Reparations: Don't Go There

[Recently the old topic of possible reparations for slavery has been bobbing up in the news again, in a Mother Jones Article that defends Bernie Sanders against criticisms levelled by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most prominent current advocate of reparations. Coates wrote a long, passionate essay on the topic in 2014 that has become one of the most famous articles ever to appear in The Atlantic. As it happens, I responded to the Coates article, all but invisibly, in The Vocabula Review. So I will go ahead and paste that piece here, my lazy-man's post for the beginning of the month. I do so with a little trepidation, both because it's pretty long-winded and because I know some good friends will find my take pretty retrograde. "Opposition is true friendship."]

Reparations: Don’t Go There

 

Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you. — Satchel Paige  

History is more or less bunk. — Henry Ford 

          1

 June's Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Case For Reparations," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, impressively reopens a question that is as old as the country itself: whether African Americans should be compensated for centuries of racial injustice. Early on, the essay set records for hits at the Atlantic website, and print and online responses have been proliferating ever since. Some of these credit the piece with transformative, landmark significance.

Yet it is a little hard to say just what Coates has added to the topic. The article is not at all what it sounds like — a systematic proposal and rationale for a reparations program — but a long meditation on black history, rambling, passionate, anecdotal, often moving, but rather diffident and at worst simply unclear as to what it really intends. At one point the author tosses out a figure of $34 billion annually, in 1973 dollars, "for a decade or two," as a possible budget for a reparations program, but that kind of detail is mostly absent. What Coates really cares about, he says, is not such nitty-gritty, but the "conversation" he wants America to have about slavery and its sequelae; that, and the mere principle of having America try to undo the wrong done over the centuries. (Adding some substance, perhaps, to the official apologies made by the House and Senate, if anyone noticed, in 2008-2009.)

The essay makes a convincing case that slavery contributed far more  powerfully to the early growth of the country than whites (at least) generally believe:

Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America — and much of the Atlantic world — was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. . . .

 By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. . . .

 . . . . white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. . . .

Yet such ideas are anything but new with Coates; on the left, these days, they are more or less doctrine. What seems newer, to me at least, is the way the article presses the argument on through the twentieth century, pointing to the Jim Crow foundations of Roosevelt’s New Deal (that liberal touchstone), giving a harrowing account of racist banking and housing practices in late-century Chicago. Tough stuff, this, for the white conscience. Apparently the reparations meter did not shut off in 1863 or 1868 or 1964, but has been running steadily right up into our era of renewed voter suppression, widespread de facto segregation, and mass black incarceration.

Coates I think is dead right that this story needs to be told, and told again: it is the necessary history we too often suppress. But does the rubric of reparations add anything to the tale itself? As if sensing that it does not, Coates lets the concept drift. By the end of the article, "reparations" stops meaning anything specific and becomes a grand metaphysical something or other that promises a new day for America:

What I'm talking about is more than recompense of past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. (70)

 All this sounds great; who could argue against "spiritual renewal"? But by all the odds, by any logic I can see, talk of reparations (let alone the reality of any program) promises no such thing, but only an endless squabble, ever more petty and divisive, over who owes what to whom.

2

 The problem is one of slippery slopes, of elephants in the room, and finally of basic premises. Once we set about compensating people for injuries not precisely their own, but inflicted vaguely on their ancestors or "race," where do we stop? Shouldn't Native Americans, in their hundreds of tribes, be first in line ahead of African Americans, as they were not merely kidnapped, exploited, robbed of their lands, and horribly brutalized, but nearly exterminated? What about the Irish, the Germans, the Swedes, the Poles, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Jews, and all the other minorities that have been unfairly treated at some point? What about women, who have been barred from the workplace, kept from voting, abused by cruel spouses whom the law failed to punish? What about Catholics, Mormons, Quakers, Christian Scientists, Wiccans? Any of these could make a case for having been persecuted at some point, their sufferings abetted by an always imperfect government and court system. What about gays and the handicapped? (It is hard to imagine America, as Coates might say, without its John Wayne ethic, implicitly patriarchal and homophobic and “ableist,” firmly in the saddle till quite recently.)

What about indentured servants who came over with the early colonists and were effectively slaves for many years? What about the poor in every age, always bullied and cheated by the rich? How do we appease the ghosts of New England children worked to death in the mills, of West Virginia coal miners coughing their way to early graves? What about the country of Mexico, unfairly attacked in 1846–1848, then savagely despoiled of territories including New Mexico, where much later I grew up, very glad to be a U.S. citizen, never suspecting that I owed it all to some very bad behavior by the Polk administration? What about global warming, which the Third World with some justice blames on the First, in a rising chorus of cries for aid?

The problem is not that no one deserves reparations, but that nearly everyone seems to.

Such difficulties grow still more acute when we try to leave the level of grand abstraction, where we think of groups and races as prime actors in the shadow-drama of history, and get down to cases. Just who will pay what to whom? Here is Coates, skillfully finessing such questions:

 

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice of reparations are the true sticking point . . .

 

Practicalities? The cited questions are nothing of the sort, but the crux of what has been proposed, the what not the how. There is a reason Coates has to feint and dodge. As Kevin Williamson remarks in a tough-minded (and to me, nearly sufficient) response to Coates in The National Review, “treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible.” There is simply no way to deduce the justice due to an individual from reflections (however lyrical and gripping) on the history of his so-called race, or of any other category to which you have decided to assign him. Guilt and merit, debt and moral desert, are irreducibly personal, the product of one's very own choices and deeds and experiences.

The idea of repaying person X for injuries done to person Y is, to most people, moral cockamamie. Yet that is what any reparations scheme, at this late date, would entail — the perplexing reality that emerges when one tries to implement the seemingly reasonable ideas of “repaying Black America” or “compensating African Americans for their sufferings.” In a reparations chat room I visited at one point, one poster snapped, “The debt owed by my unborn child is exactly zero.” What sticks in the craw, for some people anyway, is the latent implication that debt implies guilt, and that guilt now descends inexorably from the group to the individual, never mind her own acts: a new liberal-left doctrine of original sin.

 The whole discussion tends to start ugly and get uglier. A question that always comes up is what to do with instances like Colin Powell and Barack Obama, who self-identify as African American but whose forebears made it to this country only within the last generation. Should their shares be pro-rated, compared to that of people who can somehow show descent through generations of American slaves? Or do such latecomers somehow inherit all the sufferings of "the race" as a whole, and the same claim to restitution? With the president specifically, there is of course the question of how much his white "half" owes his black, and whether the debt simply cancels itself out.

One extant proposal tries to solve the conundrum of eligibility with a two-part protocol:

First, individuals would have to establish that they are indeed descendants of persons formerly enslaved in the United States. Second, individuals would have to establish that at least 10 years prior to the adoption of a reparations program they self-identified as ‘black,’ ‘African American,’ ‘Negro,’ or ‘colored.

This sounds reasonable and fair — for about a second. One problem with the first criterion is that it makes no distinction between those who can claim a single slave in their ancestry and those who can claim thousands. In fact in America most people are “born into the cause,” like the Jarndyce heirs in Bleak House, in at least some measure, simply because the math of heredity works that way. At a conservative estimate, fourteen generations now separate us from 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to America. If a young American alive today could make an exhaustive ancestry search back that far, she would in theory discover 16,382 ancestors (two to the fourteenth power) scattered through the centuries, with half that number alive all at once in 1619. The totals would need to be reduced to account for inbreeding (e.g., the marriage of cousins) along the way. Even so, the numbers would be huge, and the odds that none of one’s ancestors were slaves are vanishingly small, for almost anyone.

So if we are really going to insist that suffering and injury create an entitlement that mysteriously passes on through the loins, generation after generation, the question becomes one of percentages: how much of the ancestral grievance have you inherited? How black are you, really? Do we conduct melanin assays, or what? If you are going to launch a vast benefits program based on race, that seems to be where you are headed. 

As if sensing the problem, criterion number two tries a different approach: let reparations eligibility be determined by the act of “self-identification” in the present, sustained for at least ten years. In some ways, indeed, this seems a more promising tack (more on this in a moment). In others, it boggles the mind. How can the mere act of self-identifying, or anything else I do or fail to do now, make me a victim (or not) of crimes committed and suffered long ago? If it is really present status that determines eligibility and desert, why bring up history at all?

An associated minor question is whether the reparations benefit should be means tested. I would not like to be the politician who had to explain to a white kindergarten teacher why her taxes were being raised to provide a race-based payout to, let's say, Herman Cain or Oprah Winfrey. Well, no problem; we can simply curtail benefits above a certain income level. But the very existence of such African Americans — rich, famous, influential — undercuts our premise of universal victimhood and hints at flaws in our accounting methods. A true tally of anything must subtract payments made from the balance still owing, but in this case we hear only of debits, and of a balance that always grows. The death of something like 700,000 whites in the Civil War, largely a struggle to end slavery, seems to make no dent in the huge principal, nor do any of the advantages that America has at least sometimes conferred on blacks as well as whites. For that matter, there is the nasty question of whether some debits should be made to the debits. Should the burning of Los Angeles in race riots be scored against the total to be allocated to African Americans? Has anger over the OJ verdict been fully amortized? Should the black incarceration rate count as evidence of continuing racial injustice (as I believe), or will someone take it at face value and dock the black team for a disproportionate rate of black-on-white crime?

But reparations writers all seem to agree that the final tally, if it ever comes in, will be unimaginably huge. Coates’s guess of $340-$680 billion is a lowball figure. Something in the one to three trillion dollar range seems to be closer to the going price. One ebullient article insists that, with compound interest, “it is possible to derive figures into the quadrillions,” but offers to settle the tab at a fire sale price of $1.38 trillion, remarking that such a payout will “probably not . . . destroy the economy.” Ka-ching. 

 

          3

 

Such problems are so obvious that liberals (in whose ranks I count myself) often seem to be bending over backwards not to see them. The idea of reparations is received with vague courtesy, not because it makes sense but because you are anxious not to offend, or wish to convey support for the basic idea of racial equality. This leaves the field open to the far right, who have no such compunctions. A little gem in the Neanderthal mode, as deft as it is unfair, is a blog post from 2002 by Fred Reed, aimed at Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor of African American studies (who would much later have a famous beer with President Obama). With apologies, a snippet that seems instructive:

 

On the Web I find that Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks ....

Tell you what. I believe in justice. I'll give you a million dollars for every slave I own, and another million for every year you were a slave. Fair enough? But tell me, how many slaves do you suppose I have? In round numbers, I mean. Say to the nearest dozen. And how long were you a slave?

Oh.

In other words, I owe you reparations for something that I didn't do and didn't happen to you. That makes sense. Like lug nuts on a birthday cake.

The tone is toxic, but the shot finds its particular elephant rather well: with the real victims and perpetrators long gone, we are trying to compensate and punish stand-ins, and the idea just does not add up.

But in assailing Gates, of all people, Reed badly mistakes his target. In 2010, Gates published a New York Times article, "Ending the Slavery Blame Game," that deals mostly with difficulties in the concept of reparations. That the essay took courage to write is shown by the acrimonious counter-fire it soon attracted, for example in a long online critique by Molefi Asante.

Gates quietly points out that for centuries slavery was business as usual in Africa, and that a huge majority of slaves taken to America — perhaps 90 percent — were originally captured by other Africans — not by viciously greedy whites, as in the TV series Roots and, it seems, the imaginings of most pro-reparations writers. It is comforting in various ways, to blacks and whites, to imagine those eighteenth-century slavers as heartless, barely human predators. The more difficult part of the truth may be that they were middlemen doing what people always do: participating in the world as they found it, with a keen eye for their own advantage: a cruel bunch, but not exactly monsters. Apparently some of those who arrived in America in chains had themselves been slavers, till their plans miscarried and their intended victims turned the tables on them. Some slaveholders in the New World were themselves black. Life, as they say, was cruel. In the Middle Passage and on the plantations, commercialization increased the horrors of the vile old system to extremes too brutal even for the minimalist norms of the time; but it was by that very token that the reaction came on at last, and it was not so long (1807, 1865) before the system collapsed. A point often made by conservatives is that the impetus for this, the unheard-of idea of abolishing slavery in a world that had always known it, was mainly white, Christian, and European: the kind of pigeonholing that the topic always encourages.   

Gates stops short of dismissing the idea of reparations, finding it still worth discussion, leading perhaps to some kind of "symbolic" restitution. Reed, though, in his earlier assault, speaks as if Gates were the most uncompromising pro-reparations firebrand, turning up the ridicule full blast. This, too, seems instructive. The topic is simply polarizing. Try to find a middle ground, as Gates does, and you get withering fire from both sides.

At the heart of every pro-reparations statement I have seen (here, for instance) is a naïve moral absolutism that reveals itself in rhetoric of crime, sin, guilt, redemption, and so on. Writers simply take it as given that slavery was a hideous and unparalleled crime, that this is obvious, that there is no need to explain. They seem to assume that life has a baseline of niceness and decency and good fortune from which any departure can be scored as an aberration; and it is this assumption, powerful though unstated, that sets the reparations tally going.

Moral relativism is problematic too — it can justify anything — and no doubt we are right to look back with anger and disgust at the slaver, the overseer, and the Jim Crow landlord. But if you really mean to quantify the damage and evil they did — assigning a number, compounding interest — it is not realistic simply to abstract their misdeeds from history and proceed as if they had happened yesterday. You need to enter more fully into the moral and material contexts of the malefactors’ times, asking unpleasant questions like, Realistically, what would the victims’ fate have been otherwise and What were the standards of the day, trying to exchange your fantasy baseline for a real one, one that allows for all the defects of human nature and merely human systems of justice. You will not walk this road for very long before you rediscover that horrific platitude of the slaveholder and the segregationist, Well, the Negro is better off here in America than he ever would have been in Africa. That remark is so offensive, notice, not because the historical logic is really faulty, but precisely because it refuses to let go of history, in a way that delivers a tremendous insult in the here and now. Rather than starting fresh, it tries to define the African American as a permanent debtor, inferior forever. But isn’t that what the reparations argument now tries to do to whites?

Such things tend to go unsaid not because they are not thought and felt, but because the social and political terrain is so tricky. Get a comma wrong, and you seem to be advocating slavery, murder, rape, the whole package.

In this kind of rhetorical predicament, feeling that the reparations issue defines him as guilty and indebted no matter his personal acts or intentions, what the white liberal or conservative (it no longer matters) finally wants to say is something like this: "Look, I'm sorry for what some of my ancestors did to some of your ancestors (and vice versa, because no doubt our family trees cross at some point). But that was them, not you and me. Also, life is rough, people are beasts, and what whites did to blacks was pretty much what blacks would have done to whites if they could have, probably. Maybe it is even what one of us would do to the other right now if society collapsed and things got desperate. But has it all turned out so badly? If the slavers — black slavers — had never come, would you have a better life today in Mali or Rwanda or Zimbabwe? From here on out, I’ll try hard to be fair if you will. But I flatly deny personal responsibility for anything I have not personally done. Best I can do."

 Ugly enough for you?

           4

 But there is no need to take the debate to such wounding extremes. One of many things I learned from Coates's article is that the NAACP formally supports reparations. So I looked up the association's 2010 resolution on the issue, and found this to be pretty much the nub:

 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the NAACP call upon the United States Government and several foreign countries which participated in or benefited from the African slave trade ... to make such investments to improve the conditions of 2010 African-Americans through better schools, health clinics, job training, environmental cleanup ... to allow the people of color damaged by slavery's policies to develop the health and economic standards of the entire country ....

What instantly strikes me is that there are no remedies here — none! — that I do not support on other grounds entirely: simple fairness, simple social justice going forward. More help for a badly disadvantaged and still-persecuted minority? More funds for schools, clinics, job training, and environmental cleanup? Of course! Why didn't you just say so? My tax check is in the mail. Just don't call it reparations. The NAACP seems to have found the worst, least convincing argument possible to support its goals: a strange thing.

It is too simple to say that justice is (in Saussure's terms) synchronic rather than diachronic, a creature of the now, a matter of timeless structures rather than unfolding processes. Justice of the judicial kind, at least, always begins with a backwards foray, very tightly focused, to unearth specific injuries that can then be redressed in the present, providing a hopeful standard for the future. The question, though, is how far back justice can reach, and how wide it can spread its nets, before the enterprise becomes speculative and arbitrary, more likely to do harm than good. That is why statutes of limitation exist.

 Coates cites one instance that suggests the limits of what the law, faced with overwhelming historical and existential wrongs, can reasonably hope to accomplish. In 1783, Belinda Royall, a freedwoman who had spent 50 years as the slave of one Isaac Royal, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature, which in that day incorporated functions that would be taken over by the torts court in our own, for support in her old age. Coates comments on the outcome:

Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.

 

But this is not really a case of reparations at all. The award was no grandiose attempt to repay black people generally for a century and a half of unpaid labor, much of it done by dead ancestors, but a specific, modest award of damages, for clearly enumerated injuries, made to a direct victim soon after the event, and paid by the one who had wronged her and benefited by it. Even here, one suspects that the outcome could have been different if Isaac Royall had been alive to contest the suit. He had, after all, broken no laws.

The criminal or torts court does what it can do, but it is a poor model for schemes of overall social justice; it scales up very badly when one tries to incorporate multitudes of people and vast stretches of time. If it is social justice you are shopping for, the synchronic mode really is better. You need to face the future with the sort of resolute cheerfulness, almost disingenuous, almost amnesiac, that was shown for instance in Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Lay out the entire scheme of social relations in a big chart and decide what looks right or wrong right now, then make the changes that seem least unfair. You will fail of course, but tomorrow you try again, and then again, and you may make progress. When you have constructed a present that looks even somewhat fair, that will be time enough to worry about the past, which is far less fixable.  

Reparations is not a conversation endlessly deferred and postponed, but one we have been having for centuries. Our problem now is how to desist, not how to recommence.

 

The Use of Literature

Recently I bumped into an old friend, a colleague from the college English department in which I taught for many years. She had news. The department, it seems, has just finished revising its two-semester freshman sequence, a pair of courses that has always been the department’s bread and butter, as it is required of all students. The thrust of the new revision was to remove all the literature from the second semester, so that students and teachers could concentrate on just writing.

So I’m like, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. In my own day, that sequence was revised every few years, I seem to remember; and the aim of the revisions was always to establish English 1002 as more clearly and unquestionably a course about teaching students to write — not about literary appreciation, which fell under increasing suspicion of being a mere frill. The course went from Introduction to Literature at one point, to a brief stint as (ugh!) Writing About Literature, to Literature and Composition. This latest redaction renders it as “ENG 1002: Composition II: Argument & Critical Inquiry,” combining a muscular emphasis on debate and polemic with an odd ambition to bring back the ampersand. Here, as in my day, the feeling seems to be that literature — now not so much as mentioned —  is more a hobby of the professor’s than anything that really benefits the student. It needs to be fended off, so that students can get what they really need from their balky teachers, solid writing instruction, not some elitist mumbo-jumbo about iambic pentameter or Virginia Woolf or whatever. When the hungry sheep look up, they must be fed.

 

But why has the exorcism had to be performed so often? It seems that Literature keeps creeping back in, like kudzu.

Historians of the discipline, like Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, tell us that the dichotomy of reading versus writing, literature versus composition, appreciation versus literacy, has always been there. English teachers — and before them Classicists, and before even them priests and monks and ministers — have always liked best to think of themselves as expert guides to a body of more or less sacred writings: adepts and exegetes, keepers of the flame; priests, really, but too timid or shrewd to say so. We have always been happy to let our courses be workshops on needed skills, but also wanted them to be quests for wisdom, hot in pursuit of that mysterious truth that lives (we feel sure) in the great texts.

The fallback position, though, has always been writing rather than reading, Rhetoric rather than Literature. When the dean or the parish or the parents demanded to know where the money was going , the teacher could always justify his modest salary by stressing his role as a writing instructor. People in authority, it seems, have always been eager to have teachers take on the scut-work of grading student papers, asking rather few questions about what the process really entails. Partly due to such inattention, teachers have won permission to bring some literature into the course or minor or major, eagerly explaining that it will make the students, not just better writers, but better people, partaking as it does of that mysterious higher wisdom the teacher has glimpsed here and there in her own reading. By that point in the conversation, though, the dean has already quit listening, turning to one side and muttering,  “Yes. Well. Just make sure they can write a decent theme. With punctuation, please.”

In the old days it was much easier to make the higher-wisdom argument for literature. Authorities from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson adhered to much the same formula, according to which literature, dulce et utile, delivered nuggets of moral instruction nicely sugar-coated with “pleasure.”  No mystery about what the higher wisdom was: just standard everyday Virtue, tarted up a bit by the sales department. There will always be plenty of people who believe exactly this, and their ranks will always include most college deans and high school principals. But for the last two centuries or so, teachers have known better;  they have understood the grave deficiency of didactic moralism — message-hunting — as an approach to literature or any art. You don’t need Hamlet, after all, to teach you that procrastination is bad; you don’t need Lear to teach you to file a will before you get dotty. To Kill a Mockingbird may teach you not to be a racist, but the better bet, if you already are a racist, is that it will only teach you to hide the fact. From about the Romantic era on, it has been precisely the tendency of art to defy “bourgeois morality” and herd thinking that fans and critics have most celebrated. The job of the poem is to transcend and confound ordinary understanding, not to teach trite Sunday school lessons.  

But all this leaves would-be Lit teachers in an untenable position. We have to go on insisting that the higher wisdom is there, by cracky, but that it is ineffable and mysterious, that it decisively resists paraphrase into anything obviously true or useful. This argument goes over badly at PTA meetings.

So what about the more purely practical argument, that literature makes students better writers on the basic, nuts-and-bolts level? Isn’t the point of Hamlet, finally, that it enhances students’ grasp of English and their ultimate fluency? Gets into their bloodstream and nourishes their own rhetorical and linguistic powers? There is some truth here. But Composition specialists — those annoying puritans, the dean’s and parents’ fifth column inside the discipline itself — have done studies and proved, what seems pretty obvious anyway, that a person can become an excellent writer without ever reading Homer or Shakespeare.  If Just Writing is the criterion, the kids don’t really need all that transcribed ululation from the Globe. What they do need is immersion in prose, on almost any topic under the sun, more like that which you are actually asking them to produce.

So do we relinquish Literature, at least at the freshman level? Do we evacuate in haste from unproved and poorly founded (or outright paradoxical) claims to moral authority? I confess to being an unreconstructed, unrepentant advocate of literature — of something called literature — at the freshman level and everywhere else. Now, as during my own decades as a mostly underperforming college teacher, I subscribe to a churlish doctrine that might be dubbed Insane Holism. No paraphrase can do justice to IH, but its main tenets are more or less as follows:

·         Literature, in some loose expanded sense, is really part of the language, so that in studying the one, you naturally and inescapably end up studying the other, and might as well not fight it. “Teaching English” is really all one thing: the grammar, the punctuation, the lexicon, the three-part essays, the Great Works and the less-great, the popular culture, the brainstorming, the creative writing workshops, the mythological references, the confusion over the apostrophe, the linguistics course with its graphs and data. Affirm all of it together. You will never cover it all, but that itself is the beauty part.

·         There are many clever tricks, well known to composition teachers, that can unlock the students’ latent writing potential, bringing about impressive short-term improvements in the essays. Sooner or later, though, you confront the need to increase the potential itself. You are never going to get smart essays out of stupid students. So at some point you have to sit back patiently and await the outcome of long-term intellectual developments in key areas: general knowledge, judgment, vocabulary, critical thinking.

·         Speaking of general knowledge, studying literature can be an excellent way to get it. One benefit of reading and arguing about Hamlet is the way you pick up tangential lore about all sorts of things: Elizabethan sanitary practices, the code duello, the Viking invasions, psychoanalysis, theories of monarchy, and on and on. Dilettantism has its dangers, of course. But a good Lit teacher is really, like Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus, a professor of Things-In-General.

·         All writing is creative writing. Accept this fact and honor it. Even that inventory report for your boss does not get done until the inner voices speak.

·         A big part of what makes literature literature, and important, is its cultural currency. It is important to know because so many other people know it, even if its claim is finally, like the claim of a native language, quite arbitrary. It provides a frame of reference and a shared fund of vicarious experience that grounds, sharpens, energizes, and stabilizes communication. (Linguists have theorized that Shakespeare, all by himself, substantially slowed the pace of language change in English after 1600.) The King James Bible, classical mythology, and Shakespeare remain the best examples of writings that have virtually fused with the language, and are still the best bets for the future. Beyond that, what will retain cultural currency past 2025 or 2035, say, in the world for which we are preparing our students, is anyone’s guess and a thing that needs to be argued about. Lord knows that English departments everywhere have revised and expanded the canon of what counts as literature, again and again during recent decades. Eventually a purge of membership rolls may be in order (drop Poe!), but for now, canon wars are a healthy thing. What matters is not the answers arrived at but the debate itself.

·         On the same head: what finally matters most is not that the student know Hamlet specifically, but that she have an intense, critical, well-mediated encounter, helped by a prof who is passionate and learned and a little crazy, with some great art. Readily generalized, such experiences really do trickle down into the rest of one’s intellectual life, in all sorts of ways.

Well, you get my drift: I am all-in for a content-rich, somewhat reading-centered, chaotic, intuitive, adventurous, scattershot, and pretty old-fashioned approach to English Composition and every other English class. Do not expect the teachers to be technicians, busily installing essay-production software into freshman brains, getting it done on a schedule that pleases the higher-ups. Let them go on being interesting, creative, cranky people, with lots of strange incidental knowledge, lots of idiosyncratic enthusiasms that they love to share. Recognize that the goal of freshman comp is finally the same as the goal of education in its entirety: the building of a smarter, more knowledgeable, fuller, wiser, stranger student. It is not something that can be hurried, and you will never get there at all if you keep on narrowing and dumbing down your courses in fits of well-meaning but misguided practicality. Nor if you keep on letting financial and vocational anxiety leach out the very elements that students and teachers love most.

Killing Tom Dooley

[A lazy man's post to begin the new year. Here is something I wrote a couple of years back and published at The Screamonline, Stu Balcomb's great site. It's also up at The Vocabula Review, hiding behind a paywall. May be somewhat timely given all the happy war-talk the Republicans are lately indulging. I promise something newer around the 15th or so.]

It was 1958, I was six, and the song on the radio was “Tom Dooley,” by the Kingston Trio. When it came on in the supermarket, in the car, in the kitchen at home, grownups would pause and get a strange, dreamy look, humming along, mouthing the words. Sometimes they would meet your gaze and give a solemn little nod, as if it were God Bless America or Onward Christian Soldiers that they were hearing. 

This was a lot for a six year-old to make sense of, since the song was -- is -- a shuddery blend of love and death, outwardly as devoid of uplifting content as song could be. Based on the well-publicized 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster, in North Carolina, by one Tom Dula, the folk song in earlier versions is mainly a bit of Gothic fun, heartless and untroubled as a tabloid. It jeers at Tom and gloats over his well-deserved punishment. But the Kingston Trio’s down-tempo version, with its Calypso beat and barbershop harmonies, aims at pathos. It begins with one of those portentous voice-overs that were so much the fashion in Fifties pop:

Throughout history, there have been many songs written about the eternal triangle. This next one tells the story of a Mr. Grayson, a beautiful woman, and a condemned man named Tom Dooley.  When the sun rises tomorrow, Tom Dooley must hang. 

Then the first of several choruses, mournful, simple:

                  Hang down your head Tom Dooley,

                  Hang down your head and cry;

                  Hang down your head Tom Dooley,

                  Poor boy you’re bound to die. 

In short order, we learn of Tom Dooley’s crime:

                  I met her on the mountain

                  And there I took her life

                  Met her on the mountain

                  Stabbed her with my knife.

I can remember being seriously perplexed by all this. It was, I think, nearly my first hint that grownup love was less easy-sweet than in Disney movies, where the air-brushed lovers dance across swirling pastel landscapes, buoyed by a sound track that sounds like a church choir. If Tom Dooley was a bad man, why on earth was the song calling him a “poor boy,” and generally taking his side? What did Mr. Grayson have to do with anything? And that business with the knife--! The phrase “eternal triangle” meant nothing to me, and I took it that Tom met the “beautiful woman” there on the mountain for the first time and then promptly stabbed her. 

And all the adults nodded and tapped their feet, mouthing the words, as if to say, yes, this is the way it is, yes, they saw how a “poor boy” could make such a mistake. It seemed that murder was one possible response to Beauty, not even all that surprising,   almost natural. I was misreading, of course, but perhaps still finding something that was really there. What still unnerves me in the song is the eerie way it takes Tom’s deed as fait accompli, as if murder were so much in the normal run of things that it needed no special explanation. The tag-line, “Poor boy you’re bound to die,” repeats and repeats, in accents that vary from hushed pity to a kind of fey celebration, till the effect is of encountering something absolutely fixed, a stone wall against which you break your fists.

So those weeks of the song’s vogue were one of those times, not rare in the Fifties, when a child could suspect that the adults were all insane. Right at the borders of our agreeable household world, my sister and brothers and I knew, were the Russians and the Bomb. A little further out, the War that had so impressed the grownups was a dark surround peopled by Japs, Nazis, and other terrors, replete with tanks, flamethrowers, bayonets, and worse. In two generations America had fought two world wars, plus the Korean aftershock, and war had taken on an expected, seasonal aspect. Our turn was doubtless coming. And the next round, everyone knew, promised to end everything in one great flash of hydrogen. 

Not that we were hearing much of this directly. Famously, those poor boys who went off to fight Hitler and Hirohito came back mute, disconnected from friends and family, unable for decades to give real voice to what they had seen and done. That was more or less the case with our own father, who said nothing to us children about his war. Much later, when I was nearing middle age, he began coming out with marvelous yarns about his year in the Philippines, where he logged 82 combat missions piloting a PBM, the Navy’s workhorse light bomber. How he and the crew once returned from a night mission to discover, at dawn, a palm branch stuck on one pontoon, so low had they dipped beneath the enemy tracers on their approach to target. How once in a tropical thunderstorm the wind shear pegged the variometer up, then down, while water spurted into the shuddering cockpit from a half dozen leaks. How he and his crew were shot down in a night action off Mindanao, and ditched in the ocean and swam all night before being rescued -- all but the man who died. How half the pilots in the squadron were badly wounded or dead within six months. How MacArthur was a homicidal horse’s ass who got good men killed out of pure vanity. 

But this would come later. In the Fifties he was still silent, and the country with him.  With the nation still psychologically on a war footing, the threat of annihilation still looming, candor was unwanted, despair basically illegal. Hence Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed, I Love Lucy, TV Westerns, To Hell and Back starring Audie Murphy as himself, Lawrence Welk, Dinah Shore, all the schlock and denial of that notoriously repressed and inexpressive era. Our parents and teachers and Walter Cronkite on The Twentieth Century, speaking essentially with one voice, went on rehearsing the lessons they believed War Two had taught them: soldier on, don’t ask too many questions, do what you must, hope for the best, follow orders. Such the Zeitgeist. In school, everyone still remembers, children practiced hiding under their desks, supposedly a response that would make some kind of difference in a nuclear attack. 

So hearing the song now, one thinks, how very Fifties. Soldier on, Tom, down into that lonely valley where they will hang you. What is nascently subversive, though, is the studied pity for Tom, depraved wretch that he is. Within a decade the Stones will record Sympathy for the Devil, and the Animals, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the later Beatles, and countless other demons will be escaping from the opened Pandora’s box of Rock. Here in 1958, the lid is just beginning to lift.  

These days I wonder if the feminists ever took hold of the song, noticing (what now seems as jarring as a pretty housewife smoking over breakfast in a Life magazine) that Grayson and Tom Dooley are both named, but not Laura Foster, who figures only as the “beautiful woman” of the introduction and the “her” of the first verse. In real life Grayson was a wealthy farmer who briefly employed Tom Dula, then rode with the posse that captured him. Some versions of the folk song transformed him into a romantic rival, others into the sheriff who apprehended Tom, and the Trio’s abbreviated take seems to endorse the first possibility without excluding the second. Laura Foster becomes even more ambiguous, a mythic femme fatale, the scene and cause of Tom’s crime rather than its human center. The song does not scorn her pain, exactly, but seems unable to imagine it, while it gives eloquent voice to Tom’s. She could be a pinup on the wall over a GI’s bed, revered at a desperate distance, never known. Or she could be Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren, any of those bosomy visions who ruled Fifties cinema, their agreeable silliness as soothing to the veterans as, later, it would be problematic to their children.  

The song also invites a psychoanalytic reading, and not just because1958 marked the approximate zenith of Freudianism in the United States. The “Mr.” before Grayson’s name makes him an older and more powerful nemesis, while the distance of the “beautiful woman” from the “boy” Tom makes the Laura-figure seem likewise his elder: enough to convict them of being Mom and Dad, if we are talking orthodox psychoanalysis. Still more to the point are the phallic overtones of “my knife,” as patent as they are discomforting. Tom kills Laura by putting something of his own deep inside her, a gruesome caricature of love that epitomizes all the darker elements of Eros. Even at six, I swear, the gist of the warning was clear to me: sex is dark and dangerous, steer clear.

But even more, the song then and now seems mysteriously linked to the War. Like all modern war stories, it expresses the shock of sudden disillusion, of fatal rupture from a world one had thought to be good. Not too absurdly I hope, it reminds me of Randal Jarrell’s great “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

“Tom Dooley” has not progressed so far into either disillusion or surrealism, but it has some of the same nightmarish foreshortening: the murder already done, the verdict in, only the hanging left. Evil is real, desire can be savage -- and life is not so rosy after all. It ends suddenly and far too soon, in a catastrophe for which you yourself bear most of the guilt -- most but not all, for it is Beauty and Love that have betrayed you to your own worst possibilities. In all this there is a hint, at least, of the returned soldier’s eternal complaint against the society which has sent him to do and suffer the unthinkable. The historical Tom Dula was in fact a Confederate war veteran, impoverished, as soldiers on the losing side tend to be. America and I did not know this in 1958, but part of what we were hearing, just possibly, as the song rose up the charts and inspired Folk Rock and became a landmark of the popular culture, was the sadness of that older war resonating with our more recent ones. What made the grownups tap their feet and nod was that so many of them knew too well what it was to keep vigil the night before a day when you expect to die.

And some of them knew what it was to take a life. Granted, Tom’s “sweetheart murder” of Laura is quite another thing than combat; yet it strands Tom in spiritual terrain that must have seemed familiar to many men who had seen too much in Europe or the Pacific or Korea, even as it suggests the anger at the home front that can be one of the soldier’s deepest secrets, his rage that can have a cold core of misogyny. If it is for Mom and apple pie and Your Sweetheart that the boy fights, then anguish can whisper the corollary: that it is the women who sent you to war, betrayed you to a living hell. Meanwhile, as Dave Grossman and others have shown, the soldier who has killed fights the fear that he may be actually and permanently a murderer, at war with everything he has fought to protect, with the Good, with the Eternal Feminine. It all comes together in this nebulous lament of a soldier (perhaps) who comes home to the woman he loves to find that she has betrayed him (perhaps), and very certainly kills her and is hanged for it.  

Playing in the attic one gray day in Minnesota, six months or so before the song hit the charts, my sister and I found the flight mittens my father had worn in ’44-’45. They were huge, clumsy things, big enough to serve as hats for us, hastily stitched together on the wartime assembly lines; but the leather and the fur trim and lining were oddly luxurious. To plunge your hands into that thick warmth was to feel, in the most unsettling way, the pitiless altitudes to which Dad had climbed in his slow and shaky plane, to bomb enemy ships when he could find them. The absoluteness of the whole martial proposition came suddenly clear, the lunacy. Right here had been our father’s steady, much-washed surgeon’s hands, the surest and gentlest things in our little world. In these clumsy mitts they had guided the plane through the searing cold air, hour after patient hour, till it was over the target, till the bombs were in position, till they could be dropped on the screaming men below.

Enough to make you hang down your head and cry.