Kings & Cabbages

This is an old book review I’ve written up: and I’m posting on the blog because, well, its better than letting it molder on my desktop.

The Original: paunchy, stolid . . . & heroic?

John Adams Review

McCullough’s John Adams is a worthy read. McCullough has the art of storytelling; he knows how to make his subject powerful, compelling and relatable. By the end, the reader sees John Adams as larger than life, but  relatable, as well. The balance between Hero and Everyman is well done; you can admire him for the sheer scale of his project and empathize with him in the thick of his struggles, personal mortifications, familial trials, and political rivalries.

What made Adams a Hero: his cause (the idea of political liberty) and his absolute (heroic) dedication to it. What made him an Everyman: McCullough’s attention to the dense web of relationships—wife, family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and rivals—that he negotiates in the course of life and work. The ending was superb . . . transforming a quote from one of the letters written by Adams on personal aggravation, disappointment, and the grand delight of life, into the man’s own epitaph. John Adams says the final word for himself, and what words. They sum up both his reflectiveness, his perspective, his humaneness in the complex emotions, and his sense of humor

The Man
It’s worth saying a few words on Adams himself. Character study is a pretty fascinating business: to chart out someone’s personal qualities, and sometimes use it as a mirror to further our own goals of personal excellence. I’m awed by Adams’  devotion to reading: it’s part of the 18th century culture of letters I guess, to see reading as a disciplined pursuit, rather than a hobby or distraction. I guess it considerably helped Adams that Youtube wasn’t around at that time.

“Drawing up reading lists and embarking on a course of study is what any man or woman of excellence must do. One must master absolutely some areas of knowledge and thought (in his case, the classics and law) not neglecting to revisit and re-inform himself of them throughout life, while all the while reading and having correspondence with individuals from diverse fields of work so that one is a truly well rounded individual.”

His correspondence with Benjamin Rush, the physician and founder of modern psychiatry, is a great example of this ethic. Also, we can learn from Adams the discipline to keep a diary and record impressions and lessons of life that might otherwise be lost like “leaves on a stormy wind.” According to McCullough, Adams was faithful diary writer, never swerving even if it were to jot down a line through the turbulent times of his life.

Paul Giamatti looks a lot better . . . he's got the resolute look down cold.

Personally, what I admire most intensely is Adams’ dedication and loyalty to relationships, no matter what the personal cost. His dedication in personally answering the thousands of letters that came during his presidential tenure is a case in point. His long friendship with Jefferson is a good illustration. The regard and attachment he cemented with Jefferson, during their tenures in the congressional committee of the Declaration of Independence, ambassadorship in France and England, and other posts, was plenty tested during the later years of presidential rivalry. In his writings and business dealings, Jefferson comes across as rather cold (hello, some of the man’s slaves were his own kids . . . whom he freed only on his deathbed). The mechanistic, Newtonian view of the universe he subscribed to as a man of the Enlightenment, in which the most powerful law was perhaps self-interest, is reflected in the way he approached human connections as well.

But even when Adams learned of Jefferson’s treachery in hiring muckrackers in a smear campaign during their presidential battles, even while he came to revise his understanding of the Jefferson behind the courtliness and gentlemanly reserve, he still maintained connections that somewhat flickered back into life during their post-retirement correspondence. He never slammed the door shut on a relationship he valued.

We can also find plenty to admire in his relationship with his wife, Abigail . . . the letters are amazing, sketching a meeting of minds and personality. Clearly, the two loved each other as husband and wife, friends, companions, helpmates: a supportive, multi-textured marriage. She was his equal in every way, and one of his most trusted advisers in the presidency; he respected her above the mutual bonds of dependence. A man’s capacity to see his wife as an equal is nothing to sneeze at, certainly not in the 18th century (nor today, despite the lipservice that’s paid to it . . . we are living in an age when the ideal woman is to be a Kim Kardashian, I suppose).

The Workers for Political Liberty
The ideas were already there. Jefferson and Adams didn’t come up with anything; we can ignore the somewhat grandiose claims of US mythmakers on the Founding Fathers inventing modern democracy. They wrote, spoke, and implemented ideas that had already been developed by Locke, Montesqieu, Hume, Hobbes, and other philosophes (who themselves took plenty of leaves out of scholarship from Africa, the Islamic world, etc . . . but that is a subject for another day).

But in Adams and Jefferson, we can also see a tremendous contradiction in these philosophies of social/political independence. First, European universalism-exceptionalism: their belief in man’s inalienable rights conflicted with Euro-tribal/national racism. It’s quite a convenient way to limit the “inalienable” clause by qualifying whose a man and who isn’t; and obviously, the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East as man, weren’t men. Second, suffrage and political representation granted to citizens  vs with class elitism, where the “natural aristocracy” as Adams puts it, was supposed temper the impulses of the “mob” (Hobbes’s distrust of human nature, conflicting with political rights).

In fact, Adams horrified reaction to France’s revolutionary government instituting a unicameral legislature is a good example of this interesting schizophrenia. The brutal crackdowns in Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion (essentially led by dispossessed farmers, who saw no benefits from the Revolution and did end up losing the land and moving west) is another. Jefferson’s stirring eloquence against the evils of Negro Slavery, contrasted by his refusal to free his own slaves so that they could labor for his debt on grounds of “self preservation” (but which really meant preservation of his princely lifestyle).

The later political careers of men like Adams and Jefferson are quite interesting; they show how the liberals of the Revolution became the conservatives of the new American government. The Revolution ended up replacing one elite gobbling power and resources, with another. At the end of the day, the rebellion was about the fact that the British were cutting into too great a share of the American planter/mercantile class’ profits. The revolutionary experiment was about shattering a political glass ceiling, only to swiftly replace it with an economic one. These are my critiques of McCullough’s portrait work: it’s too glowing, too caught in the golden haze of post-national romanticism. The good old days . . . the larger than life Founding Fathers . . . well, perhaps the US hasn’t corrupted the political program they set down, perhaps the later generations followed the blue print only too well.

So, I’m supposed to be a TA this coming school quarter (me, a TA! . . . who would have believed it?). Anyhow, I submitted my weekly reading plan on the selected class theme—Heroes and Superheroes. Response: apparently, I need to add more movies because surly, 18 year old math majors aren’t going to slug through reams of cultural theory.  I was particularly recommended District 9, the recent South African sci-fi flick  that’s been making waves on the indie-film circuit. I checked out the trailer and had mixed feelings:

I haven’t watched it, so it seems awfully unfair to be judgmental: but it just looks so gosh darned dark. A mix of Independence Day, Cloverfield, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as James Berardinelli puts it. If there aliens in the universe who were to enter into our world, they should slap the global movie industry with a libel suit for the way they’ve been used for our meta-reflections into human nature.

The reason I’m fond of Star Trek (the series, not the ridiculous new movie) is the blend of optimism about science and humanity: technology is enabling, and it is a matter of collective education to progress to a point where we stop using our know how to oppress others. District 9 seems to plunge straight into our Armageddon complex: i.e., our 20th century crimes prove that we are hopelessly fallen, and the only road ahead of us is cataclysm and destruction. Umm, okay.

I get the point that District 9 makes interesting parallels with apartheid, genocide, etc. But really, do aliens have to be repulsive looking robots? Do human characters have to show up their physical ugliness by worse deeds (i.e., making the point ad infinitum that we are psychically, morally repulsive, etc?). At some level, this is a failure of imagination; we can’t imagine an alternative, and that is why we are foreclosing other possible futures. Imagination is a powerful thing, after all; its self-fulfilling.

So anyways, I’ll watch District 9 . . . and will then post my own review. But I might end up teaching it, regardless of my feelings .  . . I’m sure the kids will love it.

I just finished watching one of Bollywood’s mega hits of 2007: Bhool Bhulaiya. The production values were fantabulous . . . Bollywood certainly doesn’t suffer from underfunded cinema budgets. The movie opens with a young Indian prince returning home from (where else?) America with his mod scod wife to take up residence in his haunted palace, much to the horror of his extended family. I settled in for 4 hours of the normal Bollywood flick with anticipation: the lovely Vidya Balan played the modern wife, the prince was suitably good looking, there was a lovely, romantic musical number in the start. (KK, love your voice!)

But as the movie wore on, I began to feel shock. Could it be that India, after a vigorous feminist movement, India, the country of heroines like Arundhati Roy and ladies of the Narmada Dam campaign, is regressing to reactionary antidiluvianism? The ghost of a mistreated dancer from generations past seems to strike and things start going horribly wrong, especially to the young princess. The Levi-clad, laptop-comfy prince obviously doesn’t believe in supernatural hoo-haa. He does apparently believe in prosecution on suspicion, accusing his jilted cousin (’cause, losing a hot guy like him is enough to drive any chick psychotic). Next, a famous Indian American psychiatrist—Akshay Kumar going for comedy but coming off as buffonish—is called in to treat the cousin. On his expert advice, she is then shunned by her family and locked up in a room. And when we are treated to a indigestible psychological explanation for how it’s the young princess who is possessed by the ghost of the murdered dancer, there is painful sequence in which a pundit called in for exorcism actually strikes the crazed lady with a stick. That sound you hear? That’s The Feminist Mystique going up in flames.

India is trying to recreate the ideal Aryan culture that it believes it lost with the coming of Islam to India (a narrative processed straight from the history books of British Orientalists). I’m from that part of the world and have been watching Hindi movies forever, but now, I actually have to read the subtitles. Not that it’s surprising, what with Bollywood being one of the major vehicles to Sanskritize the language of the subcontinent. But with the culture and traditions, patriarchy is also making a comeback. This is where you have women touch their husbands’ feet in a recognition of their godhead (as in, pati dev), where lower classes deferred the value of their whole existence to the comfort and desires of the upper castes, and where respect for parents is conflated to a situation in which they have an unhealthy degree of influence in their children’s lives: Ekta Kapoor’s soap serials, anyone?

Traditional forms of authority are given uncritical validation. In Bhool Bhulaiya, you have an ecstatic ceremony for the prince’s return, where all the villagers turn out to watch the royal return to his palace in a carriage drawn by a white horse and get coronated with a diamond decked turban. That’s really nice, except India is apparently a democracy. And his wife, before the musical number says something that roughly translates as: “I’m so blessed you have made this unworthy thing [nacheez] to be your Rani.” I’m blessed I didn’t have dinner before I started watching this flick or it would have gone through an unpleasant trajectory.

With the separation of India and Pakistan, both nations have tried to turn their back on what was a brilliant shared culture and tried to ethnicize their shared heritage. So, here, you have Gandhi-esque pastoral scenes of village pundits meditating under trees, rituals at the holy river Ganga (presumably . . . its nice that the prince’s state is located in a part where the Ganga flows through), Bengali dance sequences, all set in the backdrop of Mughal architecture with those unmistakable arches and embellished wall paintings. There’s also the obligatory Muslim song sequence, where Muslim forms of worship are portrayed in an elaborate (and usually ritualistically wrong) sequences that serves to exoticize and other Islam: setting Islam apart as something strange and foreign, not a force that was integrated with the very fabric of the subcontinent for hundreds of years. Only as far back as Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah, Hindi films represented Indian Muslims with a naturalism that could only come from home. Now, we’re a fashion that’s slated to go out of date.

For me, Bhool Bhulaiya is exactly what the name suggests; something that deserves bhool-jana (forgetting).

The past week, I went to see The Great Debators with a friend. The opening shot announced that this was indeed a “big” film; the smooth, panoramic shot of the Southern Texas’ forests and mangroves not only set the scene, but spoke volumes about the production values, the expertise, and the money behind the movie. Clearly Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington also felt the need for a change from the low budget movies in which black men inevitably end up cavorting around in women’s clothes or fat suits (sometimes both at the same time). Thank God.

James Berardinelli sees the movie as the epic struggle of Wiley College’s talented black debate team to rise up against the racism that infected the 1930s South. The heart of darkness unveiled in The Great Debaters is of course, the lynching scene; as Melvin Tolson drives his team to a competition, they come across a gathering of white rurals congregating around the charred body of a young African American hung on a tree. “Was he a farmer, was he a sharecropper?” wonders one of the debaters later on. “They lynch people in Texas,” the young James Farmer Jr. tells his Harvard audience in the concluding debate. True, the ignorance and brutality of South deserves to be recorded as one of the darker chapters in human history. At a salon I recently attended, we saw printouts of historical lynch scenes where some members of the the white audience congregating around lynchings were actually smiling in glee. Clearly, there is no darkness like the darkness in the heart of man. Read the rest of this entry »