Sherry Chandler

At The New Republic, John Judis makes the case for Barack Obama as The American Adam:

Looming over all of American history–but particularly the country’s formative years–is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only person, according to the West’s major religions, to have lived unburdened by what came before him. As literary critic R.W.B. Lewis wrote in 1955, in his wonderful book The American Adam, early generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they could create a future without reference to the past. The revolutionaries who fought for America’s independence saw themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but with history itself.

…

In his Studies in Classic American Literature, which appeared in 1923, D.H. Lawrence identified the celebration of the new and the rejection of the old as “the true myth of America.” According to this myth, Lawrence wrote, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.” The myth of America as Adam runs through our country’s literature–from Walt Whitman’s self-description as a “chanter of Adamic songs / Through the new garden the West,” to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby to Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. And it reemerges periodically in American politics–usually during times of upheaval or discontent.

…

Obama’s youthful unlined face, his exotic name, and his unusual upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents, black father, and Indonesian stepfather contribute to the sense that he can give the United States a fresh start. He is like Herman Melville’s Adamic hero, Billy Budd, a foundling who was “happily endowed with the gayety of high health, youth and a free heart” and “looked even younger than he really was.

I would like to pause here to point out that, though Billy Budd may have been presented as a type of the American Adam, he did not come to a good end, nor was he presented to us as a viable role model because he was just too naive to live. Nor, though he was the center of a considerable mancrush, did he manage to act as a savior.

Not arguing that Barack Obama is either innocent or naive. Just talking about the full resonance of the analogy.

Oh well, cynical old Melville was the spoiler in the myth of American exceptionalism, and so, apparently, am I:

Of course, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins has remarked, some voters are repelled by a promise of fundamental change. “Women–especially older women–are often politically risk-averse,” she writes

Well, there’s the teeth drawn from my vagina dentata, pitiful thing that it is anyway, all dried up with age. Just a Grinch by definition (to mix my metaphors), just slavering to steal Christmas. After all, if Gail Collins says it is so, it must be so.

Here’s an interesting statement to make about a type of Adam:

Former Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont said of Obama, “I’ve fallen for him.”

And so did we all fall for Adam if I remember my Genesis. Seems like there was something about getting thrown out of Paradise, maybe some angels with flaming swords.

It may be true that I’m just an old crone, or perhaps a Lilith, a spoiler in the charmed circle of Eden, but women don’t have too much reason to get het up over the Adam myth. And I do believe that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again in the belief that you’ll get a different result.

Huckleberry Finn was a type of the American Adam but he had to light out for the territory. Jay Gatsby was another, mooning over the blue light at the end of Daisy’s dock. How the flaming swords have diminished but he still wasn’t able to regain his paradise.

Overall, I’d say the Adam thing hasn’t worked out too well for us. We have exceptionally and innocently committed genocide, slavery and miscegenation. We have innocently raped a continent from sea to shining sea. We are now innocently consuming most of the world’s resources with a whole world economy depending upon our maxing our our credit cards.

I’ve had it with innocence. I’m ready for some hard-eyed realism. Maybe with a few laugh wrinkles around those eyes.

Afterthought: I would like to reiterate that I am not necessarily anti-Obama. But I see another version of sexism in this article. And that does make me mad. Afterthought the second: And anyway, wasn’t it the Bushies who said they didn’t have to worry about boring stuff like history and reality? Afterthought the third: I forgot to mind my manners and say that I found this article by way of War and Piece.

Update: If giving is an indication, Kentucky will go strongly for Obama. Not that it will matter much in May. He’s gotten considerably more in campaign donations from Kentuckians than all the other candidates combined. Interestingly, Ron Paul has outstripped John McCain here in the Bluegrass State.

from Kevin Drum:

Of course insurance companies are interested in discriminating based on a genetic markers. That’s what insurance companies do: they evaluate risks and then offer pricing and coverage that are appropriate and profitable based on those risks. If they don’t do that, they aren’t being insurance companies.

It’s worth saying this over and over: insurance companies don’t discriminate because they’re evil. They do it because it’s what insurance companies do. It’s a core part of their business, and if they don’t do it they’ll go belly up.

This is the biggest reason for wanting to get private insurance companies (mostly) out of the healthcare business. If it were just a matter of their being corrupt or evil, that actually wouldn’t be so bad. We could figure out ways to regulate them into good behavior. But it’s harder than that. The kind of behavior that most of us want — comparable coverage for everyone under nondiscriminatory pricing rules — is flatly not something an insurance company can offer.

but they don’t seem to like Hillary Clinton.

Though I have to confess. If I had $2,300 or even $200 of disposable income, I’d probably use it to go to a conference instead of giving it to a political candidate. Anything under $200 doesn’t show up on these lists.

Novelists also lean Democratic but have more time for Hillary.

via.

Supplemental list here.

Recently, Thomas Jefferson has been coming under heavy criticism not just for slave ownership but also for miscegenation. Not much has been said about George Washington, however. As far as I can tell, Washington himself cannot be accused of miscegenation but, somewhat like Lincoln, he sure does seem to have been married to it.

I bring this stuff up on Washington’s birthday, not because I want to besmirch Washington, but because it is the worm at the heart of our national rose. Also, it’s a theme I seem to be following lately. Just keeps popping up so I figure there must be some reason for me to think about this stuff right now.

These men were products of their time. They were very wise and forward thinking but they had their limitations and their blind spots. George Washington was a great man but he was fully human and by definition flawed.

Our job, it seems to me, is to acknowledge this fact, not to cast blame and counterblame. Once we acknowledge that this is a national problem, then perhaps we can move beyond it.

From George Washington’s will:

Item Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. To emancipate them during her life, would, tho’ earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties on account of their intermixture by Marriages with the dower Negroes, as to excite the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences from the latter, while both descriptions are in the occupancy of the same Proprietor; it not being in my power, under the tenure by which the Dower Negroes are held, to manumit them. And whereas among those who will recieve freedom according to this devise, there may be some, who from old age or bodily infirmities, and others who on account of their infancy, that will be unable to support themselves; it is my Will and desire that all who come under the first & second description shall be comfortably cloathed & fed by my heirs while they live; and that such of the latter description as have no parents living, or if living are unable, or unwilling to provide for them, shall be bound by the Court until they shall arrive at the age of twenty five years; and in cases where no record can be produced, whereby their ages can be ascertained, the judgment of the Court, upon its own view of the subject, shall be adequate and final. The Negros thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read & write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. and I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay, after the Crops which may then be on the ground are harvested, particularly as it respects the aged and infirm; seeing that a regular and permanent fund be established for their support so long as there are subjects requiring it; not trusting to the uncertain provision to be made by individuals. And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which have befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, it shall be optional in him to do so: In either case however, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life, which shall be independent of the victuals and cloaths he has been accustomed to receive, if he chuses the last alternative; but in full, with his freedom, if he prefers the first; & this I give him as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.

According to Nancy Hurrelbrinck in her article Freeing His Slaves is One of Washington’s Greatest Legacies

“Washington’s pronouncements on the subject of slavery could be contradictory . … It’s one of the mysteries of his life,” said Henry Wiencek, a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities…

As a child, Washington couldn’t have helped but absorb a distinction between the treatment of black and white children, said Wiencek, the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. Whereas white illegitimate children of indentured servants, who were often prohibited from marrying, had to be taught to read and write and apprenticed in a trade, their mulatto counterparts were typically indentured for 33 years, “a big chunk of a person’s life then.”

Martha Washington also grew up with slavery. When she met George, she was the widow of the wealthy Daniel Parke Custis, whose father almost willed his estate to a young black boy who was possibly his child, which would have left her husband-to-be penniless.

During the Revolutionary War, Washington hesitated to enlist blacks, but he knew they had been fighting well in New England–and that the British were recruiting slaves by promising them freedom–so he allowed them in. At the end of the war, when his army marched to Yorktown, one in four of his soldiers was black, according to a mercenary German officer’s journal.

“Why isn’t this woven into our collective memory along with Paul Revere, Betsy Ross and Ticonderoga?” Wiencek asked.

At Yorktown, Washington had a spy in enemy camp, James Armistead, who served loyally at the risk of his life, but was sent back to slavery after the war. He appealed to Lafayette, who wrote a tribute that Armistead took to the legislature, winning his freedom.

…

The Washingtons’ views about slavery were also probably influenced by their familial relationships with African-Americans, and may have impelled George to change his mind, he suggested. Martha had a mulatto half-sister who lived with her throughout her life and who had a child with Jackie Custis, Martha’s son by her first marriage.

Jackie Custis died a few years later, but Washington’s family acknowledged the child as part of the family. He was free, but married a slave, and their children were emancipated by the husband of one of Martha’s granddaughters.

“These relationships were everywhere. It’s astonishing, the level of denial that has obscured all of this,” Wiencek said.

For more on Washington, check out the University of Virginia’s Washington papers and the Library of Congress. For more on the painting, see the George Glazer Gallery.

Update: And then there’s this, which happened locally, but which I had to find via Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Watch at YouTube.

This cartoon has been banned from television broadcast. I’m not sure why, possibly for drug-related content??

Spoiler warning.

The first part of this Netflix adventure lay in actually getting the right movie. When we pulled the sleeve out of our pretty red Netflix envelope last week, the DVD sleeve said 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and mentioned Glenn Ford and Van Heflin but when we popped it into the player what we got was Russell Crow and Christian Bale. It seemed almost as though the small gods of Netflix couldn’t believe anybody would really want to see a 30-year-old western shot in black & white when they could have a no-doubt faster paced, grittier, more colorful modern remake.

But that was precisely the version we did want to see. So we bunged the DVD back in the envelope unwatched and sent a message to Netflix that we wanted the movie we wanted. To their credit, they got the right one back out to us almost the next day (it was the weekend).

It was worth the wait. The worst part of the movie was the song, “3:10 to Yuma,” sung by Frankie Laine (of course). It was derivative in both words and music and a perfect example why Laine didn’t realize he was parodying himself when he sang the Blazing Saddles theme.

Once the bombast of the theme is done, however, 3:10 to Yuma is a fairly slow and quiet film that gives the tension time to build and Glenn Ford, with his slow crooked smile, time to charm the pants off stolid Van Heflin. Well, let me rephrase that. Time to charm the sawed-off shotgun out of Heflin’s hands.

He does charm the pants off Felicia Farr’s saloon girl, though all we have of that scene are the two of them coming out of the back room through a beaded curtain, putting their clothes in order just ever so subtly. That’s enough. I know how all the parts go together.

Heflin reprises his long-suffering sodbuster role from Shane (1953), with even echoes of the gunfighter’s seduction of the rancher’s wife and son(s). In this case, he’s Dan Evans, a small-time rancher and American everyman who made the mistake of setting up business on land without a water supply sufficient to stand up to drought. He takes the job of guarding Ford’s Ben Wade for the $200 he needs to buy water rights from a neighboring rancher. You can see how this part of the plot echoes.

In this film, however, Heflin isn’t castrated by a gun butt to the head, which allows for overtones of High Noon (1952) as we watch that big hand moving along, nearing 3:10. (Tex Ritter much more believable in the music department here.) And just like they did Gary Cooper, the townspeople desert Heflin, leaving him to make a lone stand for truth, justice, and the American way.

But the center of the film focusses on the drama between the two men as they sit in a hotel room waiting for the train that will take Ben Wade to prison in Yuma. And/or the arrival of Wade’s gang to rescue him. Ford charms, Heflin resists and the two men develop a tense camaraderie, sharing cigarettes, parrying with words. (Though most of Heflin’s parrying consists of telling the irrepressible Ford to shut up.) Also a familiar American movie trope, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone topping Ford’s performance here. To quote Dave Kehr in the NYTimes, Glenn Ford could be a bland hero but never an uninteresting villain. Much of the joy in this film is in watching Glenn Ford with his perfect equanimity and his tip-tilted stetson.

The film is unrealistically free of brutality, blood and guts. I’m sure the modern remake corrects those errors, which is precisely why I don’t really care to see it. I know how all those parts fit together, too.

And to be honest, I don’t really believe Van Heflin made it out of town alive. Ben Wade was boss to an amazingly inept gang of brigands. Or that a Ben Wade ruthless enough to shoot one of his own men rather than be caught would not have taken advantage of Dan Evans any number of times.

But it wasn’t part of the world created here for either of these men to be brutally shot down. Evans is not a murderer and Wade is not without some twisted sense of fair play. It was, I suppose, a more innocent time.

3:10 to Yuma is based on an Elmore Leonard short story of the same name.

Watch at YouTube.

P.S. I didn’t say anything about the black & white cinematography because I’m really not very smart about that stuff. But it’s beautifully filmed, as most black and white film is, to use light and shadow to enhance the tension.

Some beautiful horses and horsemanship, too.

from Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern University Press, 1980):

Robert Bridges saw all forms as balancing convention with discovery. That the writer of free verse can count on obtaining certain effects by the use of certain rhythmic devices, he argued, “implied that they are what other ears are prepared to accept, and such effects can only be the primary movements of rhythm upon which all verse has always depended” [from "A Paper or Free Verse," North American Review, 216 (Nov. 1922), 547-58]. “What other ears are prepared to accept” is conventional. But “the primary movements of rhythm” must have been discovered somewhere in the poetic material or in the human ear or soul or nervous system. Pound claimed that the sonnet exemplified such a discovery. It “occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His ‘genius’ consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter” [from Literary Essays, New Directions, 1968]. Even near the revolutionary beginning (1918), Pound acknowledged that a traditional meter could sometimes be the “absolute rhythm” he sought for each poem. He believed “that most symmetrical [i.e., metrical] forms have certain uses [although] a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” [Literary Essays]. It was a question of choosing among available alternatives, not of bowing to the dictates of any convention that could not accommodate the particular character of the individal poem.

Free verse simply presented the most radical alternative, and many poets chose not to avail themselves of it. …Yeat’s “No Second Troy” is not a sonnet, not because it lacks two lines, but because his subject did not accord with the movement implied by the sonnet form. …In “Leda and the Swan,” the accord did exist—though the poem also extended the possibilities of the sonnet. The thrust and return of its thought, its movement from concrete action to meditation on the action called for the sonnet form, as the steady accumulation of impassioned questions in “No Second Troy” did not. …Finally, I would argue that the writing of metrical verse was generally improved by the whole atmosphere of new and experimental attention to form.

When it comes to de-fence, Bush is a class act.

From Melissa del Bosquethe in the Texas Observer:

Just 69 miles north, Daniel Garza, 76, faces a similar situation with a neighbor who has political connections that reach the White House. In the small town of Granjeno, population 313, Garza points to a field across the street where a segment of the proposed 18-foot high border wall would abruptly end after passing through his brick home and a small, yellow house he gave his son. “All that land over there is owned by the Hunts,” he says, waving a hand toward the horizon. “The wall doesn’t go there.”

In this area everyone knows the Hunts. Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt and his relatives are one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library. In 2001, Bush made him a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where Hunt received a security clearance and access to classified intelligence.

Over the years, Hunt has transformed his 6,000-acre property, called the Sharyland Plantation, from acres of onions and vegetables into swathes of exclusive, gated communities where houses sell from $650,000 to $1 million and residents enjoy golf courses, elementary schools, and a sports park. The plantation contains an 1,800-acre business park and Sharyland Utilities, run by Hunt’s son Hunter, which delivers electricity to plantation residents and Mexican factories.

…

Garza stands in front of his modest brick home, which he built for his retirement after 50 years as a migrant farmworker. For the past five months, he has stayed awake nights trying to find a way to stop the gears of bureaucracy from grinding over his home.

A February 8 announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the agency would settle for building the fence atop the levee behind Garza’s house instead of through it, which has given Garza some hope. Like Tamez, he wonders why his home and small town were targeted by Homeland Security in the first place.

“I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?”

Most border residents couldn’t believe the fence would ever be built through their homes and communities. They expected it to run along the banks of the Rio Grande, not north of the flood levees—in some cases like Tamez’s, as far as a mile north of the river. So it came as a shock last summer when residents were approached by uniformed Border Patrol agents. They asked people to sign waivers allowing Homeland Security to survey their properties for construction of the wall. When they declined, Homeland Security filed condemnation suits.

In time, local landowners realized that the fence’s location had everything to do with politics and private profit, and nothing to do with stopping illegal immigration.

Read all of this piece to learn how the fence follows the money, not the border. Short version: cronies and contractors.

I found this link at the Sideshow, where Avedon Carol raises a pertinent point about telecom immunity:

The law requires [the telecoms] to cooperate with lawful warrants, and that they should never be immune from accountability for breaking the law. I’m amazed that Democrats keep failing to use this language. The telecoms broke the law. The administration bribed or coerced them into breaking the law. If the government issues lawful warrants in order to protect our security, the telecoms would be breaking the law if they didn’t cooperate. This seems like pretty simple stuff to me. (Perhaps someone else should say that if the Evil Islamofascist Caliphate really does takeover the US, as the wingers apparently fear, it’s been mighty helpful of the administration to have a mechanism to spy on everyone already in place, hasn’t it?)

Blogalicious offers a handy-dandy list of print magazines that accept e-mail submissions.

As Diane points out, postage is going up, so these magazines are doing us a considerable courtesy.

Thanks, Diane.