Writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things are committing themselves to the ahistorical and the mythical.
.. I was raised closer to the nationalist tradition. For many years, even after I grew distant from nationalism, I shared this faith in the primacy of black politics. But the problem is history. The more I studied, the more I was confronted by heroic people whose struggles were not successful in their own time, or at all. To the extent that they were successful, black politics was a necessary precondition, but never enough to foment change.
It became impossible, for instance, to think about emancipation without the threat presented by disunion, to talk about the civil-rights movement without the ghost of Nazism or the Cold War. It began to seem to me that black politics was the wind at the American window. At rare moments the window opened and black people pushed through. The window seemed to open for one reason and one reason alone—some threat to white interests becoming intolerable. “Hope” struck me an overrated force in human history. “Fear” did not.
.. I think this is a fairly common outlook among many professional historians. Hope may well be relevant to their personal lives, but it is largely irrelevant to their study. Moreover, the search for a crude inspiration, for a narrative which dictates that America triumph in the end or justice necessarily win out, seems immaterial to their actual discipline.
.. Often, I’ve had people ask if the manner in which Germans came to reckon with their genocidal past gave me “hope” for my own country. I don’t know. One wonders how much this reckoning was aided by the fact that so many German Jews were killed and thus unavailable to participate as actual citizens. Is a “reckoning” with a people you’ve nearly exterminated really a reckoning at all?
.. This is neither the stuff of sweet dreams nor “hope.” But I think that a writer wedded to “hope” is ultimately divorced from “truth.” Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things, are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself.
Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography
What was weird is that, in Guralnick’s book, Goldman’s more sensational gossip was, on the whole, quietly confirmed—Elvis was a junkie with occult preoccupations, who did die of an overdose, and was toured to death by “Colonel” Tom Parker, in part because Parker really was an illegal immigrant, from Holland, who couldn’t get a passport and was frightened to take Elvis abroad—while being simultaneously deprecated as inessential.’
The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Elvis was, to put it bluntly, as a dumb fuck with a drug problem; Guralnick showed that he did have a drug problem, but was far from dumb, with keen spiritual yearnings that, through bad management and bad luck, got sidetracked into those grinding tours and substance abuse. The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Sinatra is as a bad guy with a big voice. Kaplan shows that the bad-guy stuff was, in truth, pretty bad, about as bad as one had imagined and a lot worse than one had hoped. He did hang out with and cultivate mobsters, real killers, though more in a semi-hostile, semi-affectionate fraternal manner than with the pitiful, feudal devotion pictured in “The Godfather.”
.. Worse, Sinatra beat people up, or had others beat them up for him, often in shameful acts of bullying—picking on casino employees or less successful, dependent entertainers.
.. Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation, and in its (often imagined) presence his temper tipped over in an instant. This was followed, usually, by remorse, once he had sobered up and stopped seeing red. But, in the interim, real damage was done to real people: he threw a telephone at a businessman once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fracturing his skull and very nearly killing him. The other cause of his rage may be oddly taboo to tell. Sinatra was a bad, mean drunk, and, since he was often drunk, he was often bad and mean.
.. Nor is Kaplan simply an idolater. He sees how genius sits in a fortunate network, offering character sketches of Sinatra’s arrangers, who were as essential to Sinatra’s art as George Martin’s production was to the Beatles.
.. Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico—it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated.
.. Sinatra’s painfully bipolar nature is exactly the pattern of his best music, with “swinging” records continually succeeded by sad ones, again and again, and though this is obviously partly a response to the oscillating commercial demands for dance music on the one hand and make-out music on the other, it isn’t just or mainly that. No one else even attempted it quite this relentlessly. We have “Songs for Swinging Lovers” and “Only the Lonely” because Sinatra was a desperately driven man with a melancholic depth.
Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery?
I saw the collective, institutional side of this process in the ongoing scrutiny of public statues and street names, the markers at the sites of atrocities, and the brass-plated stones embedded in the sidewalk outside my apartment building that listed all the Holocaust victims who’d once lived there. I saw the individual side of it in the lives of my German friends who’d spent a gap year volunteering at hospitals in Israel, who studied Yiddish in a spirit of preserving the endangered language of a culture their great-grandparents sought to annihilate, or whose relatives read their Stasi files and confronted the neighbors who’d informed on them to the East German police.
.. The longer I lived in Germany, the more steeped I became in this attitude toward the past, and the stranger the scarcity of visible markers of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans seemed on my visits back to the U.S. I understood that the two countries’ histories have different timeframes, different geographies, different varieties of wrongdoing, but some of the broader lessons of Aufarbeitung — that individuals and societies can improve themselves morally by struggling against the human urge to look away from the sins of the past, or that atonement is a process that instills a sense of responsibility for the past rather than an action that starts from that sense — felt strikingly absent in America.
Simple Sagotage Field Manual
() The saboteur may have to reserse his thinking and he should be told this in so many words. Where he formerly thought of keeping his tools share, he should now let them grow dull; surfaces that formerly were lubricated now should be sanded; normally diligent, he should now be lazy and careless; and so on. Once he is encouraged to think backwards about himself and the objects of his everyday lief, the saboteur will see many opportunities in his immediate environment which cannot possibly be seen from a distance. The state of mind should be encouraged that anything can be sabotaged.