BOOKS / C.E. McAuley : Jonah Raskin's Bio of 'Pedagogical Pilgrim' James McGrath

Jonah Raskin's biography of artist/teacher James McGrath was designed by Rag Blog art director James Retherford.
Pedagogical pilgrim:
Jonah Raskin's new bio of
artist/teacher James McGrath

Raskin's new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

By C.E. McAuley / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

[James McGrath: In A Class By Himself by Jonah Raskin. Preface by Bill Ayers; book design by James Retherford. (2012: Santa Rosa, CA: McCaa Books); Paperback; $18.]

Teaching, when done correctly, is an all-consuming passion. There is a popular saying from a popular book: “Teach like your hair’s on fire.” In author Jonah Raskin’s new biography, James McGrath: In A Class By Himself, he writes about a teacher who taught like his life was on fire.

Raskin should know. Beyond being a prolific author, poet, and journalist -- Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, has also written biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman -- he was a professor for over 30 years, teaching topics ranging from literature to media law and everything in between.

He himself has a cadre of dedicated former students whom he has mentored over the years and he recently became the first ever Professor Emeritus in the history of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University. But his new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

Early on McGrath discovers himself as an artist and finds that his creative spark lights up not only his life but what would become his teaching as well. It would be a spark that would become an all-consuming flame, though. One that would destroy his relationship with his wife and strain his relationship with his children.

Some of the relationships are now under repair. It’s something McGrath doesn’t like to talk much about -- but his absence of words speaks volumes about the sacrifices that many teachers and artists have to make for their teaching and art and for teaching as an art.

McGrath grew up in Depression-era Tacoma, Washington. Though he first considered life as a geologist and studied at the Central Washington College of Education, a poor algebra grade led him to reassess and a $1,500 scholarship to the University of Oregon at Eugene helped McGrath find his true artistic path. While getting his M.F.A. from the University of Washington McGrath began teaching at Columbia High School and his legendary journey began.

And when teaching and art fused together McGrath found his life’s purpose. Raskin deftly captures McGrath’s journeys around the globe in what he calls “the life and times of an extraordinary American teacher, mentor, cultural ambassador, and Pedagogical pilgrim.”

McGrath with students at Hopitutuqaki (the Hopi School), Hotevilla, Arizona. Image from James McGrath: In a Class By Himself.
Traveling the world teaching art, making art, and mentoring generations of students may sound inspiring to some -- and it is -- but Raskin does not shy away from describing McGrath’s intensity, toil, and sacrifice as he struggles to bring art and the ways of creativity to students from Asia to Europe and the American Southwest where he became a leader in the Institute of American Indian Arts.

McGrath found himself working across cultures and finding a place where cultures can be shared and honored, and he was also a teacher and administrator at U.S. Army bases across the world.

As a teacher and advisor in the Institute of American Indian Arts, McGrath, the program, and its students rose to national prominence -- garnering the attention of presidents and the national press of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when the American Indian Rights movement held the national attention, a time of social foment and revolutionary ideas and ideals.

But even this, perhaps McGrath’s crowning achievement, was not without controversy as he was a Caucasian teaching and helping to bring American Indian art to the forefront. Despite that, his students considered him to be the same as them -- just as his students in Asia and Europe did. It was in that sense that McGrath’s philosophy of creating -- from the center out and expressing oneself genuinely whatever the cost -- transcended racial and ethnic boundaries.

And, as he aged, it also transcended the boundaries of time as his students became artists and teachers themselves. It is not too much to say that McGrath, who is still creating today, is revered as a friend and legend among those who have been a part of his teaching -- and it is a testament to the man’s personal philosophy of art as life and teaching art as life.

Raskin has done an assiduous job researching McGrath and interviewing McGrath and those who have been in his sphere of influence for decades. His compelling writing style brings readers into a book about someone they, likely, have never heard of but need to hear about. As such, this book is a must read for teachers and students.

The world is filled with bad teachers. And good teachers. But, it’s not filled with many extraordinary teachers or extraordinary biographers. And I believe a book about an extraordinary teacher, such as this one, could only be written by another extraordinary teacher and extraordinary writer. Raskin fills both roles with aplomb.

Far too often people want to read biographies about people they’re already familiar with. Most often political figures like Churchill or Kennedy and entertainers or Nobel laureates. And something can be learned from doing that.

But it’s in hearing the stories of the unsung greats -- such as James McGrath -- that people can come to learn the power of one individual, one regular man who became an extraordinary teacher, and who has made a positive difference in the world.

This is an all-true-tale of a teacher who is still teaching after 60 years and continuing to inspire generations. Jonah Raskin has given us a special gift by telling us the story of James McGrath. And I hope one day someone will tell his story just as well.

[Charles “Chip” McAuley is an instructor in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University and adviser to the STAR, Sonoma State University’s award-winning student newspaper. He is also a widely-published freelance writer.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Interviews with Activist David MacBryde; Author Jan Reid

Berlin-based activist David MacBryde in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, November 9, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio. Inset photo below, from left: Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer and guest David Macbryde. Photo by Charlie Martin / KOOP.
Rag Radio podcasts:
Our man in Berlin David MacBryde
and Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2012

David MacBryde -- a Berlin-based correspondent for The Rag Blog -- offered a progressive perspective on developments in Germany and the Eurozone to the Rag Radio audience on Friday, November 9.

And on Friday, November 2, Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid shared the story of the legendary late Texas governor. He was joined on that show by radio journalist Frieda Werden, who worked with the Ann Richards-initiated Texas Women's History Project.

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's interview with David MacBryde here :


and listen to our interview with Jan Reid and Frieda Werden here :


Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas. It is broadcast live Fridays at 2 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Sunday mornings at 10 (EST).

David MacBryde, a former Austin peace and justice activist, is a faith- and economics-based social activist with roots in the Quaker church. Much of his work in Germany has involved the “Swords to Plowshares” movement, especially in the work of converting military bases to peaceful civilian use, and with the anti-war American Voices Abroad in Berlin. He discussed the European Occupy Movement and economic justice and environmental activities among other topics.

MacBryde studied physics and mathematics at Yale and philosophy at the University of Texas, was a staffer at The Rag, Austin’s influential ‘60s underground newspaper, and worked with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and with Austin’s Armadillo Press, an IWW union print shop. He was also a UT shuttle bus driver and worked with the drivers' union, ATU Local 1549. David MacBryde moved to Germany in 1981.

David also reported on the October 31-November 2, 2012, conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, honoring the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which he attended, and discussed how the SDS concept of "participatory democracy" influenced his life and his politics.

Author, journalist, and Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid, in the KOOP studios, November 2, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio. Inset photo below, from left: Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer of Rag Radio, Frieda Werden of WINGS, and author Jan Reid. Rag Radio photo.
Jan Reid, the author of Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards, is a senior writer for Texas Monthly and his writing has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times. His other books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, Rio Grande, Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm, and two award-winning novels, Deerinwater and Comanche Sundown.

Also joining us on the show was Frieda Werden of WINGS, the Women's International News Gathering Service. Austin native Werden is also the Spoken Word Coordinator at the Simon Fraser Campus Radio Society near Vancouver, British Columbia.

When Ann Richards delivered the keynote at the 1988 Democratic National Convention (“Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth”), she instantly became a media celebrity.

In 1990, Richards became the Governor of Texas. She was the first ardent feminist elected to high office in America; her progressive achievements and the force of her personality created a lasting legacy that far transcends her rise and fall as governor of Texas.

In Let the People In, Jan Reid draws on his long friendship with Ann Richards, interviews with her family and many of her closest associates, her unpublished correspondence with longtime companion Bud Shrake, and extensive research, to tell a very personal and human story of Richards' remarkable rise to power as a liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state.

Former President Bill Clinton wrote, “Jan Reid gives us new insight into Ann Richards, whose wit filled any room with laughter, whose candor chased away every smoke screen, whose heart was as big as Texas...”

Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. The show, which has aired since September 2009, is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The host and producer of Rag Radio is Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

All Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts and can be listened to at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, November , 2012: Singer-Songwriter -- and multiple Austin Music Awards winner -- Guy Forsyth.

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Jonah Raskin : Jack Kerouac's 'Mishmash' Life

Jack Kerouac. Photo by Tom Polumbo, circa 1956. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Jack Kerouac’s 'mishmash' life
and his biographers

None of Kerouac’s biographers are as concise as he was, none of them as poetical as he, and none of them as unapologetic about his seemingly chaotic life as he.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2012

More biographies have been written about Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) than about any other American writer who lived in the second half of the twentieth century, but no biographer has written anything as alive and as punchy as Kerouac’s own three-page profile of himself modestly entitled “Author’s Introduction” that can be found at the front of Lonesome Traveler, a collection of his essays about America, Mexico, and Europe.

Of course, he was a genius. (Ann Charters includes it in The Portable Jack Kerouac, a volume of his writings that she edited and that was published by Viking in 1995.) Kerouac’s biographers, even the best of them, have been adept researchers, faithful scribes, dogged investigators, and attentive oral historians but they haven’t had his flair for language or his gift for story telling.

Word-for-word Kerouac outclassed nearly everyone who has tried to capture his furtive life in print and aimed to satisfy the seemingly endless appetite for information about his sex life, his drug consumption, and his hi-jinks on the road with Neal Cassady and others.

Kerouac’s friend and mentor, William Burroughs, the author of the surrealistic novel, Naked Lunch, once said that Kerouac persuaded a generation of Americans to drink espressos and to buy and wear Levis. Forty-three years after his death in 1969, Kerouac’s life style is still contagious and readers are still gobbling up books about him and about his work as though he were the golden boy and the patron saint of post-modern American literature.

Joyce Johnson’s The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012) is the most recent Kerouac biography, and though it weighs in at nearly 500 pages, the author wisely doesn’t call it the definitive biography. She’s much better equipped to write about Kerouac today than anyone else in or out of academia. A scholar who has studied his manuscripts, she’s also an ex-lover who knew him personally in the late 1950s.

Johnson stops her story in 1951 when Kerouac was 29 years old and still had 18 more years to go. Most of Kerouac’s other biographers try to cram his whole life into one volume; readers often feel like they’re swimming in a sea of details and can’t recognize the shore or the main currents. Johnson always provides signs and signals that provide a sense of direction. She frequently says, “for the first time...” -- and that’s helpful.

The publication of Johnson’s not definitive biography offers the opportunity to reconsider Kerouac’s previous biographies, including Paul Mayer’s Kerouac that he unwisely calls “definitive.” It’s definitely not definitive.

It’s also a good time to reflect on the larger subject of Kerouac and the art of biography itself. It feels like it’s now or never especially with three Jack Kerouac movies due to hit movie screens including Walter Salles’s cinematic version of On the Road, which will probably blur the already blurry distinctions between biography and fiction that Kerouac himself created by writing what he called “true-story novels.”

He made that statement in the three-page self-portrait at the front of Lonesome Traveler in which he also noted that he wrote On The Road in three weeks, a statement that Johnson argues persuasively is patently false. Speed mattered to Kerouac: writing fast and driving fast. Spontaneity mattered, too, though his speedy, spontaneous life style and his rapid consumption of alcoholism contributed to his death at 47.

But his early death is also part of his continuing appeal; he didn’t live long enough to betray his own youthful dreams and sense of innocence.

According to Beat scholar Ronna Johnson, who keeps count, there are 21 Kerouac biographies. They include: Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac: A Biography, Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe, Ann Charters’s Kerouac: A Biography, Ellis Amburn’s Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, Victor-Levy Beaulieu’s, Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay, Robert Hipkiss’s Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism, Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, Barry Miles’s Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, Warren French’s Jack Kerouac, Steve Turner’s Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, and Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s, Jack Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac.

They all add to the Kerouac legend, and sometimes they shed light on Kerouac, too, though they’re often hagiography, not biography.

In some ways, Gifford’s and Lee’s 1978 book, which is still in print, is the most user friendly because it offers the voices of Kerouac’s friends, lovers, and editors -- Lucien Carr, Carolyn Cassady, and Malcolm Cowley to name just a few -- and leaves it to readers to sit in the biographer’s chair and put all the pieces together.

Everyone can have his or her own version of Kerouac. Steve Turner’s biography Angelhead Hipster -- the title comes from Ginsberg’s poem Howl -- has lots of photos of Kerouac, including one that shows him looking happy on a Montreal TV station in 1967, but for the most part Turner repeats the same old stories.

But that’s what nearly all of Kerouac’s biographers do. Many of the stories -- such as Kerouac’s first meeting with Neal Cassady, who inspired the Dean Moriarity character in On the Road -- are lifted entirely or in part from Kerouac’s novels, which means they aren’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They’re somewhere between fact and fiction, legend and history.

All of Kerouac’s biographers see aspects of him, whether it’s his spirituality, sexuality, or his duality, but none of them see as many different aspects as he saw of himself. No one has ever combined as creatively as he managed to combine, and in three pages no less, all the many congruent and incongruent aspects of his life into a kind of cubist self-portrait.

Kerouac saw himself as a man of nearly a dozen identities: an adventurer, lonesome traveler, hobo, exile, verse poet, mystic, drug taker, and solipsist. He was never just one thing. He didn’t even allow that he was an American pure and simple. He was a “Franco-American,” he insisted.

In the three-page self-portrait that he entitled “Author’s Introduction” he kept adding more adjectives to describe himself, finishing with an image of himself as “independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.” It was characteristic of him not to use commas. He never did care for conventional punctuation. Indeed, one could probably write a biography of Kerouac focusing on his grammar, his use of colons, semi-colons, and periods. They say a lot about his feeling for language, his sense of rhythm, and the spoken word.

The first rule for biographers, of course, is not to allow the subject of the biography to dictate the theme, the tone, or the meaning of the life. One wouldn’t want to be bound by Kerouac’s own outline of his brief, frenetic life. There are essentials he didn’t include, like the fact that he never learned to drive a car. Gerald Nicosia provides that nugget in Memory Babe. But Kerouac’s resume is a gift that no biographer would want to neglect, either.

None of Kerouac’s biographers are as concise as he was, none of them as poetical as he, and none of them as unapologetic about his seemingly chaotic life as he. He wasn’t embarrassed to say that his life was rudderless, directionless, and that he would go “anywhere.” His biographers have been intent on finding direction, goals, and meaning.

While Kerouac claimed in his three-page self-portrait that he had a “beautiful childhood,” most of his biographers have detected tragedy and deep troubles: the poverty of his exiled French-Canadian family, the death of his older brother, Gerard, and his father’s alcoholism. Biographers might go back to his childhood, see it through his eyes and through the eyes of his parents, too, as much as possible.

In his “Author’s Introduction,” Kerouac gave many of the essential biographical details about himself: birth on March 12, 1922; student at Columbia College from 1940 to 1942; his first novel, The Town and the City written from 1946 to 1948 and published in 1950. But he gave more than the bare facts. He gave background and he provided interpretations and insights.

Thus, he describes his father as a printer who was “soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II.” Of his mother, he wrote that she “enabled me to write as much as I did.” Indeed, he depended on her. Kerouac mentions the death of his brother Gerard at age nine, and he acknowledges the influence on his writing of American and French authors such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Thomas Wolfe.

London’s impact on Kerouac is often downplayed, though his compact, lyrical 1984 biography, Tom Clark offers a pithy quotation from Kerouac about London. Kerouac called him “the greatest man that ever lived” and “the greatest union of the adventurer and the writer.” Clark also ends his unconventional though refreshing biography with a poem entitled “Jazz for Jack” in which he describes the author hitting the city, listening to jazz, and writing in his notebook.

What’s perhaps most striking about Kerouac's three-page creative resume is the long list of occupations and jobs that he held and that no biographer has used to paint a comprehensive portrait of Kerouac as a worker. He toiled, he noted, as a scullion and deckhand on ships, gas station attendant, railroad yard clerk, cotton-picker, forest service fire lookout, construction laborer, “script synopsizer” for 20th-Century Fox' and newspaper sports writer.

About all of his jobs and occupations he was proud. None were too lowly to mention. All of them together -- with the exception of his job for 20th-century Fox -- suggest his affinities with the proletarian writers of the 1930s, and his sense of solidarity with the hobos, tramps, and migrant laborers of the Depression.

Of course, Kerouac didn’t include everything and everyone in his three-page account of his own life. There was no way he could in that short a space. His exploration and embrace of Buddhism in the 1950s doesn’t elicit a single word. Then, too, he did not, for example, say anything about his Beat friends from New York and Columbia in the 1940s. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs do not appear, nor his wives and girlfriends, nor his daughter Jan.

Next to “Married” he wrote “Nah” and next to “Children” he wrote “No.” He was clearly in denial, though he made his brief resume with its many facts and ample details look honest and candid. Under “Special” he wrote “Girls.” He didn’t deny that he had an interest in the opposite sex or in sex itself, but he didn’t want to name names. There were too many women to name.

In 1960, when he wrote his “Author’s Introduction,” he was also eager to cut the ties he once had to Ginsberg and Burroughs, and to the Beat Generation itself. He didn’t like being called “The King of the Beats.” Beat pauper was more his style, since he identified with the down-and-outers.

So, he wrote that he was “actually not ‘beat’ but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic.” It’s as useful a label as any other. Moreover, he pointed out that he had a basic complaint about the “contemporary world.” What irked him most of all was “the facetiousness of ‘respectable’ people” who were “destroying old human feelings older than Time Magazine.”

Despite all his jobs and occupations that brought him into the work-a-day-world, he had a profound sense of himself as a solitary being and disgruntled, too. Kerouac’s solitariness is in large measure what draws readers to him, but it’s not the only factor.

Readers are also moved by his profound longing for the “old human feelings older than Time Magazine,” by which he means love, friendship, comradeship, and loyalty which he saw quickly eroding in the “sinister new kind of efficiency” that began, he thought, during the Korean War and that were in some ways, “the result of the universalization of Television.” (He didn’t write those words in the “Author’s Introduction, but in his 1957 essay “About the Beat Generation.”)

Like Burroughs and Ginsberg, he could sound conspiratorial. Ideologies and “isms” repelled him, but he was innately political and keenly aware of inequalities of wealth, power, and the force of cultural conformity.

Kerouac’s many biographers have tended to make it seem as though they discovered all on their own the hidden, secret, and subterranean life of their subject. But Kerouac revealed himself as a mystic, Catholic, “lascivious” rake, hobo, football player, worker, and more. He didn’t say “erotic” or “sexual.” He said “lascivious.” It seems as apt as any word to describe his frenetic sexual activity.

He also offered valuable clues about himself, many of which have never been pursued. His main writing teacher, he claimed, was his mother Gabrielle; “learned all about natural story-telling from her long stories about Montreal and New Hampshire,” he wrote. No biographer seems to have taken that claim seriously or to have investigated it and described it, perhaps because it’s too simple and obvious and because his mother wasn’t a published writer.

No one has been willing to say that Kerouac had a “mishmash” of a life, as he himself insisted, or that he was an abject failure as a father, a husband, and perhaps as a son, too, though he was profoundly loyal to his mother and father. Kerouac’s biographers have wanted Kerouac to be an angel -- sometimes fallen, sometimes not -- and a saint, too. They have dressed him up in a heroic suit of clothes that doesn't really fit him.

Of course, biographers don’t get paid and they aren’t published for writing about mishmashes, but rather for creating a sense of order, for imposing pattern, finding links, and offering psychological interpretations that put all the pieces together.

Joyce Johnson puts the pieces together with the help of Sigmund Freud. Kerouac, she wrote, had an “Oedipal complex” with his mother that affected his relationship with other women. But what American writer worth his very soul didn’t have a real or an imaginary Oedipal relationship with his mother, and what difference did it or didn’t it make to the writing itself? Probably none. Oedipus complexes don’t seem to help writers write or be published.

Johnson does a better job as a biographer when she discusses Kerouac’s life as a writer typing his endless sentences than when she plays amateur psychologist and shows him tied to his mother’s apron strings. She’s not the only biographer in that regard. For 40 years, biographers have enjoyed psychoanalyzing the author of On the Road.

To a large extent, they have missed the essential Kerouac: Franco-American disreputable mishmash literary genius no commas. Perhaps one day a biographer will use Kerouac’s snapshots of himself as portals into his life and work. Meanwhile, there’s the “Author’s Introduction” to Lonesome Traveler that sums up poetically the literary travels of a novelist who expressed the angst and ecstasy of the Beat Generation and nearly every generation since.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Rick Ayers : Marable's Malcolm Bio Hits and Misses

Malcolm X in 1964. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko for U.S. News & World Report / Wikimedia Commons.
Malcolm X and the right of resistance:
Dr. Marable's book fills in gaps
but misses on Malcolm's core vision

By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

Malcolm X was a towering figure of the 20th century, connecting the wave of Third World revolutions sweeping the globe with the Black Liberation Movement inside the U.S. While the powerful seek to domesticate the man and tame his legacy -- a narrow self-help guide or high school lesson on pulling oneself up by the bootstraps -- his deeper contribution to the central liberating struggles of our time continues to resonate.

Malcolm X’s life and work was forged in the furnace of a specific historic moment: the old-style colonies were breaking up after the two devastating world wars; India won its independence; China overthrew a pro-western regime; revolutionary battles threw the French out of Algeria and Vietnam; Cuban guerrillas evicted the U.S.-supported dictator Batista.

Vijay Prashad’s powerful analysis of the period, The Darker Nations, documents the rise of the Non-Aligned Nations movement and the creation of the term “Third World” to describe the former colonial and neocolonial regions which wanted to be in neither the Soviet nor the U.S. camps -- they wanted independence, freedom from nuclear threat, democratization of the United Nations, and their own locally-grown participatory democracies.

During this same time, the long struggle of African Americans against white supremacy and for basic Constitutional rights and fundamental recognition of their humanity was taking a more militant turn. Malcolm X, first from within the Nation of Islam and later from his own organization, pushed to redefine the terms of the movement -- from a petition seeking a way into the U.S. mainstream to a liberation struggle demanding independent power and transformation of the political economy.

Today we forget how far ahead of the wave Malcolm X was, how he created the wave. This is what made him so dangerous to those in power, what drew the attention of the FBI as well as the CIA and various military intelligence agencies.

So many touchstone principles that would soon propel the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and dozens of other organizations and movements, were first given clear articulation in the early 60’s by Malcolm X. These included:

• Black pride and “Black is beautiful.”
• The move from a petition for rights to a demand for power.
• The change from seeing African Americans as a minority to recognizing them as part of a majority, the Third World majority, on a global scale.
• The identification of the conditions of African Americans as one of domestic colonialism as well as racial and ethnic discrimination.
• The questioning of the use of nonviolence as the primary tactic for black liberation, encapsulated in the phrases “The ballot or the bullet” and “By any means necessary.”
• The recognition that white people could be and often were a hindrance to the fullest development of Black leadership and the African-American struggle in the South.
• The demand that white people work against racism in their own communities and build solidarity with the Black Liberation Struggle.
• The critique of the Black petty bourgeoisie, which seemed to be making it in America and leaving behind poor and working class African-American communities.

The list goes on and on. While he did not invent or own each of these principles, Malcolm X was the most clear, consistent, and successful popularizer of these views. African-American insights, critique, and inventions have always been major drivers in politics and culture in the U.S. -- whether it has been in music, theater, comedy, and literature, or in a the political struggles to enact democracy through elections, economic structures, or education.

The reverberations of Malcolm X’s leadership were felt everywhere, even penetrating the consciousness of this white liberal college student first getting involved and trying hard to understand the world.

I remember being in New York in the summer of 1966, a year after the assassination of Malcolm X. I lived with Charles, an old friend from prep school. We were exploring the city, taking classes, marveling at the explosion of arts, and following the various vibrant political battles everywhere.

In mid-June the front page of The New York Times featured a story on the “March against Fear” in Mississippi which SNCC had mobilized after James Meredith was shot at the beginning of his solo protest against the segregated university. Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks dropped a bombshell on the first evening rally, calling for something new to the Civil Rights Movement: Black Power! The marchers had responded with enthusiasm and Black Power became the chant punctuating the march and the Movement itself in that fateful summer.

Black Power had a resonance and meaning that was unmistakable, and it was not about “personal empowerment” or psychological states. It was an enunciation of the anti-colonial struggle of African Americans, a call for political power -- by any means necessary. Everything Black activists said afterwards to elaborate and explain the idea was important but the phrase was clear and people knew what it meant. It was Malcolm X’s vision, come to life in the battles of the deep South.

My friend Charles and I diverged right then. He thought the Black Power turn was a disaster: it was reverse racism; it was going to isolate the movement. But I had already been drawn to Che and the Cuban revolution, to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and to the Freedom Democratic Party and Fannie Lou Hamer’s articulation of the struggle in 1964.

Many white activists agonized about what it would mean; some who risked their lives for the struggle for justice were hurt when they were asked to leave the South and organize against racism in their own communities. But most got it, had even seen the truth of this analysis in the streets and the meetings. They were pleased, delighted, inspired by the powerful turn that the movement was taking.

Of course, the involvement of us white college kids was a matter of choice but also of privilege. It mainly consisted of reading and discussing. The challenge of the mid-1960’s however plunged us into action. We were no longer just watching a movement; we started building a movement. We were pushed to drop our beneficent and patronizing charity ideas, to think in terms of solidarity.

We began to fight as part of a strategy that recognized the leadership of the Black Liberation Movement and Vietnamese resistance, and the profound transformation of relationships around the world. Did the revolution of the late 60’s and 70’s win? No it did not. But the world would be a much better place if it had.

Dr. Manning Marable’s new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, does much to fill in and correct the historical record. Most agree that Malcolm X’s autobiography, written with Alex Haley, is a powerful organizing document but leaves much out.

Marable offers many beautiful and satisfying moments: the background on Malcolm X’s family and upbringing, the story of the Garvey movement (the United Negro Improvement Association -- UNIA) and its strength throughout the U.S. in the teens and 20’s, the descriptions of Malcolm X’s trips to Africa and the Middle East which are much more detailed and impressive than earlier accounts, and the explication of the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

But on the fundamental significance of Malcolm X, on his core vision and contribution, Dr. Marable gets it wrong. In the midst of his detailed research, he swipes at the philosophy of Black Nationalism and anti-colonial internationalism. In describing Malcolm X’s historic 1960 debate with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, he asserts that Rustin won hands down because he proved the “practical impossibility” of setting up a Black state, exposing the “essential weakness” of the nationalist line.

It is one thing to be opposed to Black Nationalism, but to suggest that it is simply an illusory idea with no possible way of being pursued is to mislead. The long history of the struggle for Black Power goes back to Martin Delaney before the Civil War, through the UNIA of Marcus Garvey; it is seen in the work of W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson in education; and even in the position of the Communist Party in the 20’s and 30’s which defined a Black nation in the South; the Négritude movement from the Caribbean and Harlem was part of this movement; and it includes many organizations in the 60’s and later, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after they embraced Black Power, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, the African People’s Socialist Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Panther Party, DRUM, The Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Black Arts Movement, and the explosion of Black Student Unions.

These movements had all kinds of proposals: some for territorial zones inside the U.S., some for reuniting with Africa, and some for independent political identity within an extended presence throughout the U.S. Malcolm X was neither confused nor stumped when confronted with anti-nationalist arguments. His was an internationalist, anti-colonial vision and politics. There is no one else in the U.S. during this historical period who articulated and advanced this insight so powerfully.

Professor Marable argues that reform was possible in the U.S. and that this fact undermined Malcolm X’s position, suggesting that “perhaps blacks could some day become empowered within the existing system.” In order to show that change can come without overthrowing the system, he cites Nixon’s introduction of affirmative action laws.

A look at the condition of African-American people today in relation to educational opportunities and meaningful schools suggests that Malcolm X’s side of the argument was closer to the truth. Marable rejects Malcolm X’s criticism of middle class Black leaders who had supported the election of Lyndon B. Johnson for president. “It apparently did not occur to (Malcolm X),” he asserts, “that great social change usually occurs through small transformations in individual behavior.”

I’m sure it occurred to him but he was part of a much more radical critique, a more far-reaching call for transformation of social relations.

Dr. Marable declares that “‘black nationalism’ was highly problematic in a global context, because it excluded too many ‘true revolutionaries.’” But it’s not problematic at all, any more than Cuban nationalism, Latin American solidarity, Pan-Africanism, Vietnamese nationalism, or anything else that was shaking the world precluded relations between Third World movements.

As in all anti-colonial struggles, Malcolm X asserted the right of resistance and even the importance of African Americans arming themselves. Marable declares that such comments “alienated white and black alike.” But in reality, this is part of what made him so wildly popular.

When Malcolm X says that African Americans should vote but not for Republicans and Democrats, Dr. Marable claims that he “was promoting electoralism but in practical terms gave blacks no effective means to exercise their power. Who were they supposed to vote for if no one on the ballot could bring any real relief?”

The answer is clear: Malcolm X advocated independent political action. That was the only place he believed African Americans could get relief.

The art of writing a political biography is tricky. Two examples that stand out as excellent are Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, and Henry Mayer’s All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.

Each of these does something very important: they situate the focal lives within the movements that produced them and the movements they built. They explicate the positions of the protagonists and appreciate the evolution of their positions -- including the debates, experiences, and commitments that made them. And they don’t put themselves in the position of debating with the person they are profiling.

While Manning Marable has made a great contribution with this biography, in some respects he misses the central significance of Malcolm X. The speeches of Malcolm X are available everywhere and should accompany this book, for they animate, explain and consolidate so many experiences and feelings that were boiling beneath the surface at the time.

Malcolm X understood and pursued the implications of the earth-shaking revolutions going on and his words continue to capture the radical imagination of freedom lovers around the world today precisely because he stood for international solidarity and a restructuring of power. It is a vision that still inspires.

[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu. He blogs at Rick Ayers, where this article was also posted. Read more articles by Rick Ayers on The Rag Blog and listen to Thorne Dreyer's Interview with Rick Ayers and Bill Ayers on Rag Radio.]

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BOOKS / Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power

Who wants yesterday’s papers?
Today’s biographers and cultural critics!

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 26, 2010

[Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, by James McGrath Morris. Published by HarperCollins, February 2010; hardcover, 576 pp; $29.99.]

What goes up must come down. That seems to be as true of newspapers as of footballs hurled into the air by Vikings quarterback Brett Favre or Saints quarterback Drew Brees.

Indeed, these days newspapers are coming down fast and hard from coast-to-coast and in between too. Once upon a time, they were the lords of the land; now they are vassals to even more powerful lords like Google, which dares to tangle with Communist regimes in countries like China.

As newspapers fold around the country, and as circulation and ad revenue drops, the newspapers of yesterday have taken on new significance, and their editors and publishers have become more than figures of historical curiosity. “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” Mick Jagger asked rhetorically, and followed that question with a terse answer, “No one in the world.”

That’s no longer true. Yesterday’s newspapers are today’s treasure troves. They tell us how citizens were thinking and feeling, and what they were told to think and feel by press lords like Joseph Pulitzer, who ran a tight ship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and at The New York World until he died in 1911.

Pulitzer was everything that William Randolph Hearst, the legendary newspaper tycoon, was not. Pulitzer was Jewish and an immigrant. English was his third language, after Hungarian and German, and the United States was his adopted country. But like Hearst he had a passion for print media, and like Hearst, he made newspapers his business, his religion, and his personal credo. Along with Hearst, he helped to give birth to a particular form of American journalism that shaped the ideas and the opinions of the masses, and that created a mass culture.

James McGrath Morris burrows deeply into Pulitzer's vibrant, explosive life, shakes off the cobwebs, and gives it a distinctly contemporary feeling. If the name Pulitzer rings a bell today it is probably because of the prizes that bear his name, and that are awarded to authors every year, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not. Morris’s book ought to change Pulitzer’s reputation and bring him out of the obscurity in which he now languishes.

A veteran of newsrooms, and radio stations, and an astute critic of the media, Morris is the author of two previous books about newspapers and reporters -- The Rose Man of Sing Sing and Jail House Journalism. He brings to his biography of Pulitzer a keen appreciation of the craft of reporting, and the economics and the politics of the newspaper industry. Money is a bright thread that runs through his biography, and makes it of interest at a time when newspapers are struggling to survive financially.

Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power makes use of new and original sources -- some of them rescued from a trash bin in St. Louis -- along with a long buried memoir by Pulitzer's brother, sibling rival, and nemesis, Albert, who sold his own newspaper The New York Journal to William Randolph Hearst.

In the 1890s Pulitzer and Hearst engaged in a war of words; both practiced what was called “yellow journalism.” They both urged the United States to go to war in 1898 and invade Cuba, though Morris feels that Pulitzer was not really a warmonger, and argues that on more than one occasion Pulitzer urged negotiations not gunboats or gunboat diplomacy.

Morris's book is certainly not a repeat of W. A. Swanberg's massive 1967 biography; from now on it will probably become the definitive work on the subject. Morris begins his story dramatically on Pulitzer's yacht, the Liberty, in 1909, in Havana, Cuba, shortly before his death. He goes back to the beginning -- to Hungary in 1847 -- and he follows his story through the upheavals of 19th-century America -- from the Civil War to the eve of World War I. Morris shows how the man who was born Politzer Jozsef turned himself upside down and inside out. An outsider, he became a consummate insider.

Though Morris does not defend everything about Pulitzer -- certainly not his temper or his meanness to members of his own family and associates in the newspaper business -- he tells a tale that is inspiring. The reader cheers Pulitzer as he arrives in New York, climbs his way out of the ghetto, and writes his own rags to riches story, just as the United States was beginning to flex its muscle as a military and industrial power.

The first 200 pages of the book are both entertaining and informative. They hold a reader’s interest. But from that point on, and beginning with the chapter entitled "The Great Theater," the biography catches fire, and the writing becomes poetic, as for example when Morris says that Pulitzer was "willing to dance with the devil."

Morris shows that Pulitzer played a major role in creating a provocative, perhaps almost diabolical newspaper style grounded in sensationalism. He shows, too, that he was unafraid to take on the powers-that-be, including President Theodore Roosevelt who thought he was libeled in the pages of The World.

However, even while Pulitzer attacked the wealthy and the powerful in his flagship newspaper, The New York World, he moved in elite circles and rubbed shoulders with the likes of J. P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. He turned his back on the masses and embraced millionaires.

Morris's biography suggests some of the ways that today's bloggers and editors might attract new audiences. Indeed, Pulitzer had a knack for publishing front-page stories that had the nation at large talking, debating, and almost battling one another. William Randolph Hearst learned from him, borrowed some of his techniques, and gave him a run for his money, as Orson Welles's biopic Citizen Kane shows.

In his time, Pulitzer was as charismatic as Hearst, and as famous, too, and reading this biography one wonders why Welles didn't make a "Citizen Pulitzer." Perhaps a bright, young director -- or even a well-established director like Martin Scorsese, for example, who knows the historical period intimately -- will do just that.

Morris's biography is ready-made for the movies, with big scenes and larger-than-life characters. It looks back to an America when the daily newspaper was an essential part of life, and it makes America itself as much of the story as Pulitzer. Morris’s biography offers hope for the future of journalism, too.

[Jonah Raskin teaches in the communication studies department at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.]

• Find Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris on Amazon.com.

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James Retherford : The Story of Dada

Alfred Jarry on absinthe.
The Story of Dada (Part One)

Inspired by the edgy transubstantiation of primitive energy and ontological nullity in Dada’s impromptu poetic style, [Hugo] Ball tried to emulate it -- but without success.

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2009

Born in 1871 amidst the revolutionary fervor of the Paris Commune, poet provocateur and pioneer psychedelic explorer D. D. Dada was the love child of deceased visionary author Comte de Lautréamont and Louise (“the Red Virgin”) Michel, conceived on Lautréamont’s death bed in a selfless act of mercy fuck by Paris’ notorious advocate of chastity and revolutionary socialism.

His father dead at an early age and his unchastened but no-longer chaste warrior mother imprisoned and then exiled after the fall of the Commune, young Dada was nurtured in the back alleys of Paris, educated in worldly (and fleshly) ways by the demi-mondes of Montmartre. According to all contemporary accounts, he was a prolific student with a voracious appetite for the subject matter.

When Dada was in his teens, he had the shocking experience of being run over by a green man standing on the handlebars of a speeding bicycle; the resulting broken pelvis and psychological damage would cause Dada to walk with a limp and talk with a pronounced stutter.

As absurdist fate would have it, the wreckless green bicyclist turned out to be absinthe-fueled Alfred Jarry, who took the injured Dada into his parent’s home to heal and then gave him a job as an apprentice in the family’s pillow-making factory.

Dada proved to be a very imaginative pillow maker and began to make large-scale stuffed creatures and phantasmagorical characters. One such creation was a big green life-sized stuffed doll named King Ubu. Jarry — who was imbibing so much absinthe at the time that his own skin had taken on a permanent green hue — adapted the bright green pillow as his imaginary soul mate and then wrote a seminal play about the big fellow.


Dada would influence Jarry in other ways as well. Growing up within earshot of the fashionable and intellectual coterie of Montmartre and St. Germaine cafe society, he developed an extraordinarily inquisitive and sophisticated mind regarding matters of scientific and philosophical consequence. One biographer credits Jarry’s own excursion into the realm of pataphysics to a potent mix of Hegel — that is, Dada’s impassioned but speech-impediment-challenged discourse thereof — and too much absinthe.

Forced to flee his beloved Paris during the war years, Dada found his way to Zurich in 1915 where he got a job helping Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings renovate a backroom space into a cultural nexus called Cabaret Voltaire.

One day Ball was standing nearby when Dada, frustrated while trying to install a urinal in the women’s bathroom, began to use his wrench to beat out strange polyrhythms on the metal pipes. As he pounded on the pipe, he also began to utter what sounded like an incantation of nonsensical rhythmic stuttering sounds.

Inspired by the edgy transubstantiation of primitive energy and ontological nullity in Dada’s impromptu poetic style, Ball tried to emulate it -- but without success. Soon thereafter he asked the erstwhile plumber/pillow artiste to become the club’s official bathroom cleaner and his own unofficial ghost writer.

Soon Ball and Hennings were joined by other émigré artist/conspirators -- Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jean (Hans) Arp, and Tristan Tzara -- and Cabaret Voltaire became the community center for a new anti-fascist peace movement. But when the organizers gathered in the cabaret to brainstorm a name for their new political-cultural tendency, the formidable male egos immediately sprang to full turgidity, creating such a rift that the little ship of the absurd appeared ready to capsize before it cleared the slip.

Amidst the ensuing cacophonous shouting match, Dada had climbed up on a ladder to hang theatre lights and could be heard muttering to himself, banging his hammer as emphasis. As the group argued, Dada chanted and hammered. The louder the argument, the louder he chanted and hammered, slowing building in rhythmic intensity. What he chanted went something like this:



The entire group fell silent.

Textile artist Sophie Tauber had been quiet throughout the loud debate among the men. Now she spoke up. Reminding the ego-embattled males in the group that they were, after all, launching a class-conscious albeit absurdist revolutionary anti-art movement, she suggested that it would be profoundly appropriate to name the organization after this non-aspiring, ego-free man who scrubbed the toilets, hung the lights that would shine upon them, and so brilliantly articulated the heart and soul of their philosophy.

Even Tzara was forced to agree with her flawless anti-logic.

Thus dadaism was born — the 20th century’s first authentic Yippies!

[James Retherford is an editor and designer at The Rag Blog and a director of the New Journalism Project. His attempts to link his lineage to D.D. Dada have been inconclusive. His new blog is Dancing with Dada.]

The author's Yippie lineage has been confirmed.
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