"In any discussion of the problems in our world today, racism must rank high. Not because we are soft-minded liberals obsessed with countless crimes throughout history induced by colour, religion, tribalism or chauvinism of one kind or another. But because the poison which we hoped and believed had been eradicated in our own time by the knowledge of the ultimate evil- the gas-chamber murders committed by the Nazis--is in fact still present, not in any one area of discrimination or racism, or in a restricted number of specific rulers or governments, but in all humankind. I call it "Inner Racism."-

Gitta Sereny, "The Healing Wound"

THE COMMONWEALTH

 


“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well nigh thought and said.

Ralph Waldo (this pic always makes me think of Harry Shearer) 

My gosh is there anything Ralph Waldo didn’t seem to know I mean seriously he was such a khokhem, a lamden amerikaner overly impressed with himself at times but a man devoutly engaged with his thoughts and besides  I have a soft spot for a person who can abandon his church, literally, (or maybe he never should have opened that coffin)  and discover God or the Idea of the Divine Soul and so was always open for connections to be made while he just kind of sat around his home in Concord or went out for a stroll perhaps planning his next lecture- he actually made a pretty good living just giving lectures either around his hometown or out on the “lecture circuit” which I guess was very mid-19th century Amercian; a prodigious reader to be sure and even had a noted intellectual publication named after one of his lectures which is still being published and occasionally read today, The American Scholar, which I have recently checked out as  I came upon a couple of seemingly unrelated “postings” while lazily browsing through the etherworld of the internet along the googlehighway. Emerson would have been appalled I’m sure to watch such as I, a low- ranking member of the mythic 47 percent of the government-dependent schnorrers that Mitt has written off, casually clicking away my days while not pursuing more remunerative activities. To make matters worse I had, too, come upon an article by the estimable Simon Schama – I have actually read two of his books-honest-and enjoyed them immensely- deploring the world of bad blog writing and admonishing index-peckers about the “swampy suck of self-indulgence” and to beware the “thoughtless recycling of experience” to which I was and am ready to wave to the Saturday night audience and shout  ”Goodnight Everybody!” as the band plays my exit music. But a-blogging I go and
of course the joke’s on me because no one will ever read this -including my beautiful wife
(I once was a social-reporter of sorts for a small L.I. throwaway and would use earl wilson as a verb, as in “I earlwilsoned it to the next table”. The gig didn’t last too long.) so, in a sense, I can continue without worrying about the swampy suck. 

To Emerson who derived great pleasure from books – and I can just hear Ricky Santorum now – the idea was to bring the same conviction; passion to the reading itself as the writer did to the writing – at least for the good stuff. There is a whole bunch of good stuff to be read today detailing both passionately and dispassionately the state of our present Amercia  just as unfortunately there is a whole bunch of what I can only call dreck claiming to do the same. How best to choose? Well to be honest with you if you haven’t really figured who and what does the most harm to Amercia and the world read everything – EVERYTHING- and send word every 10 years or so to let us know you’re still breathing. Me? Well I browse as I say and if something catches my eye I stop and take a closer look, which is how I came by a recently published book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by the great Chris Hedges and way too talented Joe Sacco – I’m on the waiting list of my local library for this which may speak volumes as I live in a small and fairly conservative town so hope does spring eternal- and they’re telling a story about what happens to working class people who fall prey to the criminal rapaciousness and murderous greed of unchecked corporate power ( I am almost tempted to say the same old story but it is one of the great ironies – don’t worry I’ve got plenty of cliches left- of the Amercian Dream narrative that among the finest Literature produced in Amercia is that which tells the story of poverty in this country; the struggles of working people to make better lives; any number of “immigrant” tales and certainly the slave narratives, the early work 0f Upton Sinclair, say, or Jacob Riis or Lincoln Steffens or later books like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s  The Other America or Barbara Ehrenreich‘s work- I’m leaving out so much…but)
 BUT my immediate response had nothing to do with the subject of the Hedges/Sacco book- as important as it is- it had to do with the damn Title and herein lies my sometimes limited (paranoid?) vision of history and I’m back at Ralph Waldo again, for it appears that someone, an editor at Nation Books perhaps, was not paying enough attention to the selection of the title for so important a book as this as it has already been used in an even darker context; it was used as the title of Zivia Lubetkin’s autobiography and story of the courageous Jewish Resistance fighters during the Nazi war of extermination. Ms. Lubetkin was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s Jewish Fighting Organization and was a founder of Ghetto Fighter’s House in Israel. Her book was published – in English translation- over thirty years ago.
Not exactly a pure match but close enough to notice. And close enough to unsettle my head a bit to thinking hey, nice going guys, great work, from two large and righteous hearts but not this title, not from two legitimate critics of Israeli policy no matter how right they may be, not this title in light of who you are for you set an example and you should not detract from it however unwittingly by using a title so near that used by a true hero of the Jewish people ( another irony she’d probably be among  your greatest supporters) who lived out her life in Israel and died over 34 years ago. You are usurping in a way her last witness to the world. You can have another title, people know you. How many are left – especially in Amercia- who have heard of Zivia Lubetkin?

Or Joseph Epstein for that matter( just kidding). He is the one time editor of that publication named after one of Ralph Waldo’s famous Lectures, The American Scholar, a magazine by the way that I have spent no time reading over the past 40 years or so being as tainted as it was by certain associations I had and continue to have little use for let alone wish to read, busy as I am. First impressions are lasting especially for impressionable young minds- why just look at Paul Ryan – and in the matter of Mr. Epstein I have always remembered him as a writer of  a particular piece of what my old correspondent, Gore Vidal, would say was “fag-baiting”; a very nasty bit of writing it was. It appeared in Harper’s magazine over 40 years ago and in it he wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it.” (The editor at the time was Midge Decter who is married to Norman Podhoretz, father of John whom we have cited in previous posts) I don’t think he has ever apologized or thought the need to and anyway he went on to what most would think of as a distinguished career as a lecturer (not a professor?) like Ralph Waldo, a long-time editor of The American Scholar, and an author of several well-reviewed books, a contributor to any number of neo-con outlets and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. I don’t know
He didn't have a tie so they made him wear this
if Mr. Epstein was invited to the recent Birthday bash at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Ave. in honor of Bernard Lewis, Middle East/Islamic scholar who is considered one of the doyens of the Neo_Con gang, but I read that several of the war criminals (my take) were on hand to help blow up, I mean blow out the candles including Paul Wolfowitz and Judith Miller (see a previous post) and the big kahuna himself, Henry Kissinger. For years Joseph Epstein wrote under the name of Aristedes, rumored to have been one of the best and most honorable men in ancient Athens and who as a general was renown for fighting the Persians, something all Neo-Cons through the ages can be quite proud of, especially today. In certain







Joseph Epstein
Executed April, 1944


knowledgeable venues the name Joseph Epstein would stand fine by itself with no need of airy noms de plume. There was another Joseph Epstein, however,  who fought for the French Communist resistance against the nazis and was arrested during a meeting with other Resistance leaders, including the French-Armenian poet and Resistance leader, Missak Manouchian; over 20 of these French patriots who were arrested then were tortured and executed and, recently, photographs and documentation came to light thanks to a present-day French hero named Serge Klarsfeld ( you should really check out these names too, kids- and if you happen to be fortunate enough to visit Paris you may want to take a solemn moment to visit the memorial to these brave people, just outside  


Executions at Mont Valerien, 1944


the city at a place called Mont Valerien).
Eight members of the French communist urban guerilla resistance unit 'The Missak Manouchian Group,' including their Armenian-born leader Missak Manouchian (1906 - 1944) (third from left in line, second from left in photo), stand before a wall as they await execution a few days after their capture by German occupation forces, Fort Mont Valerian, Paris, February 21, 1944. All were members of the Franc Tireurs Partisans-Main d'Oeuvre Immigr?e (Irregular Partisan Riflemen - Immigrant Workers). They became the subject of a notorious Nazi propaganda poster, l'Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), which attempted to show the resistance as foreign terrorists. Visible in the photo are (left to right) French-born Robert Witchitz, Manouchian, Romanian-born Joseph Boczov, Polish-born Wolf Wajsbrot (1925 - 1944) (spelled 'Wasjbrot' on the poster), Polish-born Szlama Grzywacz (1918 - 1944), Polish-born Maurice Fingercwajg (spelled 'Fingerweig' on poster) (1922 - 1944), Hungarian-born Thomas Elek (1925 - 1944). (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images)
 Anyway I couldn’t help making this seemingly indiscriminate connection if only it hadn’t had another anti-nazi fighter who happened to be Jewish with the same name as “our” Joseph Epstein who  admits to being a reactionary and has a problem with “lefty” writers, one of whom was undoubtably Mr. Vidal who had responded to Mr. Epstein’s fag-baiting remark as follows:” No Jew ought ever to mention the removal of any minority “from the face of the earth”. It is unkind. It is also unwise in a ‘Christer’-dominated society where a pogrom is never not a possibility.”, which is probably why I serendipitiously came across a recent piece of his in the lamentable Weekly Standard (I have been doing a lot of bottom feeding lately). The piece is called “Who Killed the Liberal Arts”-that’s what caught my eye initially- I didn’t realize where or who had written it at first- and as in all NEOCON exegesis it is a somewhat long bildungsroman – how- I- was- a- listless,- lazy- uninterested- student- who- didn’t- take- my- father’s- advice- of- becoming- a- salesman like- him- and- soon- found- the- light- thanks- to- the- University of Chicago (need we say more?) and became the Yossele of by-line fame. I guess it appeared in The Weekly Standard because Commentary had probably featured its yearly quota on articles decrying how Amercian Liberals have slain Amercia’s High Culture.  Not exactly the sharpest pencil Mr. Epstein readily admits  that at the sound of a classmate reciting French poetry in French he was all set to apply for a career at Jiffy Lube, which in our current climate of corporate malefaction would have fit very nicely to the zeitgeist as it was Jiffy Lube who was investigated a few years back for charging customers for services they never rendered which is how a certain candidate has conducted his life which seems ok for the neocon colleagues of Mr. Epstein and of course that crowd never lets facts get in the way of their cockamamie theories it is obvious that Mr. E didn’t care much for history either as Jiffy Lube was founded twenty years after he left his beloved University of Chicago. So over a half century of striding the heady world of intellectual debate and tumult he publishes in as specious a rag as there ever was  his valedictory (probably not but what the hey) review “Who Killed The Liberal Arts?” and his unsurprising conclusion – because he had already answered this question years  ago and in one interview ( in 1999) in particular where basically says the same thing- that its the teachers who insists on including such 2nd and 3rd rate contemporary, read: Living writers in the curriculum for they “have not done much for literature. Its a mistake to spend a lot of the four years reading living writers”. Its the older writers that have the quality so don’t waste your time with the second raters like Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Adrienne Rich, who else?, oh yeah, Jack Kerouac of course. The Commentary crowd hated him and so Joseph Epstein whose “discovery of Commentary was the great intellectual event in his life” had to include ol’ sentimental Jack in with the “second rate” Nobel Prize recipients and such. I suppose he never asked his students – he lectured (never taught) for a long time- to read Kerouac which is a shame; its like treating your students like Jiffy Lube treated their customers, especially since if they didn’t read him for themselves they missed out on some of best prose ever written by an Amercian writer. I’m a bit surprised that the neocon gang didn’t take to Jack, I mean his politics were just as conservative in a way and his patriotism as fervent and more and he loved his mother ( and he did speak French, sort of). And what is even more Mr. Epstein has a great deal in common with saint Jack than even he realized:
all the while holding off these un-Democratic barbarians and extolling such champions of Amercian Exceptionalism as Sarah Palin.

Joseph Epstein: 2012


“Had I not gone to the University of Chicago, I have often wondered, what might my life be like? I suspect I would be wealthier. But reading the books I did, and have continued to throughout my life, has made it all but impossible to concentrate on moneymaking in the way that is required to acquire significant wealth. Without the experience of the University of Chicago, perhaps I would have been less critical of the world’s institutions and the people who run them; I might even have been among those who do run them. I might, who knows, have been happier, if only because less introspective—nobody said the examined life is a lot of laughs—without the changes wrought in me by my years at the University of Chicago. Yet I would not trade in those three strange years for anything.


Jack Kerouac: 1951
“In America, the idea of going to college is just like the idea of prosperity is just around the corner, it was supposed to solve something or everything or something because all you had to do was larn what they taught and then everything else was going to be handled; instead of that, and just like prosperity that was never around the corner but a couple miles at least (and false prosperity -)

going to college by acquainting me with all the mad elements of life, such as the sensibilities, books, arts, histories of madness, and fashions has not only made it impossible for me to learn simple tricks of how to earn a living but has deprived me of my one-time innocent belief in my own thoughts that used to make me handle my own destiny. So now I sit and stew in a sophistication which has taken hold of me just exactly like a disease and makes me lie around like a bum all day long and stay up all night goofing with myself. I had thought, in, and before college, that to be a writer was like being, of course, the Emile Zola of the film they made about him with Paul Muni shouting angrily in the streets at the dumb and stupid masses, as if he knew everything and they didn’t know a damn thing; instead of that I wonder what working people think of me when they hear my typewriter clacking in the middle of the night or what they think I’m up to when I take walks at 2 A.M. in outlying suburban neighborhoods – the truth is I haven’t a single thing to wr- feel foolish …How I wish I could grow corn tomorrow morning!”

Joseph Epstein 2012
I turned out to be a better teacher than student. In fact I took to saying, toward the close of my 30-year stint in the English department at Northwestern University, that teaching provides a better education than does being a student. If he wishes to elude boredom among his students and embarrassment for himself, a teacher will do all he can to cultivate the art of lucid and interesting presentation and the habits of thoroughness. Thereby, with a bit of luck, education may begin to kick in.”


Jack Kerouac 1951
“…sat in a grave of his own in his overcoat in an empty unheated Saturday classroom of West Denver High not a mile across town, his brow in his hand as blackboard dust swam across October fires in the corner where the window-opening pole was leaned, where it was still written in chalk from yesterday’s class (in American Lit.) When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, sat there in a pretense of thinking for the benefit of any teachers and even kids passing in the hall with some of whom just before he’d in fact been joking, sat now moveless in a pretense of remembering, with severe precision, the exact date of something that was
bottlenecking his entire day, left wrist raised for a quick look at how much time was left, frown of accompaniment already formed, drawer pulled with letterheaded memo paper ready to fly the instant he smacked the desk deciding, but actually choking over loss, choking over loss, thinking of the love, the love, the love he missed when his face was thin and fresh, hopes were pure. O growing old!”

Joseph Epstein 2012
The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.”


Jack Kerouac 1951
“In those days I must have been a regular student wandering in thought among the shops and windows, like in Poe or Melville. In fact, yes by God I was; I worked as a waiter in a basement Bohemian restaurant with candles on oilcloths in Greenwich Village and got high with the dishwasher in the kitchen on tea, talk and dancing, the dancing he did himself, he was an African primitive dancer, his hands were long as nails, he was a colored maniac (sic); I’d muse on him as I wended my way snowward. Not soon after that, though, I’ll bet I began to look around. The sins of America are precisely that the streets…are empty where their houses are, there’s no sense of neighborhood anymore, a neighborhood quarter or a neighborhood freeforall fight between two streets of young husbands is no longer possible except I think in Dagwood Bumstead and he ain’t for real..”

Joseph Epstein, 2012
“Then there is the business school, especially in its MBA version. Business schools are not about education at all, but about so-called networking and establishing, for future employers, a credential demonstrating that one will do anything to work for them—even give up two years of income and pay high tuition fees for an MBA to do so. As with an American Express card, so with an MBA, one daren’t leave home without one, at least if one is applying for work at certain corporations. Some among these corporations, when it comes to recruiting for jobs, only interview MBAs, and many restrict their candidate pools to MBAs from only four or five select business schools. Pledging the fraternity again.”


Jack Kerouac, 1951
“-__beyond this old honesty there can only be thieves.”
Of course as is often the case in matters so frivolous as this there is a review of a book by an old girlfriend of Jack’s in the current issue of The American Scholar . The author of the memoir, Joyce Johnson, had written a lovely remembrance about thirty years ago but this volume, according to the reviewer, Deborah Baker, may have fallen a bit short on the merits as she states:
“But it is when Kerouac writes of his tortured struggle to find a new “method”—he doesn’t use the word voice—that the insufficiency of Johnson’s own method becomes apparent. At such times, one imagines young Joyce in the back seat of a car smiling grimly with Jack at the wheel, careening between moods and women and abruptly abandoned manuscripts—as if she is still, in part, the girlfriend trying to domesticate a story that keeps veering away from her.”


And thats a shame because you want so very much to see this memoir succeed too and especially as it is given such a notice in Joe Epstein’s old haunting grounds as The American Scholar. Ah, but perhaps the ghost of misbegotten metaphor still walks the halls there as the reviled author of On The Road never learned how to drive in the first place.


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