Dick J. Reavis : Diverse 'Moral Monday' Movement Captures Imagination in North Carolina

Demonstrator being arrested during a protest at the Legislative Building in Raleigh, N.C., Monday, May 6, 2013. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.

'Moral Monday':
Diverse NAACP-led movement
'achieves mass' in North Carolina

“When I got to an A.M.E. [African Methodist-Episcopal] church for a meeting called by the NAACP and saw that 70 percent of my audience was white, I knew that something was happening in North Carolina!” -- Rev. William Barber

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2013

RALEIGH, North Carolina -- Four weeks ago, on Monday, April 29, an encouraging but puzzling progressive movement was born in an unlikely locale, North Carolina.

It calls itself “Forward Together” or sometimes, “Moral Monday.” It is led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and it began when a group of 17, thoroughly integrated by age, sex, and race, refused to disperse during a protest inside the state’s General Assembly.

The “Moral Monday” protests have continued, and, at last notice, are gaining ground. On June 3, as a crowd estimated as high as 1,600 gathered, 151 demonstrators repeated the offense of the 17, bringing the total number of arrests to 309.

Most media observers believe that when and if the total surpasses 500, the campaign will attract significant national attention. Already the local press has got it right. “Moral Monday Achieves Mass” said the headline on a June 4 front-page story in the Raleigh News & Observer.

The movement is unquestionably onto something, but it’s also a puzzler in several ways. In the context of state politics, it is essentially a racial and Democratic rising. In 2008, by the narrowest of margins, a majority of North Carolinians voted to elect Barack Obama. The state hadn’t gone Democratic in a national election since 1976. The outcome was in part a reflection of racial demography: African Americans account for 22 percent of the state’s population, nine points above the national average.

North Carolina had long been governed by “moderate” Democrats, but Obama’s victory set off a white backlash that led to twin Republican victories, first in 2010 legislative races. In 2012, the state favored Romney and gave the GOP -- including numerous economic libertarians and Tea Party cranks -- veto-proof strength in both its legislative chambers.

Pat McCrory, an ostensibly business-as-usual Republican and mayor of Charlotte, the “Wall Street of the South,” won the governor’s race -- and immediately revealed an alliance with the ultra-right.

In a virtual blitzkrieg of activity, the General Assembly has passed or soon will pass bills whose consequences will upset almost everyone: measures to shorten the duration and amount of unemployment insurance payments, to impose a sales tax on medicines and groceries, and to abolish an enrollment cap on elementary classrooms.

Measures nixing federal funds to expand Medicaid, requiring voter IDs, and trimming voting hours are a part of the package, as is a bill to abolish inheritance taxes on estates of more than $5 million. The ultra-right’s push has suffered only one setback: a bill declaring Christianity as the state’s official religion didn’t get out of committee.

Rev. William Barber.

North Carolina is the least-unionized state in the nation and its white Democrats are led by Blue Dogs; fervent opposition wasn’t expected and hasn’t come from either quarter. Inspiration has instead come from the Rev. William Barber, an African-American backcountry preacher, not so polished as the grave and decorous Martin Luther King, but nearly as rousing, more eclectic or inclusive, and, odd as it may seem -- funnier!

Barber is a Baptist who, noting that one of the legislative proposals currently threatening the state is called House Bill 666, quipped that, “Some of y’all liberals won’t believe me, but I believe that even the computers numbering those bills are guided by the Word of God!” But Monday he turned his podium over to an LGBT spokesperson -- a white lesbian mother whose partner is black. Barber’s style may be archaic, but his message isn’t, as the old song says, “Gimme that old-time religion / It’s good enough for me.”

Internally, Barber’s movement is more akin to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- with an emphasis on “Christian” and “Leadership” -- than to that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The freewheeling debates of the Occupy movement, in which even fools could speak, are not a part of the scene. Instead, a coterie, including legendary white civil rights worker Bob Zellner and lawyer Al McSurely -- an organizer whose home was in 1967 bombed by the sheriff’s department in Harlan County, Kentucky -- plan what the movement will do from day to day.

The puzzling thing is that the response to their call has not been what anyone anticipated. While rallies in support of the cause are more representative of the state’s population, most of the movement’s arrestees -- including this reporter -- have been whites older than 50, most of them, college-educated -- Mother Jones and MSNBC fans. Physicians, professors, and even a few locally-elected officials are in their ranks.

Ten days ago, to build support for Moral Monday, Barber and his closest aides began a statewide speaking tour. “When I got to an A.M.E. [African Methodist-Episcopal] church for a meeting called by the NAACP and saw that 70 percent of my audience was white, I knew that something was happening in North Carolina!” Barber declared. But he wasn’t speaking in what we call “all seriousness”: he was noting an irony that puzzled, and maybe amused him, too.

Nobody has yet been able to fully explain the arrest-sheet demographics. Cuts in unemployment insurance don’t take effect until July 1: maybe the unemployed don’t yet know what’s in store, some people say. Others point out that today mugshots of the arrestees are posted within hours on the Internet, from which they are universally available, maybe forever.

Twenty years ago, only lawmen could tap such information electronically. Knowing this, college students are justifiably afraid that an arrest record will follow them for the rest of their lives. A few people complain about the dominance of god talk in Moral Monday speeches, but outspoken atheists are still beyond the pale here.

The commentary is not always doubtful, however. Ever since the fall of Reconstruction, a consensus has prevailed among Southern radicals. The greatest obstacle to the region’s progress, they’ve said, has been that whites were unwilling to follow black leadership. Barber’s rise as the head of a mostly white army has broken that taboo.

Because its demographics are new and could shift in unpredictable ways, no one is really predicting Moral Monday’s future, and I think there’s a good reason why. Nearly 50 years ago, I was an SCLC volunteer. One of my first duties was to redirect traffic from a parking lot at one venue to another, for a speech by Dr. King.

I resented the assignment because it meant that I wouldn’t get to hear him. But when I complained to a veteran field staffer, he imparted a bit of wisdom that’s still good coin. “Dr. King and them aren’t going to talk about anything but where the Movement is going,” he said. “But if anybody knew, this wouldn’t be a movement!”

[Dick J. Reavis is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. A former senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine and the author of six books, Reavis was a contributor to the original Rag in Austin and was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com. Read more articles by Dick J. Reavis on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : ¡Que Vivan los 'Plantonistas' de Wall Street!

"Plantonistas" protest Mexican election results at Mexico City's Zócalo plaza, Nov. 11, 2011. Photo by Régis Lachaume / Wikimedia Commons.
Borrowing From Mexico:
The Wall Street Plantón

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / October 19, 2011

The widespread demonstrations that have taken place since September 17, when “Occupy Wall Street” began, deserve a better generic name than “occupations.” After all, in American English at the moment, "occupation" is not a felicitous term. It usually refers to a spot in the labor force -- and today that may connote a suspect privilege -- or worse, the actions of the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nobody wants to be an "occupier."

Furthermore, we do not say, or want to say, “I spent two hours at the occupation today.” Instead, New Yorkers say, “I spent two hours at Liberty Square today,” unless they are policemen, who prefer “I surveilled Zuccotti Park today.” Elsewhere, most people say they were at "the Capitol" or "City Hall." These words are too localized for generic use.

Our Mexican neighbors have been staging protest campouts for more than 50 years. In 2006 thousands of them raised tents and kitchens in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main plaza, for two months in protest of vote fraud that denied leftist presidential candidate Andrés Miguel López Obrador a victory.

The era is long past when Americans had little choice but borrow words from the Athenians, Romans, French, or Germans. Mexicans are now our same-street, next-door neighbors and sometimes our kin -- or us -- and their term for a protest campout that lasts for day is un plantón (Plaahn-TONE). We should adopt it.

My Larousse dictionary says that un plantón is “a group of people who congregate and stay a certain time in a public place to protest or make demands.” In popular usage, el plantón is the generic site where they gather. The word is derived from the reflexive verb plantarse, which the Larousse dictionary defines as “to stand firm in one place,” as in, “She planted herself in the doorway and wouldn’t let anybody pass.”

What this means to us is that we should be able to say, “I spent two hours at the plantón this morning.”

The makings of a plantón. Image from Oaxaca: The Year After.
But even the Mexicans, with their long and essentially tragic history of protest, have not perfected protest terminology. They generally call people who attend plantones “manifestantes,” a term that is transparent even in English, but does not distinguish between ordinary demonstrators and those who overnight in a square or on a capitol grounds -- or advocate doing as much.

Most Americans are familiar with the term "Sandinistas" to denote disciples of the Nicaraguan rebel Augusto Sandino. A few years ago, we even coined the term ‘Clintonistas’ to refer to minions of a president. Mexicans haven’t adopted a specific term for people who take part in or advocate plantones, but following the logic of their language, we can coin a derivative which maybe they’ll borrow. We should not only say, “I spent the night at the plantón” but also “I am a plantonista.”

[Dick J. Reavis, who was a contributor to the original Rag in Austin, is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com. Read more articles by Dick J. Reavis on The Rag Blog.]

• Read more Rag Blog coverage of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Austin.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : Are Hoover and Obama Peas in a Pod?

Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama: Peas in a pod? Image from Decline of the Empire.
The more things change...
The Obama tax compromise

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2010

The story below is from the January 3, 1931 issue of the Southern Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA in Birmingham and Chattanooga, 1930-37.

Tax refund to rich exceeds Hoover relief

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In the midst of mass starvation Andy Mellon’s treasury department of the federal government refunded $126,838,333 in taxes to the wealthy bosses of the country during the last year.

Hoover’s lies

This sum is more than the paltry $116,000,000 appropriated by Congress for fake unemployment relief after so much bickering and Hoover’s talk about runs on the treasury. While millions of workers and farmers are starving, the government not only does all in its power to prevent any increase in taxation of the rich but actually returns them millions of dollars while talking of a treasury shortage.

At the same time figures released by the government show that in 1928 income tax returns revealed that there were 511 people in the country who had a yearly income of over $1,000,000, an increase of 221 over the previous year. These exploiters made their millions out of the workers and farmers who are now starving to death.


Plenty of cash

The United States Steel Corporation, which runs the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company in and around Birmingham, and has been laying off men by the thousands and cutting wages, received $15, 265, 343 in refunded taxes for the year. And Andy Mellon is one of the steel corporation men, and the money is turned over in cold cash.

In the face of those cold figures which show on which side of the line property lies, Hoover and Congress talk of the paltry sums appropriated for so-called relief as something the workers should be thankful for to the end of all time. This is nothing but plain robbery of the masses by a handful of people, the greatest criminals the world has ever known. These farts should give more energy to the unemployed workers in their fight for unemployment insurance and relief in cash which, as is seen, lies in plenty in the pockets of the bosses.

[Dick J. Reavis is an Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University who is indexing the Southern Worker. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : The Conspiracy in the Attic

Above, Dick Reavis now. Photo from San Antonio Current. Below, Dick Reavis then, in 1966 demonstration by Sexual Freedom League on University of Texas campus. Montage image scanned from The Daily Texan.

The conspiracy in an Austin attic:
My first rad-confab

I had never seen marijuana and though I knew that it was prohibited, it didn’t occur to me that my new friends were seated in a circle to pass a joint around.

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / August 19, 2010

[The Rag Blog has a lively online discussion group composed of friends and contributors. Many are veterans of the Sixties New Left and underground press and lately have been been sharing war stories of the early days. We intend to pass some of them your way. Journalist, author, and educator Dick J. Reavis admitted to the following.]

I joined Students for a Democratic Society by signing a card at a sidewalk recruiting booth outside Gregory Gymnasium at the University of Texas in Austin during fall semester registration, 1965. I was new to the campus and had never heard of SDS.

Perhaps because I told the students at the booth that I had spent the summer as a civil rights worker in Alabama, one of them invited me to what he or she may have called a meeting -- but turned out to be a party. It was set for a Saturday evening, and I went by on my way to work.

My job was essentially that of a domestic servant. I was a photographer for Jack’s Party Pictures, a business on the Drag which sold pictures of Greek parties and dances. The night of the SDS gathering was my first day on the job.

The rad-confab was held at a two-story clapboard house near the corner of 17th St. and West Ave., where several SDS members lived. I presented myself, though a door to a kitchen, about 6:30 p.m. A young woman pointed me to a set of stairs that led -- to an attic! But it didn’t bother me that, as things seemed, SDS might be a conspiratorial group.

A few feet from the top of the stairway I found six to 10 people seated on crates or boxes in a circle. With his back facing a dormer window sat the apparent chairman or guest of honor, Al Shahi, a fleshy, dark-skinned Iranian student who, I later learned, was sometimes the titular president of SDS.

One of the attendees explained that Shahi had received an order to vacate the country or face deportation. But the mood was that of a farewell party, not of plot to foil the immigration service.
It only took a glance for me to conclude that maybe I was in the wrong place.

The word “hippie” did not then exist, or hadn’t reached Austin, but my new-found peers were developing the style. The males had hair longer than customary and may have been mustachioed or bearded as well. I was clean-shaven, burr-headed and probably wearing tan slacks and a white dress shirt, the de facto uniform for Jack’s.

If sartorially I was clean-cut, philosophically I was disheveled, the opposite of my new friends. That summer in Alabama had upended my picture of life, and on that evening, I wasn’t sure if I was still a Baptist, or even believed in God, but I was ready to burn the country to the ground. Respectable white folks were either enemies or hypocrites and we who were young and Southern, I had come to feel, had to oust them and overturn the whole way of things.

Before many minutes had passed in that attic, I felt tormented by what I saw and heard. Why were people sitting in a circle, anyway? Why were they chit-chatting? When would the meeting begin, who would announce its agenda?

It seemed that I had been invited into a conspiracy whose purpose was merely to waste time. I had never seen marijuana and though I knew that it was prohibited, it didn’t occur to me that my new friends were seated in a circle to pass a joint around. I didn’t even know what a “joint” was.

Finally, if memory serves me right, some brave soul produced a penny matchbox of pot, then rolled, lit, and passed a joint.

Before it came to me, I begged off and went down the stairs, figuring that my fellow radicals would take me for a cop, though I was confident that their suspicions would pass. Within minutes I was at my first photo shoot, at a fraternity house only blocks away. The frats were just beginning to congregate; only two or three couples were on hand. A guy who acted as if he had authority sidled up me and said, “Why don’t you come back at a white man’s hour?”

I looked at him pretty hard for a second. I knew that I couldn’t strike him and would probably lose a fight if I did, and I didn’t think I could object to his terminology, because, essentially, I was working for him.

“Okay,” I said, and walked to my car.

A “white man’s hour” for work, had I tried to hire the frats to work for me, was probably equivalent to never, I figured. So I didn’t return.

Monday when I reported for a new assignment, owner Jack gave me a piece of his mind. “They told me that you promised to come back but you didn’t,” he said.

I nodded and made no excuses, knowing that, as a newbie, I wouldn’t be fired.

Thinking back on that day, I suppose that I owe the SDS celebrants an apology for crimping or stalling their festivities. But the way I also figure it, those frats owe me an hour or two of wages. I’d have shot pictures at their party, as I did at dozens of subsequent fetes that semester, had their representative not convinced me that he wasn’t worth serving.

[Dick J. Reavis, who became active in SDS and contributed to The Rag in Sixties Austin, is a professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Dick J. Reavis : Bruce Watson's 'Freedom Summer: The Savage Season...'

But his take is a bit romantic...
Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer a page turner

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2010

[Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, by Bruce Watson (Viking, 2010, 384 pp, $27.95.]

New York publisher Viking-Penguin in June released Freedom Summer, a book by Massachusetts writer Bruce Watson, previously the author of a volume about the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti. Thanks chiefly to his use of telephone logs, Watson gives readers a nearly minute-by-minute account of the violence which native blacks and a thousand mostly-white college students faced as civil rights agitators in Mississippi during the summer of 1964.

Watson’s account is the second volume published under the title Freedom Summer. Its 1988 predecessor, by Doug McAdam, an Arizona professor, was a sociological study. Both works concentrate on the experiences of the summer volunteers, many of whom were forerunners of, and prophets for the Vietnam anti-war movement. Berkeley firebrand Mario Savio, feminist pioneer Casey Hayden, and Congressman Barney Frank were among them. The chief difference in the two books is that Watson’s volume is a page-turner.

He structures more than half of his tale around the disappearance of volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, and the rest of it, around the Mississipi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to a lily-white Mississippi delegation at the August 1964 national Democratic convention.

While building the drama of these two events, he intersperses reports of church burnings, beatings, arrests, and murders. The result is an accurate picture of the civil rights movement, or CRM, as a war, one in which, to the misgiving of many of its foot soldiers, one side was unarmed. Nonviolence, in Watson’s account, was not an overarching philosophy, but a promising, if largely untested strategy.

From time to time Watson’s story dips into the internal politics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which, he admits, was brought low by the defeats and conflicts of the summer project. Within a year, SNCC stopped accepting whites into its ranks. But on the whole, Watson’s account is romantic: SNCC regulars are daring warriors, summer volunteers are noble and brave.

Freedom Summer is a biographical volume for several contributors to the original Rag, the late Charlie Smith, Bob Speck, Robert Pardun, and Judy Schieffer, among them. I read it because I believed that it would help me assess my life, two summers of which I spent with summer projects in Alabama. Watson’s account convinced me that Mississippi was more perilous than Alabama, though he does not delve into the chief reason why. Because it was more industrialized, Alabama had during the 30’s -- in the Scottsboro, Sharecropper’s Union, and CIO campaigns -- had developed a tradition of struggle.

If Watson fails at any task, it is because of his optimism. Not only does he downplay conflicts inside SNCC, but he also comes close to endorsing a teaser line on his book’s cover: “The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy.” Mississippi has elected more black officials than any other jurisdiction, and though it didn’t fall into the Obama column in 2008, Watson apparently believes that Freedom Summer wrought a decisive victory. That, after all, is the received wisdom about the CRM as a whole.

That view is untenable if, like many of the movement’s veterans, one takes the view that what the CRM accomplished was a triumph for civil liberties, which is something less than the triumph of racial equality. It’s mere equality before the law. If, as I believe, the circumstances of African-Americans in the Twentieth Century are essentially those of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain, they are then the markers and victims of the status that moneyed “democracy” accords its most exploited workers.

By this yardstick, the accomplishments of the CRM must be measured by health, educational, and living standards. None of these show anything nearing a state of equality between the races. Not only do the statistics show wide disparities, but, as any reader of history -- or student of Social Security! -- must realize, all political changes are reversible.

Freedom Summer was not the decisive battle, as Watson suggests, of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, nor did it produce permanent change. The Movement was a victory in a protracted war in which hostilities have temporarily ceased.

[Dick J. Reavis, who contributed to The Rag in Sixties Austin, is a professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com

• Find Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson, on Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Dick J. Reavis on 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'

A worrisome message from Nicholas Carr:
What The Shallows means for the left

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2010

[The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (Norton, 2010; Hardcover, 276 pp, $26.95).]

Literature students in American universities no longer see any point in reading whole novels. Instead, they want to scrutinize a work’s most pregnant passages, scanning or overlooking the balance of the texts. This is the most startling notice I encountered among dozens of disconcerting reports in The Shallows, a June book subtitled What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

Much has been made in the mainstream press about the warnings advanced by the book’s author, Nicholas Carr, a journalist best known for a 2009 tome about Google. Most reviewers of his present volume have focused on his predictions of doom for libraries and the printed word, though as a careful author, he doesn’t quite predict anything so dire, perhaps for a reason any long-form journalist knows well: publications that don’t preach hope don’t sell as well as those that do.

Carr draws his arguments from reports of recent, but still pioneering, studies of brain physiology, and from psychological experiments. His book got a boost in late May when researcher Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan presented a paper before a Boston meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, claiming that empathy levels among college student had dropped 40 percentage points over the last 25 years. Konrath and other researchers blamed the decline on webification and computerized social networks. It was as if she had gone to Boston to confirm the predictions Carr had made.

His text, without help from Konrath, carries a worrisome message, especially for oldsters with the ideological biases of those who click to this blog. The message is that the death of ideology and activism may finally be upon us.

Carr’s chief point is that computerized search engines, Tweets and the like, as books originally did, have reduced the value of memory and cogitation, while boosting the lures of immediacy and statistical citation. Today we can get decision-making data faster than ever. We need not, or we come to believe they that we need not, meditate, ponder, or even sleep upon what we’ve absorbed -- let alone bring first-hand experience to our tasks.

The prevalence of this attitude, whose venerable genealogy Carr traces, came home to me a couple of months ago in a conversation with a student editorialist who, as a budgetary measure, seriously advocated that university bureaucrats be sent packing and students be hired, at lower salaries, to take their places. Though as a professor I am naturally no fan of university administrators, the proposal struck me as foolish.

“But if you do that,” I told the student, “we will lose institutional memory.”

“No we won’t,” he insisted. “We now have databases!”

The error of mistaking Google links for judgment, I might add, is not new to today’s college generation. A cohort of Mexico correspondents saw the same sort of unseasoned judgment in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, while the NAFTA agreement was being debated. From what reporters in Mexico could see, economists and pundits were tapping macro statistics about the Mexican economy and concluding that it was on the cusp of joining the developed world. We looked around, at the problems of daily life in Mexico, and said to each other -- though rarely in print -- “Huh? Somebody who doesn’t know this country has got it all wrong!”

The subsequent development of the web has put a similar capacity for error at the fingertips of every literate American, as is evident in today’s proliferation of well-sourced bloggers who are bereft of personal experience. People in home offices in Iowa opine about the measures Pakistanis should take to quiet the Taliban -- or about the need to “secure our border” with Mexico. In the past, such opportunities for error were reserved to the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and think tanks with outsized endowments. Every fool with a web browser can now regard himself as a legislator and editorialize about what he or she “supports” or “opposes” -- as if someone with clout were heeding.

Carr’s warnings are practically an obituary for those of us who, largely as a fruit of the turmoil of the ‘60’s, developed dissident world views. Pacifism, socialism, Pan-Africanism: ideologies like these cannot be formed without the careful study of whole works of thought, because they draw a systemic picture of life that differs from prevailing “pragmatism,” i.e., the philosophy of adjustment to “democratic” capitalism.

The tools of the declining Left -- newspapers, heavy tomes, study sessions -- have little appeal today. Bits of information dropped into the world view of “pragmatic” common sense spur political action, in the rare instances when any is in the cards. When one Arizona rancher is murdered, presumably by Mexican immigrants, national outrage takes root within days: nobody feels a need to live on the border or to study the history of Mexican-American affairs.

Not all of Carr’s news is disheartening when read from the Left, however. He says that the emerging mentality is collective and that it quickly forms a consensus. He sees this as endangering an individualism and a literary heritage that he treasures, but he contradicts himself by reporting a finding, common to dozens of observers, that what the web does is heighten individualism through what scholars call the “fragmentation” of personal tastes and interests. Andy Warhol may have said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, but what fragmentation means is that in many senses, everyone will be an eccentric for life.

As an old socialist, I of course have faith that people will regain empathy and that their movements will someday reinvigorate systemic critiques and visions -- or concoct new ones -- and will improve the world in qualitative ways: history can’t be over yet! But in the United States, no movement has done as much in the past two generations, and Carr and Kornath give little reason for hope. The upshot of The Shallows is that whatever happens in our nation, risings like the ‘60’s are at least a couple of generations away.

[Dick J. Reavis is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

• Find The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, on Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : How Davy Crockett Really Died

Costumed Klansmen plying their trade. Image from University of North Carolina.
The true story:
David Crockett and the KKK in San Antonio

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

During a bout of recent microfilm reading in the pages of an old and obscure newspaper, I discovered who killed Davy Crockett and how he died. The story reporting it is below. Perhaps history buffs in San Antonio will be able to help me flesh out this startling Texana find:

SAN ANTONIO, Tex.—David Crockett, 24 year-old jobless white worker, is believed to have been “done away with” by Klansmen, following his disappearance and the finding of his bullet-shattered automobile.

“Warning. We are certain you raised the Ku Klux Klan issue in this campaign,” said a note he received the day before his disappearance. “If you want to remain in good health, tend to your own private business and leave us alone.” The note was signed “K.K.K.”

The issue of the right of Negroes to vote in the Democratic primary has again been raised in this present campaign, with many demanding this right following a U.S. supreme court decision supporting upholding it. Negroes are, nevertheless, still barred from the primaries and the Texas supreme court has upheld this rule.

The trick of this story is revealed in its headline: “K.K.K. ‘Gets’ White Texan.” It is from the Sept. 1934 of the Southern Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party in Birmingham, Ala.

It leaves much untold. Who was this David Crockett? A city directory would tell us, and so, too, might copies of the July or August issues of the “boss” dailies in San Antonio. (I am not in Texas. If anyone wants to volunteer to do the library work, I’d be much obliged.)

Maybe David Crockett, the one mentioned here, ought to be a hero for the Left in Texas!

[Dick J. Reavis, a contributor to the original Rag, is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com .]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / 'El Monstruo : Dread and Redemption in Mexico City'

El Monstruo:
John Ross' history of Mexico
A must read for Texans

The problem with any informed accounting of Mexico is that its historical figures, like assassins, are often deadly, swift, and seemingly mad.

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2010

El Monstruo, or “The Monster,” a work by lefty John Ross, published last fall by Nation Books, is ostensibly a history of Mexico City. As such, it faces an insurmountable challenge.

Founded in 1325 and today with a population of about 23 million, Mexico City has over the past century become to its nation what a combined Washington, D.C., New York, and Hollywood would be to the United States.

It is Mexico’s political, financial, and movie capital, and also the seat of light manufacturing. Though it is possible to write an architectural or art history of the city, no one can compile a political history of Mexico City that is not also a chronicle of the rest of Mexico -- and nobody has successfully done that in one volume. The 500 pages of El Monstruo rank Ross with the best of those who have tried.

The problem with any informed accounting of Mexico is that its historical figures, like assassins, are often deadly, swift, and seemingly mad. American historians may forever fret over the question, “Who was our worst president?” -- Andrew Johnson? Calvin Coolidge? George W. Bush? But none of them held office for more than two terms.

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, by contrast, was president of Mexico 11 times, in periods both before and after his capture at San Jacinto. He’s easy to recognize as Mexico’s worst president, but that only makes the historians’ question more vexing: During which term of office was he at his worst?

The American presidents John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush suffered serious injuries in foreign conflicts, but Mexico has had two amputee presidents, both of whom lost their limbs in civil wars. If American history is comparative, Mexico’s history is superlative.

Though he is not a writer whom Mexicans call “indigenist” -- one who equates the Conquest with the Fall -- in analyzing the Revolution of 1810, Ross sympathizes with Father Hidalgo’s dark-skinned hordes, and he paints the mid-19th-century Zapotec president, Benito Juarez, as nearly a saint. According to Ross, the Revolution of 1910, like a massive freeway pileup, left nothing but death and wreckage in its wake. The Revo, Ross argues, was murdered with Zapata, “although it has lurched around like an untidy zombie ever since.”

By not depicting Mexican history as a series of stumbles towards a better day, he breaks from the tradition of writers on the Left, whose scribes always preach hope. Only a few years ago Ross was an admirer of Subcomandante Marcos and the contemporary Zapatistas, but he has given up most of that. In El Monstruo, he predicts that no revolution is coming in 2010, and that the nation’s dominate left-wing formation, the Partido de la Revolucion Democratico, will probably be mired in internal tiffs when the 2012 presidential election comes.

What especially sets Ross apart from both mainstream and left-wing commentators of both countries in discussing Mexico’s straits is his refusal to grant any quarter -- after 1940, anyway -- to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, which held congressional majorities and the presidency from 1929 until 2000. His exposition of its evolution is important today because the PRI is climbing into power.

From about 1940 onwards, the orthodoxy upheld by scholars and the press -- and even the Mexican Communist Party -- was that Mexico was a democracy of a unique kind. Its uniqueness lay in its one-party character. Oddly, what qualified it as a democracy was its “pluralism”: though communism was often illegal, communists did opine in newspaper and magazine columns, teach at universities, and produce films. Mexico was not the home of any Red Channels or Hollywood Ten. But student protesters, and union and peasant organizers who tried to distribute handbills risked their lives.

American enthusiasm for PRI peaked, as Ross points out, during the 1988-1992 presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom The New York Times billed as a “brilliant theoretician” and the Dallas Morning News called “a man on a white horse.” In contemporary Mexico, though nobody can challenge Santa Anna, Salinas is on the runner-up list of worst presidents. Ross can claim, to his credit, that he never cut any slack to the PRI.

Now 72, he first saw Mexico City in the late Fifties as a Beat expatriate and poet. He still publishes in its genre today. His latest chapbook, Bomba, includes these lines, bound to be of comfort to anybody of his generation and political stripe. Their import is more universal than anything to that has to do with Mexico.

The Revolution does not begin.
The Revolution has no beginning.
The Revolution is unending.
The Revolution is not like a faucet --
You can’t turn it on and off.
The Revolution leaks all the time --
You can’t call a plumber to fix it.

Since his return to Mexico in 1985, Ross has written dozens, perhaps hundreds of dispatches -- many of which have been published on The Rag Blog -- plus a half-dozen books, almost all for the left-wing press. The last third of the El Monstruo is liveliest because it deals with events and practices that he observed, not from the airy perches of the Establishment press, but on the sidewalks outside of the creaky downtown hotel where he lives. His best paragraphs are about daily life, as in these lines from Pages 293-294:

At first glance the ambulantaje or street commerce appears to be chaotic -- but the chaos is fine-tuned. Associations of street vendors impose their own order. The juice vendors come out early to catch the predawn breakfast crowd, taqueros... are on the streets in time to feed those rushing for work. General merchandise, fayuca (domestic appliances and other pirated goods), set up by mid-morning and carry on until dark. Merengue (homemade candy) vendors appear in the afternoon, and the camoteros -- sweet potato people with their peculiar whistling carts -- take over in the evening.

The best of John Ross, however, is also often the worst of John Ross. The sentence beginning with “General merchandise” is ungrammatical, and he salts his copy with Spanish words and slang, often defined in parentheses, as if El Monstruo were a language text. Sometimes his Spanish is converted into English in a glossary that his editors no doubt compiled. But they missed a lot. Ross once uses the term jipi, which his glossary correctly defines as “hippie” -- but what’s the point, to show that the sound of the English "h" is represented by the Spanish "j"?

When he mentions that “La mota is for sale 25 hours a day,” most Texans his age probably know that “mota” is marijuana, but it’s unlikely that most Americans do -- and his glossary doesn’t translate that.

I don’t think it stands in his defense that he sins bilingually. “Rateros... were sometimes stomped to death by their intended vics,” he writes. Though his glossary correctly identifies rateros as thieves, as a literate American, I was momentarily puzzled by “vics,” a particle that apparently means ‘victims.’

“ … Paco Stanley was whacked in the parking lot of a glitzy taqueria, ” Ross reports. A television personality, Stanley was shot, killed on the spot in 1999, Ross afterward lets us know. But pages later, he avers that “Another luminary whacked by the still-secret plague was... Manuel Camacho Solis.” The politician Camacho, a victim of the swine flue, is still very much alive. In bypassing useful if common words like "shot," "killed," "murdered," or "stricken" in favor of less precise slang like "whacked," Ross may have thought he was paying homage to the Beat tradition. But in my eyes, slanginess signals the descent of a writer into the discourse of everyday speech.

Throughout his book, even in chapters about colonial days, Ross intersperses reports on conversations with the regulars at his downtown Mexico City hangout, a restaurant called La Blanca. These pieces are valuable as slices of mundane modern life, but they belong in another volume, perhaps “Chat and Chew with John Ross.” In El Monstruo they take on the character of television or radio commercials, unwelcome breaks from the business at hand.

Despite these flaws, El Monstruo is vital reading, even in a world in which, until a month ago, Islamology was the hottest game in serious journalism. Especially in the days since Sept. 11, 2001, Mexico has been reported as merely the home of hungry hordes and trigger-happy hoodlums. The panic of Arizona is a reflex of a deepening ignorance among Americans of the facts of Mexican life, something which El Monstruo could do a lot to correct.

In my view, however, the book offers something even more important than that. It ought to be required reading -- “guilt” reading, even -- for the educated class in Texas. Most of the members of this strata, among whose number I include myself, have read a history of New York City, or if not, at least several tomes set in that metropolis. Many literate Texans are fluent in the differences between Chelsea and Queens, but only a few of them can distinguish between Las Lomas and Iztacalco.

Mexico City, my computer tells me, lies 757 miles from Austin; New York is 1515 miles distant, nearly twice as far. Anyone who reads Texas history -- or any Texan who merely looks into the nearest restaurant kitchen or onto the nearest construction site, or listens to hallway or airport chatter -- knows that Mexico City is a lot more important to our lives than New York ever was; Texans of Mexican ancestry need only sign their surnames to know that.

Any future happiness for Texas is inconceivable without taking account of Mexico, and any belief that New York is somehow more relevant to the state stands as an obstacle to our self-understanding. Ross, even though he’s an old beatnik from Manhattan, would readily agree to that.

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator, and author who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. He is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.]

• Find El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City by John Ross, on Amazon.com.
• Find articles by John Ross on The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : Texas Monthly's 'Where I'm From'

Erykah Badu (right) at nine years, with her sister Nayrok, six, in Dallas in 1980. Badu contributed to Texas Monthly's special edition. Photo from Texas Monthly.
Signs of a new inclusiveness?
Texas Monthly's special edition

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 25, 2010

The current issue of Texas Monthly, a “special edition” whose theme is “Where I’m From” is worth some reading, some scrutiny, and some thought.

Though the funerary photo of Laura [Eva von Braun] Bush on its cover is an eyesore, its teaser lines carry an eye-raising message. Nineteen contributors and interviewees -- mostly notables and novelists -- are named there: four of them are Mexican-American, two of them black.

With luck, the issue’s inclusiveness forecasts a new and better day at the magazine. It’s as if Texans, and all Texans, could produce a national-class magazine without heavy supervision from the non-Texans who dominate the state’s industry of words.

A few weeks ago, Mexican-American writers chastised the editors of both the Texas Observer and the Monthly for accepting slots on a panel of 11 other whites at an Observer-sponsored “Texas Writer’s Festival.” From the sidelines I assailed them for billing non-Texan whites as homefolk.

But the Monthly’s special edition would have already been at its printer -- outside of Texas -- when the controversy arose, and that might indicate that the magazine, or at least its editor, Jake Silverstein, had already turned a corner, if only for a single issue.

The significance of “Where I’m From,” however, goes beyond questions of color and regional origin. As a commercial product, this artifact is an oddity. Mass-market magazines are generally aimed at prosperous and prospering readers 25 to 40 because that’s the demographic advertisers seek.

The Monthly’s “From” issue mainly carries accounts of life in Texas before 1970, certainly before 1985. In the annals of the industry’s prized readership, anything before 1985 is history, and anything before 1970 is ancient history -- and as Henry Ford long ago told us, for Americans “history is bunk.”


If not many young people will turn the pages of this edition, their parents will, and that probably explains either its origin -- or merely its commercial convenience. The magazine’s paid pages include a 42-page advertorial from institutions of higher learning: private and public colleges alike are seeking students who pay full tuition. The issue is so fat with ad pages -- including eight advertorials, running a total of 78 pages -- that getting to its content is like fighting one’s way through the canebrakes along the lower Rio Grande.

The issue describes Texas through memories of childhood and adolescence, and that’s a relief from the usual definitions: Texas as a cluster of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, or markets, and Texas as a collection of electoral districts, a la Texas Tribune. Sadly, of the 10 shorter pieces in the front of the magazine, in sections entitled “Growing Up,” and “Leaving,” six come from people in the environs of New York City. Those contributors are mainly writers who, because the project of Texas publishing was betrayed, have made their careers in the American industry’s hometown. But even expatriate accounts tell us what Texas is like.

The traditional answer to the question, “What Is Texas?,” as founding writers at the Monthly often noted, was to be found in the pages of Texas Highways: nice people doing nice things, especially in county seats. Though some of the same Pollyanna approach is evident in the “Where I’m From” issue, a few of its accounts get closer to the truth, as I see it, anyway.

My observation has been that, when they are sincere, all thoughtful Texans voice a love-hate relationship with their setting, just as people in Northern Mexico do. The state’s turbulent history and even its terrains, like those of Northern Mexico, don’t offer us much choice: Texas is not Maine or Costa Rica or California North.

By that standard, the prize contribution in the “From” issue is an as-told-to piece from Rick Perry, his recollection of his upbringing on a dry-land North Texas cotton farm. Perry told interviewer Silverstein things like:

[The area around Haskell] could be one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate, brutal, uninviting and uninspiring places … I spent a lot of time just alone with my dog. A lot.

Perry talks about daylight darkness created by dust storms, about bathing in No. 2 tubs, and, as John Kelso has noted in an Austin American-Statesman send-up, mother-made underwear. His tale is truly worth telling as fiction -- in a novel by the likes of Cormack McCarthy.

On the other hand, in an interview with Monthly long-timer Mimi Swartz, Democrat Bill White talks in middle-class truisms, Texas Highways style.

The view of Texas as a locale not merely of nostalgia, but also as a problem or project leaps out, too, with contributions of El Paso historian David Dorado Romo, who finds commonalities in the Texas-Mexico and Israeli-Palestinian borders, and of Erykah Badu, who reports that “…in the late eighties crack cocaine came and everything went to hell” in the South Dallas neighborhood of her childhood.

For Perry, the question “what was Texas” does not draw an idyllic answer, and for both Romo and Badu, what’s relevant is not only “what was Texas?” but “what is it becoming?” That worry should torment both the Monthly and the 25-to-40 demographic in the issues to follow “Where I’m From.”

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator, and author who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. He is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : The Genealogy of Bill White

A Bill White ancestor making his way to Texas? Photo by Texas cowboy photographer Erwin E. Smith.
¿Quién es más Texan?
Genealogy, politics, and Bill White

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2010

Democratic candidate Bill White’s great, great, great, great grandparents came to Texas in 1850. That’s the upshot of the headline -- or propaganda -- in a four-page, slick advertising insert that fell out of my copy of the Amarillo News-Globe on Thursday.

I’m no genealogist, and it took me awhile to deconstruct all of that.

White’s advertising supplement is probably an attempt to persuade voters that he’s at least as Texan as Ricky Perry, the descendant of at least one Texan who served in the Confederate Army.

But White’s claim, or attempt, is risible on at least one level. If my calculations are correct, White’s family tree includes 32 great, great, great, great grandparents. If two of them came to Texas in 1850, what about the other 30? His roots circular may be an appeal from genealogy, but it presents a very edited genealogy. Maybe the rest of his ancestors were Red Russians?

The insert will in any case be viewed in some quarters as an oddity. We’ve seen nothing like it in national politics: did John Kerry advertise that he’s the many, many great grandson of Mayflower passengers? Does Barack Obama claim descent from Kenyan royalty? White, in authorizing the insert, is, if nothing else, guilty of what the “cosmopolitans” call “provincialism.”

If genealogists dig into the facts that underlie the White bulletin, they may be able to determine whether he -- or Perry’s -- ancestors owned slaves, because that might be of interest to African-American voters. But I doubt that it will become an issue, because not many people in Texas believe that the regional, national, or class origins of anyone’s great, great, great, great, great grandparents are important today.

The real point of the roots circular is revealed by the text and sepia-toned photos of its interior pages. White may be a Houston urbanite -- everybody knows that -- but his ancestry, according to the insert’s interior photos and captions, includes Texans who lived in Corsicana, Jones, and Caldwell counties, Corpus Christi, Sinton, and San Antonio. Counting back the generations lets him establish a statewide, even rural and small-town identity.

Rick Perry does something like that by proclaiming that he was born in the hamlet of Paint Creek, which according to the Handbook of Texas, “In the late 1980s ... had [a] school, two churches, several houses, a football field, and a covered barn in which the school buses were parked.”

Winning the support of rural voters is still helpful, it seems, in gubernatorial races and maybe in other Texas political contest. But it is not necessarily important to the journalists who cover those races, or at least that’s what owners and editors of Texas newspapers and magazines, most of which are headed by non-Texans, seem to believe.

No gubernatorial candidate has presented himself as qualified for office because he is a native of New York and a graduate of Ivy League writing programs or political science academies, apparently because such standards are only relevant to politics. Journalism, on the other hand, is a technical or scientific skill in which the successful practitioner may hail from any regional or national background, and needs no rapport with voters.

Perhaps I am alone, but I see a problem in the lack of an analogy there. Those people whom we refer to as “the voters” are in the journalistic world known as “the readers,” the people who, at least in theory, ultimately determine whether a publication lives or dies.

And if politicians have a less respectable job, spouting words, oozing empathy, winning hearts and minds, and assailing local corruption -- well, of course, journalists have nothing to do with an undertaking like that!

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator, and author who teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. He is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis : Something Missing at Texas Writers' Festival?

"The Texican." Painting © Mike Aston /
mikeastonart.com .
Artaud and Arizona:
Tempest at Texas Observer's writers' fest

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2010

This weekend a startling email come to my inbox and to those of others who are identified with journalism in Texas. Its title line read, “To Liberal Activists Who Happen to be Latina/o/s.” Though I don’t fit either the Liberal or Latino categories, being a nosy former reporter, I read what its poster, antonioartaud@grandecom.net, had to say.

“The revered journal of Texas liberal politics The Texas Observer is having a writer’s festival,” its opening blandly began. “Guess what -- they forgot to invite any Tejana /o/s and African Americans. Impossible, you say. Que fue eso? Did we forget to show our papers? How do we prove we’re Texans too?

“And to make matters worse, they’re in cahoots with Texas Monthly,” Artaud continued. “Almost all the writers invited are either the editor of Texas Monthly or former/present Texas Monthly writers. Yes, the same magazine that has ignored us for over 25 years as personas non grata in their Texas.”

The post closed with an exhortation and a warning: “Cancel your subscription, write a letter, protest the event at Scholz Biergarten, but above all, consider yourself on notice.”

I am told that the author of the post, Antonio Artaud, is a student of journalism at a college in San Antonio. His sentiment was, to use an oldster’s term an Anglo journalist friend applied: “Right on!” Artaud knows of what he speaks -- and what he pointed to is a scandal.

Monday Artaud followed with a post containing messages of support from, among others, the novelists Dagoberto Gilb of San Marcos and the all-around San Antonio wordsmith, Gregg Barrios (who also wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin). Something was building. “Latina/o/s” were, for the moment anyway, rising to protest against business as usual in the circles of Texas journalism.

The hubbub died late Monday or early Tuesday when Artaud sent a third post, announcing that the Observer had agreed to include a Latino writers panel and issue an apology. Better late than never, I suppose. But as always in American history, it appears that no arrangement was made to include blacks.

Before the hubbub died, I did some thinking. Placing myself in the shoes of the editors of the Observer and TM, I asked what might be done to permanently integrate those publications without fundamentally altering anything.

I’d have canceled the Writers’ Festival (or “writers’ festival,” as the Observer’s announcement so graphically put it.) I’d have rescheduled it and expanded its panel to include -- two or three New York Puerto Ricans or Dominicans! After all, Nuyoriqueños are as much Latinos as Mexican-Americans, and many of them are as African-American as anybody in the United States.

If this idea doesn’t make sense, it should: the Texas nonfiction establishment has already applied the same logic to Anglo Texans.

I may get some of the facts wrong because I’ve been outside of Texas for six years, but to the best of my knowledge, the editors of the daily newspapers in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are white non-Texans. The editors of The Texas Observer and Texas Monthly, Bob Moser and Jake Silverstein, fit the same category, even though the general report is that they’ve improved those publications.

I am less sure about the Observer, but at the Monthly, the tally is plain: the magazine has had four editors, only the first of whom was a Texan. My observations, when I was a journalist in Texas, were that at both dailies and elite magazines in Texas, only about half of the editorial staffers were Texans before they became reporters in Texas.

The Observer and the Monthly are, of course, by now “old media.” The most contemporary entry into the ranks of elite Texas journalism is the online daily, The Texas Tribune. I would note that its first and only editor, Evan Smith, is from the city of New York.

A few years ago I put together a still-unpublished statistical study of the Monthly which showed that Texans, 95 percent of the editorial staff at the magazine’s outset, became a minority during the ‘80s, and stabilized at about half during the ‘90s. The Monthly has never hired a Mexican-American staff writer and its one African-American reporter vanished within months of his engagement.

None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. It is accepted wisdom among educated Americans today that class and regional differences don’t count for anything: we live in a placeless, classless meritocracy, people believe.

When Texas Monthly, as today, calls itself the “National Magazine of Texas” it in no way means to imply that it is the magazine of a state which sometimes imagines itself a nation. Instead, it is a magazine of national quality -- which in the publishing world, means “as good as what’s published in New York” -- that, incidentally, happens to be published in Texas.

The sensibilities of the locale mean nothing, the standard of reporting means everything. Journalism is an acultural scientific product, disconnected to land, the past, and tradition. It produces sterile news, cleansed of the smell of the dirt from which it came.

With that as the accepted wisdom, it’s clearly heresy to bring even ethnicity, as Arnaud did, into the equation. Meritocracy knows no gradations, so what difference can it make that the editor of the Tribune is from New York, the editor of the Monthly from California and the editor of the Observer from North Carolina?

I dissent from the accepted view for reasons that are as inchoate and instinctual as sometimes studied and glib. Suspicions haunt me, the latest of them because of the controversy over Mexican immigration in Arizona.

Several years ago Texas was the home to two or three border-control militias, just as Arizona was. I looked into the Texas outfits and found that even though they were led by small-time ranchers whose spreads were near the border, those ranchers -- and most of their lieutenants -- were recent arrivals from the rural Midwest.

My suspicions and speculations tell me that, Arizona being the retirement destination of the Midwest, as Florida is for New York, Arizona’s anti-Mexican hysteria is probably traceable to the state’s non-natives. In a way, it comes naturally to them: Mexico is as foreign to rural
Midwesterners as Iraq is to most Texans.

Anglo, Latino, and African-American natives of the frontera alike have traditionally regarded immigration restrictions as a joke, though in recent years they have become a real annoyance. But inlanders tend to see border walls, passport requirements, and crossing-bridge shakedowns as dignified embodiments of American law.

As reactionary as Texas may otherwise be, its last president, the Islamophobic George W. Bush, made an honest attempt at humanizing immigration law, and the state’s current governor, Rick Perry -- a lifetime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, no less! -- has said that Arizona’s anti-Mexican ethnocentrism is not for him or his state.

I can find no other factor that uniquely explains the “progressive” character of the Bush and Perry stand except this: growing up even as Anglos in Texas, their attitudes towards Mexico and its descendants took a better-than-American form. Neither regards immigration as a merely legal or economic -- or racial -- issue, as most Americans do.

According to the theory of meritocracy common to the American empire, success and placement depend, not upon the question of national or regional origin, but instead upon one’s educational credentials. Other differences between Americans have no place in this scheme.

This is why state-supported universities, for example, conduct national talent searches for almost all faculty jobs. The same placelessness has been at bottom of the selection of editors and writers for the Monthly and the Observer and probably, the Tribune as well. If in Texas we hire editors and journalists who are often non-Texans, according to meritocratic ideology, it must be because competent writers are hard to come by in Texas; if we also wind up with editors and writers who are not Mexican-American or black, why would the same conclusion not apply? The theory that marginalizes Anglo Texans downgrades all Texans, Latinos and African-Americans as well.

In his original posting, Artaud attached a copy of the Observer’s announcement of its bash. I counted 13 panelists. Perhaps because I have been away, I recognized the names of only seven of them, among them one writer from the city of New York. I wondered to myself, “how many of these Texas writers are really Texans?” I do not know the answer yet, but my guess is that it’s more than one. Were the same sort of celebration being staged in New York, I do not believe that a single paisano would be on the billing; more than one -- certainly not! Yet Texas is today more populous than New York.

The Observer, in deciding to heed Artaud’s complaint, at least in regard to Latinos, may have decided at long last to remedy its lack of sincerity and vision -- for a month or two, anyway. But the notion that the self-expression of Texas should be the affair of non-Texans is only an extension of the otherwise-hidden hegemony which skin color makes plain.

Today I was thinking that, perhaps because I’ve been called a “horse’s ass” more than once, I should feel a little bit sorry for horses as well. In the eyes of most of them, I’ll wager, all equine magazines should be written and published -- by equines, not by their riders!

Horse sense tells me that in Texas, whites are riding on the back of a culture that has always included Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, and white non-Texans are riding on the back of the cultural mix that only Texans, of any color or ethnicity, fully appreciate or understand.

[Dick J. Reavis is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

Antonio Artaud passed along this letter, sent to The Texas Observer by UT professor Emilio Zamora:

Editors,

I published a book on Mexicans and the Texas home front with Texas A&M Press and co-edited an anthology on Latinos and Latinas in WWI with UT Press, both in 2009. I have received two awards for the first book from the Texas State Historical Association and the Institute of Texas Letters. Despite this, I was not invited to participate in your writers' festival. This is not the first time that public programs on new books have slighted me, but I have recently discovered that this time you have also overlooked other recently published authors of Latino/a descent. You may have included one of these noted authors, Belinda Acosta, but only after she pointed out the glaring problem.

I should add that Latino and Latina writers are also usually absent from the pages of The Observer and this is not necessarily due to our failure to submit materials to you. A case in point is Professor Angela Valenzuela's excellent review of Avatar which she submitted on February 5, 2010. You have not published the piece nor have you even sent her a note acknowledging her submission.

I cannot help but think that the problem of under-representation and erasure of major portions of U.S. and Texas history (women, minorities, labor, civil rights, for example) in our public school curriculum extends far beyond the Texas State Board of Education. Isn't it really a sorry shame that we should be talking like this among ourselves when major battles for equal rights (with the State Board of Education, for instance) require our undivided attention.

Emilio Zamora, Professor
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick J. Reavis: 'Catching Out' in the Secret World of Day Laborers

Image from Portland Indymedia.
Researching my new book on the job:
Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / February 15, 2010

Author/activist/educator and Rag Blog contributor Dick Reavis will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, February 16, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

They will discuss Dick's new book, Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers, and his earlier book -- Ashes of Waco: An Investigation -- about the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. They will also talk about Dick's experiences in the Sixties when he was active in the civil rights movement and with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and wrote for Austin's undergound newspaper, The Rag.

On a blazing and humid day about 18 months ago I was working on a day labor crew. Five of us from the day labor hall and two guys from a landscaper's regular crew were digging up dead yellow sod and putting down new green sod in the expansive backyard of a million-dollar home.

We were thirsty. One of us, a young black man whom I'll call Maceo, asked the boss man to bring a water cooler.

"But where will I get it?" the landscaper asked.

"At Lowe's!" Maceo exclaimed!

The boss man complied, after a fashion. He left and came back in about an hour with a cooler. It was filled with lukewarm water. We were thirsty. All of us gathered around.

Maceo took a taste and demanded ice.

The boss man reached for his cell phone, called the labor hall and said that he was firing Maceo.

That didn't seem fair to me. The kid was only demanding what every outdoor worker needs in the broiling sun: cool, clear water.

I looked at my peers. No hierarchy existed among us, but one of our number, who we called "Real Deal," stood out as our leader. He could out-booze and outwork all of us, and he had been "catching out" at the labor hall for 11 years -- longer than anyone, even its managers. I knew that if Real Deal threw down his shovel, we'd all join in. If also knew that if I -- the only white on the crew and a worker with frailties so notorious that I'd been nick-named "Pops" -- did it, I'd be alone.

Real Deal had led a spontaneous rebellion on a construction site about a month before, and I knew he could do it again.

But for reasons I couldn't discern, he didn't throw down his shovel that morning. Maybe it was because the owner of the house had given him some Ibuprofen. Strong as he was, Real Deal's back hurt, too.

The water cooler tale is one of the day-on-the-job stories -- not exactly about class struggle! -- that I tell in my book, Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers, which goes on sale Tuesday, February 16. Every page is about the daily life of the some two to three million men and women who go to labor halls -- with names like Able Body and Labor Nation -- each morning, hoping to "catch out," or be dispatched to a job. Sometimes the jobs are good for six months, but more often, they last only a day or two.

I am a former reporter, now turned professor. I started my day labor career at 62, mainly because it looked to me like when I retire -- if ever that day comes! -- I'll be a few dollars short. I'd done day labor when I was younger and I had enjoyed it because dispatchers had sent me onto sites and into shops and trades that I'd otherwise have never known. I'd have been ignorant about how blue-collar workers live, and as Marx said (though I can think of a few exceptions), "ignorance never helped anybody."

By the time I finished two summers on my day labor crew, I knew that the notes I'd taken would make a book, and I believed it should be written. We as a nation waste millions of words a year on celebrities, sports stars, and lying politicians, but nobody had ever written a book about the lives of Americans like the honest, if sometimes unmanageable, men and women with whom I had spent working days.

I am now 64 and I think it's prudent to presume that this will be my last book. It certainly will be the only one I write about day labor. Most manual workers develop either back or knee troubles, or both, in their 50s, and the result is that by 60, they hurt too much for strenuous tasks. I was able to join them thanks only to my relatively benign white-collar past. When my former labor peers turn 55 and 60, unless they can qualify for disability payments -- only 40 percent of applicants do -- they'll will have to wait longer than me to retire, even to a precarious old age.

This is life in the United States, a country in which most people believe that manual labor is boring, repetitive, and unskilled, undeserving of handsome pay and company-sponsored old age programs. My book tells a lot of stories which I think are interesting in themselves, but if it has a message, it is only this: all of that stuff that people believe about blue-collar workers ain't true.

[A native Texan, Dick J. Reavis teaches journalism at North Carolina State University. An award-winning journalist, educator and author, Reavis was active with SDS and the New Left in the Sixties. He wrote for Austin’s underground newspaper, The Rag, and later was a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. His book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compound, was published by Simon and Schuster and may be the definitive work on the subject. His latest book is Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers.

Dick will read from and sign copies of Catching Out at MonkeyWrench Books in Austin at 7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 27, and at Sedition Books in Houston at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 28.]

Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers by Dick J. Reavis; Simon & Schuster, $23.99; 352 pp.

Though a writer and English professor by trade, [Dick] Reavis found himself taking on the role of a day laborer to help supplement his retirement and savings. Appearing at the local labor hall to “catch out,” that is, get picked for a job, Reavis, who wrote about illegal immigrants in his first book, Without Documents, becomes one of the millions of Americans who work all manner of manual labor gigs and are, economically and socially, “living on the edge,” as he lugs boxes, digs ditches, and hauls debris with fellow workers.

Despite each of the jobs being unrelated, the book is held together by Reavis's central focus on the plight of a working class that has no health insurance, for the most part must rely on others for transportation, and, in many cases, may not even have a home to return to at the end of a long day. Also to his benefit, Reavis allows his colleagues -- hard drinkers like Real Deal, shirkers like Tommy, softies like Office Skills, and hard workers like Sung -- to take center stage in his tales, which run the gamut from humorous to heartrending.

This ability to bring the small successes, daily struggles, and measured dreams of these “down-at-heels” working stiffs makes the book's final chapter, in which Reavis outlines the legal and economic reforms needed to help day laborers get fair wages and treatment, overwhelmingly persuasive.

-- Publisher's Weekly / November 30, 2009

• Find Catching Out: Life in a Day Labor Hall by Dick J. Reavis on Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...