The Try-Works

I have to admit, I was a little surprised at the sustained level of fury incited by Ward Churchill’s “Some People Push Back.” I remember reading the essay in its original form in September of 2001, and it seemed to me a pretty common-sense indictment of U.S. exceptionalism. One which, it’s worth noting, was well borne out as the facts around 9/11 unfolded. Unlike most of the analysts and experts spouting off in 24-hour cycles on the cable news networks, Churchill not only nailed who’d attacked the WTC and the Pentagon, but immediately provided their reasoning. (In fact, I suspect that the CIA and State Department might radically improve their intelligence analysis with the aid of Professor Churchill. I’ll bet he could’ve anticipated an ongoing resistance to the occupation in Iraq, for one thing. And, hell, he probably even could have predicted the US government’s re-allying itself with Al Alqaeda.)

Nor was I particularly dismayed at the Eichmann metaphor. I immediately understood it to do everything a good metaphor should do. It managed to convey new meanings to both the subject and the object, and to expand the discourse surrounding both. From Churchill we learned a new way to perceive the technocrats at the top of the World Trade Center, just as we learned a new way to perceive Eichmann. And from these perceptions, many of us learned something indispensable about the bureaucratic functioning of power. If anything, the fury the Eichmann metaphor has ignited speaks to its aptness. Churchill’s essay has captivated the national discourse in a way I can’t remember a piece of writing doing in my lifetime.

The same held true of what passes for the left in this country. They seemed to take Churchill’s incendiary condemnation of US foreign policy personally, as if they understood it (quite rightly) to expose the absurdity of their lukewarm and wholly ineffectual posturing. As such, one wasn’t able to open a leftist publication without finding a dozen essays, letters to the letter, and etc., that (1) stated general agreement with Churchill on principle, (2) provided a typically tepid criticism of US foreign policy, then (3), moved to eviscerate him for the imperfection of his metaphor. Of course, these betrayed more about the authors’ misunderstanding of metaphor than Churchill’s misuse of it. A metaphor is imperfect by its nature. That’s the point. A perfect metaphor, after all, would be a synonym.

What struck me most about the reaction to the essay, however, was the near total lack of contact with American literature evinced by our media pundits. That the American people will pay a price for the actions of their government until they adequately affect change in US policy is hardly a new theme in American letters. The theme of collective guilt with disastrous results runs throughout American literature. If Churchill has gone beyond the limits of dissent, then so have Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau. The incendiary nature of Churchill’s writing puts him squarely alongside many of the authors ensconced in the American literary canon; authors even Vincent Carroll, Bill O’Reilly or Dan Caplis might defend, given the unlikely premise they’ve read them.

When I first read Churchill’s essay, for instance, I thought of Moby Dick, and its ship of state, the Pequod, named for an American Indian people exterminated by Puritans and described as a “cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” While writing the novel, Herman Melville was so profoundly disgusted with the American degradation from republic to empire, as described by biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant and literary scholar Richard Slotkin, that he created his ship of state’s captain as the ultimate Indian-hater, a monomaniacal Puritan descendent, driving his vessel on a genocidal course of expansionism. And finally, when none on the ship are capable of altering the Pequod’s course, Melville sinks it, refusing to spare even good but weak men like the Quaker Starbuck, who are insufficient to affect change in the face of atrocity.

I also thought of William Faulkner, whose attempt to shock the South out of its dangerous romantic myth of Southern gentility relied on images and metaphors no less disturbing than Churchill’s: such as, in Sanctuary, the raping of a genteel young woman with a corncob. And I couldn’t help but think of Faulkner’s stylistic successor, Cormac McCarthy, and his modern classic Blood Meridian, who summed up the American character by having its foremost representative, judge Holden, espouse the uniquely American credo, “if war is not holy, man is nothing but antic clay.”

Then there’s Ernest Hemingway, who responded to our last series of political purges with a statement far more extreme than anything Churchill is accused of: directly endorsing the murder of an elected official. As he wrote in Look magazine in 1954, “[there is nothing] wrong with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin that a .577 solid would not cure.” He later expanded the theme in a letter to Senator McCarthy, inviting him to Cuba with the following: “You can come down here and fight for free, without any publicity, with an old character like me who is fifty years old and weighs 209 and thinks you are a shit, Senator, and would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived.”

And I thought of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and his “On Genocide,” a condemnation of US aggression in South Vietnam that ends: “When a peasant dies in his rice field, cut down by a machine-gun, we are all hit. Therefore, the Vietnamese are fighting for all men and the American forces are fighting all of us. Not just in theory or in the abstract. And not only because genocide is a crime universally condemned by the rights of man. But because, little by little, this genocidal blackmail is spreading to all humanity, adding to the blackmail of atomic war. This crime is perpetrated under our eyes every day, making accomplices out of those who do not denounce it.” The point of complicity by silence is nearly identical to Professor Churchill’s.

And of English author, D.H. Lawrence, who wrote ” . . . you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Given the last fifteen years of absolutely brutal U.S. policy towards Iraq, and the near monolithic indifference of the American citizenry, I doubt Lawrence would revise his assessment today.

I thought too of Frederick Douglass, who wrote: “Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” This seems an uncannily appropriate statement, given the governor of Colorado’s demand for Professor Churchill’s academic head, solely on the grounds of his agitation.

These are, of course, only the responses of widely anthologized, mainstream authors. To round it out, we’d have to include many others. JG Ballard should be in there for his “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” And who could leave out Paul Krassner’s account of Lyndon B. Johnson fucking the exit wound in Kennedy’s throat? Then there’s Eldridge Cleaver, one of my personal favorites, who laid out a scathing indictment of American class/colonial sexual pathology which still has university professors shutting students down for daring to speak his name aloud. (I know, I tried.) Or, how’s about Gindberg’s “America”? Or, shit, everything by William S. Burroughs? (And it’s worth noting that for all the talk about Churchill never being published by reputable presses, he’s a staple at City Lights. Hard not to wonder if his critics on that point are just entirely illiterate.)

Then there are the statements made by American Indians. Given the recent, and idiotic, academic fraud allegations against Churchill, it’s hard not to be reminded of Four Bears, principal leader of the Mandan, indicting whites for deliberately infecting the Mandan with smallpox — while dying of the disease. Or, in another example of the attempt to quash American Indian points of view, Sitting Bull, who as Derrick Jensen reminds us, “said, when forced to speak at a celebration of the completion of a railroad through what had been his people’s land: ‘I hate you. I hate all the white people. You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.’ It’s important to note, by the way, that the white translator did not speak these words, but instead the ‘friendly, courageous’ speech he had prepared.”

And there’s Malcolm X, of course. Whose “roosting chickens” statement it was that Ward Churchill was referencing.

Most pertinent to Churchill’s essay, however, I thought of Henry David Thoreau’s “A Plea
for Captain John Brown.” Lest we forget, prior to the Harper’s Ferry insurrection, John Brown orchestrated the butchery of several Kansans who had committed no other crime than obeying the law of the land. Along the Pottawatomie Creek in southeastern Kansas, for example, Brown and his gang hacked the unarmed farmer James Doyle and his two sons, who had never owned a slave in their lives, into bloody chunks with broadswords and sabers - solely because they endorsed slavery on general principle.

In full awareness of this, Thoreau described Brown as “an angel of light,” and each of his followers as “a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow-man.”

Thoreau assumedly didn’t condone the butchery of unarmed civilians. It wasn’t his interest to condone or condemn, and what would have been the point anyway? The slaughter was done. Instead, he used the incident to make a much more relevant argument regarding the far greater evil of slavery. “The slave-ship is on her way,” he wrote, “crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by ‘the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,’ without any ‘outbreak.’”

Because of this greater evil, Thoreau went on to write of the US government: “[w]e talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented! A semihuman tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away.”

Nor did Thoreau reserve his disdain for the government. Like Churchill, he sat the brunt of guilt on the collective head of the American citizenry, who allowed their government to commit atrocity with impunity. “The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward,” he writes, “. . . [h]e shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit.”

To Thoreau, slavery was an unsustainable condition, just as a US foreign policy contingent on illegality and brute force is to Churchill. As such, Thoreau defended the use of violence - indeed, the use of violence against unarmed civilians, as is implicit in any defense of John Brown - in overthrowing slavery. “I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause.”

Then, in a rhetorical move far more extreme than anything in Churchill’s essay, he called for right-minded citizens to directly emulate John Brown and crew. “These men, in teaching us how to die,” he wrote, “have at the same time taught us how to live.” One can only assume that the surviving members of the Doyle family were outraged by Thoreau’s statements, just as the family members of the WTC dead are outraged by Churchill’s. However, in the face of the horror of slavery, Thoreau’s speech was necessary to provide some context for John Brown’s actions, as well as to provide a consciousness of the continuing consequences of maintaining a slave state. I submit that Churchill’s essay is equally necessary, and equally important, for nearly identical reasons.

The core of Professor Churchill’s essay is his disgust with the US sanctions against Iraq, particularly during the early 1990s, and their devastation of the Iraqi people. Presciently, he understood these to be the primary motivation for the 9/11 attacks. By 2001, anyone who was paying attention had heard of the 1996 UNICEF report claiming a half million Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. We’d heard the same from Dennis Halliday, who resigned as head of the UN’s humanitarian program in Iraq in protest of those sanctions. After confirming the number with the WHO, he’d presented the information in a number of interviews, as well as in a speech on Capitol Hill. We’d also heard it on 60 Minutes, when Lesley Stahl asked Ms. Albright, “we have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died when in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?” Ms. Albright infamously responded, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

Even from folks who opposed the Iraq sanctions, I’ve heard that Churchill’s essay is too extreme. That carries all the sense of a sack of hammers. Condoning government policy that causes the starvation of a half million children is extreme. Enjoying profits made off those deaths is extreme. And contrary to what many of our ever right-leaning leftist media figures would have us believe, shilling for political figures who have maintained those sanctions were right and proper, such as both Ms. Clinton and Howard Dean in have done, is most certainly extreme. Picking up a pen and giving voice to one’s outrage in an essay isn’t extreme in the least. If anything, within the context of American letters, it’s, well, patriotic.

Melville ends another of his novels, The Confidence Man, with an image of apocalypse incurred by the collective guilt of the American people similar to that found in Moby Dick. And in what may be the core of that novel, Melville writes of a pro-slavery character: “[y]ou are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.” You can agree or disagree with the sentiment. But Churchill’s expression of it is firmly rooted in the tradition of American literature.

We have a proud heritage of incendiary authors. The status quo is the moderate author’s ground; their job is to ensure nothing changes, but by very small degrees. There are plenty of them out there, and there always have been. They’re always sensitive, their metaphors are as close to perfect as one can get, and if we’d listened to them we’d still live in a slave state. Our incendiary authors like Churchill have a different project; they work to ensure change comes, and quickly. Yes, they’re going to be controversial, and yes, they’re going to hurt some feelings. But they’ve always been necessary to inspire the US citizenry to tangible change.