I find it hard to imagine a world without “Superman” or “Batman” but I can imagine a world without “Spiderman” but not without “Mickey Mouse.” Ubiquity makes it difficult to take apart the mythology strand by strand but one of the key cultural resonances of “Superman” was that of the outsider, the alien who had to find a way to fit into his New World of America but hidden away were dreams of heroic deeds and success.
Thoughts: My most intense experience of Superman was watching George Reeves playing him and crippled by Kryptonite and feeling an intense five year old sexual desire to protect him. So “Superman” for me was a window onto my gay identity and certainly with his rippling muscle and chiseled features, Superman was stuff of gay male fantasies as well as for straight men wishing they could be bold and brave.
Photos. That is what made Life magazine – Life. Not just any photos but great, big, bold, heroic ones that captured viewers and overwhelmed them so that they didn’t mind the meager and often unhelpful text i.e. accompanying articles.
Two women made Life. Clare Booth Luce tried to pitch the idea of Life to Conde Nast but he was too broke to purchase the name Life for the new bold, photographically rich magazine Clare Booth not yet Luce had in mind. When she finally became Luce, he purchased the name for $92,000 and engaged the second woman, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White to splash her images across the large, dynamic pages. Her latter description of the magazine’s concept was that of “horizon widening” and involving a “great rush of wind.” Ah, I long for the days people could unself-consciously write like that.
Thoughts: There is another element to Life besides its larger than life quality and that is advertising. Just as the pictorial articles could now sweeping across the wide open prairie of larger pages, so could advertising. It too could become bold and overwhelming. Remember, Life came about in the mid-thirties. Television had already been invented but didn’t become accepted until after WWII. By that time, America had become conditioned to learning through photos – Life as it were and advertising in the same manner was accepted as the wave of the future. Henry Luce was never a TV guy but Life paved the way for NBC and CBS to conquer the airwaves and ultimately give us the noisy, flashy world we now inhabit.
The Harlem Renaissance brought us the new negro and with it a new sense of the possible for African American literature. One of the writers to take full advantage of this was Richard Wright whose, “Native son” become a crucial part of American literature.
Ralph Ellison built upon Wright’s contribution bringing modernism into African American literature with the “Invisible Man” and explores African American male identity coping with racism, ignorance and violence.
Thoughts: Deep in the white psyche lies a tremendous fear of the black male. I speak from self-knowledge and believe that my fear is collective. It was formed from inchoate reactions of other white people to blacks. I probably had fully formed this fear by the time I was five. It was formed without anyone ever verbalizing why I should be afraid.
“Native Son” and “Invisible Man” are critical texts in how African American men have coped with this fear coming at them from every direction, communicated verbally and non-verbally in so many ways. It shows the damage done and ways of survival in a welter of inchoate emotions – from inside and out. I didn’t find reading these books lessened my fear of black men but it allowed another feeling to co-exist which is sadness for their trauma and for what seems an unbridgeable gap between black and white.
Placing these two Southern authors in the same title could elicit a guffaw as would a title that read, “Dr. Phil and Carl Jung.” That initial reactions is based on snobbery, the high brow disdain for middle brow literature. Sure, Faulkner used experimental techniques and Mitchell wrote in the 19th century realist fashion but both share something in common: a desire to strip away the mythology surrounding the Southern way of life and history that its not that so far-fetched to clump them together.
But the critical difference between the two is their messages about race. In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner confronted the ugliest of racial facts – that American democracy rode on slavery’s back while Mitchell viewed slavery as a regretful but mostly necessary fact because of the “Negro’s” child-like nature. Faulkner’s work never achieved anything like Mitchell’s popularity because the myth of the gracefully noble but doomed civilization of the South comforted Americans much more than a work that confronted the core of our democratic existence.
Thoughts: Americans don’t really like history. They much prefer mythology as it allows them to view their founding fathers like Greek gods in which they can be acknowledged as having faults, but their basic divinity is never questioned. But if Americans accepted as fact that slavery was embedded within the civilization that proclaimed equality and liberty for all, would we be able accept the ongoing shame of racial disparity in American society?
George Gershwin’s iconic status in American musical history would be unchanged even if he had never written “Porgy and Bess.” This is because his aspiration to write a great opera is seen as pretentious and over-reaching. While ”Summertime” and other great tunes from that show have entered the pop culture lexicon, the other elements that make an opera great, aren’t there.
Sadly, if Gershwin had lived another decade and written a few more operas, Porgy and Bess might have been seen the starting point of new operatic tradition rather than the terminus. If Gershwin had written several operas at his death, his foray into this musical form wouldn’t have seemed like a lark but the work of a dedicated artist forging into a new direction.
Thoughts: Gershwin was an American musical great and yet by touching the third rail of American history – race, his opera nearly became a relic of a bygone era. When he wrote the opera, the notion of white folk portraying the African American experience was seen as noble and progressive but a couple decades after he wrote the opera, it was viewed as condescending and therefore racist. Things have swung back in the other direction some – the greatness of the characters and the tunes simply don’t allow for “Porgy and Bess” to die. But no white person could undertake such a project about African-American life today and be taken seriously. This kind of political correctness might be understandable given the ongoing charge that racism plays in American life, but these restriction have as much chilling effect on creativity as do many others from tyrannical regimes.
Is there any irony in the fact that AA was born two years after prohibition ended? Had a repeal bender driven home the point to Bill Wilson that he was powerless over alcohol or was it just coincidence? Surely the nation wasn’t finished with its bender – popular culture lit up over alcohol from hard-boiled detective fiction to film noir, jazz joints and neon martini glasses burning up the urban sky.
Alcoholics Anonymous spins the Great American myth a bit – yes there is the quality of rebirth, clean slate, freedom to create a life of one’s choosing but there is an added element here, the sense of hitting bottom and humbling oneself before God which isn’t very American at all. But in true American fashion the moment of humbling is just that – a moment. Then its on to the bright future which includes a healthy dose of the converteds’ self righteousness which is an American evergreen.
Thoughts: What to make of applying the AA model to everything? Its sad how something so powerful and effective is cheapened and dismissed because it becomes a tedious cliche rather than a living testament to changed lives. AA for sex, food and gambling addictions has turned every one into a victim turned hero. And now AA,merged with the celebrity memoir. makes everyone believe can be saved by its simple and powerful creed. But the thousands of lives lost every year to alcoholism suggests that is not for everyone.
Americans were suspicious of the skyscraper. It represented the ultimate triumph of the city and there was something unAmerican in its push upward rather than outward. But to immigrants for whom America was as much idea as place, they saw the skyscraper as freedom, breaking free of the shackles of space and height.
Thoughts: America use to be the unquestioned king of the skycraper, not just the inventor but the land of the tallest. That ended a decade or more ago as asian countries began to assert their economic might. Now the skycraper is king in Dubai, a fake place aiming simply to have the tallest at all cost. There is no context, no real city or civilization to support the efforts. But that original burst of height that culminated in the early thirties with the Chrysler and Empire State buildings will always be an awe-inspiring moment in the gee-whiz wonder of American urban life.
The art of the 1930s transformed the wispy and fanciful look of Art Deco into a more stolid and streamlined form. This followed along with the shifting agenda of artists from “art for art sake” bohemianism of the twenties into the collective, social action that art embraced in the thirties. Stuart Davis whose jazzy, semi-abstractions stand out during this time, embraced art as connected to social life and change.
Leftist activism which involved artists evolved from early thirties class solidarity to fighting fascism which threatened liberal democracies in Europe. The Soviet Union was still embraced as an avatar for social justice despite the thuggish show trials and evidence of gulags and mass deaths. Then in 1939, Stalin made a pact with Hitler shattering the utopian dreams of American leftists had place in the Soviet Union.
Thoughts: The struggles of artists like Stuart Davis in the thirties to bring art in line with social justice seem like naive, noble failures. There is no denying the excitement in the hope that art could transform society. But much of the art sucked. True art needs a culture of unfettered individualism. The best art is that which is idiosyncratic, that arrests an audience or viewer. Collective art gets dull in its sacrifices to group think.
America has had its share of charismatic political figures but Huey Long remains the greatest. And Willie Stark, Robert Warren Penn’s fictional version points out why. He was equal parts tyrant and crusader for the poor. Stark understood that the niceties of the American political system will never result in overturning the economic apple-cart. If government is an “umpire” between various social and racial groups, it will always favor those who have the knowledge and resources to work its levers to their advantage.
But built into the “niceties” of the American system is a recognition that no matter how pure the intentions of a person who violates the niceties, they are in that moment of violation, polluting their intentions and undermining the very movement they hope to lead to the promise land. This Catch 22 means that we must look elsewhere for social transformation. Martin Luther King understood this better than any figure in American history. He definitely worked within the political arena but always from a different orbit, one of religious organizing. But even he ran aground when he tried to transform economics from that perspective.
Thoughts: Is economic justice worth pursuing and if so, how? The only way I can imagine anything positive happening is a Nuremberg style trial forcing Americans to face truths they don’t want to acknowledge. The key truth is that we Haves are fearful that by sharing more of what, will result in our losing it all. The American myth is very binary – you must strive to be rich or you will be poor.
Did the Depression-era audience that heard FDR intone calmly about the safety of America’s banks, marvel at the contradiction of sitting in their living rooms, listening to the human voice coming to them over the “wireless” reassure them the world wasn’t about to fall apart? Technology had taken them so far in such a short time and yet it hadn’t delivered them from the horrors of the Great Depression.
Is that contradiction at the heart of the thirties style fascism? The belief that only by surrendering to a Great Papa whose control of the airwaves was enough to provide security and prosperity if at the price of certain freedoms? In the end it wasn’t about the banks or the money but about calming and then controlling the inner turmoil of people wrenched from one dire extreme to another awestruck gee-whiz.
Thoughts: Barack Obama was the first president to turn to YouTube for communicating directly to the American people. Every week on Saturday, he posts his video to the Internet and every Saturday what remains of the mainstream media, dutifully reports on what he said. But so what? He has failed to create a moment. Instead he has just uploaded one more video to YouTube competing for viewer’s time with a cat playing the piano, the latest snark from John Stewart and a Justin Bieber pop confection.
Obama has to create and then seize the moment. He did this with the Republican town hall early in 2010. That was a riveting spectacle that revealed the demagogic cynicism of his opposition but since then he has mostly floundered despite his campaign’s mastery of new media. No drama Obama didn’t need to create drama during a Presidential campaign – it was inherent. But now he does and he doesn’t.