, politically, and culturally. Nationalist Russians, of course, believed and believe their nation has a messianic mission to save the world as well. 

There have been a number of excellent books on nationalist, militant, militaristic, misogynist, and “literalist” White evangelicalism. No one, however, has helped me understand the ins and out and twists and turns of the culture and cultures of blood and soil, authoritarian, misogynist, and cherry picking "literalist" White evangelicalism than Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, edition with a new preface, 2021) by Kristen Kobes Du Mez. In Jesus and John Wayne Calvin College historian (Calvin is a conservative Christian Reformed college located in Grand Rapids, Michigan) Du Mez takes readers on a journey into post-Cold War  militant White evangelical culture, its subcultures (for example, complementarian, dominionist, Zionist, an ideology that links American nationalism with a support for Israel, Calvinist, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, intellectual), and the battles for hegemony within this social movement between the various cultural identity groups each of whom, to a great extent, create overlapping if somewhat different ideologically grounded realities (Americanism, anti-abortion, anti-femisist). 

No one I know of has done a better job than Du Mez of taking readers into the White nationalist evangelical countercultural media bureaucracies (for instance, publishers, bookstores, schools, camps, parachurch organisations and interest groups). No one I know of has done a better job of  exploring the saints superstars and stars of the movement, the chilvarous Knights of the golden mediaeval and Christian past, including John Wayne, Rambo, and Oliver North (a fascinating mixture of the fictional and factual, many of the factional, of course, made somewhat fictional by the saint making practises associated with the movement), and the history of the failings, foibles, and hypocrisies—including bullying, wife abuse, the abuse of children, sexual abuses of adults and children, the abuse of power, and hubris—of several of these White right evangelical superstars and stars. Given this discourse it should not be a surprise that White right evangelicals would find politician “cowboys" like Ronald Reagan appealing. It probably does not need to be said at this point that many of these Christian nationalists have rallied behind a bully, a narcissist, a con man, a xenophobe, and a perceived strong man named Donald Trump and adopted him as one of their own.

White Warrior Theocratic Christian evangelicalism, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, as Du Mez shows. We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore social movements  have been around for a long time and they are not going anywhere soon as there is always something that people can whinge about. Du Mez notes, for example, one longue durée precedent for White right evangelical Christian nationalism and anti-modernism, Billy Sunday, the avuncular anti-Communist and anti-evolutionist and anti-modernist Biblical criticism former baseball player (there is that sport connection again) and evangelist. 

It is here, in this genealogy of the forebearers of White right nationalist evangelicalism, that I had a problem with Du Mez’s book. There were important others, many of whom Du Mez unfortunately elides, who are cut from the same intolerant ideological cloth as the Cold War “Christian” warriors Du Mez focuses on. There was more recently than Sunday, for example, Gerald L.K.Smith. Smith was yet another former supporter of the New Deal who, like Father Coughlin, morphed into a rabid right wing anti-Communist and anti-Semite White supremacist Christian nationalist crusader and evangelist populist. In 1943 Smith founded the isolationist America First Party and ran for president of the US as its nominee in 1944. Later he would run as the presidential candidate of the Christian Nationalist Crusade Party. In 1948 Smith instituted an annual passion play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas modelled after one at Oberammergau, Germany, which many considered anti-Semitic until changes were made to to its script after World War II. There were and are the White right wildcat oil men from once Confederate Texas who helped fund the White populist right evangelicals and build their counterculture, subcultures, and parachurch organisations (on this see, for example, Darren Dochuk’s Anointed in Oil). 

There are other problems I had with Jesus and John Wayne. Du Mez does not explore, in as much detail as I would have liked to have seen, the links between Mr. Potter style prosperity capitalism and its ideology of godly winners and losers (shades of Donald Trump and his ilk), an ideology comparative historian and social scientist Max Weber linked to modernisation and the de-Calvinisation of Puritanism, something that eventually linked up with extreme individualism, narcissism, and hedonism in the modern and postmodern world. She downplays the role of geography, specifically the strong presence of White populist Christian nationalism US South, including Texas, and in the intermountain and far West, and the intersections between it and racism (Jim Crow, anti-Asian ethnocentrism). She downplays the echoes and the influence of the 19th and 20th century muscular Christianity and the Christian health reform of the 19th century (think the Seventh Day Adventist Kellogg) on White right populist evangelicals, some of whom clearly assume consciously or unconsciously the greater fitness of Whites and who are as conscious of the food they eat as the heirs of the countercultural hippies they so often despite and slur in order to be the strong men and obedient women god intended them to be. She downplays the fact that the cult of domesticity, the notion that males should be the head of household and the protectors of the family and by extension the nation (a notion one also finds in fascism) which maintains that women should be queens of their household and nurturers of their family, has a long history elements of which go back to the Victorian era, an era so much of White right Christian evangelicalism draws on and from (and an ideology that may even go back to hunter-gatherer societies and cultures). She does not explore the impact of romanticism with its nationalisms, its revival of chilvaric warriorism (Wagner's Parsifal, for instance), and its nationalist hiking group excursions into nature, on American populist White right evangelicalism (on this and the intersections between romanticism, nationalism, fascism, and ethnocentrism see George Mosse’s superb The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries).

Despite these underemphases and lacunae Jesus and John Wayne (did she want to write a more popular academic book for a broader intelligent audience and not burden it with information overload perhaps?) remains one of the best books I have read on Cold War nationalist and patriarchal evangelicalism. It should be on the must read list of anyone interested in American history and how America got to the Donald Trump now. 

The Music of My Life: Georges Bizet Edition

 

I have been listening to music since the mid-1960s. Memory is fuzzy here but I think I have been listening to art music or classical music since the 1960s as well. I probably heard it first in films and cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes cartoons, and fell in love with it. I have never looked back.

I have been buying classical records since the early 1970s. The first one I bought, if memory serves, is the 1970s Bohm performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

At the time I started buying classical records the big boys included the late lamented Philips Classics, which was my favourite since they had the glorious Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon (DG), and EMI. At the time all these giants of the industry seemed to have been run by people who actually liked classical music and who, while they saw it as a commodity, did not, as the people who run these labels seem today, to see it as little more than something similar to a Serta bed or a Cadbury’s candy bar. 

Between the 1960s and the early 2000s these labels released tonnes of great, good, and adequate performances of classical music, mostly the hits: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all that jazz. Today, Philips is gone. It was gobbled up by Decca, who, like Philips and DG,  was gobbled up by the megacorporation Universal. EMI went belly up and is now part of that other bureaucratic giant of the classical music industry, Warner Classics. Today DG and Decca don’t release much in the way of art music. Presumably, it isn’t a big enough seller for them to warrant the release of new performances unless of course, a performance is given to them by some conductor or symphony orchestra and they don’t have to pay for the recordings. They are releasing old music, much of it in the form of monster conductor boxes like those of Herbert von Karajan, the pride of DG and perhaps the best known conductor, along with Bernstein, of the 1970s and 1980s. 

The action in classical music these days is with the independents though even those are getting gobbled up by the big boys. The wonderful English independent Hyperion was recently purchased by Universal making its future an open book. The wonderful Swedish independent label BIS recently got gobbled up by Apple making their future open and raising the question what does Apple want with a label that has recorded tonnes of Scandinavian music? We still have Naxos and other independents like Brilliant Classics, thank god. Naxos and Brilliant are perhaps the most interesting labels today given how much interesting music, including art music outside the mainstream, they record and release.  

Of the big boys my favourite label at the moment is Warner Classics. I love to buy composer box sets and recently Warner Classics has been releasing a number of interesting one. I have their wonderful Mendelssohn and Prokofiev box sets, for instance. But the box sets I love the most from Warner are those of French composers. Erato and EMI France, which are now part of Warner, have recorded some wonderful French art music over the years, and Warner is slowly but surely collecting it, collating it, and putting it in box sets for release. I have their Berlioz, Dukas, Faure, Franck, Pierne, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens box sets, all of which are wonderful. I recently purchased their Bizet box set.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the Bizet box set. It contains some wonderful stuff in good and very good performances. However, it does not contain several EMI and Erato recordings of Bizet that should be in the box. The box contains two performances of Carmen: the Pretre/Callas and the Rattle, both of which are good (I actually preferred the “original” edition conducted by Rattle to the Pretre). It doesn’t, though it should have, contain the Beecham, Mazel, Plasson, and Burgos performances of the opera, an opera that is one of the most popular in the repertory. It has the Pretre Pearl Fishers but not the Cluytens. It has some of the Plasson Bizet but should have it all. The Plasson performance of the L’Arlesienne incidental music is complete unlike the Gardiner in the box set making one wonder why the curators of the set chose the Gardiner instead of the wonderful Plasson. It has no Martinon Bizet but should. As for the concern that this might be too much repetition in the set, I say the more the merrier.

I hope Warner keeps releasing box sets and particularly French classical music box sets. I am praying for uch needed Chabrier and a Chausson box sets from then. Here’s hoping.

Life as Crisis Management: The Food Stamp Renewal Kiada

 

There really is no escaping Murphy’s Law, Kafka’s Law, or Voinovich’s Law, call it whatever you will. This is a lesson I learn every month if not every week.

Because of the increasing cost of my medical bills last year—I am now the proud owner of irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, asthma, arthritis, and sinus issues—I decided to apply for food stamps. I was trying to find anything within reason to keep me financially afloat. 

Recently, I got the form that would allow me to renew my food stamps (or SNAP, as it is now known). So, I filled out the form, both in electronic and paper form, and sent the latter back to Albany County Social Services.

Within this packet of material was a date and time I was given for an interview. Unfortunately, the date and time conflicted with an appointment I had at Albany Ear, Nose, and Throat, an appointment I made six months previously, today at 9:30 am. So when I sent in my paper application for SNAP I noted on the sheet they sent me on which I could notify them about any problems with the date and time that the date and time I was given for an interview conflicted with my doctor’s appointment. I never, of course, received confirmation either that my application was received electronically or in paper form and never received any confirmation that the office received my I have a problem with the date and time form.

Assuming the worst, I went early too Albany ENT today and waited for the 9:30 am call. 9:30 am passed. 9:43 am passed so I headed into the doctor’s office assuming they got my message. When I got home at around noon guess what? You guessed it, I had a message from Albany County Social Services that I had just been called by them for my interview. The message told me to call them as soon as I could.

And that is what I did as soon as I could. As soon as I could, however, was when the office was out to lunch. So I called after 1 pm, typed in the 2 in to speak to a SNAP operative and waited and waited. Eventually a message came on telling me the volume of calls was massive and to leave a message which is what I did. I am still waiting. I have, by the way, called and left a message asking for a call back with Albany County Social Services before and got no return call. So the question is: will I get anywhere this time or will I have to call and call and call?

The answer to that question is no, I did not get a call. I did, however, get a very pleasant representative at Albany County Social Services who did my interview and renewed my food stamps, which don’t amount to very much but every little bit helps in these retirement days. I managed to get through at around 1:45 pm on Thursday (a good time to call?). Before I go I want to note something that should be obvious: those involved in the SNAP programme everywhere, particularly in the era of Mr. Potter style capitalism, are no doubt overworked and underpaid both of which help me understand why it is so hard to get through to them by phone and makes me appreciate even more than I already do everything they do.

The Books of My Life: John Sayles (Molyneaux)

Modern and postmodern life is inherently absurd. Since human life is absurd it is also, as the reflecive person grasps, sometimes annoying. One of the most annoying aspects of human life, in my humble opinion, are critics, particularly literary, film, and television critics.

Critics, of course, come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours just like toothpaste and Jello. There are, for example, at least since the rise of the new digital media that can be used to make money, the casual amateur reactor who reads books and watches films and television programmes and reacts to them for money”. As a general rule the reactors to books are the best of this digital age species.

There are the fanboy and fangirl critics many of whom actually know something about the production aspects of what they read and watch because as fans they scour the  world for primary source material about the writer, director, and creator of the novels, films, and shows they adore. They generally turn the writer of the book, the director of a film, or the writer-creator of the show into a saint (and a sinner once he or she sins like all humans invariably do). Much of their knowledge, their cultural capital, about the making of a novel, a film, or a television show, comes from interviews with those involved with whatever they are reading or watching along with second hand sources such as biographies.

Then there are the academic critics. Academic critics come in several stripes. There are those, a minority, who actually do primary research on an author, a film director, or a television show creator. Generally speaking these critics try to put films or television shows into economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts. As I said these literary, film, and television historians, these social scientists, of art and commerce, are few. 

There are the crystal ball textualists of which there are, these days, many. Crystal ball textualism, the dominant or hegemonic strain of literary, film, and television theory academics have been socialised into and trained in these days, is not grounded on extensive contextual descriptive analysis. Crystal ball textualism assumes that everything you want and need to know about a novel, a short story, a film, or a television programme, can be found in the finished text itself. The finished text is what these wizards with special knowledge peer into in order to immediately decipher any text by teasing out the psychoanalytic dream worlds, the ethnic aspects, the racial aspects, and the gender aspects of the text they are peering at. They are aided and abetted in this task by the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches they have been socialised into. This means that they, unlike more intense fan boy and fan girl critics, generally pay only limited attention to primary source materials beyond the text.

Each of these critic cultures are fundamentally cultural and ideological. They are strongly normative and value laden though many would not admit this. Some critics, many of whom seen to be wanna be writers of books and wanna be makers of films and television programmes tend to whinge and whine about movies they find too talky and with too little camera movement and editing. For them such talky and static movies are theatrical, a term of derision for them, and not cinematic because they are too talky and have too few cuts and camera movements (both of which seem to become moral forces for them). The fact is, however, and to the contrary, anything put on film is a moving picture, is a piece of cinema. Moreover, there is nothing inherently evil about a film with intelligent talk and limited editing, limited cuts, and limited camera movements. See Rear Window.

Another thing academics, particularly academic crystal ball textualists whinge and whine about as they study novels, short stories, films and television, shows is that aren’t politically and ideologically correct their politically and ideologically correct. For them any novel, short story, film, or TV show that isn’t anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist is inherently bad if not evil at least to some extent. For them progress is tied to a decline in racism, sexism, and classism. And while I agree with Richard Roud (“Introduction" to Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980) that all criticism has normative aspects to it and while I have no problem with critiquing and criticising various forms of ethnocentrism in media texts, all cultural analysis, in my opinion, should be tempered by and grounded on sound descriptive analysis and primary documentary evidence before one moves on to interpretation and homiletics. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that all forms of criticism are equally normative and equally ideologically correct. The critics with the least cultural and ideological baggage are those historians and social scientists who do have the capital or at least some of the cultural capital to explore the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of “texts” and who do engage in primary research, film historians and social scientists like Gerry Molyneaux whose book on the independent film director, writer, and actor John Sayles I recently read. Molyneaux’s John Sayles: The Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000) was, for me, a welcome antidote to the crystal ball textualism that dominates academic criticism these days and the ignorance is bliss reactions of YouTube reactors. Molyneaux explores Sayles’s life from birth to his latest film, which was, at the time the book was published, Limbo (1999). He takes readers on a journey that starts with Sayles’s birth in upstate New York through his work on Roger Corman films through his life as a writer, script doctor and through his life as a film director. He rightly notes that Sayles and others of an independent bent were stimulated by the fiercely independent cinema of writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes who, like Sayles, often wrote and acted in order to make money to fund his own cheaply, by Hollywood standards, made films, that were accused by some of being too talky and too primitive cinematically by some at the time.

What sets Molyneaux’s book apart from many other film studies monographs past and present is its focus on the broader social contexts of Sayles’s life and work. Monlyneaux nicely explores the economic contexts of Sayles’s films all of which were made for six million dollars or less, sometimes a lot less. He nicely explores the role Sayles’s partner, Maggie Renzi, played in obtaining funding for these independent films in an economic context that was often dynamic making raising funds difficult. He notes that Sayles often financed all or a good part of his films himself. He points out that whether Sayles’s films made a return on investment—often they did not—this translated into further difficulties  for him and Renzi to get money to make the films he wanted to make. He nicely explores what might be called the leftist political orientation of Sayles’s films such as the pro-unionism of Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), the ethnic focus and ideological complexity of Lone Star (1996), and the humanism of Men With Guns (1998). He explores Sayles’s commitment to making films his way. He explores Sayles’s sometimes problems with the suits that ran the Hollywood studios and Sayles as scriptwriter and script doctor for hire, sometimes for the studios. Sayles, for instance, as Molyneaux notes, made Baby It’s You (Paramount, 1983) and he was the creator and show runner of short lived television show Shannon’s Deal (NBC, 1989-1990) for NBC,  the former, in particular, left a bad taste in Sayles’s artistic mouth. He explores Sayles’s career as writer of short stories and novels. He explores Sayles as actor. All of these—Sayles as a script writer, Sayles as a script doctor, Sayles as a writer of novels and short stories, and Sayles as an actor—helped Sayles make monies to fund his own films. He explores the theme of community in Sayles’s work and the complexities and ambiguities of Sayles’s work. He notes Sayles’s interest in race, in ethnicity, in class, and in unions, something that should earn Sayles a legion of politically and ideologically correct academic fans but doesn’t seem to have. In Sayles’s films so much if not all is on the surface and crystal ball textualists generally prefer directors who make them dig beneath the surface given that they perceive themselves as kind of cine-psychoanalysts with a social conscience.

Sayles has gone on to write further novels and films and direct further films since Molyneaux’s book was published foregrounding the fact that Sayles is still an artistic work in progress and that analysis of Sayles’s work is also a work in progress and so any conclusions about his work must remain tentative. He limitedly explores the criticisms of Sayles as a dialogue director rather than a cinematic director though he notes rightly that financial realities place limits on the equipment one can obtain and the film stock one can use, something that many of the critics who seem to think that films are made in an economic vacuum forget. Many if not all of these critics still think of art and the artist in romantic terms, as unsullied by the real world. Whether Sayles and Renzi will be able to put together what is necessary for Sayles to make another film remains an open question as I type given the realities of contemporary big money Hollywood film making and the difficulties in making independent films and getting them distributed these days. Perhaps streaming will come to the rescue. Only time will tell.

Molyneaux’s book on Sayles may not be as academically and intellectually sexy as books that come from the crystal ball textualists (some clearly find crystal ball textualists work sexy). It nicely lays out the actual economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of Sayles’s film. It provides a sound base line for further studies of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the work of writer, director, and actor John Sayles even if, like fanboy and fangirl criticism, it tends to be too often more laudatory than critical. And while we like what we like—and I admit I like Sayles’s films a lot—what we like needs to be grounded in an analysis of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of life. Finally, Molyneaux’s book raises that eternal question about books on film directors: couldn’t it have done what it did in article and hence less repetitive form?