Implacable Violence, Part One The death of Senator John McCain quickens our interest in how to deal with contemporary narratives of life history. McCain's touchstone story pertains to American conservative values, the consequences of trauma, military and public service, violence, and a sense of honor. Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence, the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of "race." Narratives about McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of sexism, constipated values, inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism, sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service. Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set...
THE POEM UNDONE To be addressed at a beach she thought most square. To be called to a window to see what ought to be heard. What might sting like a mosquito infecting one with knowledge. She thought of Yeats, of Leda, of time, the coming of a terrifying swan. Did he say the sea's calm, tamed by moonbeams, when sound visualized is turbulent? Is music's allegory of war no more than conceits of violence gathering to clash in the death of light? How violated can a body be? What's put in pain by a mosquito's ignorant gift, by its eternal tweet of sadness, by retarded misery's ebb and flow and slow torture of climate changing? Such faith, such hope, such charity did Antigone, imitating Isis, sprinkle on a corpse. Honi soit qui mal y pense and mea culpa invades the heart. Tragedy has gone with the breeze somewhere to fall apart in another country, t o alarm with ...
PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 . (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998). Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction . He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934). His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beingsā¦" DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilizationā¦" Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization. Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published two years before Black Reconstruction ? No. It wasn't an accide...
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