Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Sounes, who is English and may not know any better, arches his eyebrow at 1963 Newport because the setting itself “underscored the gulf between the proletarian roots of the music and the privileged lives of most of the performers and the majority of the audience.” I guess he missed Dylan, later on, at Royal Albert Hall in London. And it’s this same summer he’s talking about when he speaks of “antiwar sentiments then in vogue.” Would that they had been in vogue, months before the assassination of John Kennedy, when the only Americans yet in Vietnam were still called “advisors.”

  But more schematic than the books have been the reviews of them, everywhere from the Washington Post to the online magazine Salon.com, buying into an antithesis between folkies and rockers and plunking down in belligerent favor of the snarl and the stomp, as if we couldn’t listen to both; as if in fact we hadn’t been listening, not only to Seeger and Odetta and Baez, but also to Motown and James Brown and the Drifters, even before Bob Dylan, while nursing his hurt feelings that Carl Sandburg had never heard of him, was so stunned to pick up the Beatles on his car radio singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that he was moved to the Bob equivalent of a Gettysburg Address: “Fuck! Man, that was fuckin’ great! Oh, man—fuck!”

  Never mind the failure of anybody to take Joan Baez’s Quaker pacifism seriously, from Joan Didion in 1966 to Jonathan Yardley in 2001. Never mind whose career looks more honorable and who’s really posturing at the end of an awful century—those acoustic guitar players who went south for civil rights and tried to stop troop trains with their middle-class bodies, or the Macho Rubbish Rehab Ramblers with their amplified electric chairs and enough attitude to trash a hotel room and gang-bang a groupie. Never even mind that a whole lot of things are also always going on besides popular music; that there is news, too, on the wounded radio.

  Mama’s in the fact’ry

  She ain’t got no shoes

  Daddy’s in the alley

  He’s lookin’ for the fuse

  Besides telling us that “folk music is a bunch of fat people,” these are the thoughts of Citizen Bob after the Kennedy assassination:

  All I can say is politics is not my thing at all. I can’t see myself on a platform talking about how to help people. Because I would get myself killed if I really tried to help anybody. I mean, if somebody really had something to say to help anybody out, just bluntly say the truth, well obviously they’re gonna be done away with. They’re gonna be killed.

  To which he added:

  You can’t go around criticizing something you’re not part of and hope to make it better. It ain’t gonna work. I’m just not gonna be a part of it. I’m not gonna make a dent or anything, so why be a part of it by even trying to criticize it? That’s a waste of time. The kids know that. The kids today, by the time they’re twenty-one, they realize it’s all bullshit. I know it’s all bullshit.

  I’m not surprised he found God in 1979. It was a very seventies thing to do, like Rolfing, Arica, acupuncture, and biofeedback. Like tantric yoga and the hot tubs of Esalen. Or Jonestown and est. Like pet rocks, WIN buttons, smiley faces, and swine-flu vaccine booster shots. It led directly to power ballads and Ronald Reagan and the Last Tango on Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Meanwhile, some of the rest of us were required to think about the women’s movement, and read Toni Morrison, and poke at the meaning of a James Baldwin sentence: “If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

  Baez has recorded this exchange with Dylan, in March 1965: “I asked him what made us different, and he said it was simple, that I thought I could change things, and he knew that no one could.” It was a puerile thing to say, a species of adolescent fatalism, a waste of our precious time. No wonder he’s back on the bus. If we really have to choose between, on the one hand, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and the world exactly as it is and ever shall be, or, on the other hand, such sixties folkie fantasies as fishes and loaves, community and solidarity, peaceable kingdoms and rainbow coalitions, sanctuary, and, of course, Joan Baez—well, where do I sign?

  Just like a woman.

  Networks of Terror

  AFTER A COUPLE of days of doing what they do best, which is grief therapy, the television networks and cable channels reverted to what they do worst, which is to represent the normal respiration of democratic intelligence.

  Never mind the apocalyptic branding every producer of continuing coverage felt he had to inflict over, under, and around the multiple reruns, the endless nightmare feedback loop of jumbo jet, firebomb, and towers falling down. Soon enough, “America Under Dastardly Attack” would be succeeded by “The Empire Strikes Back.” Nothing less can be expected of a commercial culture with a logo, a patent, a copyright, or a trademark on everything from pro athletes and childhood fairy tales to the human genome. What does surprise is that nobody thought of “Infinite Justice.” What a brainstorm.

  Still, television was our surrogate: a stunned witness, a black box, and also a storybook we needed. This is what it looked like, the Big Pixel, and the mangled steel and broken stone; the brilliant blue, unbearable sorrow, heroes in uniform, stalwart mayor—and an unmooring and a creepiness, as if a CAT scan had suddenly disclosed anomalies as unreadable as Rorschachs. So not even a girdle of oceans was enough to preserve our innocence. Nor could we flee in our pump-up running shoes. And what good were laser-beam defense shields against the guided missiles of our own passenger planes?

  We gathered as we usually do in a parenthetical frame of mind, somewhere between the trauma and the stress syndrome. We have been there when we were merely curious: an Oscar or a Super Bowl. And when we have felt compelled: the Watergate hearings or the Berlin Wall. On exalted moments, like a moonshot. On dreadful occasions, like an assassination. It’s a fix, and I’m not here to pick and choose among the performance arts of a Rather and a Brokaw and a Jennings. Bad news grays their skin beneath the powder, glooms their eyes staring at the Prompter, slows and thickens their aspect whether they’re wearing a jacket or not—although it often seems that we also see through them, to the pentimento of every other terrible thing that ever happened while they had to sit there like an Easter Island emperor penguin.

  I will say that Aaron Brown on CNN was the man I wanted standing on my roof, from whom I’d even buy insurance, while Bill O’Reilly factoring on Fox was a guy I wouldn’t let in to check the Con Ed meter. But then CNN also still has foreign bureaus in those inconvenient places where the strangest people behave as though they have a purchase on history, too—like Kabul, from which only Nic Robertson was seen to be reporting, as only Peter Arnett had reported from Baghdad during the Gulf War.

  But we needed the rapture of the feed. We needed the shadow on the scan.

  And then the reversion. Before you could say Holy War, the screen filled with the usual pols, and their hierophants and sycophants. Bad enough that we had to listen on every channel to the same spin doctors explaining the same behaviors of a Flying Dutchman president. But we also had to listen to the pols we had booted out of office in previous elections: one last photo op for James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and Dr. Kissinger himself. What we didn’t see—or at least I didn’t, and I have more eyes than most flies—was any meaningful dissent from the tom-toms. End of dialogue.

  We are apparently supposed to shut up and eat our spinach. Asking questions, proposing alternatives, making distinctions, arguing analogies, remembering history, or criticizing our stand-tall president is, for the moment, unpatriotic and maybe even unmanly. Wave that flag, stuff that qualm. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 19 that even such “peacenik” leftovers from the Vietnam era as Lee Weiner, one of the Chicago Seven, and Stew Albert, an original Yippie, were all of a sudden in favor of retaliatory violence and “surgical” military strikes. Grace Paley, on the other wonderful hand, suggests in the same article that we bomb Afghanistan with three tons of wheat, rye, and rice, since they are starving: “If we do it with a vicious attitude, maybe that will be enoug
h for some people.”

  There can be no grievance that excuses the killing of innocents, either by terrorism or state violence, its Siamese twin. Any cause that does so is corrupt. The murder of children in Belfast, Sarajevo, Rwanda, Beirut, or anywhere else is beyond extenuation. Some of the West’s best writers, from Dostoyevsky and Conrad and Malraux to Mary McCarthy, Heinrich Böll, Doris Lessing, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer, and Gabriel García Márquez, have tried to read the minds of what Don DeLillo in Mao II called “men in small rooms.” All they’ve done is make those minds seem almost as interesting as their own, which of course they aren’t. The kamikazes of Kingdom Come—the skyjackers, land miners, thumbscrewers, militiamen, death squads, and ethnic cleansers; the bombers of department stores, greengrocers, and abortion clinics; the Pol Pots, Shining Paths, and Talibans—have stupefied themselves. To imagine otherwise is to be as ethically idiotic as Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who told reporters in Hamburg on September 16 that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art ever.”

  That said, our intellectual responsibility is to read our own minds. We are, we are told, at war. In wartime in America, civil liberties go out the window. Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general pushed an Espionage Act through Congress that kicked socialists out of state legislatures and sent Eugene V. Debs to prison. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t at all troubled by the internment of thousands of Americans guilty of nothing else but Japanese descent. Even the Cold War was hard on radical schoolteachers and those government workers who could be blackmailed because they were homosexuals. And the War on Drugs has long since undermined constitutional protections against searches and seizures and a dozen other niceties of due process.

  Let’s hope a war on Osama bin Laden and his cancer cells is more successful than the war on coke and smack, although the difficulties seem at least as onerous and the prosecution likely to last even longer. But already 115 individuals are being held by federal authorities under the notoriously permissive gunslinger bylaws of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, without charges, bail, or even lawyers. (When in recent history have we seen so few lawyers, fetishizing an antiquated Bill of Rights?) Already Congress is falling all over itself to give attorney general John Ashcroft most of what he wants in roving wiretap legislation, e-mail, and other Internet peeping rights, detention and deportation of aliens based on secret evidence, and a gutting of statutes of limitation, not to mention the unleashing of the CIA to hire its own gang of thugs and to resume assassinating foreign leaders we don’t like. And already the cry goes up for a technological deliverance from our grief and insecurity by the “biometrics” of fingerprinting, voice recognition, retinal scans, and racial profiling, not only at airports, but at train stations, sports stadiums, parks, schools, and reservoirs. Plus of course a national electronic ID “smart” card, capable of tracking our criminal history, our bodily motions, our financial transactions, and our driving speed. Previous “wartime” abridgements of freedom have been temporary, but will Infinite Justice mean Permanent Surveillance?

  Somebody besides Congresswoman Barbara Lee must ask these questions. And why haven’t I seen her on network or cable television?

  About Afghanistan: On September 14, Tamim Ansary, an Afghani writer of delightful children’s books who happens to live in Berkeley, posted a cri de coeur that has since been forwarded on tens of thousands of e-mail sites. He hates bin Laden and the Taliban equally. But he argues that a bombing attack will only kill women and children, including five hundred thousand orphans from all the previous wars. How then to snuff the mastermind? Ground troops, obviously. But these would have to advance from Pakistan, where bin Laden’s sort of fundamentalists are perhaps stronger than the government. Which in turn could mean a fight to the death between Islam and the West, exactly what bin Laden lusts for.

  Imagine Tamim Ansary talking to Larry King.

  There are indications that Colin Powell may share these apprehensions, but even as I type, two dozen heavy bombers are circling what we think of as the crime scene and the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, with seventy attack planes, has left Virginia for an undisclosed location. And I wish each pilot could read not only Ansary’s anguished essay but also a September 15th Internet communiqué from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the underground feminist organization that has braved the wrath of the Taliban by teaching its own children and by smuggling out videotapes of executions to Western news outlets. RAWA asks us, please, to differentiate between the people of Afghanistan (70 percent women and children) and “a handful of fundamentalist terrorists.”

  But that’s impossible, from an aircraft carrier or a bomber or the little blue fox full of Bill O’Reilly. It’s especially impossible if nobody talks straight to us in the mainstream media. It’s almost as though we don’t need any legislation to curtail our dangerous civil liberties. Stunned by grief, we’ve shut ourselves up. If the ultimate contemptuous purpose of terrorism is to dominate and humiliate—to turn citizens into lab rats and cities into mazes—then bin Laden may have already won this round, because we seem to have acquiesced into playing his favorite game: bloodbath.

  Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing

  ABOUT RACE IN America, about music in history, about atom bombs and “phantom mechanics”—curved space, loopy time, pure chance jump and flow—The Time of Our Singing is an astonishment but not a surprise. Richard Powers has been astounding us almost every other year since 1985, turning intellectual activity into imaginative literature in novels that ask homesick rangers and resident aliens to cope with everything from game theory, molecular biology, and artificial intelligence to such terrorisms as hostage taking and the behavior of “limited liability” corporations. We can no longer be surprised at whatever he dares to think in ink about.

  Powers has been warming up for this novel in particular. Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) ended with a son looking for his sick father, who had run away into the atomic desert of Los Alamos. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) needed Johann Sebastian Bach’s polyphony to crack the genetic code. And Operation Wandering Soul (1993) brought the nonwhite Third World home, to a pediatrics ward in a public hospital in Watts, Los Angeles. As if these sight lines were to triangulate on the American unmentionable—mixed race: “There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred”—we now have the Stroms.

  David Strom is a German Jew who has escaped the Nazi net to profess physics at Columbia University in New York, where his ability “to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core,” to hear the “harmonies in time” of forces and fields that curve and flow, will be useful during the war to atomic scientists like Rabi, Bethe, Pauli, Von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Fermi—“all of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and release.” On Easter Sunday 1939, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., David Strom meets Delia Daley.

  Delia is the brilliant daughter of a black Philadelphia doctor; she is also a daytime hospital nurse, a nighttime music student, and a part-time singer in church choirs, with a sound “that could fix the broken world.” She should have had a concert career except that she arrived at the conservatory for her audition wearing the wrong skin. And she’s come to the nation’s capital for the same reason as David and 75,000 other people—to hear Marian Anderson sing in spite of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Against all odds, David and Delia decide to start their own revolution: “Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.”

  At least they make three more Americans: Jonah, “a year older, a shade lighter,” than his brother, Joey, followed by their darker little sister, Ruth. And so long as all five are gathered around a piano in their derelict house in the northwest borderlands of Manhattan, playing “Crazed Quotations”—a musical game born of David and Delia’s
shared belief that “any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key” and that, as Delia imagines it, “in the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song”—they seem safe enough. But outside, “ever downward, from crazed to numb,” race trumps love “as surely as it colonized the loving mind.” These “halfbreed” children must sing not only for their supper but also for their mother, burned alive in an explosion before she has finished making her music.

  “Honey-wheat” Jonah, sent away to music school in Boston at the insistence of Albert Einstein himself, is best at performing “whiteness,” at singing Stockhausen and Schubert and even Palestrina, regressing in harmonic history throughout the novel, all the way back to Gregorian chant, as if his very own backyard hadn’t grown a wonderful bastard music of spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls, gutbucket, rag, blues, jazz, and scat. “Muddy milk” Joey, his sometime accompanist, has a harder time hiding out in concert halls from an America at race war. On one occasion, he finds himself playing show tunes in an Atlantic City dive. On another, more usefully, in a freedom school in Oakland, California, he teaches old stuff to street kids weaned on rap, for the first time doing work “that wouldn’t have been done if I wasn’t doing it.”

  Ruth? She has always lived in the burning world, the real history that torched her mother. While Jonah (“Orpheus in reverse”) sings his way to the monastery, Ruth’s history agonizes onward, from Marian Anderson to the Million Man March, with full stops at Emmett Till, “Bull” Connor, Medgar Evers, Birmingham, Newark, and Watts. Watts is where Jonah finally reads the score. So much for the Cloisters and unicorns. But Ruth is a Black Panther. It’s her freedom school where Joey ends up teaching, and it’s her son, of all the black children lost in space-time, who will be found in the wavelengths of color and pitch in the “somewhen” of his Jewish grandfather.