Rush is Right - Part 1

Once upon a time, a significant portion of Rush’s listeners were liberals, but those days are long gone. I’m probably one of few liberals who still hang in there, not because I enjoy it, but because Rush mirrors the views of a good many Americans, including some of my best friends. El Rushbo is worth an estimated $330 million; he didn’t acquire that fortune by challenging his listeners. He does not shape their opinions so much as articulate them.

Arguably there is an exception to this: Rush excels at playing upon the emotions of his listeners. His basic frame is that liberals are willfully, knowingly wrong. Liberals don’t have policy differences with Republicans. Rather, they are intent on taking your freedom and establishing a totalitarian regime in which everyone must embrace their ideology or else. This is a modern expression of a trope that has existed since the American Revolution. Historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it “the paranoid style in American politics.” It is a continuation of the revolutionaries’ conviction that the British government was a threat to liberty. Thus, throughout our history, one’s political opponents have been depicted as a threat to liberty as well.

A basic tool in Rush’s arsenal is mockery. He not only excoriates liberals, he caricatures them, typically by impersonation. Apparently liberals habitually speak in an indignant, flustered tone. This mockery is especially pronounced when he touches upon diversity. He has a pet term for feminists—“feminazis”—but other groups attract his scorn without even the honor of a pejorative tagline. Essentially diversity has no purpose other than bashing white males and indeed, the “diversity police” have no tolerance for any viewpoint that does not wholly conform to theirs. Rush takes particular umbrage in multiculturalism and particular glee in mocking it.

There are nonetheless two respects in which I agree with Rush. In my previous posts I have outlined them. To begin with, according to Rush, in the cosmos of diversity’s proponents, “The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men.” This is an extreme formulation of an argument I have advanced that diversity’s dominant trope is the Exodus: the liberation of people long oppressed. This narrative requires a Pharaoh, and the role is thrust upon heterosexual white men. That is what once annoyed me about the work of Jamaica Kinkaid in "A Small Place" and Malek Alloula’s "The Colonial Harem."

One available response is to just suck it up and listen to what they have to say. A better response—although difficult to pull off—is to reject whiteness as a core feature of one’s identity. If you don’t think you’re white, you’re not going to feel targeted by the world’s Kinkaids and Alloulas. But it is really no wonder that a good many white males just get angry and resentful and switch off. Rush faithfully reflects their sense of alienation.

I’ll explore my second area of agreement with Rush in my next post.

I Know You Are But What Am I? Rush on Race

One of the obligations of maintaining a blog is that you have to post at a consistent rate. For a while I was publishing a discursive post every day. The trouble is, since my last post I’ve been too swamped with my regular work to fulfill my promise to get back to posting about Rush Limbaugh and racism. But consider this a down payment.

Rush’s characteristic take on racism is to declare that the proponents of multiculturalism are the real racists. A sample:

“You can give the proper definition to a lot of things. The proper definition of socialism? They [Millennials] don’t know what that is. They don’t know what the real definition of communism is. Millennials today hear ‘socialist’ and think that it means being social, being nice to people. Living in groups of people that treat each other fairly. That’s what think socialism is. They have no idea what it is. Same thing with racism. Racism now is any disagreement with somebody… By the way, the only people that can be racist in America today are white men.

“(paraphrased) ‘African-Americans or women, Asian men or women, Injun men or women? It’s impossible for them to be racist ’cause they’re minorities. They don’t have any power to hurt anybody with their racism. The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men. White Christian gay men are excluded because they’re gay, and gays are a minority and therefore they can’t be racist.’ It’s hideous, and it’s ridiculous. It ought to be… It should have become a joke by now, as frequently and as often as the Democrats are out there charging it. It’s lost whatever meaning it ever really had.

“There are some genuinely rotten people out there who are racist, and there’s many proper definitions of the word. Now, Al [a caller] was right that a lot of what is just rude and impolite behavior is being chalked up to racism. But racism, in its real form, is hideous. It believes in the inferiority of other human beings because of the way they look. It believes in the inferiority of people over things they have no control over. Real racism is despicable, it’s hideous, and it’s ugly — and this is what’s so outrageous.

“They’re just charging that any white person’s existence today is racist, and it traces to the founding of the country. That’s what they’re saying. I mean, there are college courses now on what type of where white people are being forced to take it so that they’re being forced to understand their born-with, inbred racism. They’re being taught there’s nothing they can do about it, that they are inherently flawed in this way. The only thing they can do is constantly apologize and make amends at every turn. Well, what we’re talking about here is not racism.

“And the racism that’s properly defined, there isn’t that much of it. That’s the real thing that irritates me. When you start talking about actual, real racism, the Democrats want you to believe it’s everywhere, and that it exists solely in one political camp: The Republican camp. Barack Obama was one of the biggest racists you can believe. Racism is also the active attempt to divide people on their human differences. I’ll tell you: Trayvon Martin was the first episode where Obama sought to divide.”

Left Cheapens Real Hate , Calls Ivanka's White Dog Racist

Jail Break - Part 2

Some years ago I chanced to attend a Pentecostal church whose membership was about evenly divided between whites and Blacks, with numerous interracial families. After the service I stood chatting in the parking lot with a number of men, all of whom happened to be white, married to African-American women, and thus the fathers of children of mixed heritage. We all knew that in our society these children would all be seen as African-American and treated as such—which would of course inevitably make them subject to racial discrimination. Thus these white men had a problem that most white men do not: the anxieties that go with raising non-white children in a society still suffused with white racism.

They knew that, although themselves recipients of “white privilege,” they could not impart this privilege to their own flesh and blood. Thus they urgently wanted a society in which the privilege was dissolved. They had no idea of how to accomplish this—not because they were unintelligent but because they knew the grip that white racism still holds upon our society. They understood its power—so powerful that even as individuals, they could not cease to receive its benefits. There was, as I suggested in my previous post, no place to leave their whiteness upon the altar.

What does it mean to be white? It means to be the member of a race, so what does race mean? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars were confident that they knew. They went about classifying humanity into races and assigning characteristics to each. By the twentieth century, however, the problems with this “scientific racism” became apparent. Writing in 1942, a white Southerner noted that scholars of race could not even agree upon the number and composition of the races. “Thus one scholar makes an elaborate classification of twenty-nine races; another tells us there are six; Huxley gives us four; Kroebner, three; Goldweiser, five; and Boas inclines to two, while his colleague, Linton, says there are twelve or fifteen. Even my dullest students sometimes note this apparent contradiction.”

The races have no objective existence. They are invented, inhabited, modified, and destroyed. In the antebellum United States it was common to hear scientists speak of Slavs, Teutons, Celts, Hebrews, Alpines, and Mediterraneans as separate races, though nowadays all such individuals would be considered Caucasian or white. The historical melding of these groups gives the game away, for the success of “whiteness” resides in its political and social utility, and each of these groups was able to place itself on the same political and social footing as the Anglo Saxons who long dominated the United States. Whiteness is ultimately about power, pure and simple.

I own a white skin, and I have no idea how to divest myself of the privilege that whiteness confers. But I *do* have it within my ability to recognize that this privilege is unfair. I may be stuck with it, but I can choose not to make it part of who I am. I don’t have to think of myself as white—or I can at least try not to think of myself as white. By this reasoning whiteness is no longer about privilege. It is about inhabiting a kind of prison.

When I think of this, I think of a passage from “John Brown’s Body,” Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem about the American Civil War. It is in a context far removed from the prison of white identity but it conveys a sense of what is involved with any form of psychological imprisonment.

The passage occurs in a soliloquy in which Lincoln’s thoughts range across the course of his life and psyche as he awaits the outcome of the battle of Antietam—which, if a victory, he has decided will bring the moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Toward the end of the soliloquy he imagines himself in a psychological prison, and speaks of languishing in “the blind darkness, … the lonely cave // That never hears a footstep but my own // Nor ever will, while I’m a man alive // To keep my prison locked from visitors.”

Lincoln then asks:

What if I heard another footstep there,
What if, some day—there is no one but God,
No one but God who could descend that stair
And ring his heavy footfalls on the stone.
And if He came, what would we say to Him?

Here is where the poem, for me, captures the tragedy of making whiteness the core of one’s identity:

That prison is ourselves that we built,
And, being so, its loneliness is just.
And, being so, its loneliness endures.

Still, there may be hope of a way out, a jailbreak:

But, if another came,
What would we say?
What can the blind say, given back their eyes?

No, it must be as it has always been.
We are all prisoners in that degree
And will remain so, but I think I know
This—God is not a jailor….

Jail Break - Part 1

It’s time to bring this series of posts in for a landing so we can return to El Rushbo and his gleeful embrace of “Barack the Magic Negro.” This requires a post longer than usual, so please bear with me. I have divided it into two parts. Even so, this first part is 1,100 words in length.

The project of multiculturalism, or to put it another way, diversity, implicitly reflects the Exodus narrative—the release from bondage of a people long oppressed. The “long oppressed” includes a long list of people: African Americans, Latino/Latinas, Native Americans, women (aside from conservative women unsympathetic to multiculturalism), persons who identify as LGBTQ, and persons with disabilities, to name a few. That narrative requires a Pharaoh, and white males are assigned that role whether they like it or not. I myself do not like it, although I am prepared to tolerate it.

But plenty of white males--and for that matter plenty of white females--have had it up to here with playing Pharaoh. Which is a big reason they listen avidly to Rush Limbaugh and his hordes of imitators. It’s also a big reason so many of them voted for Donald Trump. For years they have howled about “political correctness,” although, whether or not they know it, they deploy the phrase as a way to invalidate any opinion they find uncomfortable. Instant invalidation is, indeed the go-to tactic of aggrieved whites. Black Lives Matter? No, ALL Lives Matter. (No shit. But the force of meaning of “Black Lives Matter” is “Black Lives Matter Too.”)

To be sure, political correctness does exist. Some people, no matter their ideology, are temperamentally fundamentalists, and political correctness is a reflection of that. But it’s not nearly as widespread as it’s cracked up to be. What *is* widespread are the millions of people who honest to God really have been oppressed. And historically their oppressors have been white. White heterosexuals, to be precise.

I have just turned 60, and I am old enough to recall a time when this oppression was unabashed, when heterosexual whites still openly regarded this country as a country of, by, and for heterosexual white people; and non-white and/or non-heterosexual people had better know their place. That African Americans should “know their place” was a byword, and, with some allowance for socio-economic class, it applied to Hispanics just as forcefully. As for individuals who nowadays self-identify as LGBTQ: they had no place. They were regarded as perverts, pure and simple.

The incomplete triumph of the modern Civil Rights Movement changed that, sort of. But white racism didn’t disappear, it just took another form. It went underground—often so far underground that many whites didn’t realize that it continued to exist, alive and well and residing in themselves, manifested in a myriad of ideas and actions that were racist but operated outside their conscious awareness.

Aside from being self-aware about it, I am not so different from those whites. I was born in North Carolina during the final years of legal segregation, and although my parents were not virulent racists they reflected the racism of their time and place. They breathed it in and out as naturally as they breathed oxygen. Inevitably, they raised me to breathe it in and out as well. Infants and toddlers figure out the world with astonishing speed, and one of the first things I learned is that my skin was white and so I *belonged* in a way that other kids did not.

This did not mean that I hated Blacks, nor did my parents, and we did not consider ourselves to be racist. Yet that was a mistake. Because racism is frequently vicious and ugly, it is too easily conflated with racial hatred. In fact, however, the essence of white racism is the preservation of “white privilege;” that is, the dominant position of white power and values. That privilege can take a variety of forms, many of them so obvious that, paradoxically, whites overlook them completely.

The term “white privilege” is unfortunate. Although innocuous in academic circles, once released into general discourse it drove many whites straight up a wall. “Privilege” had strong associations with inherited wealth, and when used in that way most whites, accurately, could say that it did not apply to them. “White advantage” is a better term. Yet even this requires explanation.

“White privilege” echoes “male privilege,” a common term in the feminist lexicon. But In 1988 feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh published an essay reporting on the result of a thought experiment in which she replaced “male” with “white,” and considered the ways in which her white skin gave her the sort of unearned advantages that feminists had long ascribed to males.

Mulling this over, McIntosh compiled a list of forty-six ways in which her whiteness operated, on an everyday basis, to make her life less burdensome. A sample: “I can if I wish to arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. . . . I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. . . . I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. . . . I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race. . . . My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races. . . . I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.”

To repeat a point, whites take such advantages so much taken for granted that they operate outside conscious awareness. McIntosh herself reported that in order to remember her list she literally had to carry it around with her.

By this reasoning the essence of white racism is not hostility toward other races but rather the preservation of the advantages that go along with owning a white skin. This imperative is so deeply engrained in our society that the advantages are nearly impossible to relinquish even when one wishes to do so. There is seemingly no altar upon which to place one’s whiteness.

Ha! I Found You!

Many years ago I attended a colloquium on multiculturalism in the classroom. It was run by an expert from Midwestern State University, an African American professor of education who was probably in his mid-fifties. At one point the professor asked a question about how best to deploy multicultural perspectives and offered a menu of four possible responses. Then he went over each response, one by one, and asked us to raise our hand when he mentioned the one that sounded best to us. I didn't listen carefully enough, didn't realize the menu was loaded, and raised my hand at one of the "wrong" responses. In fact, it happened to be the worst of the wrong responses.

The professor pounced. He asked me what I taught. History, I said, and when he asked what sort of history, I said military history. He began to explain to me, in pretty heavy-handed fashion, about the deficiencies of the response I'd chosen. It was clear to me that it never entered his head that I might have chosen the response from anything less than a deliberate, committed, reactionary position. His tone of voice became mocking. He addressed me as "General" several times. All in all, he did the best he could to make me feel like a fool. And he really seemed to enjoy doing it.

Other than the way he treated me, I thought his presentation was useful, and when I ran into him afterward I made a point of thanking him. I don't know that I was being gracious so much as I wanted to indicate that he had been wrong about me and I was really on his side. He could barely bring himself to grunt at me in response. I had the distinct impression he didn't want me on his side. I had the impression that although he had spent his life struggling against the bigots of the world, he rarely had the chance to unload on one. He had enjoyed unloading on me, and that was the value I had to him: someone to unload upon.

I could easily multiply examples of this. And since we tend to generalize most freely from our negative experiences, I could easily forget the numerous times I have spoken to proponents of multiculturalism who were as gracious as this professor of education proved malignant.

Still, a great deal of writing that deals with colonialism, sexism, racism, and the like--particularly some of the earliest and most seminal work in the field--is politically very charged. It has an adversary, the white male, and usually it assumes that all white males are alike. If it leaves me as a white male feeling insulted and invisible, both at the same time, I might consider that it is often written by people who have felt insulted and invisible their whole lives. I can suck it up for the time it takes to read a book or an article.

Gut Reactions

Whence did my gut reaction to Alloula's “Colonial Harem” arise?

Alloula plainly saw me--a white male--as being in effect the colonial photographer. That was obvious to everyone in the seminar. The book was a polemic against people like me. Although I happened to be reading his text, I was not his intended reader--except in the limited sense that he considered people like me the "sender" of "this immense postcard" he was returning.

Alloula also saw what he was doing as political, an act of resistance--as Alloula put it himself, an "exorcism." The people he was resisting, presumably, were also people like me.

So there I was, willing to read Alloula and hear what he had to say, only to discover that Alloula's response to me was a book-length diatribe against me. And not even a diatribe addressed directly to me, but rather a diatribe about me with me present. Reading Aloulla was like being insulted and treated as invisible, both at the same time.

As irrational as this gut reaction might be, I think it's worth taking seriously, because I don't think I'm alone in having it. I think white males have this gut reaction constantly when they dip into works concerning colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. I think it's tiresome to be constantly positioned in the role of Pharaoh, and I think a white male has only three responses to being positioned in that fashion.

The first is to turn away, to reject, to roll one's eyes, to scoff.

The second is to deny that one is the target, by agreeing with and trying to identify with the Alloulas of the world.

The third is to take it--either because one thinks one deserves it, or because one accepts it as the price of hearing what the Alloulas of the world have to say.

The first reaction is probably the most common, and it fuels the widespread exasperation, on the part of conservative white males (and for that matter conservative white females), with the whole project of multiculturalism.

The second reaction is common among most white male academics. And after all, why not? They didn't create the colonial project--or sexism, or racism--so they can as readily choose to identify with the oppressed as with the oppressor. Which would be fine except that ordinarily they benefit from a power structure that favors white males as much as if they actively identified with and supported it. Which makes the second reaction a cheap and easy game.

The third reaction is the hardest, because it obviously requires accepting a position that is unpleasant. This is tough enough when one is merely reading a book or article. It's much more difficult when one actually engages face to face with the Alloulas of the world, as we’ll see in my next post.

Disappointment and Rejection

Last week in Claire Robertson's readings course (Colonialism, Women and Sexuality), we read Malek Alloula's "The Colonial Harem" (1990), a pretty much standard text in postcolonial studies, especially in critiquing what Edward Said terms "orientalism." Alloula is convinced that when European men photographed Algerian women to service the burgeoning postcard industry ca. 1890-1930, it was all about sexualizing, possessing, and penetrating those women. Judging by the photo, Alloula has a point. But Alloula thinks the same agenda is present in the photo that adorns the cover of his book; also numerous photos of Algerian women covered head-to-toe and veiled so that only their eyes are visible. In fact, postcards featuring veiled Algerian women handily outnumber any other image in the book.

Alloula, without the benefit of having been a colonial photographer himself, knows the colonial photographer's every thought. "The first thing the foreign eye catches about Algerian women is that they are concealed from sight. . . . The opaque veil that covers her intimates clearly and simply to the photographer a refusal. Turned back upon himself, upon his own impotence in the situation, the photographer undergoes an initial experience of disappointment and rejection. Draped in a veil that cloaks her to her ankles, the Algerian woman discourages the scopic desire (the voyeurism) of the photographer. She is the concrete negation of this desire and thus brings to the photographer confirmation of a triple rejection: the rejection of his desire, the rejection of his 'art,' and of his place in a milieu that is not his own."

Yep, the colonial photographer must be thinking this. As opposed to, just maybe, an initial experience of "Hey great! It's only 9 a.m. and here's a throng of veiled women I can photograph. At this rate I could complete my assignment by noon!" Reading along as Alloula recounted, page upon indignant page, every voyeuristic, sexually frustrated thought the photographer has, I began to get a little ticked off. This seemed a cheap and easy game. You start with a set of assumptions about the colonial photographer--as if there were only one colonial photographer--and read them into every single postcard. And how do you know your assumptions are valid? Why, just look at those postcards! Isn't it obvious?

Later, when the class met, I was comfortable enough with everyone else to say that the book had rubbed me the wrong way. The response was interesting. Most of the grad students are in women's studies. Well-grounded in literary criticism, they weren't at all fazed by Alloula's approach to analyzing the "text" of these postcards--though they were quick to perceive that Alloula could be read as sexist: "How dare those colonial men gaze upon our women?"--as if the Algerian woman were a possession of the Algerian male. Nor were they put off by my own visceral reaction to the book. But they did encourage me to think more carefully about whence my reaction arose. And once I did, it was not at all hard to figure out its roots. But first, let Alloula get a word in edgewise:

“I attempt here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender.

"What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me, were that still necessary, the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian, must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history. Among us, we believe in the nefarious effects of the evil eye (the evil gaze). We conjure them with our hand spread out like a fan. I close my hand back upon pen to write my exorcism: this text.”

-- Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, p. 5

A Small Essay on "A Small Place"

Jamaica Kincaid's “A Small Place” is a small book--just eight-one pages. You can read it in one sitting, and since she writes so wonderfully well, you will probably do exactly that. The book opens in the second-person: Kincaid addressing the reader directly, a conceit she maintains throughout. The notional reader is a white American or (worse) European or (worst of all) Briton, and Kincaid leaves you in no doubt that you suck. You don't get it. Notwithstanding the fact that you're reading her book.

Because if you got it you would neither be reading the book nor, in Kincaid's imagination, peering down with pleasure at the beauty of Antigua as your plane makes its approach into the main airport at St. John's, the capital. You would be reflecting on the fact that "this empire business was all wrong" and would be "wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their [your forebears'] bad deeds [from which you still benefit, you bastard], for no disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death would have been better."

In contrast, the indigenous population of Antigua is pure and innocent. Well, not exactly indigenous, the Siboney, Carib, and Arawak Indians having been long since wiped out and replaced by West African slaves, from whom most of the 68,000 citizens of Antigua & Barbuda are descended. And not exactly pure, since Kincaid makes clear that the government is spectacularly corrupt. But the Brits showed them how to do it, so the Brits are to blame. And have I mentioned lately that you suck?

As the book progresses, the tone shifts a bit. It's as if Kincaid, hearing her jeremiad, begins to question one aspect of it, namely whether the Antiguans--even ordinary Antiguans--are really that pure and innocent. She doesn't unbend about whites, though. Or for that matter Arabs, for Arabs from Syria came to Antigua some years ago, made a killing, got hooked in with the government and enthusiastically nursed at the public teat. (Antigua even maintains, at considerable expense, an ambassador to Syria, and you can easily guess why it does and who gets to draw the salary as ambassador.)

But at the end of “A Small Place,” the tone becomes wistful and heartbreakingly sad. Here is the conclusion:

“Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted, there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, assuming you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all the things that adds up to. So too with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.”

It takes Kincaid eighty-one pages to get to that point. The average white person wants to be at that point on page one, if not the title page, if not the cover. The average white person wants to object that he himself never held slaves or sat behind a desk in a colonial office, or shot any "wogs," so he is in no way responsible for the on-going pain and poverty in postcolonial societies. And weren't the Japanese just as bad? The Moguls? The Aztecs? The Africans themselves through their complicity in the slave trade? Don't all human societies dominate other groups given the chance? Well, yes. But you have to ask yourself--or at least, I have to ask myself--whether questions like that open up terrain for exploration or foreclose further inquiry.

What does any of this have to do with military history? It happens that Kincaid thinks that "race is a false idea. It's just an invention to enforce power. So I never talk about race. I talk about the inflammatory thing which is power." She thus has something in common with military historians, who seldom talk about race but have as their core concern that inflammatory thing called power. It's just that Kincaid hits it from an unusual angle of vision. An angle in which Admiral Horatio Nelson, by preserving British command of the seas, makes it safe for British ships to carry British goods, British officials, British soldiers everywhere and thereby perpetuate the British colonial project. Which makes him "a maritime criminal."

Kinkaid writes and gives readings and is, for all the anger in her work, harmless. Give her an AK-47, however, and she would look quite differently. One might say that Jamaica Kincaid articulates with flowing prose what other postcolonial men and women articulate with streams of bullets and book bags filled with plastic explosives. That makes her of interest to military historians.

Kiss Me, Hardy, I'm a Maritime Criminal

Just before the start of Winter Quarter 2004, I asked my colleague Claire Robertson if I could sit in on her graduate readings course, “Women, Colonialism, Sexuality.” By “graduate readings course” I mean a weekly discussion-based seminar intended to assist graduate students (those working on MA’s of PhD’s) in gaining a command of the key books, articles, and conceptual frameworks in a given field. I recently sent a email to Claire (now a professor emerita) requesting her to send a copy of the syllabus, which she still had in her files.

Here’s the part of the syllabus dealing with “Goals and Substance.” Personally, I’m going to imagine Rush Limbaugh reading it aloud:

“This reading course explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexuality in the context of colonialism, with a particular focus on women and gender. European and American colonialism was arguably the strongest political and cultural force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . It has/had many socioeconomic implications for both colonized and colonizer peoples, including women. . . . We will pay particular attention to the voices of colonized women and to their representations in colonialism.”

At this distance I don’t recall why I chose the course; probably because I was interested in learning something about post colonialism and a friend of mine, Steven Hyland (who was then a PhD student), recommended it to me. But whatever the reason, I was very glad I did.

Too often we see our colleagues mainly in faculty meetings. Too seldom do we choose to encounter them in their natural habitat, the classroom.

My first post in IPMH dealing with Claire’s course is dated January 16, 2004, which corresponds to the start of Block II of the course: “Experiences of the Colonized: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.” The first subject within that block: “Growing up under colonialism.”

***

Had a very interesting day yesterday which, unfortunately, I don't yet have time to describe. The high point was when I sat in on a course in colonialism, women and sexuality taught by my colleague, Claire Robertson. The reading for the day was Jamaica Kincaid's “A Small Place” (1988), billed as a first-person perspective on growing up under colonialism (in her case, the Caribbean island of Antigua). I expect to offer my extended reflections in a day or two. For now, military historians may be interested to know that Kincaid refers to Admiral Horatio Nelson as "the maritime criminal Nelson." One way to deal with this is to roll one's eyes. A better way is to ask why Kincaid might feel, to the core of her being, that the hero of Trafalgar merits that appellation, and at the same time ask oneself from whence the urge to roll one's eyes arises.

The Case of the Missing Mojo

In the film, “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), Dr. Evil assembles his minions around a long conference table to inform them of his latest plot. “As you know,” he begins, “every diabolical scheme I've hatched has been thwarted by Austin Powers. And why is that, ladies and gentlemen?”

“Because you never kill him when you get the chance and you're a dope?” sneers Scott, his estranged teen-aged son.

“No, because Austin Powers has '’mojo.’”

Number Two, Dr. Evil’s chief male henchman: “Mojo?”

Frau, his chief henchwoman: “Yes, mojo. The mojo is the life force, the essence, the libido, the ‘right stuff.’”

“It's what the French call a certain ‘I don't know what,’” Dr. Evil adds.

And indeed, using a time machine, Dr. Evil goes back to the 1960’s and steals Austin Powers’ mojo.

Apparently he also stole mine, because around 2000 I realized it was gone.

This isn’t funny. Stop laughing.

If Austin Powers’ mojo was the power to defeat evil and get laid, mine was the self-confidence and joy in my profession that had allowed me to be a productive research scholar.

At first I had trouble getting people to believe me. My therapist thought I was being self-critical. But she humored me by referring me to a colleague who dealt extensively with instances of blocked productivity. He started off by asking me to tell him about what I had managed to publish in the past five years. I told him. He almost literally kicked me out of his office.

“You’re more productive than 75 percent of the people at OSU!”

So he was of no help. But I knew I was in a lot of trouble.

I had several book projects already in the production pipeline: three co-edited volumes and a book on the Overland Campaign during the Civil War. But once they appeared, there was nothing behind them.

I still don’t know what happened to my “mojo.” However, I did find an outlet that stopped me from being crippled altogether.

In December 2003 I began to keep a blog of sorts, although I had heard only vaguely of blogs and had never actually seen one. So my “blog” was actually a series of linked web pages, which I wrote mostly for myself—I had no idea that anyone could read it because I wasn’t sure how anyone could even find it. A year later I got a proper blogging platform (Blogger). I called it “War Historian,” which soon moved to a WordPress platform and became “Blog Them Out of the Stone Age,” and eventually obtained something of a following. But that lay years in the future.

In the beginning, I called my assemblage of linked web pages “Interrogating the Project of Military History,” (henceforth IPMH) and at this point my walkabout went online.

I’m glad that happened when it happened. Because it enabled me to report and reflect in detail on a colleagues’ readings course I had asked to audit informally. The colleague was Claire Robertson (now retired), whom Rush would term a Feminazi; and the course was “Women, Colonialism, and Sexuality.”

The posts over the next few days will be drawn from IPMH. And trust me, they will provide us a useful lens through which to examine this “Is Rush a racist” question. Of course, the question itself is trivial. It’s the larger issue of the clash between new conceptualizations of gender, race and class, on the one hand; and people who resent the hell out of them, partly because they were bound to piss some people off--that was actually kind of the point; and partly because of the way these conceptualizations have entered the public discourse in a way that has pissed and still pisses off a lot of people, occasionally including myself.

But it is possible that some things are worthy of engagement, even if they piss us off. Maybe because they piss us off.

So stay tuned. You’re going to find this Feminazi course fascinating.

Walkabout

In 1992 I got the biggest single break of my life. I got the job I now hold—a tenured faculty member in what is arguably the best military history program in the country. (My use of “arguably” is completely insincere, by the way.) As I would discover, however, it came with a cost. A pretty heavy cost, actually.

I’ll get to that in a bit, but first let me sketch what made it was such a big break.

The military history program here at THE Ohio State University was the creation (circa 1977) of Allan R. Millett and Williamson “Wick” Murray, both of whom are now among the top military historians in the world. (I’m not kidding. Look it up.) Allan specialized in modern US military history; Wick in modern European military history. In 1988 they were joined by another first-rate historian (and world class raconteur), John F. “Joe” Guilmartin, Jr., who specialized in early modern European military history. In each case, I wince at using “specialized” as a qualifier. All three produced scholarship that ventured far beyond their nominal areas of specialization.

In 1992 the department ran a search to hire yet a fourth military historian—an almost unheard-of embarrassment of riches—a tenure-track assistant professor who would specialize in early US military history. Such positions are rare: most military historians are hired to do American or European history, etc., and have to squeeze in military history among their other responsibilities.

A lot of recently minted PhD’s wanted that position. A comparative few had a shot at it. Initially I was not among that comparative few, more or less by definition: I was a doctoral candidate (soon to complete my PhD) in the OSU military history program. That was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Why? Because academic departments normally do not hire their own students. It smacks of intellectual incest. But the search committee did something unprecedented: it recommended to the full faculty that I should be one of the three finalists for the position. In the past, OSU products had gone to other institutions and returned to OSU, but none had been hired straight out of the graduate program. It was as much a testimony to the strength of the program as to my abilities, because if OSU did indeed have the best military history program, it seemed foolish not to rule out a product of that program.

I got the job. I could tell you stories about that, good and bad. And in various quarters it was bruited about for years that the fix had been in. But let that go. Here’s the point: I was now teaching in the same department as my two mentors, Millett and Murray. We didn’t need yet another Millett or Murray. I realized, if no one else did, that I had to find my own intellectual place in the world.

That was hard from the beginning and it got harder as the years rolled on. My first book won a prize, I got tenure a year early, and by my seventh year on the faculty I had won three teaching awards. But along the way I also got a world class education in academic politics, and anyway the stubborn fact remained that I was in the same department with Allan and Wick.

As far as I was concerned, that forced me into an extended search among other fields, hoping to find something I could integrate into my own graduate training in military history. I came to think of this experience as a walkabout. It was difficult. And although it also had rewarding aspects, I could never quite figure out which predominated, the difficulties or the rewards.

But my pain is your gain. Because along the way I learned, among other things, a good deal about the vexed question of racism, with which you, the reader, and I collided with the “Barack the Magic Negro” imbroglio a few posts back. (See "The Wicked Wit of Rush.") In my next post—actually my next several posts, because I already have them written--I’ll tell you about it.

Line of Departure

We are in northern Michigan on a cool summer night, and we are fighting the Cold War. But we don’t think of it that way, not even remotely.

There are seven of us, and we are sitting around a small camp fire, knocking back a few Budweisers. We’re not supposed to have a camp fire and we’re not supposed to have beer—and certainly should not have been drinking beer on the OP earlier in the day. But there are no officers around, which is frequently the case. It is one of the virtues of our MOS, that we are usually free of officers.

It is the end of Annual Training. Sixteen days, most of them spent in the field. We are National Guardsmen, part-time soldiers, most of us in it for the college tuition. We are also field artillery forward observers, trained to kill the enemy with binoculars and a map. And all we had done that day was observe fire as two mortar platoons expended their rounds, because of the standing orders to use up all ammunition that had been issued.

The prospect of going home is always appealing and maybe that’s why one of the guys begins to sing. The song is slightly ribald. We’re a little taken aback—by the singing, not the ribald part--but we’re feeling mellow and tolerant. Enough so that when the first guy challenges the guy next to him to sing a song, the second guy does. And it goes around like that, one guy to the next, until it’s my turn. I don’t have much of a voice but there’s a song that’s been on my mind and I’m relaxed enough to give it a go. The song is quiet, calm, and easy to sing:

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
and back when your grandfather's father was young,
men of these shores made and gave up their lives pulling up fish from the sea.

While down in the African slavery trade, stealing young men to cut sugar cane,
rum to New Bedford and codfish from Maine,
they were building a wall that will always remain.

Oh, the crown and the cross the musket and chain,
the white man's religion, the family name.
Two hundred years later and who is to blame?
The captain or the cargo or the juice of the sugar cane?

The doryman he knows when the riptides will run,
he sets out his nets and he sits in the sun.
He thinks of his family and drinks of his rum and he waits for the codfish to come.

It's the same goddamned ocean that keeps them alive,
it will swallow you up, it will let you survive.
It will heal you and steal you and take you away
like a note in a bottle with nothing to say

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
And back when your grandfather's father was young,
Men of these shores made and gave up their lives pulling up fish from the sea.

For a moment no one says anything. They didn’t quite expect to hear “Sugar Trade,” written by Jimmy Buffett but known to me by way of the cover by James Taylor.

"That's not bad, Grimsley," one of them finally says.

That was thirty-five years ago. I’ve been thinking about that song again of late. Especially the line about building a wall that would always remain.

This afternoon I told my 8-year old daughter the camp fire story and I began to sing the song. I got as far as “stealing young men to cut sugar cane” before I choked up a bit and simply spoke the rest of the lyrics. I explained to her about the triangle trade. (You may think it strange but she likes these kinds of moments with her father.) I find “Sugar Trade” for her on YouTube—you can find everything on YouTube—and we listen to Taylor’s gentle rendition. She asks to hear it again. We talk about it a little bit more, then go out to rake the leaves in our back yard.

Crash

We’ve reached a tough subject. Race. Is there anything that we as a society find more difficult to discuss? Or even understand?

I promise we’ll get back to Rush Limbaugh. He’s important to this discussion. But he isn’t all that important—not enough to disrespect the gravity of what is at stake here. Put simply, we can’t afford to make pronouncements about Rush and race until we have leeched out the ideologically-driven certainties and found a way to step back and think about race and racism with full acceptance of our shared humanity.

The number of people who so far “like” this page is as yet just slightly north of a hundred, but they hold a variety of opinions about politics and a variety of ways to conceptualize race and racism, and if I cannot speak effectively to both groups then I will have failed.

Where to begin? I can think of lots of people and places, and I will tell you about some of them, because if you can’t speak in your own voice and from your own experience about this stuff—if you deal in dogma—then the conversation is over before it begins.

So let me start by offering a single sentence, pronounced by James Baldwin, the American novelist, essayist, playwright and activist.

“As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

Don’t leap to conclusions about what that means. Don’t try to understand it too quickly. In fact, for the time being don’t try to understand it cognitively at all. Treat it as sort of a Zen koan. And grant me your patience as I try to share with you the best I have to offer on this fraught, tragic, infuriating, complex, and difficult, desperately important subject.

Note to friends reading this post by way of my having shared it to my personal page. Henceforth I will not be sharing very much. If you want to hear what I have to say, you know where to find me.