Sherry Chandler

Another meaningless coincidence: Huey Long shows up twice in my morning reading, this time in a Harold Bloom article in The Guardian that I found through a link at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment.

Huey Long, known as “the Kingfish,” dominated the state of Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end: “Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!”

Harold Bloom is 75. He is a critic not to everyone’s taste, and he’s especially unpopular among women. I usually find his writing thought-provoking if sometimes a bit fantastic. This essay, called “Reflections in the Evening Land,” muses on the United States’s self-destructive tendencies. Well, actually it’s criticism as excuse for diatribe. And the diatribe rambles a little. But I find his notions of our character provocative and I enjoy his extended metaphors, though I find Emily Dickinson nowhere in his considerations. I guess she’s an outlyer.

What defines America? “Democracy” is a ruined word, because of its misuse in the American political rhetoric of our moment. If Hamlet and Don Quixote, between them, define the European self, then Captain Ahab and “Walt Whitman” (the persona, not the man) suggest a very different self from the European. Ahab is Shakespearean, Miltonic, even Byronic-Shelleyan, but his monomaniacal quest is his own, and reacts against the Emersonian self, just as Melville’s beloved Hawthorne recoiled also. Whitman, a more positive Emersonian, affirms what the Sage of Concord called self-reliance, the authentic American religion rather than its Bushian parodies.

…Emerson bet the American house (as it were) on self-reliance, which is a doctrine of solitude. Whitman, as person and as poetic mask, like his lilacs, bloomed into a singularity that cared intensely both about the self and others, but Emersonian consciousness all too frequently can flower, Hamlet-like, into an individuality indifferent both to the self and to others. The United States since Emerson has been divided between what he called the “party of hope” and the “party of memory”. Our intellectuals of the left and of the right both claim Emerson as ancestor.

…

Some of my friends and students suggest that Iraq is President Bush’s white whale, but our leader is absurdly far from Captain Ahab’s aesthetic dignity. The valid analogue is the Pequod; as Lawrence says: “America! Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael, Quakers,” and South Sea Islanders, Native Americans, Africans, Parsees, Manxmen, what you will. One thinks of our tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq, called “security employees” or “contractors”. They mix former American Special Forces, Gurkhas, Boers, Croatians, whoever is qualified and available. What they lack is Captain Ahab, who could give them a metaphysical dimension.

Ahab carries himself and all his crew (except Ishmael) to triumphant catastrophe, while Moby-Dick swims away, being as indestructible as the Book of Job’s Leviathan. The obsessed captain’s motive ostensibly is revenge, since earlier he was maimed by the white whale, but his truer desire is to strike through the universe’s mask, in order to prove that while the visible world might seem to have been formed in love, the invisible spheres were made in fright. God’s rhetorical question to Job: “Can’st thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?” is answered by Ahab’s: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” The driving force of the Bushian-Blairians is greed, but the undersong of their Iraq adventure is something closer to Iago’s pyromania. Our leader, and yours, are firebugs.

Whitman, as representative of the “party of hope,” does not fare well in Bloom’s view. And so, us liberals are doomed. The south has risen again and won the Civil War and Condoleezza Rice is predicting the return of Christ.

I have bombarded you with way too much today. And myself too. I see no way out of this morass. And besides, I love both Melville and Whitman, and Emily Dickinson too. We Americans are all this stuff at once. Nothing is black and white. Nothing is all Melville or all Whitman.

So say the cynical French.

I’ve been talking quite a bit about change the last several days: wiki, Google, “Don’t Look Back.” Cultural changes that I am too far behind to curve to pretend to understand or to be able to talk about except that I think they will change the way we view ownership of information and art. As Terry points out in her comment below, there is now an “amorphous reserved rights category of ‘technology not yet invented’” that may rob writers of their royalties. This is one thing that probably won’t change – the money boys are going to try to stay in control.

They will also change information and art, as Napster to iPod has changed music. I grew up when the dj was king, came of age with the LP and the concept album. Now it seems to me to be all randomization – one from here, one from there, hit the random button and see what happens. A sort of chaos of music.

So where am I going with this? It started with my drive home last night when I noticed that some of the big old derelict houses on Limestone Street south of Upper in Lexington are being turned into $150,000 condos. This reconstruction is probably part of UK President Lee Todd’s initiative to work with the Lexington-Fayette urban county government to revitalize the area of Lexington between downtown and the University. He has a program called “Live Where You Work.” The result has been development of lofts and condos and everything is getting spruced up – which is good, I wouldn’t want to see those historic old buildings lost – but I ask myself what kind of worker is going to be able to live here?

Urban renewal never works out for poor folk, seems like.

Speaking of the cynical French brings me to our biggest ongoing urban renewal project, our one city of French heritage. Some changes are forced upon us. How to restore New Orleans is a problem well beyond me. I get really confused, thinking about it, because I loved what is lost, but what is lost was flawed and who wants willfully to restore a flawed thing.

And I rather suspect that chaos will prevail here, too, that nobody will be able to control what happens and restore a nice orderly eqalitarian city. Things just don’t work that way. Especially not in the current atmosphere of cronyism and profiteering. But I also suspect that the poor will get a raw deal here. See, for example, this article in today’s NYTimes:

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 16 - Charity Hospital, an institution that for nearly three centuries has been dedicated to treating the poorest and sickest here - the shot, stabbed, overdosed and uninsured - has been abandoned downtown since Hurricane Katrina. It is now at the center of a battle over whether it will continue that tradition, or become a more conventional hospital.

The state officials who manage Charity say Hurricane Katrina dealt this Huey Long-era landmark a deathblow and want it torn down. In its place, they say, they want to build a hospital with a “new mission,” one that treats both public and private patients and relies less on government money.

But doctors who work there sharply disagree with that plan. They say Louisiana officials are using the storm as an excuse to achieve the state’s long-sought goal of demolishing Charity, getting millions in federal dollars to build a new hospital, and then moving away from a promise that has long been made to the city’s poor.

“People want to use these disasters to get insurance money,” said Dr. James Moises, an emergency room physician at Charity who helped clean up the hospital after the storm. Louisiana officials, he said, “saw it as a great opportunity to get the federal government to pay for a new facility.”

For months now, officials have barred doctors from the building and forced them to practice in a tent field hospital, even though the doctors say the hospital is ready for use. The doctors say the makeshift arrangement is inadequate for the severe trauma cases the hospital specializes in treating.

As one of the two oldest hospitals in North America - it was founded in 1736, the same year as Bellevue Hospital in New York - Charity has from the beginning been a symbol of a social commitment to the poor, and its wards are empty at a moment when thousands of poor New Orleans residents are struggling to return home and fear that government has abandoned them. In many ways, the debate over its future parallels that of New Orleans itself, as it chooses whether to become a more middle-class city or to return to earlier traditions.

I’m not arguing right or wrong here. It’s obvious that New Orleans can’t be restored to exactly what it was. But I think we should be paying more attention. I read the other day that money to restore New Orleans may not be appropriated this year. And next year, there’s talk of DeLaying the start of Congress until the end of January because the GOP needs The Hammer. So it may be months before money is even appropriated.

A sort of chaos of government.

And while we’re at it, why isn’t anyone helping those earthquake victims in Pakistan?

Back at the end of June, I made a post about how developers were digging up Nancy Hanks to make room for a super Wal-Mart. Nancy Hanks was a world-famous trotting horse and her grave was on the old Hamburg farm. In that post, I recounted an anecdote about some tourists who went to Nancy Hanks’s grave thinking they were visiting a shrine to Abraham Lincoln’s mother.

Now Don Daniels writes to point out that the horse may have been named for another Nancy altogether.

The following excerpt from July 1955 United States Trotting Association Hoof Beats magazine:

NANCY HANKS
…The general belief is that the filly was named after the mother of Abraham Lincoln, one of Kentucky’s greatest sons. In the old records, however, there is a dissenting voice. It seems there had been a family living near the old farm. The beautiful daughter Nancy had fallen in love with a young man of the neighborhood. The head of the family didn’t care for the youthful swain and broke up the romance as well as the impending marriage. Nancy, in a fit of despondency, hung herself. Kentuckians were great hands for folk songs and it was not long before there was a ballad about the sad affair and the ill-fated maiden was not given her family name but was called Nancy Hanks. The latter part of the name coming from the rope that was the instrument of departure.

More information in Don’s comment at the original post.

I looked “hank” up. One of its definitions is “a coil of rope” and maybe the word was part of common parlance back in those days. The theory seems a little overcomplicated to me, but folk wit is strange sometimes. Anybody know anything about this old folk song?

On a related note, I see in this week’s Citizen Advertiser that Historic Paris and Bourbon County is seeking to compile a list of horse graveyards. Well, they call them “cemeteries.” Since we are about to get a super Wal-Mart of our own, I suppose this is a wise precaution.