andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Insofar as we are just dealing with plain old racism
> -- "We don't want them Azheris, wetbacks, Turks, etc.
> around here," I don't see why we should tolerate that
> instead of squashing it. It's the oldest excuse in the
> world to argue against antidiscrimination laws because
> "forcing" people to mix will inflame prejudice. Fuck
> that. It's wrong morally and it's wrong factually.
> Integration, other things being equal, promotes
> tolerance. And to the extent taht it doesn't, bigotry
> should be prohibited, not sanctioned.
Here is a post that I wrote on another list quite a few years ago. I think it may be relevant here.
*****
Jamie Morgan wrote:
>
> Hi James, interesting argument. Spirit does seem to be acceptable in terms
> of emergence and essence as you phrase them. But the point also was one of
> deterring connotations [CLIP] One might also ask:
>
> Is the new spiritualism atheist in all its forms? Isn't a
> non-institutional - paranormal discourse of forces of nature also a form of
> pantheism? Similalrly, Bhuddhism and Daoism are not strictly speaking
> atheist, [CLIP]
One problem is that while there is a large political and philosophical (in general theoretical) body of work on solidarity (both as a political slogan and as a perspective from which to view the evolution of hominid species), there is (at least in English) no developed body of imaginative art -- painting, poetry, song -- expressing human unity through solidarity rather than through individualist spirituality. We don't know -- outside particular occasions of struggle -- have an imaginative vision of what solidarity _feels_ like, so when we try to discuss it we fall into the cliches of religion and/or pantheism (e.g., the poetry of Whitman and, I think, Stevens).
Doubtless I am ignorant of much of the writing that might fulfil (or does fulfill) this need, and I depend mostly on the songs of Woody Guthrie to give me a glimpse of what such a body of work might look like.
Deportee
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps.
You are flying them back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again.
This poem (Guthrie never wrote music for it) lives in its pronouns - that is, it moves towards asking what we mean by "we." (The text I use is that in a song book edited by Pete Singer; I have heard and seen versions with different pronouns in this first stanza, but that destroys the shift of pronouns that structures the song/poem.) "We" in common parlance is "you and I" as opposed (at least verbally) to "them." Here, then, the "we" is the singer and those who are flying "them" (the deportees) back. The perspective, then, is somewhat similar to that of Shelley's "Men of England" - sympathetic to the oppressed, bitter towards their oppressor, but nonetheless seing them from "outside." Shelley, that is, could not have written:
Wherefore, bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of OUR toil?
It is not merely that Shelley was not himself a worker; it was that in his world even a worker, become a poet, would become and "I" to the "you" of the working class.
The link of Shelley and the "men of England" is a spiritual link, an expression of universal love, NOT of solidarity. "Love" also is a word we perhaps could usefully retire for a century or so, except with reference to direct personal relations. Frankly, were I a Congolese worker or peasant living in the world created by Belgium, the U.S. and Mobuto et al, I would be more offended than impressed by Bhaskar's offer of "(unconditional) love." But let us see how Guthrie proceeds with his "we" and "they" - and particularly let us see how "I" by the end of the poem comes to exist only as an extension of "we."
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
They have a name now. "I" speaks out loudly here, but the "you" and the "they" are reversed. and is the "you" of the first stanza that is now a nameless "they." With "my Juan" and "mis amigos" we have already moved beyond Shelley, for whom the "men of England" could not be other than faceless and nameless: "men of England," merely at best citizens. The horror of "You won't have a name" speaks louder than any kind of love or merely spiritual unity could possibly speak. Spirituality individualizes (atomizes), isolates, reduces to mere passivity (passive in being a mere occasion for the self-realization -- even god-realization -- of the individual who extends his unconditional love. And it is just that forced passivity to which Guthrie responds with rage (a far nobler emotion than Love).
My father's own father he waded that river,
They stole all the money he made in his life.
My sisters and brothers come working the fruit trees
And rode the truck til they took down and died.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains,
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river -- we died just the same.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon --
` A fireball of lightning which shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just . . . deportees.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit --
To fall like dry leaves, to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?
Goodbye my to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be deportee.
The "my" of the last stanza transcends both "I" and "we" of the poem - it is a blank check to be filled in through struggle.
Carrol