Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

This is a terrifying book, for it lays bare the effective re-enslavement of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly set them free. Blackmon throws light on the way that unscrupulous lawmen and businessmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee seized black men and women---mostly men, incarcerated them on trumpted-up charges---typically, vagrancy--- and sold them as convict laborers to southern industrial concerns. Once purchased, these African-American men endured horrific conditions in the mines of the south; they were beaten, starved, and worked to death.



All the while, the occasional crusaders for justice--Wareen S. Reese, for one----saw their efforts at redress met by a stone wall of southern injustice. Vested southern interests had little practical reason to extend the hand of equity toward helpless southern blacks. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when improved technology rendered labor-intensive methods of production of coal and steel obsolete and the federal government feared exposure as hypocrites by the Nazi enemy, that the U.S. government enacted and enforced laws against enslavement.

Anyone who thinks that the Jim Crow period--Blackmon prefers the term Neoslavery---was a period of harsh treatment of essentially free people will find themselves summarily disabused of that notion up reading this book. The chapter "Anatomy of a Slave Mine"--whose title is a euphemism--speaks volumes.

German companies have compensated the victims of Nazi atrocities. Should U.S. Steel do the same?

Read
Slavery by Another Name and wince. And learn.

An Enjoyable Bromide

This book is a necessary book, not because the reader should agree with all of Howard Zinn's ideas--he occasionally drifts off into ranting, especially in his chapter on the Clinton presidency---but because Zinn poses explanations for events in US history that are plausible. The idea that the top one percent of US society has since the inception of this country held its position by maintaining divisions among those below it makes sense given the current distribution of wealth in this country.

What strikes me as unconvincing is his claim that the slightly privileged (mostly middle-class whites) have been used as a buffer against potential concerted action by society's losers. He provides evidence that suggests that this might be the case (uncited eveidence, as this is a history written for a wide audience), but I didn't see conclusive proof of the grand conspiracy against the downtrodden. In many cases, Zinn quotes three of four people whose cases might mean they were victims of calculated exploitation.

The value of this book, in my eyes, is as a corrective of the great men, great country interpretation of US history that I was fed in middle school and high school. Every society, after all, is made up of a small minority of winners and a mass of losers. What Zinn does is that, by strongly suggesting that the US is no different than elsewhere, he deflates the notion that this is a special land.

The culture that might be considered an anomoly to what he sees in the US was the pre-Columbus Native American culture, which held most everything in common and was ignorant of monetary culture. So in a sense, Zinn weeps for a lost, ireetrievable past.

This a book that every educated person should know about and enjoy reading--for Zinn is a fine writer. It needs to be part of the discussion of US history.

The End of the Novel

There was a time, once, when a novelist’s examination of, and rumination over, the mind of her subject made some sense, but no longer. Tolstoy devoted hundreds of pages to the slow, painful, psychological demise of Anna Karenina, for example, as did Dostoevsky toward Raskolnikov. I am now thinking of Theodor Dreiser’s account of the slow descent ofHurstwood in Sister Carrie.
The point is not that the writer’s trade has diminished or that style has gone awry; it is a crisis of a poverty of subject. That is to say, a media-addled, morally indifferent subject simply isn’t worthy of anyone’s time—on the writing or reading end of things. There is simply no depth to the recent personality—why would there be? Gameboy and immediate gratification? The novel is the improper form for such an audience. The novelist should meet them on their own terms—the 140-character (as it currently stands) snippet of comment. The nuanced commentary is decaying fruit.
I was once a research librarian at a major university. In 1999, I found myself aghast at the indifference of graduate students to the possibilities that lay within the stacks. Whenever I fielded a question from a graduate student and pointed them to the dark, mystery-ridden floors of stacks of books that loomed behind me, “Nah,” they would reply, “Way back there? Anything on the web?” With that, we would make our way, the grad student waddling some distance behind me, toward the bank of computers that lined the walls of the coffee shop/library. I can only imagine what the students are like today.
People seeking the quick out, the immediate solution, are not worth study. Why would anyone write about them?

Everson Walls

I saw people I had known exhausting their final reserves clawing their way in the direction of a wall, one that lingered lazily, whose eternal reaches lay well outside of anything that any of them might hope to achieve. When I was four, I saw some of it; the rest I saw when I was sixteen and most of the rest when I was nineteen . We used to stand in awe of it, this wall. Sometimes, you know, some southern kid or someone from a place you couldn’t imagine existed—somewhere in Missouri or a place like that—like a place from where anyone in his right head could only hope to escape---some kid like that used to carry broken baggage with him..a limp or a dragging slow sidecar….or a slut you can’t shake….,I think that some of the worst things you’ll ever see are my neighbors.

Man or Dog? Why one over the other?

They talked the man from the ledge, and he climbed unsteadily back onto the roof to safety, amid the cheering of the crowd below. It took a while, but he made it there. Now on firm footing, the man seized a small dog that had followed him onto the roof, and hurled it over the edge.

Should you stumble upon this lonely blog of mine, you might detect a note of darkness. If you enjoy that sort of thing, soldier on, for you might detect little sprouts of black humor, which is the most satisfying kind.

By way of experimentation, which of the following two jokes do you find funnier?

Joke One:

A man walking along the sidewalk comes upon a boy and a dog.
"Does your dog bite?" the man asks the boy.
"Nope," the boy replies.
The man bends over to pet the dog, and the dog bites his hand.
"Ouch! I thought you said your dog doesn't bite?"
"That's not my dog."

Joke Two:

I saw a man approach the bar dressed in shorts, orange rubber flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt. He ordered a drink.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Terrible. I just came from a funeral.”
“Dressed like that?”
“It was only a rehearsal. Hospice case.”

If the second joke strikes you as the funnier of the two, heaven help you.
And keep visiting.

Life's Conversations

The post office is open today. You said it was closed.
I didn’t say it was closed; I said that the mail hadn’t come yet.
Well, how could the mail come if the post office was closed? Answer me that!