Wages of Rebellion (37 page)

Black Elk expressed the power and importance of the reality of human existence that lies beyond articulation. “Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body,” he said, “but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.”
⁴¹

Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance, and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain the imagination. “For the art—the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom,” Ralph Ellison wrote.
⁴²
It was sublime madness that permitted African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Fannie Lou Hamer to resist during slavery and Jim Crow. It was sublime madness that sustained the defiance of Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized, their people were slaughtered, and their cultures and means of existence were decimated. The oppressed—for they know their fate—would be the first to admit that, on a rational level, it is absurd to think that it is only through the imagination that they survive—but they also know that it is true. It was sublime madness that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to hold on to the sacred. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust. They condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the guilty verdict to lead the evening prayers.

African Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated. The suffering of the oppressed was tangible, and death was a constant companion. And it was only their imagination, as William Faulkner notes at the end of
The Sound and the Fury
, that permitted them—unlike the novel’s white Compson family, which self-destructed—to “endure.”
⁴³

The theologian James H. Cone, who stresses the importance of Niebuhr’s “sublime madness” for all those who resist oppression, captures this in his book
The Cross and the Lynching Tree
. Cone says that for oppressed blacks, the cross is a “paradoxical religious symbol because it
inverts
the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.” Cone continues:

Primo Levi, in his memoir
Survival in Auschwitz
, writes of teaching Italian to another inmate, Jean Samuel, in exchange for lessons in French. Levi recited to Samuel, from memory, fragments of Canto XXVI of Dante’s “The Inferno.” It is the story of Ulysses’ doomed, final voyage. Levi writes that as he recited the lines it was “as if I also was
hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am.”
⁴⁵

“He has received the message,” Levi writes of his friend and what they shared in Dante, “he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular.” Levi goes on: “It is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand … before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again.”
⁴⁶

It was sublime madness that let bluesman Ishman Bracey in Hinds County, Mississippi, sing: “I’ve been down so long, Lawd, down don’t worry me.” And yet, in the mists of this despair also lies the absurdity and certainty of justice:

King Lear, who after suffering and affliction is finally able to see, warns us that unbridled human passion and unchecked hubris spell the suicide of the species. “It will come,” Albany says in
King Lear
. “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.”
⁴⁸

The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Under-shaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play
Major Barbara
, says that poverty is “the worst of crimes” and “all the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts.
⁴⁹
It was the poems of Federico García Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the
fascists in Spain. Covering the war in El Salvador, I saw that the rebel units often traveled with musicians and theater troupes.

Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. Culture can express what lies deep within us and give words to our reality. Making us feel as well as see, culture allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. Even as it reveals what is happening around us, it honors mystery. It saves us from ourselves. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” Baldwin writes, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
⁵⁰

“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” writes Baldwin. “Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”
⁵¹

Rebellion requires an emotional intelligence. It requires empathy and love. It requires self-sacrifice. It requires the honoring of the sacred. It requires an understanding that, as with the heroes in classical Greece, one cannot finally overcome fate or
fortuna
, but that we must resist regardless.

“Ours is a time that would have sent the Greeks to their oracles,” Goddard writes. “We fail at our own peril to consult our own.”
⁵²

“The people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than ever,” Black Elk says in
Black Elk Speaks
, remembering the great Oglala Lakota warrior in the final days of the wars of Western expansion.

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
⁵⁴
And this is a fight that in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires that we follow those possessed by sublime madness, that we become stone catchers and find in acts of rebellion the sparks of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside the possibility of success. We must grasp the harshness of reality at the same time as we refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. People of all creeds and people of no creeds must make an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good.
⁵⁵
The fight for life goes somewhere—the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.

Eunice is my most important critic and editor. She challenges and amplifies ideas, clarifies and corrects passages, restructures whole sections, and fixes sentences that drift into obscurity. All ideas are filtered, often first in conversation, through her. This book, like so many of my books, is dependent on her intellectual and artistic brilliance and her considerable skill as a critic, editor, and writer. That theater rather than writing is her profession makes her literary talent all the more impressive and intimidating. I dedicate this book to her not only because I adore her, not only because our love is the most wondrous thing in my life, but because, as with so many books before this one, it is in many ways her book. She has enriched and deepened this work, as she has my life and the lives of our children.

There is material in the book that made up some of the columns I wrote for the online magazine Truthdig, along with articles I wrote for
The Nation, Smithsonian
, and
The Walrus
magazines. The Truthdig columns were edited by Thomas Caswell. I worked at the
New York Times
with some of the finest copyeditors in the newspaper industry, but few of them come close to Tom. Copyediting is an art, one I fear is dying, and I am deeply grateful that each week Tom applies his decades of expertise and experience at the
Los Angeles Times
to my columns. There are more times than I can count that he has saved me from myself.

This book could not have been written without the generous support of the Lannan Foundation, the Nation Institute, and the NoVo Foundation, which provided a grant to Truthdig to fund my weekly columns.

Carl Bromley at Nation Books is one of the finest editors in publishing. He loves books. He astutely edited and shaped this book, as he did my three previous books. He blesses the writers who work with him with his literacy, passion, integrity, and generosity. Daniel LoPreto and
Benjamin Pokross, along with Alessandra Bastagli, who replaced Carl Bromley as the editor at Nation Books as I neared completion, invested considerable time on the manuscript. They provided astute and important critiques, editing, and suggestions that greatly improved the book. I appreciate their hard work. Patrick and Andy Lannan, along with Jo Chapman, at the Lannan Foundation have for years provided crucial support. It would be very difficult to do my work without them. Jeannette Quinton and Boris Rorer were instrumental in fact-checking and research. I am very grateful for their meticulous work and friendship. Todd Clayton also worked with his usual rigor and exacting accuracy on the book. He has been a joy to have as part of our family for the last two years as he finished his degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

I am privileged to work with Robert Scheer, the editor of Truthdig, whose dazzling skill as a writer and editor is matched by his wisdom, boundless generosity, and profound integrity. He is what we all want to become. Zuade Kaufmann, who matches Bob in her commitment to great journalism and commentary and who publishes Truthdig, has been a pillar to all of us who write for the site. I am fortunate to have them and the Truthdig site as my home. I would like to thank Ralph Nader, whom I speak with frequently, as well as Cornel West and James Cone, who, along with Noam Chomsky, are the intellectuals I admire most. Thanks also to my good friend Joe Sacco, who produces, year after year, brilliant, astonishing, and original work that never wavers from his clarion vision of what it means to be a truth teller, an artist, and a rebel.

Other friends and colleagues who have supported me in my work include Kevin Zeese; Dr. Margaret Flowers; Steve Kinzer; Peter Scheer, who holds together Truthdig; Narda Zacchino, whose talents as a writer and editor rival those of her husband Bob Scheer; Kasia Anderson; Donald Kaufman; Dwayne Booth, who ranks with Sacco as a cartoonist; Max Blumenthal; the Reverend Terry Burke; Paul Jay; Bonnie Kerness; Ojore Lutalo; Alexa O’Brien, my friend and coplaintiff who, along with the lawyers Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran, led our suit against Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act in federal court;
Ann and Walter Pincus; Jennifer and Peter Buffett; John Timpane; Marty Brest; Roy Singham; Peter Hershberg; Richard Wolff; Maria-Christina Keller; Lauren B. Davis; June Ballinger; Michael Goldstein; Gerald Stern; Anne Marie Macari; Tom Artin; the Reverend Michael Granzen; the Reverend Karen Hernandez; Joe and Heidi Hough; Mark Kurlansky; my former Shakespeare professor Margaret Maurer; my mentor and former religion professor the Reverend Coleman Brown, who has critiqued and edited many of my books and whom we lost as this book was being finished; Irene Brown; Sam Hynes, who proves there are scholars who are also great writers; Sonali Kolhatkar; Francine Prose; Russell Banks; Celia Chazelle; Toby Sanders; Esther Kaplan; and John Ralston Saul. Dorothea von Molke and Cliff Simms, who run one of the finest bookstores in the country and donated over 700 books to the prison library in New Jersey where I teach, are valued neighbors. I would finally like to thank the students in my classes at East Jersey State Prison. They inspire me with their fierce commitment to the life of the mind, their brilliance, and their deep integrity. I look forward every week to our classes. The crime of mass incarceration means their families, as well as the wider society, are deprived of their talents, their wisdom, and their contributions. This is an injustice we must fight.