It's a Joke?

If there is irony in the cover to this week’s The New Yorker, it’s not in the drawing itself. The incongruity lies in seeing the cartoon on the cover of that particular magazine.

If there is satire in the cover this week’s The New Yorker, it is towards the magazine itself. Certainly, it makes no supporter or detractor of the Obamas look ridiculous.

If there is parody in the cover this week’s The New Yorker, it is (again) towards the magazine itself. Nothing in the cartoon has anything to do with the Obamas, so it certainly doesn’t parody them.

If there is a joke in the cover this week’s The New Yorker, it is on the people who actually found it funny, for the cartoon speaks only to prejudice.

On this last, there’s someone who writes for The Los Angeles Times named James Rainey who seems to think the joke is on Obama haters:

It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America's finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knuckle-walkers who would do them harm by trying to turn a couple of fresh-scrubbed Harvard Law grads into something foreign and scary.

According to elitist Rainey, it seems, no one in America but he, his kid, and readers of The New Yorker have the sophistication to “get” the joke. Anyone else is either dumber than an 8-year-old or a “knuckle-walker.” Or has absolutely no sense of humor.

What would have been needed, to make Rainey's defense appropriate, would be some sort of contextualization. Karl Rove dreaming the scene, for example. Or showing a group of plotters creating that image.

A funnier vision of Barack and Michele Obama might have been the two of them in the oval office watching Leave It to Beaver re-runs while surrounded by the most boring American accouterments possible... a response to John McLaughlin's oreo comment.

Well, there’s one thing about irony, satire, parody, and jokes in general: they need to be funny to work. However, defending something by saying it is “supposed” to be funny doesn’t work. “A Modest Proposal” this is not though, perhaps, showing the Obamas sitting down to a meal of Irish babies might have been closer.

Nah….

Seeding on Top of the Unseen

There's an article in today's The New York Times that has me seeing red. It's entitled "Restless Pioneers, Seeding Brooklyn" and was written by Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

Now, before I get to just what so upset me on reading the piece, I should point out that my store and cafe, Shakespeare's Sister, is often credited for "starting it all" in Cobble Hill, with being the first upscale hangout in what is now one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. And I have lived in Brooklyn for about twenty of the last forty years, primarily in places that had not yet been "discovered." I know something about urban change, having seen it happen. And I know something about the people the change "happens to."

One of the things that, for decades, has bothered me most about self-styled "urban pioneers" is that they (like the early settlers of American, who similarly didn't "see" the Native Americans) imagine they are moving into areas where "nobody" is living.

It's happening in my neighborhood, finally. There are more white faces than ever before, and a new feeling in the area. That's fine, for things do change. However, the people who are being pushed out also should be recognized... and their needs maybe even considered.

But does that happen?

No.

What do we get instead? Statements like this (from the article):

Café Enduro, a Mexican cantina he opened two years ago in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, east of the park, is beloved by locals.

Locals?

WTF?

What "locals" does McNeil mean? Most of the people in the neighborhood have never been in Enduro, and will never go there. Certainly not the immigrants from Trinidad and Jamaica who have populated the blocks around Enduro (just three blocks from my house) for the past decades. Certainly not the Haitians who first came to Lefferts Gardens in the 1950s, fleeing Papa Doc Duvalier (many of that first wave were the doctors, lawyers, and teachers who are still at the heart of Brooklyn's thriving Haitian community). Certainly not the Asians like the man who used to repair my father's shoes in a little shop across the street from where Enduro sits, who was killed in a robbery after putting at least one daughter through Cornell. Certainly not the African Americans, who first came to the area when real-estate sharks collapsed property values by whispering that "they" were moving in.

It's not that I have anything against the food at Enduro. But I won't be eating there again. I can't, now; the food will taste of the ashes of neighborhoods pushed aside.

I am going to be happy when Culpepper's, the Barbados restaurant two blocks in the other direction from my house, is back in full operation (they had a fire, and are now doing only take-out).

Culpepper's, like Allen's Bakery, the Jamaican bakery across the street and a block down (where the line almost always snakes out the door), is a place really beloved by the locals here--like Toomey's Diner, the laconic spot where the Dodgers ate their breakfasts, when Ebbets Field still dominated the neighborhood. But you won't find McNeil there, or any of the people he "sees." Just the communities that have been here for years.

Communities whose passing he, and his new "locals," will never even notice.

And that, as I said, makes me see red. And makes me incredibly sad.

Brooklyn, a Bridge, and the Other Side

Friday, I went down to watch the fireworks. Sat on a stone retaining wall in the new park to the east of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The crowd included Japanese holding balloons from the Nathan's hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island. Presumably, they'd been cheering on Takeru Kobayashi's unsuccessful effort to regain his title, only to lose once more (in an "eat off") to Joey Chestnut. Languages aplenty surrounded us, making the celebration a real New York Fourth.

I took the pictures here long ago, 25 years ago, the first from close to the spot where I watched the fireworks this year, an area now a park, then not much of anything. The top and bottom ones come from the same negative. The one with the graffiti comes from the other side of the base of the bridge, as does the next. The final one, of course, was taken on the walkway taking one across to Manhattan.

I made a joke to the man next to me, who turned out to be Griff Palmer, a reporter for The New York Times, that the bridge is so photographed that soon we'd no longer be able to see it, its image now sealed away in little black boxes. He chuckled politely.

The fireworks flew up on both sides, from near the Brooklyn Heights promenade on the further side of the Brooklyn Bridge and, in the other direction, from up the East River beyond the Manhattan Bridge. I focused on those from behind the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the near tower (the one pictured--but from the other side) as much as the extravaganza beyond.

No matter how often I try to leave it, I always seem to end up back in Brooklyn. Once again, I am abandoning my outpost (this time, one in Pennsylvania) and retreating to the base--as I have done, now, at least six times over 40 years, ending up spending half that time elsewhere.

Though I can't help doing so, I really shouldn't look at the consolidation of my life as a retreat. Instead, I should see it as a necessary return to focus. Getting rid of my house in Belleville, almost five hours from Brooklyn, goes along with closing my store. Together, these will allow me to spend more time on what I want to be doing now, teaching and writing.

However, to me, New York has never been home (that's Western North Carolina), simply where I end up. But Brooklyn has become special to me. I know more of it than anywhere else in the world and am as comfortable on its streets as I am in the piney woods of home--I couldn't get permanently lost in either place. Turned around and confused, yes, but not lost.

To Tombouctou

We left in the back of a Land Rover, me sitting next to a 55-gallon drum, extra gas (no place to fill up until Tombouctou). Unfortunately, the stopper didn't seal well, splashing me at every bump. And, once we left the paved road, the bumps were frequent.

We were in the mail truck, me, my Canadian traveling companion, a Japanese man circling the globe (he planned on buying a camel and joining a salt caravan), a couple of Tamacheks, and a guy from the south who was not happy heading into the desert. It was the first trip of the season, the Niger River having passed its annual flood stage, and we would be making the road that would be followed until the next fall and the coming of the rains.

I've written of this trip before, but not quite in this context. I'm writing about it now simply because I just came across my turbans, one white and one black. The white one I got a couple of years later in Niamey, along with a heavy, canvas-like Tuareg robe. The black one, I got that morning, soon after leaving Mopti.

Our first stop was in a small town on the bank of the river, a place that has become famous recently as the home of the late guitarist Ali Farka Toure and his music festival, Niafunke.

I wanted to buy something to keep the gasoline off of me. The two Tamacheks told me that what I needed was a turban like they wore. They had me feel the material--synthetic--and told me to buy a three-meter length.

As it wasn't a market day, I had to wander a bit before I found a shop open. Sure, enough, though, hanging there were just such lengths, of just such material. I bought what I needed, surprised by how wide it was, how much of it there was.

Back by the Land Rover, parked on the hard packed still damp sand by the river, the two showed me how to wrap the turban. The Canadian took my picture. If you look carefully, you can see the dust and sand caked to my shoulder along with the gasoline.

Twenty-two years later, and I still have that turban.

The Meme of Seven

Though I am rarely one for this sort of thing, I was tagged by Jeremy Young of Progressive Historians, one of the best of the blogosphere.... I don't know anything about the picture I have chosen except that it shows a purported rout of British forces in Inda.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

My 7 facts:

1. When I spoke to my draft board against the war in Vietnam, my father supported me by saying that he was a WWII veteran, that both of my grandfathers fought in France in WWI, that great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers had fought on both sides of the civil war, and that the ancestor I am named for had been a colonel in the Revolution... and that all would be proud that I was standing for what I believed, as they had done. That was humbling, but unforgettable.

2. When I got my ankles run over by a jeep at age eleven, I bounced up running, shouting, "I'm dead, I'm dead." I didn't walk again for some time--and suspect I didn't die.

3. Though I graduated from Beloit College, I started my college career at Utica College of Syracuse University. Not much of a school, but a good place for one like me, whose spirit had rarely entered his high school. I learned at Utica College that education does indeed require a little work.

4. On arrival in Burkina Faso in 1985, someone told me that, there, diarrhea is a way of life. Four years later, when I finally left Africa (except for the occasional visit), after nine bouts of amoebic dysentery, various experiences with shigella, and a too-great familiarity with giardia, I knew exactly what she meant.

5. A monk at a little temple on the other side of the ridge from the beach at Bang Sen, Thailand told me (I was a child) that I would be back there before I die. We were looking out over a crematorium. I haven't been back.

6. Kim Stanley Robinson beat me by completing the first dissertation on Philip K. Dick because I couldn't get my act together and hid out in Ouagadougou instead of writing. So I had to settle for second.

7. My store, Shakespeare's Sister, enjoyed a 14-year run. I closed it in May, 2008 and miss it already.

These are the people I'll tag:

Aldon Lynn Nielsen
bowerr
Chris Clarke (at Dusty D. Dogg's insistence)
David Cohn
Steven Gimbel
Dr. Virago
Jerry Williamson

Matewan

On Wednesday evening at the NEH Summer Institute "Appalachia Up-Close," we watched John Sayles' movie Matewan (which most of us had seen, though none objected to viewing it again) in anticipation of Rebecca Bailey's talk on her study of the West Virginia town.

Dr. Bailey, who teaches at Northern Kentucky University, placed the movie within its historical and social contexts through a discussion of her own research and her personal family relationship to the events at Matewan and, a year later, in the nearby town of Welsh.

Two points in Bailey's presentation stood out. First, she made clear that the standard view of the Matewan conflict--that it was simply a battle between union and industry, and that these are the fruitful objects of historical research--is not only simplistic but actually wrong. What happened in Mingo County had more to do with the people of Matewan and the vicinity than with institutions that had both come in from the outside. Second, she stressed the importance of the connection between the personal and the historical, explaining that her interest in Matewan comes from her grandfather's experience in Welsh the day of the assassination of Sid Hatfield, who (as chief of police) had been involved in the earlier battle at Matewan. What she learned from her grandfather made her realize that the accepted story was neither accurate nor complete.

One of the people who died that day in Matewan in 1920 was Mayor Testerman. A few weeks later, Hatfield married his widow, Jesse. That's the two of them, pictured.

Bailey's book, Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal and the Roots of Conflict in Mingo County 1793-1920 will be out in September. I, for one, will read it--and not just to learn more about the subject, but to begin to further explore Bailey's approach to history, one that I find extremely important.

For the afternoon session, Ferrum College professor Dan Woods provided the broader context of industrialization in Appalachia after the Civil War, the change that led to situations like that of Mingo County. I was reminded of my grandfather's friend Charlie Cannon, whose father had founded Cannon Mills and established Kannapolis, NC--in Rowan County, home to many of my grandmother's ancestors. As a company town, Kannapolis was one of the best, a place where people did not experience the kind of life Tennessee Ernie Ford sang about (in a coal town, and not a textile town, but the impact was often the same):

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store.

Blue Ridge Institute Farm Museum

One of the things I have been learning at the NEH "Appalachia Up-Close" Summer Institute is something that I "knew" but had never thought about--and that's the plain and simple fact that my mythologized "Scots-Irish" Appalachian culture is (and was) only partially Scots-Irish, at best. The German influence, for example, was also great in the hills, another point rebutting the simplistic divisions presented in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Those folkways, all four of them (if four you must have), were a lot less British than Fischer would have one believe.

My mother's family, I've discovered over the last year, is a lot less "Albion" than once I had thought. My great-great-grandmother, born Rebecca Sprinkle, was from a family that had been Sprenckel, hailing from the Rhineland. Another great-great-grandmother, Dorcas Lowrance, came from the Lorentz family of Saxony.

The German influence was illustrated for me today through a tour of the Blue Ridge Institute's Farm Museum conducted by Assistant Director Vaughan Webb (pictured above). The farmhouse, originally from a farm some ten miles away and about to be moved again, though built some two hundred years ago for a non-German family, was built in the German style, Webb informed us, as was the barn, which had been moved from yet another farm.

Frankly, I was too much involved in just looking at things to pay much attention to the details of what makes the architecture "German" (though the barn does, indeed, have a jutting upper level of a sort common to Pennsylvania). What fascinated me was how familiar it all seemed. All these years in New York City haven't removed me completely from the hills.