“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident.

It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California because Arizona had failed to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an official holiday. To protest Arizona’s decision, and to show support for the new holiday—and, perhaps even to show solidarity with the NFL—someone on my college campus in northwestern Pennsylvania decided to celebrate with a rally. I can’t remember how, but I wound up on the program.

I read Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

To tie in to the King holiday, I added a verse of my own, how the Negro stood on the banks of the Potomac, on the steps of an American temple, and dreamed a dream of peace and justice with a preacher from Montgomery.

It was King’s day, to be sure, but for me, my big takeaway was Langston Hughes. He wrote “Rivers” when he was only nineteen, inspired by the sight of the Mississippi while on a bus trip. The poem appeared in The Crisis in 1921, and it made Hughes’ reputation almost instantly.

The Great Migration had already shifted the face of the country: Southern blacks had moved into northern cities, and possibility was palpable in the air. World War I infused everyone, particularly marginalized blacks, with a can-do attitude and renewed faith in the American dream. No where was this more evident than in Harlem, New York, which thrummed with creative energy, intellectual optimism, and wild, white-hot jazz. “In a Harlem cabaret / Six long-headed jazzers play. / A dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken gold,” Hughes wrote in “Jazzonia.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the intellectual fathers of the Harlem Renaissance, touted the power of the “talented tenth”—the top ten percent of the black population, representing the intellectual and creative genius of the entire race, who would show the rest of the world just what that race was capable of. Hughes, too, stood at the front and center of the movement.

Born in 1902—the same year Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk—Hughes moved around a lot growing up because of divorced parents. He was raised for a while by his maternal grandmother, by family friends, and eventually by his mother and her second husband. In 1919, he lived for a while with his father in Mexico, but the two shared a troubled relationship. He continued to move around throughout the twenties, attending then dropping out of Columbia, traveling overseas, living in D.C., and then finally alighting in Harlem permanently by 1929.

During that time, he continued to publish, following up on the attention “Rivers” brought to him. A chance encounter with Vachel Lindsay provided a further boost. As legend has it, Hughes had been working as a busboy at a restaurant where Lindsay was dining, and he slipped the famous poet some of his own work. Lindsay, impressed by the “busboy poet,” proved to be an energetic advocate.

Hughes counted Walt Whitman as a major influence. Carl Sandburg, too. “By 1926, when he published his first volume of verse, The Weary Blues, he already had fused into his poetry its key technical commitment,” writes biographer Arnold Rampersad:

the music of black Americans as the prime source and expression of their cultural truths. In these blues and jazz poems, Hughes wrote a fundamentally new kind of verse—one that told of joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, of ordinary black folk, in the language of their typical speech and composed out of a great love of these people.

Listen to the rhythm, for instance, in “Song for a Banjo Dance”:

Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em swift and wil’—
Get way back, honey,
Do that rockin’ step.
Slide on over, darling.
Now! Come over
With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em, honey chile.

“If there was a Renaissance going on in Harlem, the people on the street didn’t know it,” Hughes later said, perhaps a bit disingenuously. After all, Hughes served as the voice of the common black man and woman of those times. Compared to the formal poetics of Countee Cullen, for instance, Hughes was the poet-laureate of the street.

Consider the voice he captures in “Dressed Up”:

I had ma clothes cleaned
Just like new.
I put ’em on but
I still feels blue.

I bought a new hat,
Sho is fine,
But I wish I had back that
Old gal o’ mine.

I got new shoes,—
They don’t hurt ma feet,
But I ain’t got nobody
For to call me sweet.

Over the span of more than forty-five years, Hughes wrote poems, essays, plays, short stories, histories, and even libretti. In his later years, he also served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. In the sixties, even as that preacher from Montgomery led the March on Washington to the banks of the Potomac, Hughes supported King’s peaceful, moderate approach. He defended King against attacks from militant blacks, Rampersad says, and he himself attacked the “obscenity and profanity in the new militant black writing” of the time.

Years after his death in 1967, Hughes even made a cameo appearance for a younger generation. In Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical Rent, in the act-one closer “La Vie Boheme,” he appears with “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, and Cage. Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes [and the stage].” A new generation, singing along, celebrated all things Bohemian and, in doing so, found a new excuse to rediscover Hughes’ poetry.

But it’s for his association with the Harlem Renaissance that Hughes is best remembered. The poems he wrote then swing wild with energy and resonate deeply with voice. They are, most of all, fun to read. They are a delight.

Poetry “is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words,” Hughes said shortly before his death. For Hughes, poetry was life.

“He wanted no definition of the poet that divorced his art from the immediacy of life,” Rampersad says.

That is why a poet can look back and know ancient rivers, because that knowledge helps him understand the now. “Each human being must live within his time,” Hughes said, “with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country.”

Each human being must live.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years.

Princes of the Universe

1984 was the year of Big Brother. The rest of the world was grappling with the Cold War. South Africa had Total Onslaught as the Apartheid government of the time sent soldiers into the townships to fight pro-democracy activists. The ANC bombing campaign was under way with almost weekly attacks. The South African army was still fighting independence movements in Angola and Mozambique. Archbishop Desmond Tutu won his Nobel Peace Prize. The Stander Gang, bank robbers led by police officers, were killed in a shootout.

And — at the height of international sanctions — Queen visited Sun City in Bophuthatswana. The splatter of nominally independent states was an Apartheid construct, a vassal state “Bantustan,” created to represent the supposed “separate but equal” politics of the day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Queen should never have come.

Freddie Mercury — birth name Farrokh Bulsara, a gay Parsi from Gujarat who grew up in Zanzibar and was raised as a Zoroastrian — visiting a country where everything about him is illegal as a celebrated guest? I was 10 years old and most of the hype went straight over my head.

I remember that the band had second thoughts. Mercury came down with a throat infection and the band threatened to pull out. Sol Kerzner, international man of mystery and the owner of Sun City, must have thrown a lot of cash at them to get them to stay. A trick he would use to grand effect every year during the Million Dollar Golf Tournament to get his big name stars to break sanctions.

Queen stayed and played nine sell-out concerts. They arrived back in the UK to universal condemnation, were fined by the British Musicians Union, and ostracised.

Why do it? They didn’t need the money. Maybe because they felt that the band was breaking up anyway?

Mercury had started recording duets with Michael Jackson in 1981 (none yet released), singles released in 1984 and a full solo album, Mr Bad Guy, in 1985. Brian May and Roger Taylor also tried their own efforts. The creative conflicts in the band had led to albums which swung between the epic rock anthems we all love and forgettable bits of dropsy.

Mercury wanted to experiment with more disco and electronic sounds while the rest of the band considered themselves firmly in the rock camp. The dynamic of intensely creative band members pulling in different directions is almost prosaically predictable.

In 1985, when Queen delivered a mind-bending performance at Live Aid, it really did feel like a break-up couldn’t be far away.

Who wants to live forever?

In May this year, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the formation of the band, the BBC aired “Queen: Days of Our Lives.” Roger Taylor and Brian May were extensively interviewed for it and gave a real sense that 1985 was the most troubled year for the group.

Bob Geldof didn’t quite beg them to perform for his Live Aid charity event, but he came pretty close. The concert would have the world’s largest ever television audience of 1.9 billion and he wanted a band who could amp a stadium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eventually they agreed. Jim Hutton, Mercury’s last partner, said that Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, but May suggested that Mercury may already have known something was wrong at the time of Live Aid.

Live Aid may have done precious little for Ethiopia but it saved Queen from self-destruction. Mercury was always private about himself and it wouldn’t be until very close to his death that there would be any public statement about his illness.

Remember the times, though. Homosexuality was only legalised in the UK in 1967. AIDS was the Gay Disease. In the early 1980s hardly any popular male stars could maintain public support by announcing their sexual preferences for men.

Queen had already lost much chance of success in the US after the music video of “I Want to Break Free.” Written by bassist John Deacon and with the video story proposed by Taylor, this wasn’t intended as some attempt to be drag queens. It was a parody of long-running British soap, Coronation Street and was loved in the UK but banned in the US by MTV. The American antagonism to homosexuality (or even the hint of it) would ruin many careers.

The band closed ranks around Mercury. More importantly, their relationship with each other changed. Up to that time much of the creative antagonism related to the way in which credit was given for each song. Deacon, long considered one of the greatest bass guitarists, wrote few songs; Freddie most of them. From here on they would all share the credit, and the money.

At the end of 1985 they would release “One Vision,” with all band members sharing the credit for the first time. In 1986 they released A Kind of Magic, one of the greatest rock albums of all time. 1986 would see their last live tour, with over 120,000 people pouring in to Knebworth Park to view Mercury’s final performance.

The band then set to producing albums. The Miracle in 1989, Innuendo in 1991 and, with Freddie hanging on, Made in Heaven. He died on 24 November 1991.

The show must go on

What made Queen so fantastic? Mercury had a tremendous voice and personality to carry an entire stadium on his own. He was so powerful that it is easy to imagine he didn’t need the band, but he did. His solo albums weren’t that successful.

When Mercury died we also lost the musical talents of Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May. Deacon in particular, one of the world’s most creative bass guitarists, no longer even performs. Mercury may have written “We Are the Champions”, but “We Will Rock You” is Brian May’s, “Another One Bites the Dust” is John Deacon’s and “Radio Ga Ga” is Roger Taylor’s. Four people in one band each capable of producing songs that can cause entire stadia to sing and clap together?

Click here to view the embedded video.

After Mercury’s death the remaining members of the band arranged what the Guinness Book of Records regards as the largest rock star benefit concert in history. 1.2 billion people tuned in to watch on 20 April 1992.

Live Aid had shownthat such big concerts could attract a lot of attention and support. Ending poverty is too diffuse a problem for concerts to solve. Poverty is remote. Could awareness and financial support for poverty in Ethiopia really have much impact when the toxic mix of civil war and oppression which cause it is of local origin? There have been numerous anti-poverty concerts and none of them have had any impact short of reviving the fortunes of ailing pop stars.

The Freddie Mercury Tribute would be on a different scale. In 1992 AIDS was still a shameful illness. The disease was spreading rapidly everywhere. AZT, the first anti-retroviral drug to make any impact on HIV, was released only in 1987, but people needed to be tested and accept the illness. The stigma needed to be overcome.

Almost as an afterthought, and certainly forgotten by most people, Queen invited Mango Groove — a South African band — to perform via a live satellite uplink. From a frozen and blustery Johannesburg the band performed. They’re a nice bunch and their music was doing well in South Africa at the time, but they weren’t epic, they weren’t awesome. But Queen introduced the world to AIDS Ground Zero.

The concert raised $20 million for AIDS programs. It put the illness on the world agenda. Condoms would be available. Clean needles for drug users. Everywhere but South Africa, AIDS spread crashed.

Mercury’s death was a tragedy but, without it, Queen may not have lasted much longer and AIDS awareness may not have received the boost it needed. Tens of thousands of lives may have been saved.

More importantly, consider the number of gay stars who came out after 1992. Consider the compassion with which most have been received. Do you think we’d be in a position where gay marriage is even up for discussion without the near universal support Freddie Mercury unleashed?

Sadly, my homeland refused the lesson proving again that pop-star-driven charity can only take you so far. Up until very recently the country entertained a procession of AIDS denialists. Even now anti-retroviral treatment is not universally available and 4 million people are HIV positive; 10 percent of the population.

These are the days of our lives

Will there be another Queen? How much has the world changed since 1991?

Individual bands find it difficult to fill stadiums on their own. Oh, sure, your big bands from the 1970s and 1980s can still do it, but they’re still products of the old studio system which is now falling apart. The most successful recent acts are churned out through popularity contests. Journeyman bands can build a local following and then trade that up to perform at the growing number of music festivals but that isn’t quite the same.

Music has become commoditised. Streaming downloads mean that we listen to types of music and individual songs. We wanted a world in which major corporations didn’t dominate the music business and now… different major corporations dominate the music business. We’ve exchanged EMI for Simon Cowell. Sure, it’s easier for some unknown to set up a YouTube distribution of their work. Much harder to make a living out of success. Even harder to maintain momentum with so many new acts charging in.

The age of Queen was an age of limited distribution in which only big agencies could muscle up the cash to get you on every radio station and ensure you were stocked in every store. The winners in that system could become global phenomenon.

Who here thinks Justin Bieber will remain popular once he escapes puberty?

But even today I believe that someone with that much raw talent, confidence, stage dominance and vocal awesomeness would succeed. That Freddie Mercury and Queen would have been a sensation whereever they started. And, if that is the case, then maybe one day we will see his type again.

Until that day, here’s someone to love…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Perhaps it’s because I am now just awakening to Du Bois’ work that I see the book in such a light. Perhaps that awakening colors my view, giving me wide-eyed wonder to a text that’s over a century old. Perhaps my middle-class, middle-aged whiteness, and my historical place in the Twenty-First Century, makes Du Bois’ work seem exotic and wonderful.

Perhaps.

But even as I’m awakening to Souls now, so too did America then, so too did the black folk themselves, “gifted with a second-sight in this American world” as Du Bois described it—“a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”

Blacks, Du Bois argued, should see for themselves. That seems so self-evident now that to even say it seems ridiculous.

In 1903, though, blacks were still groping their way through the strange landscape of post-Emancipation America. The four decades since the abolition of slavery—which Du Bois likened to the Israelites’ forty years in the desert before they found the land of Canaan—had proven to be a hard journey marked by continued bondage imposed by economics and enforced by prejudice. Yet the journey itself “changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect.”

His own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

Du Bois could have been talking about himself. Souls provided the voice for that awakening—a voice respectful, assertive, and powerful.

Du Bois’ book represented a marked break from the black leadership of his time, as personified by Booker T. Washington. Washington advocated a policy of “conciliation toward the white South,” Du Bois said—a policy that required capitulation and accommodation. Such a policy, Du Bois contended, did not represent forward progress. It did not represent justice.

Souls opened a conversation that would evolve over two decades, finally culminating in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Du Bois, by then, was the leading black intellectual of his day, and his advocacy of black identity sparked one of America’s great creative and intellectual periods.

“It is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building,” wrote historian Nathan Huggins in his seminal 1972 study of the Harlem Renaissance. “[B]lack intellectuals in Harlem had just such a self-concept.”

Huggins’ examination lauded the intellectual and creative output of the period but ultimately judged the Renaissance a failure because it failed to translate into the kind of political traction that might’ve advanced race relations. It was based, he said, on “naïve assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.”

The great innocence of the renaissance is most clearly seen in the irony that, where its proponents had wanted to develop a distinctive Negro voice, they had been of necessity most derivative. It would have required a much more profound rejection of white values than was likely in the 1920s for Negroes to have freed themselves for creating the desired self-generating and self-confident Negro art.

Yet Huggins himself conceded that “the black-white relationship has been symbiotic; blacks have been essential to white identity (and whites to blacks).” He called the interdependence “profound.”

Du Bois had recognized it, too. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” he wrote in Souls. “One ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” It’s no wonder Du Bois’ book tapped into the racial subconscious.

It’s ironic that Huggins suggested that blacks of the Harlem Renaissance needed to embrace a “much more profound rejection of white values,” considering Du Bois suggested the same thing about Washington. While respectful of Washington, he was critical of Washington’s slow path.

Looking back today, though, one is hard-pressed to appreciate how difficult even Washington’s path was. When he dined at the White House with President Roosevelt in October of 1901, Washington stirred up such a furor that neither man dared a repeat dinner. So, from Huggins’ vantage point of the early 70s, at the tail-end of fifteen years of revolutionary Civil Rights convulsions, the Harlem Renaissance may have looked like slow progress, too; Du Bois may have looked conservative in his views.

As I look back on Huggins, Du Bois, and Washington, surrounded as they all are by the contexts of the Civil Rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Tuskegee Institute, even the legacies of Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown—I can see stepping stones, building blocks, interdependence and interconnectedness. “[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” Du Bois wrote. I can see the path of that line tracing backwards.

I hear voices, see words, feel connected. I continue to awaken to my own role in that long dialogue. I understand, just a little better, the “souls of black folk”—and in doing so understand, too, my own.

Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, Switzerland with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron “watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories.” Thomas Pynchon says that by that December Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her famous novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

It was the challenge of writing ghost stories to amuse each other that set Mary upon the idea of a different kind of horror story – one not based in the supernatural, but in science.

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Thus was something entirely new born.

My doctoral dissertation devoted considerable attention to what I called The Frankenstein Complex. I took my cues from Mary Shelley’s iconic novel because of how effectively it signified “society’s persistent fear of scientific hubris. Few questions remain as to the inventive power of the human mind,” I argued, “but many critics suggest that a widening gap between knowledge and morality plagues technological development in the West.” In other words, our technologists have this habit of doing things because they can, sometimes without sufficient attention to whether doing it is actually a good idea.

Progress for the sake of progress. Neal Postman called it technopoly – the technophilic mission has transcended, transplanted and become the society’s moral apparatus. We see the phenomenon in science fiction over and over again. Jurassic Park was Frankenstein with dinosaurs. TRON, War Games, William Gibson’s Cyberspace Trilogy, Max Headroom, Blade Runner, Brazil, RoboCop, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes, Terminator, Real Genius, The Matrix. Dozens, even hundreds more. Time and time again we are presented with what amount to twists on Mary Shelley’s epic scenario: somebody does something because they can do it without regard for the consequences.

As Paul Alkon and others note, Mary Shelley invented science fiction. And today, science fiction (SF) is often about the only tool coherent society has for critiquing technical development (technologists themselves aren’t exactly stomping on the brakes and our religious institutions can’t tear themselves free of millennias-old tribal war-god dogma to participate in a credible debate). While there’s no indication she intended to write a Luddite novel, per se, Thomas Pynchon says “if there were such a genre, [Frankenstein], warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best.” Shelley was well aware of England’s bloody Luddite revolt and the social issues that fueled it, and it’s also likely she was at least sympathetic to the rebels, given that the movement’s allies included Byron.

The significance of this particular moment in literary history cannot be overstated, because in Frankenstein Mary Shelley helped establish one of the most important ideological safe harbors in Western cultural history. At the date of the novel’s publication in 1818, England was a mere six years removed from the violent put-down of the Luddite uprising, and the wounds were still fresh. The government was in no mood to argue the future of technological development, which, then as now, probably seemed like the most profitable course to steer. SF, though, represented a safe outlet for the expression of anti-technological reservations – while the state wouldn’t tolerate the breaking of looms, it wasn’t likely to mobilize troops against a horror story, even if it did detect a subversive thematic bent.

Shelley first determined to build the tale on as firm a scientific foundation as can be managed, basing her novel on what she believed to be the most up-to-date scientific theories. To the extent that her narrative is consistent with, and a logical extension of, existing scientific cognition, it is an example of science fiction in the most rigorous sense of the word. Alkon explains that Shelley didn’t intend that scientific theory (drawn from the lectures and experiments of Erasmus Darwin) should be taken for medical reality, but the bulk of SF since has assumed that scientifically grounded thinking is the appropriate jumping off point for credible fictive speculation.

Shelley’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, reflected her desire to depict not only scientific plausibility, but also scientific rigor. Victor was nothing if not enraptured by the power of science:

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in the highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

The importance of technical plausibility ultimately serves a cultural, not scientific, purpose. Alkon, again, explains that Shelley’s attention to theory isn’t intended as a treatise on the science of resurrection, reanimation, and the creation of life. Instead, it affords a novel perspective on the consideration of the human condition in an increasingly technicized society.

Aside from its entertainment value, then, SF should be understood as providing a space where speculation about technological development can be carried out free of the threat of retribution by the technocratic majority.

A caution, though: it’s perhaps too easy to see the message of Frankenstein as being anti-technological, in much the same way it has become too easy to dismiss Luddites as simply hating progress. Just as the Luddites weren’t anti-technology per se, neither was Shelley – her novel comprises a complex, yet clearly articulated set of cultural concerns relating to scientific responsibility. Victor Frankenstein’s monster does not signify that science is automatically bad – rather, science is corrupted when divorced from society’s moral context. The monster’s abandonment symbolizes moral decontextualization, a step out of Postman’s tool-using paradigm and into the technocratic. Scientific creation is possessed with the predisposition for good until corrupted by society, says Theodore Ziolkowski, but its potential goodness depends on its harmonious integration within the ethical framework of the culture.

The blame for science run amok falls on society generally, but the bulk of the fault, Shelley suggests, lies directly with the scientist himself. Driven by the same dynamic Arnold Pacey describes as the “mainspring of technological misdirection,” – the “impulse to go on inventing, developing and producing regardless of society’s needs” – Victor never reflects during the process of planning and researching his grand experiment as to whether he ought to carry on. The thing should be done if it can be done. When he finally beholds the horror of his creation, his mind recoils. Victor’s blind pursuit of scientific achievement had led him to consider (and prepare for) only two possible outcomes – technical success, which would mark him as the greatest scientist of his time, or technical failure, which would presumably send him back to the drawing board. The possibility that technical success could result in a moral failure never occurred to him, despite Shelley’s matter-of-fact belief, expressed in her introduction to the novel, that “supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

His rejection of the monster is instantaneous, instinctive, and irrevocable. Moral abdication leads Victor to loose his monster upon an uncomprehending world, and is the direct cause of all the terror that ensues.

It would be inconsistent with everything we know about European romanticism to think that Mary Shelley meant her novel as a blanket indictment of the pursuit of knowledge per se. Instead, as Ziolkowski notes, it is a cautionary tale against science divorced from ethical responsibility. Laura Kranzler, in Frankenstein and the Technological Future, points out that SF isn’t just a warning for the reader – authorities would do well to take note, too. Noting the novel’s proximity to the Luddite uprisings, she says Frankenstein “is a direct warning in reference to these riots, and seems particularly proleptic in the modern world.”

Put another way, in an environment where rampant technological development was threatening people’s lives and culture, and where the government had shown itself willing to turn the military loose on protesters, Shelley’s novel might be read as a revolutionary text, one with a warning for the society and a veiled threat to the system.

Victor Frankenstein’s monster stood at the crossroads of the West’s increasingly pressing technological question and its malevolently advanced heirs stand there today. The monster brilliantly reflects the subtleties of the Luddite reaction, condemning not technology itself but technology engendered without moral counsel; he embodies the complexities of Romanticism, at once natural, divine, intellectual, and innately prone to transcendence; and he marks the founding of a literary genre which has made possible a widespread consideration of technical development in the popular mind.

In these ways Shelley’s singular literary accomplishment insisted on asking of science the ethical question that, in its rage for secularization, it all too often did not want to hear. That question, of course, is the same one critics like Pacey, Clifford Stoll, Kirkpatrick Sale and Mark Slouka are still asking today.

by Richard Allen Smith

Within two months of arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was sitting in the back of one of the few Humvees on Kandahar Air Field that wasn’t up-armored. Seven of my comrades and I, all paratroopers from Task Force One Fury, had rehearsed this mission over and over. This was one of the most important assignments we would have the entire deployment. We trained with the stern faces and stiff jaws of men who made their living as professional Soldiers. But as we sat in the dark in that back of that humvee, our mission commencing within minutes, the stern faces broke. The jaws quivered. Tears ran down all eight of our faces.

This mission wasn’t taking us outside the wire. We weren’t going more than a couple hundred yards, but we had precious cargo. Between our legs sat a flag-draped coffin with the remains of Sergeant Alexander Van Aalten, the first paratrooper in our unit lost during that deployment. We wiped our faces clean. We reset our jaws. We rode in the humvee to the C-17 waiting on the flight line and carried Sergeant Van Aalten onto the bird that would take him back to his home and his family.

We had a small unit, and I’m sure I had come into contact with Sergeant Van Aalten at sometime before that night. But I couldn’t remember it. I was probably the guy in the back of that truck who knew him the least. But I wept alongside my brothers. Sometimes, you don’t have to know a person to be profoundly affected by their death. Such was the case for me with Sergeant Van Aalten. And such was the case with Tim Hetherington.

Not long after that night, we began a nightly dominoes game in our hooch. Two of my roommates and I threw bones down on top of a tough box each evening with fury. I wasn’t very good. I had really just learned how to play the game on that deployment. One night I was losing badly, as usual. Through pure luck, as I had little idea what I was doing, I locked down the board within a couple moves. All the points in my buddy’s hands became mine. I went from several hundred points behind to winning the game in a single hand. Finally, my moment of post-bones celebration had come. As the other guys had done so many nights before, I wrapped my waist in the reflective safety belt that we had fashioned into a pro-wrestling style championship belt. I cranked up my crappy iPod stereo speakers and blasted my victory anthem (we each had a different one). I stood on top of the tough box, my poncho liner draped over my shoulders like a cape, and lip-synced to Queen’s We Are the Champions. It was glorious.

This is why Tim Hetherington’s life and death profoundly affected me. Like Sergeant Van Aalten, I never knew Tim Hetherington. I still don’t know much about him, other than that he was an accomplished photographer for Vanity Fair and that he co-directed the film that brutally affected me in a way no other work of art ever has. That movie was Restrepo.

Restrepo captured both the misery and the absurdity of combat better than any war film I’ve ever seen. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece. For me, Restrepo held personal relevance. During the same period that 2nd Platoon, B Company, 2-503rd (the unit followed in Restrepo) was in the Korengal Valley, my battalion was at Jalallabad attached to their higher headquarters. We also sent guys into the Korengal and while I didn’t personally know anyone from the documentary, there were faces I recognized as guys who came back to J-Bad for resupply or other purposes. There were moments in the film I remember happening back then, like Operation Rock Avalanche and the mass-cas incident with 2-503rd’s C Company.

I can’t lie – with my personal attachment to the events portrayed, Restropo may have been the hardest film to watch that I’ve ever seen. There were more than a few moments that I sat in my theater seat biting my bottom lip and holding down the lump in my throat. A friend sent me a text after I got out asking if I planned on seeing it again. I said I don’t know if I can. To this day, I still haven’t.

Often, when I’m asked about what it was like being in Afghanistan by civilians, I tell them it was the most fun I ever had being miserable. That probably sounds ridiculous to anyone who has never been deployed, but those who have know exactly what I mean. Yeah, being deployed sucks. It really sucks. But you also develop loyalty and camaraderie with a group of fellow soldiers who become your only family, and together you involve yourselves in some of the most ridiculous activities imaginable just to maintain sanity. Yeah, my deployment was RPG’s flying over my head, not showering for weeks at a time, and carrying that flag-draped coffin onto the C-17. But it was also making professional wrestling style championship belts out of PT belts for our dominoes game and blasting the winner’s theme song.

Hetherington’s Restrepo depicted all of that. The reality of war. The tragedy, the camaraderie, the absurdity, and the ridiculous things you do to keep yourself sane. I may not have known Tim Hetherington, but his work has had a greater affect on me than most of my personal relationships, let alone any movie, could ever possibly have. That’s why when I learned of his death in Libya I was absolutely floored. I spent the whole day in a fog. It was like reliving the days that we lost guys in Afghanistan all over again.

Restrepo was such a powerful movie because it did not seek to shape opinions about the war in Afghanistan. It didn’t paint soldiers as mythical heroes. It didn’t try to convince you that Afghanistan isn’t worth winning, nor did it attempt to persuade you that it is a worthy fight. It just showed war in all its absurd and horrible reality.

If there is any great lesson to be taken from Tim Hetherington’s death, it is this: war is terrible. I am somewhat of a realist, and I acknowledge that it is sometimes necessary. Just as Tim didn’t seek to change your mind with his film, I’m not making a statement of ideology here. Just stating fact. War is absolutely awful for anyone the least bit touched by it. The soldiers on each side, whether their fight is righteous or not. The civilians, the families of those directly involved, everyone. We would do well to remember this as we mourn Tim, who made it his cause to ensure that people saw the awfulness of war even when they were far removed from it.

In Tim Hetherington, the world has lost a valiant and fearless truth-teller. Even though I never knew him, I’ll never forget him and my thoughts and sympathies are with his family as they mourn his recent loss.

____

Richard Allen Smith serves as Vice Chairman and Outreach Director for VoteVets.org. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 18. After serving a stint with the 6th Cavalry and the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea, Richard was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In 2007 he deployed with his unit to Afghanistan where he served as an NCO for 14 months. He returned home in April 2008. Richard has held numerous staff and leadership positions within advocacy organizations and campaigns, and his writing on Veterans and military issues has been featured or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Washington Independent, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Atlantic, The Daily Caller, Reuters, Fox News, Center for American Progress, Talking Points Memo and in various media outlets across the country.

The late Richard Pryor, often hailed as the greatest comic to ever take the stage, is the American Chaucer. A master storyteller in the grand tradition of West African griots, fired by passion and pain, possessed of keen insight, he was also a brilliant impersonator with amazing range, an intuitive actor who never got his due, a social critic, a writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, and, most importantly, one funny motherfucker…

[On being severely burned] “I got to the hospital—You can really tell when you’re fucked up, when the doctor goes, ‘AAAUGH! Holy shit! Why don’t we just get some cole slaw and serve this up, whattaya say?’” – Richard Pryor, ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’

Bill Cosby, Buddy Hackett and other comedy legends were renowned raconteurs, but Pryor was without parallel. In addition to his own humorous observations, cheeky sex talk and ingratiating self-deprecation, Pryor would often perform as a host of characters in continuous, nuanced dialogue, sensitive to the humanity of the souls he portrayed even while gleefully sending them up. He relished dialects, slang, cadence, street parlance, foreign accents… Pryor adored the music of language, especially in the guise of his alter ego Mudbone, whereas Pryor’s contemporary George Carlin savored the meaning of words. They complemented each other, a duopoly of comedic brilliance that reigned supreme for decades. Pryor in particular spawned legions of copycats and imitators, including a young Eddie Murphy, who in his earliest gigs would perform Pryor’s material verbatim and call it a tribute. But no one could match Pryor’s boundless wit, liberating raunchiness, and gift for connecting with the audience.

“To fully appreciate the power of Richard Pryor as a stand-up comedian, you had to follow him at the Comedy Store. I did once, and I’m lucky to be alive.” – David Letterman

Pryor was brave, too. He regularly poked fun at his own impulsive libido and temperamental persona with an unprecedented frankness, earning him deep adulation among his fellow comics as well as the devotion of women spellbound by his charismatic vulnerability. He made light of his troubles and his contradictions, exposed his pains and fears, made it okay to laugh at how hopelessly human we all are. He rarely wasted a line; no matter what he said on the stage, whether in packed clubs or sold-out arenas, there was typically a larger point to the punchline, whether to lay bare an injustice, bind us with our myriad commonalities, or even find redemption in a reflective moment.

“Richard had that thing where he could make you laugh so hard and then all of a sudden he’d break your heart.” – Robert Townsend

Times have changed since Pryor’s prime. Some say the 1970′s was a wasted decade, full of garishness, scandal and pollution. Yet heroes, icons, agents of real and lasting change, smashers of stereotypes, molders of youthful opinion, abounded: Muhammad Ali. Bruce Lee. Billie Jean King. Shirley Chisholm. Harvey Milk. Daniel Ellsberg. Gloria Steinem. César Chávez. Ralph Nader. John Denver. Carl Sagan. George Carlin. And Richard Pryor… a skinny kid from the backstreets of Peoria who lived out the American dream by parlaying his considerable talents into superstardom, and who played a part in the nation’s social progress that still has yet to be fully understood or appreciated.

Perhaps inevitably, in the ever-changing American big picture, Pryor’s image has begun to fade; history will likely render him obscure, his life story shrouded and much of his humor made anachronistic by the passage of time. But his enormous influence will reverberate among the people, as would that of any great storyteller down through the ages, for as long as America exists.

“I was leaving [Africa], and I was sitting in a hotel, and a voice said to me, said, ‘Look around, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see all colors of people doing everything, you know?’ And the voice said, ‘Do you see any niggers?’ And I said, ‘No.’ It said, ‘You know why? Cause there aren’t any.’ And it hit me like a shot! Man, I started crying and shit, I was sittin’ there, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here three weeks, I haven’t even said it. I haven’t even thought it!’ And it made me say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong, I got to re-group my shit.’ I mean, I said, ‘I ain’t gonna never call another black man ‘nigger.’” – Richard Pryor, ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’

I first came across Said, as many did, through his seminal work Orientalism sometime in the 1980s. First published in 1978, Orientalism laid out Said’s thesis, which continues to prove controversial, that the West continues to portray non-Western cultures—in this case Arabian and other middle-eastern vultures—through the prism of Western imperialism with a Eurocentric frame of reference. Said went further, actually—he argued that the false assumptions underlying American and European views toward the Mideast were used as an ongoing justification for neo-imperialist occupations. As Said phrased it, Middle Easterners were viewed as being either oil suppliers or terrorists. This thesis has been provoking endless arguments over Said’s scholarship since Orientalism first appeared.

But as Said argued convincingly and compellingly through his life, it’s still the case. One of his more remarkable books is Covering Islam, in which he looks at how the middle-east is portrayed in the Western media. It’s a good thing he’s not around to see how many of the popular movements of the past two months have been discussed on CNN and in The New York Times. The former seems to bring every story down to whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood will benefit. The latter seems solely concerned with whether any of this will affect Israel. In both cases, we’re seeing Said’s thesis constantly and disappointingly affirmed.

As described in Out of Place, his autobiography (and one of the most interesting autobiographies I’ve ever read), Said is a product of multiple cultures. Coming from a family of Palestinian Christian heritage who ended up in New York City teaching comparative literature at Columbia, Said is well-equipped to deal with the tensions of carrying multiple cultures and their contradictions. Said describes his early childhood in Palestine, and then we’re off to Egypt, where his family, successful businessmen, moved among other families displaced by the formation of Israel. Said’s tales of growing up in the two cultures of Jerusalem and Cairo is a deeply moving one, as any tale of disrupted childhood invariably is. But it also explains how and why he came to literature, a lifelong passion and career, and political activism, and music.

Said was active in the cause for Palestinian statehood for decades, and took a lot of grief for it in America, where he would receive death threats periodically, and Israel, of course. A firm believer in the two- state solution, he was equally appalled at Israeli intransigence and Arafat’s grandstanding. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for a number of years before breaking with Arafat, but maintained a lifelong commitment to the Palestinian cause.

For a tribute to Said, see here; for an alternative view, and a particularly negative view of Said’s scholarship, see here; for a response, see here; for a more balanced view of Said’s scholarship, see here; and for a larger set of reactions to Said’s influence across a number of domains, see here. I’m not a trained historian, especially of a region of the world where the main languages are ones I don’t understand, but it does seem that there are some valid criticisms to be made of some of Said’s scholarship—but as Terry Eagleton points out in his commentary, Said got the general overall story correct. It’s difficult to disentangle the criticism of Said from the larger political context in which the Palestinian statehood issue regularly takes place, especially in the US. For example, a documentary narrated by Said about Palestine for the BBC called In Search of Palestine was broadcast in the UK in 1998. The BBC has been unable to get it onto US television. This is not unexpected, of course, and there’s little reason to expect any change in the near future, sadly.

Said was also a prodigious musician, as an amateur pianist, and also as a critic. He was the music critic for The Nation for a number of years, and his reviews for that period are collected in Music at the Limits, which reveals the breadth of his interests. A bit too much opera for my taste, but his observations on pianists are astonishing, especially his observations on the deteriorating genius of Glenn Gould. How could someone with such a rare musical intelligence be so accomplished at everything else as well?

But for all these intellectual influence, perhaps his finest achievement was the result of this friendship with Daniel Barenboim, one of the world’s greatest pianists and most distinguished conductors. The two had become friendly during the 1990s, almost by accident. Both had backgrounds as peace activists in the Middle East. Barenboim has had his own share of controversies in Israel, of which he is a citizen, a fact that did not prevent him from becoming embroiled in a huge political controversy when he attempted to perform Wagner. In 1999 Said and Barenboim acted on an inspired idea—that music really could be used a tool for peace. Together they founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, named after writings by Goethe, who himself had a fascination with middle eastern cultures. The idea was elegantly simple—create a youth orchestra of musicians from Israel and all its neighbors. And they did, and its impact has been profound. The orchestra, originally founded in Weimar (Goethe’s home) but now based in Seville, has been enthralling and enchanting audiences for years.

We are fortunate enough to be at one of the first London performances back in 2004, a concert that was actually a memorial concert to Said himself conducted by Barenboim. It was one of those special lump-in-the-throat moments. We were lucky to get tickets, in fact, and it was classical music groupie’s heaven. I can’t tell you whom we were sitting next to, but there were dozens of conductors and singers and whatnot in the audience—it was pretty edifying to be sitting among all that talent. But what was on the stage was extraordinary, both visually and musically. Visually, because it was an amazing cross-section of middle eastern nations, many in somewhat traditional garb and headgear, many in concert performance gowns and dinner jackets, all playing Western music. And musically, it was a remarkable performance. I still have the program. Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Bareboim conducting from the piano, has never sounded so spirited, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, played by Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian musicians, none over the age of 26, was sublime.

If Said left no other legacy than this, it alone should ensure our gratitude. As Daniel Barenboim commented on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, its purpose was not so much to promote peace as to fight ignorance. Which seems to be a good summing up of Edward Said’s life’s work.

The twelfth and last panel in our tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by artist and illustrator Bill Alger. (Special thanks to Dean Haspiel.) Official Site – Facebook – deviantART

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The eleventh and penultimate panel in this ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by cartoonist, illustrator and storyboardist James Smith. Official Site – Facebook – Twitter

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The tenth panel in this ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by artist and writer Zina Saunders. Official Site – Blog – Overlooked New York – Facebook – Twitter

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The ninth panel in this ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by longtime Westword cartoonist Kenny Be. Worst-Case Scenario – Facebook – Twitter

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The eighth panel in this ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by artist, writer and S&R’s cartoonist-in-residence, A. N. Cargo. Twitter

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The seventh panel in this ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was the second piece contributed by artist, writer and modern drunkard Karl Christian Krumpholz (here’s his first). Website – Twitter – Facebook – MySpace – Flickr

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The sixth panel in our ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by cartoonist, comic book artist and writer Benjamin Frisch. Website — Wonkette — Twitter

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The fifth panel in our ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe. InToon — Sardonika — Denver Post — Twitter — Falling Rock

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Harvey Pekar had a lifelong affinity for jazz, which is, as has often been said, the art of improvisation. Since the original artist for this panel decided without telling us that it wasn’t worth the time, we had to turn to a last-minute replacement (not a cliché—this piece was begun and completed today) to improvise a little multiple media jazz himself. The fourth panel in our ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by similarly jazz-obsessed Scholars and Rogues co-founder Mike Sheehan.

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The third panel in our ongoing tribute to Harvey Pekar was contributed by cartoonist, illustrator and author Aaron Williams. Website – Yahoo! Group

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