Posted by: George | May 28, 2012

Alabama Shakes and Alt Motown

 

Six months ago I hadn’t heard of Alabama Shakes. No one I know had heard of Alabama Shakes.

Now, everyone seems to be listening to them, and they are touring internationally. Amazing considering that they only became a group in 2009 and released their first CD on April 12, 2012.

Part of their magical appearance into our consciousness came due to a story in Gardens and Guns magazine, which has made its own magical appearance. It’s the new magazine where people all over the country go to learn about what the South might be like if you could ignore about 94 percent of it.

The magazine article gave Alabama Shakes enough exposure, added to appearances on Conan and Letterman, that they went viral. This limited exposure went viral because people listened to a song or two and felt an immediate connection. People felt an immediate connection because they heard something familiar that seemed new.

The history of Rock could be described as a process of moving away from its roots until it starts sounding a little too pop, then returning to its roots for the inspiration to move in a new direction, which is pretty much an old direction.

Before we move on, a little background on how we listen to music. Specially, I want to discuss why we connect immediately with some kinds of music but have to listen to some CDs six to ten times before it speaks to us.

Sometimes, we get music on the first listen because it’s what we could call, for want of a better term, pop music. Pop music is by definition (at least, my definition) the music you get the first time you listen to it. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It just confirms our taste. We don’t have to work to understand it or even meet it halfway. It appears right where we are already standing. It is like eating a plate of pancakes. We start with a lot of enthusiasm and get happy from a sugar rush. Then, half way through the short stack, we start to have an existential crisis and ask, “Why am I eating this crap?”

At other times, we get music on the first listen because the group brings us back to some faint origin of Rock that we love but that we nonetheless seem to keep forgetting. The origins of rock are varied. It emerged from the Blues (think of how The White Stripes seemed so original because they brought us back to Son House and delta Blues), Folk/Traditional/Bluegrass (think of how The Band returned us to Appalachia via the Ozarks), and Spirituals (think of how Motown or Elvis looped us back to the church). There’s some jazz in there and a few elements that mark Rock as R ock (the electric bass, a backbeat, etc.), but that’s pretty much a short history of Rock.

Alabama Shakes is not pop. So, by process of elimination, that means we get them almost immediately because they are returning us to one of those faint origins. I think they are returning us to Motown and the tradition of spirituals. Most people seem to be classifying Alabama Shakes as Blues. (Some people categorize them as Roots Rock, which is true enough, as far as it goes.) I would call them Alternative Motown. (It’s my term, as far as I know. If no one else has ever used it, it’s time to invent it.) I definitely feel the Blues in the band, but that’s not what draws me in. Brittany Howard’s voice (the band is all about her voice) might have the attitude of Muddy Waters (and Blues is all about attitude) or the childlike feel of Macy Gray (childlike, not childish), but the vive is all Aretha.

At this point, I should add an important point to my short history of rock. Why do we need to get back to the roots of rock? As groups work within a tradition (or even some mixture of traditions), they keep getting more sophisticated. At some point, sophistication becomes vapid. Soul moves into Motown, and Motown becomes Rhythm and Blues, and Rhythm and Blues becomes some sort of pop. Boredom ensues. Existential crisis. Then, Alabama Shakes goes back to Motown, mixes in some delta Blues, and we are wowed without having to work at it.

I don’t want to call Alabama Shakes part of a Motown revival. It’s difficult to return to a tradition in a pure way. When people try, it feels a little like a history lesson. There is something that Alabama Shakes has that is beyond Motown. (I’m still trying to figure out what that something is, but it’s there.) That’s where the “alt” comes in. Alternative Motown.

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Posted by: George | May 25, 2012

Is Bain Capital Fair Game?

When I was watching Morning Joe today, Joe, Mika, Willie, and a number of guests had a long discussion about President Obama’s “attack” on Bain Capital. Most of the discussion centered on the issue of whether or not this strategy is going to backfire.

I am not going to summarize the arguments on Morning Joe or talk about Cory Booker’s performance on Meet the Press, where he said, when appearing as an Obama surrogate, that we need to “stop attacking private equity.” (Not the message the Obama campaign expected from a surrogate.) I would rather look at the rhetorical strategies behind the general topic of Bain Capital.

As background, I need to briefly say something about the creep of propaganda. We could argue about the origin of modern propaganda, maybe even asserting that it goes all the way back to Plato’s attack on the Sophists, to the very origin of rhetoric itself. I don’t want to go that far back. I am only going back to the invention of the high-speed rotary press and the rise of daily newspapers at the end of the 19th century. As newspapers (more specifically, conglomerates of newspapers) became more powerful, we began to move into a media saturated culture (newspapers were soon supported by other media—radio, film, television) that made the manipulation and distortion of information more powerful. Think of Yellow Journalism.

In our media saturated culture, propaganda (or, at least, the techniques of propaganda) began to creep into more areas of our lives. Edward Bernays was a key figure in this creep. During World War I, he worked with the Committee on Public Information, which promoted support for the war effort. After the war, Bernays took the techniques he had used in war propaganda and applied them to public relations and advertising. At the same time that public relations and advertising were emerging as professions, political propaganda was developing in Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany.

Now, all political campaigns use the techniques of propaganda. And central to propaganda is this basic strategy: have a simple message and repeat it often. You can be nostalgic about the political discourse of the Lincoln-Douglas debates if you want, but we aren’t likely to see that kind of extended debate again. As our media saturated culture has progressed, time has sped up. We want simple messages.

This is Romney’s simple message: I am a successful businessman; therefore, I know how to fix the economy. He is repeating it often. (Yes, Obama will have his own simple message, which might even be a one word message like “forward.”)

Simple messages might be true or false, but they are not complete. They are truncated syllogisms, what Aristotle called enthymemes. In other words, the logical tie (the middle term) between “I am a successful businessman” and “I can fix the economy” is missing. Aristotle, the creator of Western logic, says this is fine because the listener supplies the middle term.

What Aristotle doesn’t say is that the middle term, as supplied by the listener, is usually ambiguous. With a good enthymeme, we sense the middle term is there, we believe it is there, we may even want it to be there, so the argument works. At least, as long as we don’t think about it too much, which we usually don’t. Unless someone makes us think about it, and then we move from clarity to confusion.

Any area of ambiguity, as Kenneth Burke says, is the site where rhetoric does its work. Romney wants the middle term to remain unstated so that his message remains simple. Obama wants to introduce ambiguity into the middle term so that Romney’s message becomes cloudy, which means it will ultimately be less persuasive.

So, Obama is not really attacking Bain Capital or private equity. He is attacking the middle term of Romney’s simple message. In other words, he wants the American public to think about the connection between Romney’s business career and (1) whether or not this career has truly prepared him to fix the economy, or (2) what the “character” of Romney’s career at Bain Capital suggests about the “character” of a Romney presidency.

Obama has asked why Romney is talking about his time at Bain Capital but not his time as governor of Massachusetts. This is, in part, an attempt to tie Romney, who wants to run as a conservative, to his time as governor of a liberal state. It is also an attack on the middle term by essentially redirecting the simple message. If Romney’s time as a business executive prepared him to be a political executive, then we will see evidence of that in his time as governor of Massachusetts, where he introduced healthcare, the model for Obamacare.

Obama has also attacked the “character” of Romney’s time at Bain Capital by portraying the company as an example of predatory capitalism. Romney and Bain Capital, the argument goes, looked for short-term profits, destroyed companies, fired workers, etc. This is, therefore, the kind of America you will get with Romney.

To defend himself (and keep his simple message simple), Romney will need to be either abstract or simple. He is being abstract when he accuses Obama of being anti-business and anti-capitalism. (Romney has used both terms. “Anti-business” is going to work better than “anti-capitalism” because “capitalism” is going to bring with it the hint of abuses in capitalism at a time when the American people are concerned about how the One Percent got to be the One Percent.) Romney is keeping his simple message simple when he counters with a few simple statistics. He has said that 80 percent of Bain Capital’s businesses succeeded; only 5 percent ended in bankruptcy.

If Romney ever tries to counter Obama’s attack on the middle term of his simple message with a long discussion of what he did at Bain Capital or a lot of facts, his simple message will become complex and he will have lost.

So, should Obama attack Bain Capital? Not really the right question. He has no choice. The right question is, “How should he attack Bain Capital?” The answer is he needs to (1) state the unstated middle term in a way that pushes Romney’s message in a new direction, or (2) introduce information into the middle term that makes us question or rethink the connection between Romney’s time at Bain Capital and what he would do as president.

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Posted by: George | May 19, 2012

Dogs and Politics

In the coming presidential campaign, the ethical treatment of dogs will likely be a side issue, but an issue nonetheless. Neither candidate will mention dogs directly. We will, however, see pictures of the Obama family with the First Dog. We probably won’t see even one picture of Mitt with a dog, any dog. Dogs are mad at Mitt.

You’ve probably heard the story about the Romney family trip in 1983. Mitt, Ann, the boys, and the luggage were crammed inside the station wagon. Seamus, the family’s Irish Setter, was strapped to the roof in a dog carrier. At some point during a twelve-hour drive from Boston to Canada, Seamus came down with a bad case of diarrhea. Brown liquid began to appear on the windows. Ever calm in a crisis, Mitt pulled into a gas station, hosed down the dog and car, and got right back on the road.

So, now we have a Dogs Against Romney website and facebook page. The webpage sells bumper strickers, coffee mugs, and mouse pads. The facebook page, when I checked this morning, had 54,749 likes.

As this side issue has gained some attention, the Romney family and the Romney campaign have tried to mitigate the event, hoping not to lose the dog-lover vote, like they have already pretty much lost the women vote (over vaginal probes) and the Latino vote (over immigration).

Ann said that Seamus actually loved riding on the roof. This sounds a little like poor people loving the dignity of being poor, or like Barbara Bush saying that Katrina evacuees living on cots in Houston shelter actually had it pretty good.

Ann also said Seamus lived to a “ripe old age,” though some accounts claim the dog ran away once the Romney family hit Canada. The dog sought political asylum, no doubt.

Mitt said the car was crowded. Well, then, why not tie the luggage to the luggage rack on the roof and let Seamus ride inside? A luggage rack should be able to handle luggage at least as well as a dog carrier.

The Romney campaign launched the counter claim that Obama ate dog when he was about nine or ten, living in Indonesia. At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama countered this counter with a joke: “What is the difference between a Hockey Mom and a Pitbull? Pitbulls are delicious.” Obama would have probably been better off not waking this sleeping issue.

Some people have commented on how the dog on the station wagon roof reminded them of Clark Griswold driving off with Dinky, his dog, tied to the car bumper or Clark strapping a recently dead Aunt Edna to the roof in National Lampoon’s Vacation.

It reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” During World War II, the ball turret gunner manned a machine gun on the underside of B-17’s and B-24’s. It was a particularly dangerous job. Jarrell ends his five-line poem with this: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

Here is my reworking of the Jarrell poem in honor of Seamus:

 

                The Ride of the Irish Setter

From the Romney yard I was lashed to the roof

And I hunched in the cage until my wet fur froze,

Six miles from Flint, loosed from my life’s last meal,

I woke to black flies and the nightmare June Bugs.

When I crapped Mitt washed me off the roof with a hose.

 

I know Flint was not on the Romney vacation route. I just like how it sounds.

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Posted by: George | May 12, 2012

The Voice of J.J. Grey

Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing J.J. Grey and Mofro at the Rev Room in Little Rock. It was the third time I had seen the group live, and it was by far the best show of the three. The crowd fed off the band’s energy, and the band fed off the crowd’s energy. Remarkable, especially for a small venue on a Wednesday night.

Grey calls his music Ghetto/Country, which makes sense, as far as it goes. Actually, his music is an interesting amalgam of just about everything that is right about American music. His influences include Lynyrd Skynyrd, B.B. King, Otis Redding, and George Jones. Grey draws from a number of traditions, but he doesn’t get lost in them.

The Ghetto part of Ghetto/Country relates to his vocal style, which will remind you of the golden era of Motown. And it is his voice that you want to hear live. Those of us who love live music are used to being disappointed in the live performance of singers who have to do forty takes in a sound booth to make a simple melody sound acceptable on a CD, who sing harmony with layered tracks of their own voice, or who resort to Auto-Tune to stay on pitch.

J.J. Grey sounds good on his CDs. He sounds even better in person. I would only say this about a handful of singers.

The Country part relates to Grey’s songwriting. Like the best of country songwriters, he tells a damn fine story. In a recent interview with Relix magazine, Grey said, “Just tell the story—there’s nothing else to do.”

The Country part also relates to his ethos, though I am pretty sure he has never used this word. He hates gated communities and golf courses. He idolizes his grandma, loves his baby girl, and respects his preacher. His music is connected to a particular rural place, the swamp region around Jacksonville, Florida, which inspired songs like “Lochloosa.” You can call him a Dirt Floor Cracker, as he tells us in a song of the same name. He regards the term as a source of pride. (Don’t get too sophisticated with your etymology here. For him, Cracker just means country white boy without all the nasty redneck values.)

For a Dirt Floor Cracker, Grey’s lyrics are surprisingly poetic. He must have spent some time listening to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, or maybe even reading poetry. Here’s a sample from “King Hummingbird”:

The deepest green, and rainbow blue

As delicate and light, as morning dew

Beating wings they whisper, a baby’s breath

Filling me with wonder

I would read those words more than once on the page. They hold up on their own, without the music, without Grey’s resonate voice.

In other ways, the Ghetto/Country label is misleading, or too limited. Grey’s guitar style comes from the Blues, especially when backed up by Andrew Trube on slide. When you add in the Todd Smallie on bass and Anthony Cole on drums, he comes across as Southern Rock. When you add in Dennis Marion on trumpet and Art Edmaiston on sax, his music takes on a Jazzy feel, at times. The horns can also become a Motown companion to Grey’s voice. Many of his songs are in the key of Major G, often used in spirituals.

So, you can call Mofro Ghetto/Country, Swamp Music, Soul, Blues, Jazz, or Gospel. In a mini-documentary made about the time Georgia Warhorse was released, Trube said, “It’s James Brown meets Skynyrd meets The Band.” It is all there in layers that nourish something holding it all together.

 That something is Grey’s voice.

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Posted by: George | October 4, 2010

A Morality Play

October 4, 2010

In the next to the last chapter of Travels with Charley (pages 230-42 of the first edition), Steinbeck leaves New Orleans. He buys a poor-boy sandwich, drives to the Mississippi River, and sits with Charley to regain his composure. An “enlightened Southerner” (“a neatly dressed man well along in years”) walks up. He and Steinbeck carry on a short dialogue about the race issue. Both men agree that change is coming and both fear the means. The Southerner points out that they are both tied to the original sin of our nation: “Surely my ancestors had slaves, but it is possible that yours caught them and sold them to us.” However, both Steinbeck and the Southerner feel they are too old to be players in the change that must come.

Even though he had not slept much the night before, Steinbeck gases up his truck and continues to drive east. At the gas station, he offers a ride to an elderly Black man. The man is “reluctant to accept.” During the ride, he doesn’t look at Steinbeck and seems uncomfortable. When Steinbeck asks him what about the school desegregation in New Orleans, the man replies, “I don’t know nothing about that, captain, sir.”

The next day, Steinbeck picks up two more riders. The first is a young white man, who is on the road looking for work. He praises the cheerleaders in New Orleans, who are, he feels, “doing their duty.” He even says that he plans to kill many Blacks (of course, using the n-word) before he dies. When Steinbeck cannot take any more, he pulls his car over and orders the man out.

The last rider is a young Black student who has been involved with sit-ins. The student feels the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King is too slow. He wants to see change in his lifetime.

While Steinbeck says that he could not claim to have presented a “cross-section” of the South in this chapter, it seems a little too neat. In a single chapter, he talks with an elderly White Southerner and an elderly Black Southerner (who represent the old order) as well as a young White racist (vowing to prevent change) and a young Black student (vowing to force change). Much of the dialogue, especially that between Steinbeck and the “enlightened Southerner,” is a little too formal, a little too finely crafted.

The chapter reads like a morality play. We view the forces of good and evil facing off and play’s chorus (the “enlightened Southerner” and Steinbeck) warn of the change to come and the “dreadful uncertainty of the means.” I suspect that Steinbeck, in this chapter, crosses from nonfiction to fiction, but I don’t think this bothered many readers in 1962. The boundaries between nonfiction and fiction were more porous then. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway carries on a dialogue with an elderly woman, clearly a product of his imagination.

The chapter, whether fact or fiction, effectively presents the question left unanswered in a book that might otherwise remain a pleasant travelogue: If Blacks are demanding equality and Whites will not relinquish their privilege, what kind of horrors will the country face in the coming decades?

If Steinbeck were alive today, fifty years later, I think he would wonder, like most of us, at how much has changed and he would despair that so much racism survives in dark corners, seldom even voiced except in a new code. Newt Gingrich would never use the n-word to describe President Obama, but he did recently say Obama might suffer from a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. I am sure that Gingrich would say he is not a racist. And yet, I suspect that Gingrich knows phrases like this tap into an anger that is as old as our country. Such phrases hardly promote thoughtful political dialogue.

While Gingrich might be in another place and time, lost in dreams of his own father, many Americans have changed. We have witnessed, in our lifetimes, progress without apocalyptic violence. We may still feel uncomfortable whenever we discuss race, but that young Black student, if he did exist, if he did ride with Steinbeck and Charley, probably saw change in his lifetime. Steinbeck feared the “means” because he did not believe it was possible for Americans to change their attitudes about race in a few decades, even if we as a society are not yet post-racial.

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Posted by: George | September 23, 2010

The “Cheerleaders” in New Orleans

Rockwell's painting of Ruby Nell Bridges

 

September 23, 2010

In the third chapter from the end of Travels with Charley (pp. 220-229 of the first edition), Steinbeck enters New Orleans and witnesses whites harass “a couple of tiny Negro children” as they enter school, escorted by US Marshals.

Steinbeck had been driving hard with little sleep. He says virtually nothing about the rest of Texas, just that he stops for gas and slabs of pie. Almost as soon as he crosses the Louisiana border, he comes face to face with racism. The attendants who fill his truck with gas see Charley in the front seat and think Steinbeck is travelling with a Black man. Over and over, he hears the same comment, which I will not repeat.

In New Orleans, he parks his truck at a gas station, puts Charley in the back, disguises himself as a seaman (he was famous enough to be recognized on the street), and takes a cab to the site of the school desegregation. He watches white women (called “cheerleaders”) hurl “bestial and filthy and degenerate” words at “the littlest Negro girl you ever saw.” In a draft of the chapter, Steinbeck had included the actual words of the cheerleaders, but his publisher was afraid of law suits. The insults were cut.

Steinbeck describes the scene as a performance: “Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.”

In the crowd, Steinbeck looks for people who might be like his friends in New Orleans, “thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy.” He doesn’t see “such faces.” Racism, Steinbeck suggests, thrives when it has an audience and when it is not challenged.

The desegregation plan in New Orleans was to integrate the first grade, then allow those students to advance. Thus, an additional grade would be integrated every year. Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that Steinbeck watches as Ruby Nell Bridges enters her first grade class at William Frantz Public School. Shortly after Steinbeck left, Ruby Nell was the only student in the school. Barbara Henry, a native of Boston, was the only teacher.

It seemed like nothing would change. Protests continued throughout the year. Ruby Nell’s father lost his job as a gas station attendant. Ruby Nell’s grandparents, share croppers in Mississippi, were forced to leave their land. Barbara Henry was not given a contract for the next school year; she returned to Boston.

Then, Ruby Nell entered school the next year to find other Black students as well as white students. No one spoke of the previous year.

As with much of the history of race issues, we could argue that remarkable change happened very quickly in New Orleans or that we are still waiting for real change. The cheerleaders, their theater, and their audience disappeared. Families in New Orleans seemed to adjust to the new reality of integration. Yet, no one spoke of the previous year.

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Posted by: George | September 20, 2010

Steinbeck Entering the South

September 20, 2010

Steinbeck begins to write about race in fourth chapter from the end of the Travels with Charley. (The chapter is on pages 215-219 of the first edition. The book doesn’t have chapter titles or numbers, so situating my discussion will be a little awkward.)

After an extended stay in Texas, Steinbeck is about to enter Louisiana. He begins the chapter by saying one of the goals of his trip was to answer the question: “What are Americans like today?” In a seeming digression, he says that Europeans view Americans as a “faceless clot,” typically not in very positive terms, but they don’t apply this general impression (prejudice?) to the Americans who are their friends. Prejudice endures, Steinbeck suggests, because we compartmentalize our general attitudes about a race from our experiences with individual members of that race. Rather than use our personal experience with individuals to question broad generalizations, we comfortably abide with paradoxes.

With the seeming digression about European attitudes toward Americans, Steinbeck is preparing readers for his discussion of prejudice, which will include Steinbeck’s own prejudice about the South. He writes: “I faced the South with dread.” He describes himself as someone who is not drawn to “pain and violence” and who does not have the experience to understand racism. While growing up in Salinas, California, he never witnessed racism. The Coopers, the one “Negro” family in the area, were treated with respect. Ulysses Cooper, the oldest son, died his “third year” in high school, and Steinbeck felt honored to serve as one of his pallbearers.

Toward the end of the chapter, Steinbeck even turns one of the then current clichés of racism on its head: “If in Salinas anyone from a wiser and more sophisticated world had asked, ‘How would you like your sister to marry a Cooper?’ I think we would have laughed. For it might have occurred to us that a Cooper might not have wanted to marry our sister, good friends though we all were.”

This is why Steinbeck feels “unfitted to take sides in the racial conflict.” When Southerners begin to discuss race issues, he feels they go “into a room of experience” he cannot enter.

Though ill prepared for the task, Steinbeck realizes that he will become a witness: “When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.”

For Steinbeck (and, he hopes, for his readers), the Coopers serve as a glimpse into the future. Because they were not objects of racism, their “dignity was intact.” They were valued and fully integrated members of the community. The Cooper family, thus, served as an argument for the positive effects of a more equitable society.

I would guess most readers, even in 1962, accepted the values of this argument. In many ways, Steinbeck’s ethos carries us. He is sermonic in this chapter, and we want to answer with an Amen. However, as Steinbeck’s words echo, as readers gain some distance from the moral force of his voice, questions arise. Could Steinbeck have come of age without witnessing prejudice? Were the Coopers treated as equals in Salinas?

The Coopers were not the first or the only Black family in Salinas. Jim Bardin settled in Salinas before the Civil War. After the war, more Black families migrated from the South, as did a number of ex-confederates. With ex-slaves and ex-confederates in the same county, we would expect some racial tension. And, the area had a significant Hispanic population. It seems that Steinbeck would have witnessed some form of racism, even if these acts were tame compared to the lynchings in the South.

The website for the Monterey County Historical Society recounts one example of racism toward a member of the Cooper family. During World War II, residents of Maple Street signed a petition to discourage Ignatius Cooper from buying a house. Ignatius bought the house anyway, but he reported felt bitter about his treatment. This was, of course, long after Steinbeck moved away, but the event does suggest that Salinas had its own history of racism.

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Posted by: George | September 13, 2010

Steinbeck and Race Issues

September 13, 2010

When I first began to talk to friends about traveling around the country, they typically responded, “Are you going to take your dog?” Even before I mentioned Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley as my inspiration, they made the connection.

Many people of my generation read Travels with Charley when they were in high school. They clearly have fond memories of the book, but there seems to be even more going on. The book, when they first read it, seems to have triggered fantasies of making a similar trip. Over the decades, the book simmered in their unconscious, undergoing a reduction, until they carried a pleasant memory of an old man and his dog, circling the country, both getting away and searching, apart from daily routines but still distracted by the mundane, checking the “pulse of the country” without a detailed itinerary. It’s a fantasy easily embraced, a guilty pleasure, an escape without guilt.

Interestingly, few of my friends have reread Travels with Charley as adults, and they don’t tend to remember the dark finale of Steinbeck’s journey.

In the end, Travels with Charley is about race. In the last three chapters, excluding the conclusion, Steinbeck drives from Texas, where he had an extended stay, into Louisiana. He writes about dreading his trip through the South, where the racism that affected the entire country was manifest and unavoidable, where travel writing would have to give way to social commentary.

In New Orleans, Steinbeck disguises himself as a merchant marine to witness, without being recognized as one of America’s most famous authors, a school integration crisis. He watches a young black girl walk past angry crowds, lead by “cheerleaders,” white women who hurl insults that Steinbeck cannot bring himself to repeat in print. In the penultimate chapter, Steinbeck presents a series of conversations with an “enlightened Southerner,” a young black activist, and a young white racist. Steinbeck and the enlightened Southerner agree that change must come but they both fear the means. The young black activist and the young white racist represent the extremes that forebode a racial apocalypse.

Steinbeck was traveling through America in the fall of 1960. Jim Crow laws were still in effect, but the Civil Rights Movement had already begun. In 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the “white” section of a bus. In 1957, schools were desegregated in Little Rock, Arkansas. These milestones were but the beginning. Most of the Civil Rights Movement would unfold in the 1960s, after Steinbeck had finished his trip. Steinbeck knew that change must come, but he could only imagine the events of the next decade.

Once he left Louisiana, Steinbeck continued to travel through the South and up the eastern seaboard, back to his home in Long Island. Interestingly, he didn’t write about this part of his trip, except for a few paragraphs in his concluding chapter, where he wrote that, psychologically, his trip had ended somewhere in Virginia. It seems to me that his trip actually ended in New Orleans. Once he had served as the Greek chorus to the racial drama of a heroic black girl pushing her way through angry white crowds, he could hardly go back to writing about an old man and his dog. Racism demanded to be the emotional climax of the book.

Racism—or how to change racial attitudes—is also the book’s unanswered question. If change was inevitable, as Steinbeck believe it was (also, as history proved) and the extremes were apparently irreconcilable, what would we, as a country, witness in the coming decade? Steinbeck wrote that he feared the “means.” He doesn’t catalog his fears, but he seems to believe that we would have to experience something like a widespread race war. The 1960s certainly brought violence—the bombing of black churches, the murder of civil rights workers, the police suppression of civil rights marches, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But I think Steinbeck feared more than all this. He expected far worse. I don’t think that he believed that most Americans could change.

The focus of this blog will be shifting for a while. I want to write in more detail about Steinbeck’s experiences in New Orleans, about the transformation of my own attitudes about race, and about the possibility—the hope—of transformation.

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Posted by: George | August 4, 2010

Road to Chicago

August 4, 2010

Last week, I made a quick trip to Chicago to move Jay, my older son, into housing at the University of Chicago, where he will start graduate school in the fall.

Here is a summary of the drive up there: leave Little Rock (rice, rice, rice, rice, rice), take a left (corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn), arrive in Hyde Park.

Here is a summary of the drive home: leave Hyde Park (corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn), take a right (rice, rice, rice, rice, rice).

We did have a good time while in Chicago, which I consider to be my spiritual hometown. I grew up in Virginia Beach. However, when I moved to Chicago for my first job after graduate school, I felt immediately connected to the city. It felt like home to me from the start.  And yes, in many ways, you can’t go home again.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck visited the Monterey Peninsula, his spiritual hometown, and he was shocked at the changes. He wrote, “They fish for tourists now.” The town had changed, and he had changed. He met with Johnny Garcia, an old friend. They shared memories, and then they both fell into an awkward silence. Steinbeck says that he was a “ghost” now: “When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness.” He concludes: “Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”

When I lived in Chicago (from 1979 to 1984), I had an apartment close to Wriggleyville, the area around Wriggley Field. I lived about three blocks from the park, a little closer to the lake, in a neighborhood of struggling young professionals, sandwiched between a Jewish community and recently immigrated Cubans. Wriggleyville was working class (except for a small Japanese population), a little run down, on the border of being seedy. When I first moved to the area, I was a little concerned about walking around Wriggley Field at night. Eventually, I realized that it looked more dangerous than it was.

At that time, I could sit in the bleechers, the seats in the outfield, for $2.50. The kids who lived in the Brownstones and Greystones on Waveland and Sheffield, the streets behind right and left field, who couldn’t afford $2.50 to watch the game, hung out in the streets, glove in hand, flagging down homerun balls.

The neighborhood began to turn even before I left. They put lights in Wriggley Field. The Brownstones and Greystones were converted to condos. Upscale bars and restaurants began to appear.

On this trip, Jay and spent an evening driving around on the north side. Wriggleyville, that working class neighborhood, is now a clean and well-lighted place, packed with trendy bars and expensive restaurants, all with oversized neon signs. The area plays to young professionals and tourists; it has the feel of Disney World.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck commented on his concern for the loss of local culture. He saw the same corporations and chains everywhere he drove. Now, you can travel around the country and find Disney World everywhere. Every city fishes for tourists. Even the French Quarter in New Orleans now has chain restaurants and is family friendly. Well, at least more family friendly than it used to be.

I had a very mixed reaction to the changes in Wriggleyville–and Chicago in general. I miss the old Chicago. Nelson Algren once said, “If you love Chicago, you have to love it for its alleyways and back streets.” I think I have that quote more or less right. He meant that Chicago was a tough, working class town. To be a real citizen of Chicago, you needed to take a walk on the wild side. I found myself missing Algren’s Chicago, my Chicago.

At the same time, most people would say that the city is much improved. It is safer, cleaner, prettier. To me, it just doesn’t seem to have as much character.

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Posted by: George | July 26, 2010

Killer Raccoons

My friend Jim came over for dinner last night. He told me a story about two of his friends who took their grandchildren camping in northwest Arkansas recently, during the time I was on my trip out west. This was apparently some kind of remote campsite where they would be off by themselves. They had to sign in at the Rangers’ station and note when they would be coming out. After setting up camp, they went to sleep and left their food out in a cooler. Three raccoons started to tear through the food. The family went out to see what was happening just as a bobcast jumped from a tree and tore the raccoons apart. The family tried to leave, but a tree now blocked their path. They were trapped for a couple of days without food until a ranger came to the rescue. I pass this story on for your benefit. I am afraid to go to the Kroger.

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