South Carolina - Barbados

South Carolina’s history begins with the ambitions of men who looked to the Caribbean islands where Spain was generating so much wealth. In 1625, soon after the Virginia Company started settling North American, men financed by London merchant William Courteen landed on Barbados, far east in the Lesser Antilles near the coast of South America.

The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.

Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.

Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.

The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.

Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.

Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.

The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.

The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.

Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.

Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.

Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.

By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.

Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.

A Tale of Two Drunks

Chrysler and General Motors are out of bankruptcy, but their still behaving like two drunks just out of rehab. The one is repeating to himself the list of things he was told he needed to do to stay sober; the other is already eyeing his old hidey holes wondering how soon he can shake his handlers and relax with his old buddies.

Alisa Priddle reports the last of the top managers will leave Chrysler by year’s end and the new CEO, Sergio Marchionne, has been testing younger men from the lower executive ranks. GM still has Fritz Henderson at the top, aided by 77-year-old Bob Lutz, rewarding the next in line.

Now Chrysler workers are telling reporters they’re shocked they’re expected to change. They’ve been told the only thing they can take to their workstation is water. What do they expect?Cigarettes, snacks, cell phones? Just recently, two planes collided over the Hudson while someone in the control tower was on the phone on private business.

They’re surprised that when a car comes down the line with a quality defect, they’re supposed to stop work until the source of the problem is identified. When I was in Detroit in the early 1980's and Toyota was taking away their markets, people were surprised the Japanese would actually stop the line.

Priddle says that when Americans adopted the Japanese concepts, they changed that principal: cars were identified with problems and taken aside to repair after they were completed. They didn’t understand, not stopping the line was the reason people no longer were buying their cars.

For non-Detroiters, not stopping the line goes back to a time when cost accountants calculated the cost per minute of a downed assembly line and everyone understood they would be fired if they were the ones who caused that expense. Those responsible for what’s now called the supply chain covered themselves by ordering excess parts, so there would always be spares when a problem was found. People were hired to deal with storage problems.

When surplus inventory failed, substitute parts were used. I had a friend who worked as a secretary in Ann Arbor in the late 1970's who had an Oldsmobile with Chevy parts. When her car didn’t work right, the dealer forced her to sign away her rights to complain in exchange for fixing the problem. When the car still wasn’t right and she realized she’d been tricked by the dealer, she vowed to never buy a GM car again.

It’s not that the Japanese didn’t understand the cost of stopping the line. However, they didn’t have the land to waste storing excess inventory, so concentrated on supplier quality. When they stop a line, they identify the person or supplier responsible for the root cause. Their goal is to hold the right person accountable, not punish the one who recognizes a problem.

Over at GM, they’ve been promoting an electric battery powered Chevy Volt that could get 230 miles to a gallon of gas as the solution to their problems in late 2010. Only, Business Week reports, they’re already planning to shift the engine from Chevy to Cadillac. Lutz insists they do it even though the Treasury Department’s telling him it’s a bad idea. In fact, he used the bankruptcy organization to remove his internal critics.

Now, the attempt to sell Opel to the Russians without the proprietary technology is in trouble, and GM is thinking maybe they can force the German government to let them keep control after all. They can return to their old ways of surviving their failures: sell more expensive cars like Cadillacs that cost the same to produce as the cheaper priced Chevies; then when that doesn’t work, cover up the losses in the American market with sales from Europe. How they can keep their emerging market open in Russia after insulting Putin over Opel is a question they consider trivial.

A few weeks back the new chairman of GM’s board announced he had met the head of the UAW and some workers and discovered there was no cultural problem to change. Ed Whitacre
doesn’t understand, the cultural problem has never been about the workers, it’s always been about the managers who train those workers to keep the line running at all costs and let them bring anything to the workstation in exchange for filing no grievances that might cause a stoppage.

Meantime, Toyota recognizes it was wooed by GM in the 1980's and may have overindulged a few times, but not so often that it became addicted and changed its biochemistry. The same day Whitacre said there was no culture problem, Akio Toyoda was in Traverse City telling analysts we are "at a point where we must re-invent the automobile" and his company has to return to its original goal of providing affordable, quality vehicles.

Culture change takes time, and doesn’t always follow from severe crisis. Marchionne is seeing the differences at Fiat where no plant has yet achieved all the goals he set, and only three are close. At Chrysler, it’s a Mexican plant that seems to be leading the conversion, followed by one in Brampton, Ontario. The Americans, at all levels, are still having a hard time understanding, when a drunk changes his habits, life changes for the enablers in the family and the local liquor dealers. Change does mean them.

It’s too soon to know the results of government intervention, but at the moment, when both are competing with a sober Toyota, it seems Chrysler is still trying to stay dry, and GM is reminding us they really haven’t proven they have the will to change.

Notes:
Howes, Daniel. "Insiders at New GM Same as They Ever Were," The Detroit News, 24 July 2009.

Priddle, Alisa. "Fiat Takes Aim at Waste in Chrysler Plant Overhauls," The Detroit News, 24 August 2009.

_____. "Jim Press' Departure from Chrysler Will Mark End of Old Regime," The Detroit News, 22 August 2009.

Snell, Robert. "Whitacre: General Motors Will Roll out New Models Early," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.

Tierney, Christine. "GM Board Sends Chief Opel Negotiator Back to Germany," The Detroit News, 25 August 2009.

_____. "Toyota President: We must Return to Core Principles," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.

Welch, David. "At GM, Dreams of an Electric Cadillac," Business Week, 21 August 21, 2009.

South Carolina - Lindsey Graham

My boss has no sympathy for people in Detroit who’ve lost their jobs. He lumps them with the sharecroppers on the Mississippi flood plain who return after a disaster. Since they don’t recognize the impossibility of their situation, they deserve no sympathy, and certainly none of his tax dollars.

We live in times when many find themselves in the position of those farmers who no longer can survive where they are, but recognize their lives would not improve if they left everything behind and started over. Not all are people ground down by poverty or illiteracy. It’s become the fate of many of our best people born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lindsey Graham always interested me, perhaps because when he was first elected to the House in 1992, he inferred a change from the racial hypocrisy of Strom Thurmond. The life-long bachelor disabused us of that hope when he eagerly volunteered to join the group delivering the articles of impeachment to the adulterous Bill Clinton in 1999.

Perhaps it’s impossible for a decent man to survive South Carolina politics in these times when the ancien regime has been so reduced in size and diversity. In that world, one has to choose between becoming a tool of the desperate or moving away.

Perhaps that’s why he was so strong a supporter of John McCain in 2008: he could both atone for the way his party smeared McCain’s adopted daughter with rumors of miscegenation in 2004 and join his cabinet if he won. Graham probably did not comprehend that the way McCain groveled to those who had humiliated him revealed a streak of rudderless ambition that destroyed his image as a man of principle outside the state.

Now that McCain has lost, Graham has to repair his relationships with the king makers of South Carolina, the ones who applauded the governor, Mark Sanford, when he was refused federal funds that would help laid-off textile workers and poor Blacks in his part of the state. Now Graham has been pressured to renounce his friend for openly discussing his adulterous relationship with María Belén Chapur.

There’s no longer some thin line to walk between integrity and pragmatism in South Carolina, like there was in past generations when Strom Thurmond could get away with supporting his daughter with a Black servant by promoting segregation. The forces of the status quo in his state have become so angry over past betrayals that they’ll attack anyone who even suggests such an accommodation. Sooner or later, Graham will be forced to betray the person or value he cherishes most, and it won’t matter if he yields or leaves. Either way, he will be left a broken man, and the cultural system will persist.

It isn’t just the Elvis Presleys and Michael Jacksons we place in situations where they can no longer function as healthy human beings. We have many decent people who are finding themselves in positions where they must survive by betraying what they believe or lose their livelihoods, and either way are diminished in their own eyes. A world of walking wounded is a world of Gracelands and Neverlands, and one that cannot respond to crises in reality when they arise.

South Carolina

South Carolina has always been one of those states that appears in lists, but doesn’t really exist in my mind. I memorized it in high school as one of the thirteen signers of the Declaration of Independence, but it was only Massachusetts and Virginia that were described in the textbooks.

The thing that’s remarkable is how often the same strain of intransigence appears when people from the state do become famous: John Calhoun provided the theory for states rights, Ben Tillman led efforts to negate reconstruction with segregation, Strom Thurmond lead the Dixicrats out of the Democratic party convention in 1948.

Race has been another recurring feature, but it has mutated with conditions: for Calhoun it was the right to own slaves, for Tillman the right to control freedmen. Recently, Mark Sanford used the refusal to provide federal benefits to the poor, implicitly Blacks, as a way to bring attention to his political aspirations.

The two ideas are tightly interwoven, but they are separate, if for no other reason than intransigence existed before abolitionists and persists after civil rights. That is also the idea that’s more dangerous to the well-being of our constitutional democracy. We’ve survived, for better or worse, depending on our skin color, the vicissitudes of racism, but we’ve already had thousands die to establish the priority of federal law over local, and still see people willing to impose their dissident views with guns.

So far, my attempts to understand South Carolina are superficial, the conclusions of anyone just starting to read about something. At best, all I have are a few facts and a number of suppositions, that need a great deal more research to become history. But, as the King of Hearts told Alice, you must begin at the beginning, and so begins a series of musings on that state’s past.

Malaria and Men

It all began with a grammar error.

On August 3rd of this year, Nathan Wolfe told readers of the Huffington Post "today, me and my colleagues from Cameroon, Germany and the United States announced our discovery of the origin of malaria."

If he had said "my colleagues and I," I wouldn’t have noticed the many violations of scientific etiquette embedded in his posting. But instead, he baldly declared "me discovery."

Now anyone who’s read the history of science or novels by C. P. Snow knows scientific etiquette is, at best, a veneer disguising ambition, jealousy and all the other human emotions that characterize the interactions of competitive individuals. Wolfe’s comment is only noteworthy for revealing the contemporary narcissistic form, "it’s all about me."

The National Academy of Science did indeed publish an on-line article that day, "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," with Stephen Rich as the lead author. After whatever jockeying for credit occurred, Wolfe came out last in the list of 14.

He wasn’t the only co-author to promote an independent narrative. Number 13, Francisco Ayala, used the University of California at Irvine as his more discrete, third-party platform. Unlike Wolfe, he at least did admit Rich was the lead author, but not without emphasizing Rich had been one of his students.

Reuters apparently used the Irvine news release for its story the next day, while the Associated Press relied on Wolfe. The New York Times picked up the latter, thereby giving Wolfe the edge in kudos for the team’s research.

Ayala, now in his 70's, is of an age when men secretly hope to win a Nobel Prize to recognize their lifetime achievements, and he has been one of the pioneers investigating the evolution of the malaria parasite. Irvine’s story emphasized that his work probes one of the great questions of contemporary medicine, how diseases like AIDS and influenza migrate between animals and humans.

But, as is the way with science, he is not alone in his presumed quest for recognition from that notoriously factious, political group in Sweden. In May of this year another team, this one centered in France and Gabon, published their findings that documented genetic similarities between the human and primate forms of malaria. Either team could make the final breakthrough that might receive the award.

Wolfe is younger and no doubt knows only one prize is awarded each year in any field and every year there are more scientists in more countries doing innovative work. He probably also knows that historians have found most scientists make their most important contribution before they are 30, and if they haven’t achieved some fame by then, they probably won’t. He’s nearing 40.

California has developed an alternative paradigm for the young that promises them celebrity at an early age if they can patent something that can be sold. Wolfe has already been tempted by that siren. Last year, Frank Rijsberman, of Google’s philanthropic group, gave money to support Wolfe’s work with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and declared "Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field." Wolfe’s Huffington Post release emphasized the possibilities of a sellable product, a vaccine.

Ayala represents pure science grappling with the workings of nature, while Wolfe is promoting practical applications for that knowledge. A malaria vaccine would certainly be useful, but will face the same cultural and financial impediments the Bill Gates’ foundation confronts now in fighting malaria in Africa. The individual or group who finds the best way to convince humans to change their behavior without coercion may be the one who should win the prize.

Notes:
Associated Press. "First Origin of Malaria May Have Been Found," 3 August 2009.

Fitzenberger, Jennifer. "Scientists Report Original Source of Malaria," University of California at Irvine news release, 3 August 2009, has best discussion of research in the field.

Ollomo, Benjamin and 7 others. "A New Malaria Agent in African Hominids," PLoS Pathog, 29 May 2009.

Reuters. "Malaria May Have Come from Chimps," 4 August 2009, edited by Xavier Briand.

Rich Stephen and 13 others. "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," National Academy of Sciences, online Proceedings for 3 August 2009.

Svoboda, Elizabeth. "Nathan Wolfe: Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic," The New York Times, 20 October 2008.

Vasich, Tom. "Biologist Francisco J. Ayala Wins National Medal of Science," University of California at Irvine news release, 9 May 2002.

Wolfe, Nathan. "The Origin of Malaria: Discovered," Huffington Post, 3 August 2009.

Anger

After World War II, psychologists tried to use the work of Freud to explain that of Hitler. They began with the simple model, drawn from physics and the steam engine, that human energy must be channeled. If it is not, it is diverted into aggression. Without a safety valve, that aggression becomes bigotry and mass hatred.

Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.

Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.

With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.

When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.

When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.

The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.

My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.

We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.

In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.

School Shootings

Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.

Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.

But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.

At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.

The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.

I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.

I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.

Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.

Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.

One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.

His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.

Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.

Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.

Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.

Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.

Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.

Merce Cunningham

When Merce Cunningham died a week ago Sunday I kept looking back at a photograph of his foot from the 1958 production of "Antic Meet." He was dressed in black, against a black background, so all that showed was his face, hands, and left foot pointed straight down in a leap with a chair strapped to his back.

That foot captured the essence of dance. The straightness of the line resulted from the raw talent and anatomy of the dancer, the pointing that looked so natural was the product of years of practice, the lighting came from a production designed to showcase dance, and the lens captured what the audience saw.

The obituaries and eulogies carried the usual biographical information and praised his choreography for blendeding modern dance with traditional ballet to capture the randomness of life. The New York Times quoted a fellow teacher, Richard Glasstone, who believed that he, along with Fred Astaire and Margot Fonteyn, had been the greatest dancers of the twentieth century.

Among the personal reminiscences was one that revealed how, even in the most ephemeral of art forms, the materialism of the Reagan years has seeped into people's evaluations of greatness. Alma Guillermoprieto remembers visiting him a few years before and noticing the shabby furniture. I'm sure Cunningham didn't care about furniture after his best friend, John Cage, died in 1992.

She also noted that the man she believed was the "greatest living creator of dance beauty and contemporary fusions of art forms...did not even own his own home." The lack of real estate didn't signify to Cunningham. Diminishment came from arthritis that robbed him of his ability to move. He was like Monet with his cataracts and Beethoven without his hearing, an artist bereft of his medium.

He himself said dance left nothing - no copyrights like those of Cage for companies to haggle over, no paintings like those of his collaborator, Robert Rauschenberg, for auction galleries to hype - "nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

Every dancer knows the song from Chorus Line, "What I did for Love," has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a single foot eternally suspended in the air, defying arthritis and death.

Notes:
Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Merce Cunningham," New Yorker website, 28 July 2009.

Macaulay, Alastair. "Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies," The New York Times website, 27 July 2009, includes quote by Cunningham and the photograph from "Antic Meet."

Morsberger Response

When I was a college freshman, one of my professors criticized a paper of mine by saying "You’re more radical than even Malcolm X."

I don’t remember now what had been the assignment in nineteenth-century American intellectual history, or what I had written. I do know it was impossible for me to have said anything like Malcolm. When he was on campus a few weeks earlier, I had been too politically incurious to hear him speak. I doubt Robert Morsberger went either, and rather suspect his knowledge of Malcolm was second or third hand.

What I was then was a white kid who had graduated from a small, culturally mixed high school in 1962 where social class was stronger than race, and where we thought, because we knew the names of Black kids and sat with them in band, we knew them.

Actually, we were probably right. Not only did we not know anything about the daily realities of being Black in a white community, we didn’t know if any of our friends had drunken or abusive parents. It would be a few years before we learned which of our classmates were so unstable they couldn’t negotiate the transition into adulthood and who were strong enough to survive Vietnam.

In short, we knew almost nothing about any of our friends.

The Morsberger response, as I’ve always called it, is the refusal to learn that our personal experience is not the measure for all experience, that if we generalized from the particular we may not be that particular.

Morsberger responses dominated the reaction of many to the young in the late 1960's who went from protesting the Vietnam war to discovering there were structural differences that limited the lives of some while benefitting others, that those taboos of high school that made interracial dating impossible were more pervasive and more destructive than we had believed as adolescents.

During the years of Republican hegemony, the Morsberger response was somewhat muted. When Sandra Day O’Connor intimated some of her professional experiences had been affected by her gender and when Colin Powell revealed he still had to deal with the realities of being Black in a white world, the Morsbergers were less inclined to punish than to suggest that perhaps they needed to improve their manners.

Such quiescence disappeared when Democrats began to seriously contest political power. How dare Michelle Obama observe life was different for Blacks at Princeton, and that she sometimes felt isolated from that privileged world. How dare Sonia Sotomayor suggest a woman descended from some Spanish-Indian mix in Puerto Rico have different experiences than white men that might lead her to different observations. How dare a man who had attended Harvard when racial tensions had been stronger in the Boston area defend a friend who had been arrested for mouthing off.

The Morsbergers demanded each retract his or her statement. When Sotomayor would only say she had spoken badly, but would not say she was wrong when she said a Latina woman might think and react differently, they denied her a promotion as unfit.

The purpose of the Morsberger response is intimidation, and always implies an abuse of power. The price it exacts in human misery is high.

On the one hand there are people like Michael Jackson who internalize criticism and try to change themselves. Many have theories about why he changed his skin color, his hair, the shape of his nose, some rooted in race, some rooted in his relations with his father. When we verbalize our reactions to his responses, we have no word but "weird" to express our bafflement.

When someone externalizes his response we’re even more confused. When I read Morsberger’s comments on my paper, I was puzzled, but was also grateful that the class I was taking was so structured that he couldn’t abuse his power and lower my grade. When Seung-Hui Cho continually heard such comments from his teachers and fellow students at Virginia Tech, he bought a gun.