Daily Archives: March 11, 2022

However, emotions may explain why reality looks very different. There could equally be emotions of fear of Russia, a sense of pride, and political rhetoric that motivate NATO to grow and become the great military power in the Western hemisphere.

Either way, the result seems rationally predictable: the clash between rationalism, on the one hand, and emotions and rhetoric, on the other, creates tensions between Russia and NATO, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as the outcome. This situation is exactly what Russias MFA was referring to: to keep the West on its toes.

In international relations, the component of morality and ethical norms is mostly confined to the national level. This is because states have moral obligations toward their citizens, but are restricted in moralizing other states. Moral obligations are also embedded into ontological security and self-identity which need to be protected against what becomes a threat.

The notion of morality creates room for diplomatic maneuverings, justifying the moral interference into the domestic affairs of other states.

Russia acknowledges the increasing need for public legitimization of foreign policy decisions. Using public diplomacy mechanisms, Russias foreign ministry implies communication with other states and with foreign and domestic publics. Referring to Ukraine in recent years and through public diplomacy mechanisms, Russia has repeatedly condemned Ukraines anti-Russian sentiments.

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Russian Foreign Policy and the War with Ukraine - Politics Today

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez sat down to write his breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), he wanted to find a way of expressing in literature all the experiences which had influenced him as a child. In his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and also in his conversations with his friend and contemporary Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza ( The Fragrance of Guava), Marquez says Solitude draws word images of his childhood which, was spent in a large, very sad house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesied the future, and countless relatives of the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity.

Born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, Marquez worked as a journalist for years before turning to writing. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he passed away in 2014 after suffering from dementia. Earlier this year, it was reported that Marquez had a secret daughter with a Mexican journalist. As new readers discover Marquez, his origins, craft, work, views on women and politics, through his books (he wrote over 15 works, including novels, short stories, and non-fiction) and interviews, its pertinent to ask how has the story of the Buendias he traces in Solitude endured so long? What pulls us to a narrative filled with men of folly, who are into alchemy and audacious wars, and women who have better sense? His biographer Gerald Martin contends that the book may have been set in Aracataca, in mythical Macondo, but Macondo becomes a metaphor for the whole of Latin America a macrocosm contained within a microcosm the local becomes universal.

For Marquez, though Solitude brought him immense fame and glory, it was not his favourite book. Before I wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold, my best novel was Nobody Writes to the Colonel, but in Chronicle I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. In my other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied, he told Mendoza. First published in English in 1982, Chronicle is based on the murder of Marquezs friend decades earlier, but like in Solitude, he juxtaposes the personal with the wider social, cultural and political milieu of a particularly violent period in Latin America. Its consciously built as a literary tour-de-force, says his biographer, for implicitly mocking the concept of suspense, the writer announces the death of his character in the first line of the first chapter: On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.

To Marquez, his most important book was The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), the one which might save me from oblivion. It took him 17 years to write about the solitude of power. Set in an unspecified country, its the portrait of a tyrant who dies after being in power for 200 years. The vultures get to him first, stirring up the stagnant time inside the presidential palace, and the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Post-Nobel Prize, one of his most-read books was Love in the Time of Cholera, about love and loss and the essential loneliness of human beings. Asked by Mendoza why the reality in his novels has been called magical realism, Marquez retorted: This is simply because rationalism prevents people from seeing that reality isnt limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.

The magical reality followed Marquez right till the end. He passed away on a Thursday, the day a bird hit a glass wall and died inside Marquezs home. In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, a tearful tribute to his parents by Rodrigo Garcia, he writes that Marquezs secretary received an email by a reader wanting to know if the family is aware that Ursula Iguaran, the matriarch in Solitude, also died on a Thursday, on a day which was so hot that birds in their confusion were flying into walls and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.

The rest is here:

Books of solitude - The Hindu

Then the crowd of protesters marched through the CBD and along Broadway before arriving at Camperdown in front of the barbed wire fortress of the Chinese Consulate General in Sydney. By displaying the portrait of Tsewang Norbu throughout the event, the demonstrators remembered and paid tribute to the famous young singer who recently immolated himself in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, for the just cause of Tibet.

The rally was jointly organised by the Sydney Tibetan Voluntary Group (STVG) and the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress Sydney (RTYCS). Several activists from Hong Kong, East Turkestan, Vietnam, Chinese pro-democracy groups along with Tibet supporters joined the rally. The crowd chanted prayers and shouted slogans that included "Save Tibet, free Tibet, we want freedom, China out of Tibet, wake up UNO, Australia supports us, world supports us, Tibet is burning and the world is watching, stop genocide in Tibet, free China, and No Chinese Communist Party".

While enjoying and praising today's good weather, Rev Bill Crews, a good friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from Exodus Fundation pointed to the water that had pooled in front of the assembled crowd, reflecting everyone and chanted "Long live the Dalai Lama" and "Long live the people of Tibet". He said, "I suppose when Putin invades Ukraine, he learned lessons from China when they invaded Tibet, when they took away your freedom and identity, but all they took away was the reflection in the water. That is all they took from you, because they didn't take away your culture and identity. They couldn't take any of it away from you, no matter how hard they tried. They can't, and they won't, but these will spread all over the world.

New South Wales MP and Greens member Jenny Leong criticised China's autocratic actions against the Tibetan people, drawing comparisons between the current situation in Tibet and that of aborigines long time ago. "If there is one thing the Tibetan people understand, it is the huge injustice that occurs when you are displaced from your own homeland. When other people invade you and take away your right to self-determination," Leong said.

She has clearly pointed out her party's strong historical stance on issues of Tibet. "You will hear later from my colleague Jannie Parker, who always also is a great representative and strong tradition of standing very closely with the people of Tibet, with Tibetans inside Tibet and the Tibetan community across this country and around the world," Leong said.

"I know that our best and our leader of the party, Bob Brown was a good friend of the Dalai Lama. I know that the Greens have stood in our federal and our state parliaments, calling for respect and autonomy for the people of Tibet. I also know that we support a Free Tibet where Tibetans have the rights to self determination. However, today is a special day because it marks the anniversary of an uprising. What we need is the recognition of basic human rights, justice and self-determination for the people inside Tibet," she added.

In his speech, New South Wales MP Jamie Parker, also from the Greens, expressed strong support for Tibet and the spiritual leader of Tibet. "I acknowledge His Holiness the Dalai Lama and pay my respects to his spiritual leadership for many decades to come and supporting a Free Tibet. Most importantly, I want to thank every single one of you" he stood in solidarity with the crowd.

"You are so important. Your presence here today sends a powerful message to the Australian government, to politicians, to policymakers in Australia that Australia is not doing enough and Australia can and must do more," Parker stressed his dissatisfaction with Australia's efforts to raise the issue of Tibet.

"Today, on 10 March, we acknowledge this particularly important day. This is the day that the Tibetan people rose up to struggle against the occupation of their land, and for 63 years the Tibetan people have not been silenced," he further added.

"Because we know that activities like this are basic human rights, like the right to assemble freely, which is a basic human right to buy and trade inside China. Freedom of expression and the opportunity for you to stand up here and express your political or religious views is almost impossible in China and, of course, in occupied Tibet," he said.

The Greens MP said that "the challenge for us as a nation, as Australia and for the international community, is to recognise that human rights must come first, not trade, not diplomacy, not money and power, but human rights, because our country picks and chooses which human rights it will stand up for and in which country. In some countries, such as occupied Tibet, we see the denial of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the violation of land illegally. Australia should take a strong stand on Tibet, as it did on Afghanistan."

To show his support and solidarity with the people of Tibet, Prof Feng Chongyi of the UTS issued his personal statement, read by Ms Li Sun, strongly criticising the CCP for its ongoing atrocities against the people of Tibet with decades of failed policies while maintaining its 'wolf warrior diplomacy'. She called out "Free Tibet, Free Taiwan, Free Hong Kong and Free China" on behalf of Professor Feng.

Speaking at the rally, Australian human rights activist Bob Vinnicombe condemned the CCP for putting the Tibetan people in dire straits and stressed that the world should raise the value of human rights and pay more attention to the vulnerable groups, led by Tibet. "Tibet is one of the oppressed people under the one-party dictatorship of the CCP, which has usurped it by force since 1949, and Tibetans have suffered immeasurable human rights persecution to this day, and I look forward to international attention being turned to Tibet so that Tibetans can be free soon."

Pointing to the similar fate of Tibet and Ukraine, Bob said that 'what is happening in Ukraine today, the atrocities of Putin we seeing on TV every day, happened in Tibet 63 years ago, hidden from the world for decades. Tibetans and Ukrainians suffered invasion, destruction and murder. Tibet was a wonderful and huge country, bigger than Australia, in term of land size.'

'Australian policies have tried globalisation and economic rationalism, allowed the CCP to pile up Australian poverty, farmland, racehorses, dairies and even airports and flight schools. Look at how many Liberal and Labor MPs are present today at this important event, there are none,' he expressed his disappointment.

After a brief introduction to the Uprising Day, Jigme Dorjee, the President of the STVG said that the recent self-immolation of a famous Tibetan youth shows that the current situation is deteriorating and is very grim. "After 63 years of occupation and genocide committed by China, Tibetans inside Tibet still face a hellish situation in their own country. Therefore, it is the responsibility of all of us who live in free countries to bring and raise the real appeal and demand of all Tibetans in Tibet to the international community on their behalf."

"The rally here in Sydney is a public display of unity, to draw attention to the current plight of Tibetans who are trapped, voiceless, inside military-occupied Tibet, and to stand against the ongoing violations of basic human rights in our homeland and in East Turkestan, where the CCP has persecuted, and which continue unchallenged to this day," the joint statement said.

While expressing his gratitude to those present at the event and to those involved in the welfare and security, including members of the local police, Tsundu Oser, the RTYCS President gave a short speech. He called on the international community to wake up and urged world leaders to raise the issue of Tibet with China and support their struggle for the freedom of their people and their homeland.

"Today, 10 March, is the 63rd anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day, one of the most important days in the Tibetan calendar. On that day in 1959, thousands of Tibetans from all walks of life rose up against China's invasion and occupation of their country. The protests were followed by brutal crackdowns, which resulted in tens of thousands of lives," Oser said.

"Tibet's recent history has seen it illegally ruled and brutally oppressed by the CCP, but this has not brought the Tibetan people to their knees, on the contrary, they have become more and more courageous, never feared or retreated, and to this day there are Tibetans who are continuing to sacrifice their blood and lives to fight for the freedom cause of Tibet," he told the TPI.

Addressing the rally at Chinese Consulate General, Dr Jin Chin, President of the Federatopm for a Democracy China (FDC), said that "the CCP will not fall in the face of the resistance of the democracy movement and Tibet's freedom struggle, but will collapse with a bang amidst the changing international landscape.

'After that, China will have a political opportunity for the Tibetan people to achieve a high degree of autonomy, even independence. By the post-communist period, China will also be dismembered into pieces, and this will be the historical reality in the future," he added.

In the course of the last 70 decades, 'political repression, social discrimination, economic marginalisation, environmental destruction and cultural assimilation' have continued, particularly as a result of Chinese immigration into Tibet, fuelling intense resentment among the population of occupied Tibet.

To check out the image gallery related to the event on our social media page, click here "Tibetan National Uprising Day in Sydney".

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National Uprising Day of Tibet in Sydney draws strong support and solidarity - Tibet Post International

When I was 17 I heard the name Dostovesky, and was enthralled. Just the name felt so glamorously intellectual, so deep. I began to read some of his novels, and my hunch was vindicated. A bit later I delved into his ideas, and my admiration became more nuanced. I partly admired his defiance of the rational humanist arrogance of the West, but I was also wary of his reactionary mystical nationalism, his faith in the anti-liberal Russian soul.

It seems that a lot of religiously minded intellectuals struggle to get past stage one. They are so taken with the flinty glamour of this writer that their critical faculties atrophy. They allow their aesthetic admiration to influence their religious politics.

Rowan Williams is a theologian I admire for the most part, but he has been overly romantic about Russian Orthodoxy, as if its vision of religion and politics in perfect harmony is more authentic than modern western Christianity. And his love of Dostoevsky has been a major factor in this.

Last year he wrote an article for the New Statesman in which he argued for the novelists abiding relevance, 200 years after his birth. He acknowledged that his opinions jar against every liberal orthodoxy you can think of. He was an authoritarian monarchist who loathed Western democratic ideals and thought socialism a diabolical perversion. But we should not dismiss his thinking too quickly, he argues:

He may have defended tsarist absolutism, but he provides the most eloquent argument of the 19th century against religious tyranny. He wrote toxic nonsense about Jews, but objected to any attempt to limit their political and religious freedom. He believed that Christian (more specifically, Russian Orthodox) faith was the only hope for cultural renewal and global reconciliation, but wrote a scarifying catalogue of the unavenged horrors of human suffering (including child abuse) for which the Creator had to be held to account. He imagined Jesus Christ being tried and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. He claimed, with a typical mordant irony, to have made a better case for atheism than most atheists would dare.

Williams implies that it is simplistic to criticise Dostoevsky for his anti-liberalism: there is actually nuanced vision here. I dont buy it. His anti-liberal vision must be squarely addressed, in normal sober terms, without reference to the poetic passages in his novels. If a reactionary, theocratic version of Christianity is a bad thing, then his version of it is also a bad thing. If only Rowan Williams spent more time explaining that a more enlightened, pro-liberal version of Christianity is possible, rather than semi-glorifying reactionary versions.

A.N. Wilson also displayed his deep love for the Russian sage a few months ago. In the TLS he reviewed various books about Dostoevsky, and concluded by suggesting that he foresaw some of the ruptures of our time. These include 'the pathetic unravelling of liberal Western Christianity, and its attempt to marry Reason and the Gospel'. This is a deeply clumsy little bit of theologising, and again it gives succour to an illiberal vision. Wilson is wrong to suggest that liberal western Christianity is defined by its attempt to marry Reason and the Gospel. This was one aspect of it, but another aspect is its belief in political liberalism. By shoving these two aspects together, Wilson implies that the liberal Christianity of the West was a huge mistake, a failure of authenticity. Does he believe this that we should have stayed with a medieval theocratic version? His desire to sound as deep as Dostoevsky has clouded his judgement.

So what, you might say these erudite Dostoevsky-fans are not likely to approve of religious nationalism in real life. Surely I do not accuse them of being Putins useful idiots? Well, there is an article in this months Catholic Herald by Mark Jenkins that gives one pause. It too begins by explaining that Dostoevsky was a prophet of Russias religious renewal, and an antagonist of western individualism and rationalism. Then it explains that this vision was revived after the fall of the Soviet Union: an intellectual called Aleksandr Dugin heralded the rise of a new Russian empire, rooted in Orthodoxy. In writings that directly influenced Putin, Dugin announced that Russias holy calling is to destabilise the decadent liberal West and make the world safe for traditional Christian civilisation. Jenkins maintains a neutral tone as he describes such ideas, but presumably he disapproves of a grand plan to divide and weaken the West. But the conclusion suggests otherwise.

Jenkins makes a surprising prediction: In ten years time, Russian tanks in Ukraine might well be greeted with flowers, rather than bullets. Really? Fundamentally, Jenkins explains, the current crisis in world affairs is rooted in the materialism and dualism of the European Enlightenment. It is a defective paradigm, remarkably similar to the one that brought ancient Rome to its knees. He then quotes Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyres belief that the liberal order is a new barbarism. And he finishes with another quote: As Friedrich Holderlin once said: Where there is danger, deliverance lies also. The implication is that Putins chaos might be providential, a righteous blow against the false ideology of the West.

This is the sort of thing that was written a century ago, about another bold foreign leader who dared to stand up to the decadence of liberal democracy: Mussolini. Soon Hitler was also praised on the same grounds. Yes, he might be crude and simplistic in his rhetoric, but who else is defying the Communists, and the secular liberals? Yes, there might be tragic conflict in the short term, but maybe this is necessary, to shake the world from its captivity to liberalism. Plenty of right-wingers said this sort of thing, right up to the outbreak of war, and religious conservatism was a major factor in their worldview.

I think it is time to question the theological disparagement of liberalism, the not-quite-harmless theocratic posturing of our leading religious thinkers.

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Dostovesky and Putin's useful idiots - The Spectator

(Brownie Harris / Corbis via Getty Images)

Norman Mailer was proud of his essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Published in Dissent in 1957, it was reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailers anthology of selections from his fiction and nonfiction. Its easy today to forget the immediate context: Mailers protest against the threat of mass destruction during the early part of the Cold War. It was absurd, the argument went, to behave as though life were normal or society rational when human beings faced daily the possibility of total extinction. Americans had to cultivate values that went beyond the concerns of middle-class comfort. What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people cannot be contained.

Powerful provocation: Mailer challenged sanitized postwar American life in his controversial 1957 essay.

In The White Negro, Mailer argues that the postwar bleakness of the 1950s saw the appearance of a phenomenon, the American existentialist, the hipster. The hipster had the life-giving answer to the threats of both instant death by atomic war and slow death by conformity. By embracing death as an immediate danger, divorcing himself from society, the hipsterwho was understood to be a white malecould exist without roots. This uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self meant encouraging the psychopath in oneself and the freedom to explore the domain of experience. Most Americans, Mailer held, were conventional, ordinary psychopaths, but a select few represented the development of the antithetical psychopath, who derived from his condition a radical vision of the universe.

Much of The White Negro is devoted to analysis of why the overcivilized man cannot be existentialist. The hip ethic is immoderation, adoration of the present. The image of the rebel without a cause, the embodiment of societys contradictions, involved for Mailer the romanticization of the psychopath. The drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Hip is the liberation of the self from the Super-Ego of society. There are the good orgasm[s] of the sexual outlaw and the bad orgasm[s] of the cowardly square. The hipster belongs to an eliterebels who have their own language that only insiders can convincingly speak, a language of found and lost energy: man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square. As Mailer writes:

The organic growth of Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in American life. Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential superiority, a superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of the unforeseeable consequences, for the Negros equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every White alive. MORE FROM Darryl Pinckney

At the time, some white writers, Mailer among them, allied themselves with Black people who were urgently calling for American society to re-create itself. Like the juvenile delinquents, these white bohemians were drawn to the culture of the urban Black. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger. Unconventional action takes disproportionate courage, therefore it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. The Negro, in Mailers view, had been forced to find a morality of the bottom. Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns.

The White Negro had its specific origins in a quarrel with no less than William Faulkner. A mutual friend had sent Mailers sketch on school integration to Faulkner. In it, Mailer had said that white men in the South feared the sexual potency of the Negro and his hatred for having been cuckolded, historically, for two centuries: The Negro had his sexual supremacy and the white had his white supremacy. Faulkner replied that he had heard that idea expressed by ladies, but never by a man. Mailer observed that the sheltered Faulkners most intense conversations had no doubt been with sensitive ladies. Yet to be so dismissed by Faulkner annoyed him, and he decided to expand on his interpretation of a sexualized racial politics.

Whatever Mailers reasons, James Baldwin later said that he could not make any sense of The White Negrothat he could scarcely believe it had been written by the same man who recognized the complexity of human relationships in his novels The Naked and the Dead (1948), Barbary Shore (1951), and The Deer Park (1955). Mailers characters do not live on the road, Baldwin observed, yet he had fallen for the mystique of the Beats. Baldwin charged Mailer with maligning the sexuality of Negroesand failing to see the limits in his point of view as a white man. Current Issue

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In his essay, Mailer reiterated the contention that offended Faulkner: that the white man feared the Black mans sexual revenge. He himself was not opposed to miscegenation. Baldwin knew American masculinity because hed been menaced by it enough, writing that the American Negro male was a walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in ones own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. He tried to convey in his work what life for the Negro was like, but he had become weary, he said, which was why he hadnt anything to say about Mailers essay when it was first published.

Yet two years later, Baldwin did respond. The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy was published in Esquire in May 1961 and reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Baldwins second collection of essays. In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer had called Baldwin too charming a writer to be major, quipped that his prose was sprayed with perfume, and suggested that Baldwin lacked hisMailersstreet credibility. Baldwin admits in the essay that Mailers condescension hurt, but he doesnt believe Mailers opinions will affect his reputation. Rather, he recalls with some eloquence the personal circumstances, differences, and similarities that prevented real friendship between the two writers. Then he takes aim: The Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found ourselves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider him as being even remotely hip and Norman did not know this and I could not tell him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.

Mailer makes a distinction between hipster (of the proletariat) and beatnik (middle class). Baldwin didntand he expressed contempt for the character in Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1952) who, when alone in Denver, seeks the Black part of town because that is where real life is. In The Subterraneans (1958), Kerouacs white hoodlum succumbs to his paranoia that his soft brown bop-generation girlfriend will steal his white soul. Baldwin considered Kerouac and the Beats inferior to Mailer as writers, and he would be as impatient with the hippies in the 60s as he had been with the Beats. He said his problem with white people was that he couldnt take them seriously. They acted like crybabiesbut their innocence was a danger to people like him.

Two approaches: Jack Kerouac (left) toyed with white characters adopting Black cool, while Richard Wright dramatized the existential conditions of Black Americans. (Mondadori via Getty Images, left; Robert Kradin / AP)

Mailers argument that the Black man in America was born to be existentialist in outlook, because, unless he was an Uncle Tom, he had no other alternative philosophy that honestly addressed his circumstances, had antecedents. In his novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright had anticipated the existential drama that follows when the feeling of what it is to be human has been lost through racial oppression. The urban loneliness Wright portrayed descended from Dostoyevsky, one of existentialisms precursors. Partisan Review published parts of Jean Paul Sartres Anti-Semite and Jew in 1946, after which Wright read widely in existentialist literature. In The Outsider (1953), he attempted to formulate a more cogent philosophy about murder and irrational behavior. Wright eventually decided that his alienation was not due to his color but was mans fate, and wrote another murder story, Savage Holiday (1954)a so-called raceless novel, a psychoanalytical study about the singularity of existence. Some critics missed Wrights insights into the racial context and were disappointed by the abstract application of existentialist ideas in his fiction, especially his notion of how the violent act defines human essence.

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Baldwin didnt see a quest for an authentic self in the sex and violence of Wrights novels either. Bigger Thomas, the black murderer of both a white girl and a Black girl in Native Son, was based on a stereotype, Baldwin said. Wright himself was so sensitive to racial stereotypes he wouldnt dance or play cards.Related Articles

Michele Wallace agreed with Baldwin. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), she said that the white mans love affair with Black Macho began with Native Son. Wallace claimed that its message was that a Black man could come to life only as a white mans nightmare. She credited Mailer with having been accurate in The White Negro about the intersection of the black mans and the white mans fantasies. But this was diagnosis, not praise. Though Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice (1968) had been outraged by Baldwins criticisms of Mailer, in Wallaces judgment Baldwin had suppressed his own ambiguities and ambivalences about gender and sexuality, because Black militancy, the political face of Black Macho in the 60s, required it of him to do so.

Racial fixation: Mailer reported on the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. (Ed Kolenovsky / AP)

An obsession with the Black male also drove The Fight (1975), Mailers report on the heavyweight championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mailer took the art of boxing seriously, and it was a subject he had some real knowledge of. However, reading him on the underworld of Black emotion, Black psychology, Black lovewith Ali as exuberant as a white fraternity president and the darker Foreman the true Africanwe cant help but recall Mailer saying of himself in The White Negro, I am just one cat in a world of cool cats and everything interesting is crazy.

Writing of himself in the third personhis signature movein The Fight, Mailer admitted:

His love affair with the Black soul, a sentimental orgy at its worst, had been given a drubbing through the seasons of Black Power. He no longer knew whether he loved Blacks or secretly disliked them, which had to be the dirtiest secret in his American life.

In contrast to Mailers fame in New York, the indifference to his presence on the streets of Kinshasa had succeeded, Mailer wrote, in niggering him; he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible. But the Zarois had an incorruptible loneliness, some African dignity, and when Mailer read Bantu Philosophy, by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, he was excited that the instinctive beliefs of African tribesmen were close to his own. People are forces, not beings. He rediscovered his old love for Blacksas if the deepest ideas that ever entered his mind were there because Black existed, and he delighted in the mysterious genius of these rude, disruptive, anddown to it!altogether indigestible Blacks. He also confessed once again to the old fearthe resentment of black style, black rhetoric, black pimps, superfly, and all that virtuoso handling of the hoand envy that they had the good fortune to be born Black. He felt he understood what a loss the loss of Africa had been for Black people.

Macho display: Mailer arm-wrestles with heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in 1965. (AP)

Anti-slavery literature was older than pro-slavery literature, but fear of interracial mixing was older than whatever the opposite of that was. Melanin infatuation doesnt always imply wanting to interact with or to be intimate with Black people. It can mean a person wanting to be Black, to be like Black people, to import Black, have the Black style, or, especially for white men, to copy Black men. The Black hustlers Detroit Red learned from in The Autobiography of Malcolm X all came to a bad end. Yes to the glamour, no to the risk.

As the War on Drugs destroyed Black militant politics, hip-hop became the keeper of the real, the authentically Black. Hip-hop, an aggressive sound created by Black American youth on the East and West coasts of the United States, is the dominant form of youth culture on earth, Jelani Cobb proclaims in To the Break of Dawn (2007), his study of the hip-hop aesthetic. But the love of things Black, like existentialism, is a tradition, not a movement. That is why Baldwin kept saying, This is your problem, not mine.

After the slaughter of World War I, many white writers and artists lost faith in the supposed rationalism of Western society. This questioning marked a return yet again to the pastoral as an idealand Black people were thought to be close to the ways of the earth. Every negative in the depiction of Black people in American cultureshiftless, emotional, childlike, animal-likebecame positive qualities. As the conventional paths to success that newly middle-class Americans chased in the 1920s were revealed to lead to the deformation of character, the exclusion of Black people turned into their supposed detachment from stress. Oppression gave Black people the freedom to want the right things from life.

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The social Darwinism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries let white people put themselves at the top of the cultural pyramid, given the (to them) advanced development of their societies when compared with the decayed societies of Asia and South America and the barbaric ones of Africa. But then Picasso paid a visit to Matisses studio in 1905, and in 1907 he had his fateful encounter with African art in the Musee dEthnographie. After World War Icivilizations catastrophe, as it was calledand after the 1919 exhibition of Paul Guilluames African art collection in Paris and the arrival of jazz there, the primitive, or primitivism, spread through the arts as a virtue, a reaction to the old social order. Our age is the age of the Negro in art, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay declared. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is Return to the Primitive.

McKay himself was more interested in primitivism in literature than he was in its expression in the visual arts. Batouala (1921), by the Martinican poet Ren Maran, made a considerable impression on McKay, as it did on Hemingway, as a novel that presents the consciousness of an African. Maran enjoys a sexual frankness in his tale of love and jealousy beyond anything D.H. Lawrence could have published about white people at that time in English. The anticolonialism of the novel is part of the natural life of the characters in their equatorial village. Batouala was one of the first literary works to present primitivism from a Black perspective as a positive political and social value.

In his study The Negroes in America (1923), McKay proposed that the root of the racial problem in the US was the old fear of social equality. To conceal the crimes of labor exploitation and lynch law, McKay said, the American bourgeoisie maintained a war between the races over sex. The sexual taboo that served the interests of the master class was a form of black magic. Sexual fear had acquired the force of instinct in the US, he contended.

The black writer Jean Toomer belongs more to the Imagists than he does to the Harlem Renaissance, but Cane, published in 1923a collection of sketches, poems, and Expressionist-like drama that Toomer called a novelwas much emulated for its nostalgia for an instinctive way of life and its eroticized Southern landscape. Waldo Frank, a novelist born into an upper-class Jewish family who became known for his radical ideas, wrote the preface for Cane and published his own novel, Holiday (1923), on similar themes. However, in Franks romance of primitivism a white womans desire for the kinds of experience she imagines is available to Blacks delivers the Black man she attempts to seduce to a lynch mob.

Sherwood Andersons Dark Laughter (1925) shows Toomers influence in its telegraphic prose style, mixed with lyric poetry, and its determination to contrast the fecundity of the South with the sterility of the industrialized North. A Midwestern white maneveryone must be labeled these daysAndersons protagonist escapes the highly organized Chicago existence that has weakened his instinct for life, finding cures for the body and soul in the ease of New Orleans, among overly enthusiastic images of sexually anti-neurotic blacks. Anderson expresses much of what he has to say about the cultural and spiritual afflictions of white people in sexual terms.

Melanin infatuation circulated through American culture after the Jazz Age, mostly unexamined, unacknowledged. Mailer developed his hypothesis of hip during yet another postwar mood of repudiation. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man, Mailer said in The White Negro. Mailer was 16 years old when he entered Harvard in 1939. Drafted upon graduation, he saw action in the Pacific in 1945. Veterans like Mailer had also seen something of the world, and the experience of meeting people unlike yourself is part of his ambitious, hugely successful first novel, The Naked and the Dead, published when he was only 25a book Richard Wright read in Paris but doesnt mention in his letters. Mailers was an American career, though he and Baldwin first met in Paris. If Henry James was Baldwins early model, then Hemingway was Mailersespecially when it came to projecting an image of masculine prowess.

The Brooklyn-raised Mailer was a New York City character, a founder of The Village Voice, a onetime mayoral candidate, his moods of dread or discontent always on public display. Making a spectacle of himself gave Mailer bragging rights, always bogarting onto center stage. Pugnacious in his intellectual style, he was not a good Jewish boy like Lionel Trilling, anglicized by the Ivy League.

In an essay published in Commentary in 1963, My Negro Problemand Ours, Norman Podhoretz, another working-class Jew from Brooklyn, remembers as bad boys the sort of Black guys Mailer casts as natural dissenters. They persecuted Podhoretz when he was growing up in Brownsville in the 1930s. Italians and Jews feared the Negro youths who embodied the values of the streetfree, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. The qualities he envied and feared in the Negro, Podhoretz said, made the Negro faceless to him, just as Baldwin claimed Blacks were to whites in general. And as a white boy, Podhoretz said, he in turn was faceless to them. Mailer wanted not to have this problem of intimidation, facelessness, shared or otherwisenot after the Holocaust. Summon instead the Maccabee who can hang tough with anyone, anywhere.

Mutual fascination: James Baldwin (left) never befriended Norman Mailer, but both investigated problems of race and American masculinity. (Bettmann)

We all have changing relationships to writers, and how they seem to us down through the years is not fixed and cant be when it comes to such complicated artists. I was not a reader of Mailers fiction. My college friends and I struggled through The Naked and the Dead and then read James Jones, a peer of Mailers as a novelist of their war, but because of the Vietnam War we preferred Joseph Hellers blackly comic tone to their grit. I can recall the sensations that The Executioners Song (1979) and Ancient Evenings (1983) were as publishing events. I have a memory of Christopher Hitchens extolling the virtues of Harlots Ghost (1991) as a CIA novel. But my heart is with Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Mailers reportage on the Republican and Democratic political conventions in 1968, and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), about the march on the Pentagon in 1967. The mere memory of those two titles makes me mourn again my older sister, an anti-war hippie who brought Mailer home in paperback. It took a while for serious citizens to like him as much as the young did, Baldwin said.

Many of Mailers readers grew up with him. Or not. Margo Jefferson remembers that she found The Prisoner of Sex (1971) insufferable. Oddly enough, it is this book, about his views on what he accepted as the natural inequality of men and women, that reminds us of the days when race relations were spoken of as a conflict between Black men and white men, for which white women were the prize and Black women were not in the frame. Town Bloody Hall (1979), the documentary about the panel discussion at Town Hall in 1971 between Norman Mailer and Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, and Diana Trilling, captures the atmosphere of his public presence: combative, provocative, fired up. The women in the audience, plenty of whom knew Mailer, take his pronouncements on women as what theyd expect: condescending, out-of-date about equality and biology, and therefore irrelevant, just more of his shtick, which was to be outrageous. This, for the man notorious for having stabbed his second wife.

Mailer brought out nearly four dozen books in his lifetime, right up to his death in 2007. Do the biographies already out there have anything to say about Jason Epstein, Mailers longtime editor, who once said he really disliked The White Negro? Epstein, who has just died, remembered in his eulogy for Mailer in The New York Review of Books his limitless ambition and his sense of the writers vocation as being a commitment to explore the deepest mysteries. Baldwin said he wanted to die in the middle of writing a sentence. Time has obscured what he and Mailer once had in common, their love of purely literary qualities. Baldwin was certain that Mailers work would outlast the newspapers, the gossip columns, the cocktail parties. And Mailers own garrulity, he might have added.

Recently, news accounts have appeared claiming that a posthumous collection of Mailers political writings had been turned down by his publisher, Random House. The rejection was due, at least in part, according to the initial account, to the reaction of a member of the publishers junior staff to the word Negro in the title of the essay The White Negro, which was to be included in the volume. There were also rumors about declining sales, and speculation over how much Random House had paid Mailer over the years for his quest for the Great American Novel. Mailers family has stressed continued good relations between his literary estate and his backlist publisher. The estates literary agent also denies that any cancellation had occurred. In any case, the collection is to be brought out by Skyhorse Publishing, haven of the canceled.

What does this episode mean for Advertisements for Myself, which seems to be very much in print? Perhaps Mailer himself has become too controversial, given his misogyny, the violence in his personal history. But some people are asking, What is the difference between being canceled because you offend and your book getting turned down because your offensiveness represents a financial risk?

Picture of virility? Norman Mailer as a young man, an era that apparently haunted his later writing. (Bettmann)

I dont want to read Mailer again, but I dont want to read any more Baldwin either, not until we get his letters. But while it may be too late for me to want to read Mailers books againor even, most of them, for the first timeI wouldnt want them not to be available in someone elses future. As a historical document, The White Negro does not need to be defended, and as for Mailers ideas on Black primitivism, as an update on an American fetish they seem more in debt to Freud than to Sartre. Mailer said he was trying to kick benzedrine when he was writing The White Negro, which brings to mind Sartre going off speed in order to prove he didnt need it. Sartre wrote his best book, The Words, without the aid of drugs.

Still, there is something cold turkey about The White Negro in its maniabut then Mailer was always on, out there. Sobriety was not one of his muses. In his time, critics talked a lot about Mailers saturation in the language, in the invention of his idiom, and how in his nonfiction each of his participant/observer narrators was a persona embarked on an adventure of mind and will. Writers must be free to take risks, to make their own mistakes. Mailer should be defended not for reasons of nostalgia but on principle.

There has always been a problem that what is being said about Black people and white people depends on who is saying it and where. There had always been the question of whether the superiority seen in Black vernacular culture was adequate compensation for political powerlessness and economic suppression. Intellectual heritage is now capital, and the belief that the fight for control of culture is political has become obsolete. Zora Neale Hurston resented white writers making money from Black material when she never got the chance to. Poachers. What separates the chaff from the wheat these days, and who decides and by what criteria? In print culture, the change in who gets to say what is grounds for expulsion from cultural memory signals a shift in power, a creation of new powers. The offended are not merely heard, they are enthroned.

I dont believe in the non-AA use of the word trigger. You are not brought down by the encounter with a written work or an object of art to the extent that you would harm yourself or others unless you were already predisposed to do so and thrived on suppositions confirmed by your paranoia.

New powers need new standards: Is the aim the chastisement of the white gaze, control over sublimated and unsublimated aggressionor the placement of an additional apparatus of surveillance and accountability over culture? The market loves what are deemed icons, while the culture has come to suspect individualism. Even David Blights monumental Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom has moments when he regrets that Douglass thought of himself as exceptional. Never mind that Douglass could not have accomplished what he did had he not had this extraordinary sense of self. The age of auteurism is over. We all can be stakeholders in the fantasy that culture should be a safe place and that talent must be democratic, not a mystery.

I do not know how we got from wanting civilized workplace practices to imposing censorshipand doing so in the name of progressive intentions. John McWhorter was inspiring in his defense of the word Negro in a recent New York Times opinion piece. I was always told that my great-grandparents, listed either as colored or Negro in every official US Census, related to the word Negro in print as manifesting the respect they and W.E.B. Du Bois had won for themselves.

Writers works often disappear after their deathsand then come back. Or not. Mailer has range in his subjects, but are his ideas just flawed, or are they so wrong theyre harmful? Eldridge Cleaver, rapist of Black women and white women, was excused back then because of white supremacys crimes. Did the murderer Gary Gilmore, the subject of Mailers Executioners Song, find dignity when he insisted on being executed for his crimes? Was the murderer Jack Abbott, whom Mailer helped get out of prison, worthy of what Mailer read into his miserable upbringing in the criminal justice system?

The history of ideas is unpredictable. Critic Sterling A. Brown was adamant that readers made the canon; academics seem to think theyre in charge these days. Perhaps time and other writers shape these matters, which are so fluidwhat to call them? Along with the objections to what Mailer represents comes an exasperation with the 60s, later generations fed up with hearing what to them sounds like the plea of impotence: that the wide cultural dimension is a crucial gauge to a free society. Artistic independence is fragile as social practice. What is being canceled is the status of art as sacrosanct, and that of the artist as belonging to an elect. Writing used to be considered a form of magic. Now its a profession. Behave.

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My Norman Mailer Problemand Ours - The Nation