by Jeff Sharlet
Some words from my dead mother’s diary, which I’d read after she died, came to mind, rough harmony with John Fogerty’s vocal: “I see those words ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and wonder again why that thumping, Southern-revival song was playing when Jeffrey was dying.”
The Jeffrey here was my uncle, after whom I’m named. My father’s younger brother by seven years, a casualty, after a fashion, of Vietnam. He was twenty-seven when he died, of cancer, just as my mother would thirty years later. Hers was in the breast; his was throughout his whole body, young bones and flesh riddled with disease and rotting in a Miami VA hospital so overcrowded that his parents almost had to move in to take care of him; the nurses, I guess, were busy with those who had a chance.
My mother was close to her brother-in-law, closer in some ways than she was to my father, who still believed in the war then. My uncle, who’d fought in it, did not. Something bad had happened to him there, or rather, a lot bad had happened to him there, but there was something he’d done, something that bothered him, something that wouldn’t let him die easy. He’d gone over early, 1963, a graduate of the Army Language School, crudely competent in Vietnamese and ready to put it to use fighting for freedom. He didn’t bother to think much about what that meant until he found himself attached to a marine unit north of Phu Bai, skulking through the jungle, creeping up on little clusters of huts so they could listen in with their radios for military operations. Artillery did the rest: Guided by Jeff’s eavesdropping, shells erased villages.
Then the army erased Jeff: doused him and his unit in defoliant, not Agent Orange but an earlier, even nastier chemical called, I kid you not, Agent Purple. The VA did try to save him at first, or so my mother believed, back before she learned that sometimes you fight disease for no good reason, because you don’t know what else to do. “Radiation treatments,” she wrote of visiting Jeff in Miami: “I watched these. You could watch the treatment on a closed circuit television screen outside the room where the radiation treatment was being given. The treatment room was like a bank vault. Joking with attendants, he lay down on a hospital stretcher and they rolled him in. Hospital pajama bottoms. Bare chest with a radiation map charted across his belly—lines and arrows. Zap here on the liver for what it’s worth. Image on a small black and white screen is rough, fuzzy. Body is thin but still pretty and dark-skinned and muscular. A lean redneck, wearing work clothes, maybe 55 or so, waiting outside the room for his treatment, smokes a Lucky and coughs again and again.”
My mother dug those old notes out years later when she found herself in much the same situation, burning with radiation that her doctors, privately, believed wouldn’t help her. She never had a chance either, but it takes a while for a body to understand that it is dying.
“Hope you got your things together,” sings Creedence.
Jeff came around in a dream to help my mother get ready. “He comes in, smiling,” she wrote. “His hair is rich black. We talk and joke. An ugly woman, fat and stern and sour waddles in. She wears a brown uniform with a belted jacket and a plain brown skirt. She takes his arm—he is wearing a white shirt—and tells him to get going. I ask, confused, what is going on. She snorts. He laughs and goes along, a good sport. He says, laughing, that I am so naive, and walks away with the woman in the brown uniform.”
A couple of years ago a friend brought me a special present—a Xerox of a tabloid newspaper, the whole page bordered in black and the headline in giant letters: JEFF SHARLET DIES. I’d known about this page of newsprint, but I hadn’t seen it in years and certainly didn’t own a copy. The date of the page was August 1969, and the paper was Vietnam GI, by and for soldiers opposed to the war. Jeff was the editor—“seditious,” in the words of a confidential 1968 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to the Chicago branch of the FBI, instructing them to put my uncle under surveillance. GIs fed up with Stars & Stripes called it “the truth paper.”
Quite a gift. It was two and a half years of the paper, in fact; my friend found them at a rally against the Iraq war, a big stack of near-complete print runs for sale to anyone who cared to remember that everything they were saying about Iraq and Afghanistan had been said before, that the latest war was not much more than an old song being played yet another time. Rip-off contractors, soldiers screwed by their officers, widespread torture, the spread of “freedom”—I could be reading Vietnam GI, or I could be reading today’s paper.
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, a crowded VA hospital in Miami, an empty street in Knoxville, my mother’s diary, my uncle’s fixin’-to-die rag. It all makes me think of “Bad Moon Rising,” neither a sad song nor an angry one, not even a great song. My mother thought it was a revival song and therefore foreboding, and my uncle, dying in Miami, probably thought it was a harsh song—his tastes ran toward softer stuff, Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt’s band, the Stone Poneys. I think it’s a song for lost causes, true because it never makes them pretty.
3Begin with the Dead
CORNEL WEST, WHO may be the most famous philosopher alive, has been wearing the same clothes for nearly twenty years. Not the same undershirt, the same socks, but the same outfit, a hand-tailored black three-piece suit, a black tie and a black scarf, and a gold watch chain. An ensemble deliberately reminiscent of jazzmen and preachers, Duke Ellington and Daddy King and his son Martin, too. Men with callings as well as style. “A sense of vocation,” says West, himself a hugging kind of man who in the course of a short stroll from his office at Princeton to a restaurant across the road for his afternoon cognac embraces and is fully embraced by a janitor, a maître d’, a group of missionaries, and a class of fifth graders visiting from Queens. West is slender, but he hugs like a sumo wrestler: crouch, grab, wrap, and squeeze. “I want to love everbody,” he tells me the first time we meet. He never holds back from anyone who wants a piece of him—whether it’s a blessing or banter, an argument with the great man or simply a hug that goes on too long—but he never gets pinned down, either. He locks eyes and holds hands and answers real questions, then pirouettes away, a dancer dressed like the most elegant of undertakers—just the suit and always the suit, zero degrees or ninety, never a visible bead of sweat or a shiver to shake his skinny frame.
“My suit is my armor,” he says. As in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 11: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” West is one of the most radical figures in mainstream American life—surely the only socialist whose endorsement is coveted by presidential candidates—but he’s also a devoted Christian, “Christocentric,” he says, criticized by leftist comrades for his insistence that moral values must be at the heart of any movement worth dying for, which to his mind is the only kind worth fighting for. He stumped for Obama in 2008, but only with the caveat that he would become his number-one critic the day after inauguration. He started sooner. “Brother Barack Obama says he has the audacity to hope,” he wrote in a small book called Hope on a Tightrope, published weeks after Obama’s election. “I say, ‘Well, what price are you willing to pay?’ ”
West despised candidate Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech on race—“It was weak, man, weak”—in which the candidate described slavery as America’s original sin. “That’s not true,” West says, sipping his cognac in the basement bar across from his office, a low-ceilinged dark room with Sinatra crooning in the background and a staff of waiters who stop by, one by one, to greet him. West asks after families and talks sports, shifting effortlessly between the mien of a politician—smiling, clasping arms—and a barroom prophet, turning back to me to pick up a quiet seam of anger about “the blindness” he believes shaped Obama’s speech. But Obama was right, he says, to place the suffering of black folk at the heart of American history. “To keep track of the doings and sufferings of black folk is to keep track of the trajectory of democratic possibilities in the empire. It’s the intellectual, existential, and political key. If you want to get the d
eepest democratic vision of the nineteenth century you don’t go to white intellectuals—you go to Frederick Douglass! He’s the one talking about rights and liberty, he’s the one talking about taking the ideas of the Constitution and deepening and refining them in the best way. That’s what I mean by that key. The Fourteenth Amendment, right? Due process for ev-er-ybody.”
West punctuates words he wants you to notice by breaking them down into syllables, a preacher’s trick that’s as rooted, for West, in the cadences of funk—he’s working on a spoken-word album with Bootsy Collins, one of the original JBs from the era of “Super Bad” and the legendary bassist of P-Funk—as in his occasional turns in the pulpit over the years.
“Fourteenth Amendment,” he continues. “Definition for the first time of what it means to be a ci-ti-zen. That’s the most precious notion in a democracy. Citizenship. What it means to be ruled and to rule. America never raised the question of what it means to be a citizen until they came to terms with defining us! What is the status of these 4.2 million slaves? Due process, all these things that affect all of us”—he taps the table three times and gestures round the room, at me and all the white waiters—“has to do with the doings and sufferings of these Jim Crow–enslaved negroes. Because our vantage point on the empire has been such that we have defined democracy from below. Y’see, that’s the key, that’s the litmus test of a democracy. There are these black folk.” He shrugs and puts his palms up in the air, an expression of comic confusion on his face. It’s his impression of the powers that be. Then he leans back, lays both hands on the belly of his black vest, and cackles.
“Now. Brother Obama says, ‘Slavery’s the original sin.’ That’s not true. I was very upset when he said that. Very upset about that. Because we should never allow suffering to blind any of us to the suffering of indigenous peoples.” When West was a boy, a teacher took him on a field trip to an Indian reservation. The squalor shocked him. No matter how bad you had it, he thought, somebody is getting it worse. “It was the subordination, the dispossession, the elimination of indigenous peoples—that is America’s original sin.”
Which is when, West believes, American democracy was born: not in spite of that sin but out of that sin, the genocide that cleared the land on which poor Europeans could imagine a country without kings. Democracy doesn’t come from the garden of Eden; it’s the flower of conquered ground, newly opened territory. Freedom isn’t free, West says, and anyone who leads you to believe as much is lying. “Innocence itself is a crime in America,” he says—the crime, he believes, the murder of the past that is at the foundation of what he calls our “hotel civilization”—“no darkness, no despair, no dread, no suffering, no grief.” No truth. He roots himself instead in what he calls “the night side of American democracy.”
His religion is that of the night side of scripture, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and a Christ story as awful as it is redeeming. “The painful laughter of blues notes and the terrifying way of the cross,” he says—a radical Christianity diametrically opposed to the suburban sermons of Rick Warren and Joel Osteen. It’s not a belief in a Christ gladly crucified on Good Friday or risen from his tomb in time for church Easter Sunday, but a faith drawn from a recognition of the despair of the Saturday in between.
“That Saturday,” West says later that night back in his office, his voice giving way to a growl, “it’s the full-fledged experience of the death of God. Which is spiritual abandonment. By any of the positive powers in the universe.” West rears up and spreads his arms and his fingers wide, his voice suddenly loud and staccato. “That’s Christ on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” He laughs, his imitation of Jesus taking on the tone of one of his heroes, Richard Pryor: high-pitched, incredulous, frightened, and absurd. “Hey man,” he translates Christ’s last words, “I thought you were coming through!”
West leans across his desk, peering through the big black-framed glasses that are as much a part of his spiritual armor as the cuff links that go with his suit (24-karat Ethiopian gold, each featuring a tiny image of Africa). “Y’see, that’s part of the humanity of Jesus. But it’s also part of the Jewishness of Jesus. Because in the Hebrew scriptures, you can’t have the prophetic tradition”—the Martin tradition—“without Ecclesiastes. Y’see, the prophetic goes hand in hand with the comic.” West reads the most existential book of the Bible—“that which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered”—with the bleak humor of the blues.
As a philosopher, West’s chief commitment is to pragmatism, colloquially understood as a humble faith in compromise. “It’s about the struggles of ‘everyday people,’” he explains, quoting Sly Stone, who back when he was still Sylvester played the organ in West’s boyhood church in Sacramento. But pragmatism, as West describes it in his definitive account, The American Evasion of Philosophy, is a tradition concerned with what he sees as jazz-like improvisation, a radical optimism that he tempers with the tragedy he takes from the blues. “I’m a bluesman in the life of the mind,” he says. “A jazzman in the world of the ideas.”
Which is to say he’s an opposites man, searching out the kinship between extremes. He doesn’t settle for the mushy middle, the politics of compromise that tend to favor the already favored. Instead he dreams of what he calls “deep democracy.” Not coexistence or collaboration or a color-blind society but what Martin Luther King, drawing from the biblical Song of Songs, called the “beloved community.” In West’s books—twenty to date—his music—political spoken-word collaborations with artists such as Prince, Nas, Jill Scott, and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard—and his public speaking—more than 150 engagements a year—West wants most of all to “prophesy deliverance,” as he put it in the title of his first book, published in 1982. That is, Prophesy Deliverance!, the exclamation point meant to remind readers that “prophesy” with an s instead of a c is a verb, not a noun, something you do, not something you’re given; democratic speech from below, not a revelation from the top down. “To prophesy,” he writes, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils.” Like the remnant of conscious humanity in The Matrix trilogy of science fiction movies—based in part on West’s work—we must save ourselves.
West appears in the second and third Matrix movies as Counselor West, one of the leaders of Zion, a steampunk metropolis deep beneath the surface of the earth. The rest of the human race lives in a dreamworld devised by intelligent machines; only a few free men and women like West and the movie’s hero, Neo, break free of this matrix of artificial reality. To West’s thinking that makes them poets, bluesmen, and jazzmen combined.
“And by poets I don’t mean a person who writes verses,” he explains one night in a public lecture on the Hebrew prophets at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. “I mean what Shelley had in mind when he said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world! All those who exercise imag-i-nation, and get us outside of our egocentric pre-dic-ament! Give us a sense of awe and wonder! So we become concerned about something outside of our own little bubbles, our own little suburbs, our own little slices of reality, our own little professional managerial spots”—he makes that sound like a filthy word, then pulls up in a hard pause, the suit drawn up on his shoulders as he hunches down close to the edge of the stage, whispering when he resumes—“our own little iron cages. There’s a lot of material toys in the cages. But you’re still in prison. And poets allow us to shatter those bars.”
When the talk is complete, West gets down on his hands and knees so he can greet at eye level the fans filing by the stage, alarming and delighting one after another as he swings his arms out—is he going to fall face-first?—only to wrap them around whoever is in front of him, hugging every potential poet and comrade in turn.
WEST HAS BEEN JAILED for half a dozen causes since he was first arrested as a Harvard freshman at a student protest. His second arrest came whe
n the Cambridge police rounded up the three black men on his dormitory floor after a white classmate said she’d been raped by a stranger. “Lined us up three times,” he remembers. “Kept us in for a number of days. Had her come in, shaking, crying, and the police are saying, ‘Now, these three did it.’ She said no.” West’s voice sounds like South Boston as he plays the part of the cop: “Now please, don’t be worrying about hurting their feelings. You know they did it.” The woman said no again. “Three times over two days. That white sister saved our lives! She held on to the truth, man.” Years later, when West was commuting to teach at Williams College in rural Massachusetts, a highway patrolman pulled him over. “You’re the guy,” the cop said. “Nigger we’ve been looking for.” West told him he taught philosophy and religion. “And I’m the Flying Nun,” the officer answered, placing West under arrest. When West began teaching at Princeton, cops stopped him three times in his first ten days. He still has a hard time catching a cab in Manhattan. West speaks of these experiences not as revelations but as simple facts. “Just the way the world is.”
“It’s all about witness, brother,” he tells me one evening in his office, rocking in his chair. “Every person who bears witness has to have the depth of conviction of a martyr. You have to be willing to die. That’s the statement allowing you to live.”
I’ve been meeting West in Princeton across the span of a year, not so much interviewing him as following the eddy and flow of his passions. During these months they have included a renewed obsession with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume; nineteenth-century Russian literature; a new appreciation for the early twentieth-century Meiji Restoration in Japan; his musical touchstones, Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield, and Sarah Vaughan; and a book he wants to write called The Gifts of Black Folks in an Age of Terror—the post-9/11 period West describes as the “niggerization” of white America, its encounter with the fundamental fear that has long been inflicted on black people.
