All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well . . .
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Tuesday, January 1
A NEW YEAR'S GREETING FROM JULIAN OF NORWICH
by
Lloydville
on Tue 01 Jan 2008 12:47 AM PST
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well . . . Monday, December 24
NO ROOM AT THE INN
by
Lloydville
on Mon 24 Dec 2007 02:46 AM PST
 When very young kids hear the Christmas story for the first time, and you then ask them what they remember most about it, they will invariably say, "There was no room at the inn." That looms larger than the cute animals, the happy shepherds, the magical gifts. Kids know what the story is really about, where it really begins -- in rejection, exclusion, humiliation. These are subjects that preoccupy very young kids. Growing up, we tend to find ways of managing these preoccupations, but they never leave us. Christmas is not just about the hope renewed by the birth of a child -- it's about the ways hope is lost. If sorrow and despair don't figure into your understanding of Christmas, the story of it won't add up to much. Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the happiest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature precisely because it is the saddest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature, may be the best proof of that. Here's an incredibly powerful holiday tale from the Flickhead blog -- a most appropriate meditation for the season. Wednesday, December 12
NUESTRA SENORA DE GUADALUPE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 12 Dec 2007 03:34 PM PST
 Today is the feast day of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the Mother of God, who in 1531, not long after the Spanish Conquest, appeared to Juan Diego, an Indian convert to Christianity, on a hill outside what is now Mexico City. To the amazement of Juan Diego, and to generations of Mexicans since, she appeared in the form of a young Aztec girl. Since that appearance, she has become both patron saint and national symbol of Mexico, the embodiment of its own peculiar form of Christianity. She endured through all the anti-clerical episodes of Mexican history and her image is omnipresent in the country today -- an abiding solace and guide. This Christmas season might be a good time to think of her children who are living in the United States without proper documentation, in constant fear of the law, scorned and reviled by many but working hard, supporting their families here and back in Mexico and contributing untold millions to our economy. These are, for the most part, good and gracious people, industrious and committed to sacrifice almost anything for their children's future. We are lucky to have them among us. Their children are our children. Feliz navidad, compadres! Tuesday, November 13
D-DAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 13 Nov 2007 12:23 AM PST
 This picture has an aura and authority that may become harder and harder to appreciate. It was taken by Frank Capa, who went into Utah Beach with the first wave on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Utah Beach was, as it turned out, the most hellish sector of the invasion, where the most casualties occurred. Even before that became known, Capa would certainly have been aware that he was risking his life to record the moment on film, that there was a good chance he'd never return from France, even if he managed to get ashore there. But he knew how important the invasion was -- what a visual record of it would mean to everyone praying for its success, and to future generations. In modern warfare, there would probably be video cameras attached to the landing craft, capable of transmitting live images to a command center somewhere, but in Capa's time a real live human being needed to be there with a camera to bring back pictures of the assault. A life had to be put on the line for it. Capa could assume, too, that his pictures would have a built-in authority as proof of his witness. Today, in the era of Photoshop, when photographs can be faked almost beyond detection, the photographic medium has lost some of this authority. We have to think retrospectively to summon up what the image above and the one below meant to Capa and his contemporaries.  There was a tragic but somehow fitting end to Capa's experiences at Utah Beach. He survived but most of the photographs he took did not. A nervous lab assistant back in England tried to dry Capa's rolls of 35mm film too quickly -- and all but eleven of the images were destroyed. But this just served to make those eleven images more precious -- to remind us of all that was lost on D-Day, all the lives of young American soldiers that ended on the invasion beaches. The eleven images that do survive are miraculous things. It's like having photographs of the last day at Thermopylae, of the battle on Bunker Hill, of the furthest advance of Pickett's charge. The visual records of future wars will be more extensive and more useful to military planners, but they won't have quite the human dimension, the spiritual dimension, of Capa's pictures. They may make us shudder but they won't make us cry -- as Capa's do, or should. Friday, November 2
JACKSON'S END
by
Lloydville
on Fri 02 Nov 2007 12:15 AM PDT
 Stonewall Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia, near the Virginia Military Institute, where he taught before the Civil War. But his arm, which he lost at Chancellorsville, where he received the wounds that killed him, is buried near that battlefield. When Jackson's shattered arm was cut off after the battle it was thrown onto a pile of amputated limbs, as was customary, but his chaplain decided to retrieve it and he took it to the nearby farm of a relative, who buried it in the family plot. Eventually a small stone marker was erected over its final resting place.  The grave can be visited today, but it's not easy. When I toured the Chancellorsville battlefield two summers ago, with some relatives, we had to park at a gate about a mile from the cemetery and walk to the grave. My eighty year-old mom was along, and she made the trek with the rest of us, in the hot Virginia sun. The cemetery was beautiful -- a small fenced-in plot on a knoll overlooking cornfields, shaded by old trees. There was no particular emotion associated with visiting the site. An arm is a tool. It was like visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson's sword. It was the walk with family that was moving -- and surreal, like the Civil War itself. We Americans are going to take up arms and kill each other in great numbers, they said back then. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Stonewall Jackson's arm, we said generations later. Somehow it all made sense. I kept thinking of Jackson's famous last words: Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees. There are some mysterious, unexplainable journeys that just have to be made. Sunday, October 21
THE DIFFICULTY OF DEALING WITH GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:08 AM PDT
 A guy is talking with God and he says, "God, what is a million years to you?" God says, "A million years is a second to me." The guy says, "God, what is a million dollars to you?" God says, "A million dollars is a penny to me." The guy says, "God, could I have a penny?" God says, "Sure -- just a second." Wednesday, October 17
THE DARK FIFTIES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Oct 2007 02:08 AM PDT
 We sometimes think of the Fifties, the Eisenhower years, as a time of blandness, naive optimism and conformity. As a kid in the Fifties that's how it seemed to me -- I took everything at face value. I was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club -- I had the ears.  Looking back today at the popular culture of the Fifties, with wiser eyes, perhaps, the picture is much different. The sunny side of things looks like the thinnest of veneers. Film noir flourished in the Fifties. Pulp fiction got unspeakably bleak and harrowing. The subversive sexuality and energy of rock and roll bubbled up from the black underclass with astonishing ferocity. Some white performers tried their best to tone it down, but it stayed dirty. Ed Sullivan could present it as a kind of vaudeville novelty act, but kids knew better -- soon it would become the soundtrack for everybody's life.  The Beats had already started turning on and dropping out, in an unsettling but compelling rehearsal for the Sixties. At the time it seemed like a bizarre aberration.  The film cycle depicting middle-class teen-aged angst and rebellion was born.  An old guy to the Brando character in The Wild One: "What are you kids rebelling against?" Brando: "What have you got?"  Low-budget sci-fi movies retailed images of apocalypse by the score.  Even the kinder, gentler manifestations of popular culture reveal, on closer examination, dark undercurrents. Charles Schulz said this of his mildly satirical comic strip Peanuts: "All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away."  And consider the apparently frivolous comic visions of Frank Tashlin -- which are, if examined closely, savage deconstructions of popular American culture.  Indeed, the more you look at Fifties culture the more it comes to seem that those mouse ears weren't at the heart of it -- they were distractions from a deep national anxiety, a brooding sense of dread that permeated everything. Sunday, October 7
CHANCELLORSVILLE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 07 Oct 2007 11:21 PM PDT
 If you visit the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville, in the Virginia countryside west of Fredericksburg, you can find at the intersection of two small country roads a marker at the place Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson met around midnight between the 1st and 2nd of May of 1863 to plan the next day's action. They had between them 40,000 men and they were facing a Union army of 70,000 men. Jackson had a startling proposition for Lee. His scouts had found some dirt roads through the woods that twisted around the right flank of the Union position. Jackson proposed that he lead his 28,000 men over these roads and fall upon the Union flank from behind. Lee pointed out that while Jackson was marching, he himself would have only 12,000 men with which to hold the 70,000 Union troops in place. Jackson nodded -- yes, that was about the size of it.  I like to think of the look in Lee's eyes as he contemplated this more or less insane idea -- they must have burned with joy at the boldness and fearlessness of Jackson plan. Lee thought about it for a moment and told Jackson to go ahead. Jackson made the march pretty much undetected -- reports of it that reached the Union officers on the right of their line were disbelieved. They were just too preposterous.  Jackson rounded the Union flank and attacked at dusk. The whole Union right collapsed and the whole Army of the Potomac was set in a panic that was just barely contained. It was one of the most stunning victories for an outnumbered army in all of military history -- but it's costs were high. Riding to the front to assess the progress of the action, Jackson was accidentally shot in the darkening woods by his own men, and would later die of his wounds (in the bed pictured below,) never resuming his command. The victory also emboldened Lee to make his second invasion of the north, resulting in the catastrophe at Gettysburg.  Ironically, it is the death of Jackson, and the defeat of the South, which allows one to admire the feat of arms that Lee and Jackson pulled off at Chancellorsville. Their cause had a great wrong mixed up in it -- the institution of slavery -- and no one can look back and wish they had won. But Jackson's death was a measure of expiation -- enough to let us love him and Lee for their genius and audacity and courage. It fixes the moment of their greatest triumph in amber, in a beauty outside of time. Monday, October 1
THE GHOST CITY CHAMPIONS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Oct 2007 01:12 AM PDT
 Fall is in the air -- you can tell, even out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert, because the Mets have just completed their annual Autumn collapse. After dominating their division for almost the whole season, with what looked like the best team in baseball, they decided in the end to just dry up and blow away, like leaves in the wind. It was one of the worst late-season collapses in the history of baseball, and the Mets didn't go down fighting -- the whole team just seemed to stand around, staring blankly into space, waiting for the nightmare to consume them. The Mets have been my last real connection to the city of New York. I have a lot of friends who still live there but they visit Vegas regularly, so I think of them as Vegas friends now. But the Mets seem to have taken on the qualities of the new New York I couldn't live in anymore -- rich, bland, complacent, without grit, without character. I think the time has come to let them go -- let them fade into the old ghost city that exists now only in my memory. In that city, they will always be champions. When Willie Mays, playing for the Mets at the end of his career, decided to retire, he said, "There always come a time when somebody have to say goodbye." Goodbye. Saturday, September 29
SIMONE WEIL ON BRUTALITY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 29 Sep 2007 10:03 AM PDT
 Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in . . . a confrontation. -- Simone Weil Monday, September 24
WITNESS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 24 Sep 2007 07:36 AM PDT
 [Photo © 2007 Paul Kolnik] In his great book The Labyrinth Of Solitude, Ocatvio Paz remarks that "architecture is a society's unbribable witness." If you want to know the truth about any society, look at what it builds. So what is the witness of Las Vegas, the most popular tourist destination in America? As you sit on the terrace of a French bistro, attached to a replica of Paris, and look across the street at an evocation of an Italian lake, or down the street at a replica of New York, or up the street at an evocation of ancient Rome, the message is clear -- "We don't know where we are." Everyone in America feels this, along the strip developments and in the malls that all look the same, whether they're in Georgia or California -- even though they might not feel it on a conscious level, or admit it to themselves. That's why they come to Las Vegas in such great numbers, and why they love it. Las Vegas tells us the truth, let's us admit the truth -- we don't know where we are -- and the truth is always exhilarating. It makes you want to party. [A note to readers: I apologize for the site's being out of commission for a while -- it exceeded its bandwidth once again, even though my hosting service allowed me double the usage I was paying for. They finally decided that I needed to pay them more money -- that now done, the site should be functional for the foreseeable future. Thanks for the interest!] Thursday, September 20
ALWAYS CHRISTMAS
by
Lloydville
on Thu 20 Sep 2007 02:39 AM PDT
 In his fascinating novel Little, Big, John Crowley proposes the idea that time does not actually elapse between Christmases -- that at Christmas we simply flip into another time frame in which it is always Christmas and always will be. Then we flip out of it again.  This is certainly how Christmas feels, and it ties in with some ideas Octavio Paz proposes in The Labyrinth Of Solitude, his great meditation on Mexican history and the Mexican character.  In the book, Paz discusses the importance of the fiesta in Mexican life, as a time when Mexicans cast off their masks, the barriers they erect against any penetration of their characteristic solitude, and feel free to commune with others, sometimes socially, sometimes erotically, sometimes violently. Paz suggests that fiestas, and all ritual celebrations, don't commemorate an event but recreate it -- recreate a transcendent moment when time is dissolved and masks are discarded. This of course ties in with the theological proposition that Jesus is actually present in the wine and the host at Christian communion services -- and more broadly with Kierkegaard's notion that Christian believers are literally contemporaries of Christ. And of course it explains why time does not pass between Christmases. Wednesday, July 18
THE SEA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jul 2007 02:51 AM PDT
 There are times when I think the ocean offers answers to unanswerable questions: Where do virtue and goodness go when they're lost -- where
do they come from in the first place, so preposterous and inconvenient? At other times I think the ocean only offers an accompaniment to all this -- no answers, only consolation, a consolation that is itself a mystery. Be quiet anyway, and listen . . . Readers, There will be no new posts for the next week or two, then some exciting news. Until then, enjoy the archives and be assured that I remain . . .
a sus pies,
Lloydville
Saturday, June 16
A FREUD QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 16 Jun 2007 01:14 AM PDT
 "Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height . . . In times during which no obstacles to sexual satisfaction existed, such as, may be, during the decline of the civilizations of antiquity, love became worthless, life became empty, and strong reaction-formations were necessary before the indispensable emotional value of love could be recovered." This helps explain why modern American culture is so pornographic on its surface but so unsexy. It may be the least sexy culture in the history of civilization. It occurs to me that the attraction to Victorian style, visible in sub-cultures like steampunk, may be a nascent reaction-formation to the dead sexuality of modern pop culture. Would downloading the Paris Hilton sex video on a steampunk computer (like the one below, courtesy of Boing Boing) be somehow more erotic than downloading it on a regular laptop? Would it miraculously become "naughty" instead of soul-killing? Do we envy the Victorians for the very concept of "naughtiness"?  Thursday, June 7
20TH-CENTURY SCUMBAGS: JEAN COCTEAU
by
Lloydville
on Thu 07 Jun 2007 02:19 AM PDT
 Here's a guy you definitely wouldn't want to invite into your home. He doesn't seem to understand the purpose of an ashtray. Thursday, May 24
THE CIGARETTE POLICE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 24 May 2007 12:01 AM PDT
 Above is one of the few authentic photographs of Robert Johnson, the great blues artist. Having allegedly made a bargain with the Devil to acquire his almost supernatural musical gift he was probably not too worried about the health effects of smoking, but others are worrying on his behalf -- and yours. A U. S. postage stamp made from the photograph removed the cigarette from his mouth. Robert Johnson paid for this photobooth portrait, and this was how he chose to present himself before the camera's eternal gaze, with the haunted eyes and the spidery fingers on the frets of his guitar and the cigarette dangling from his lips. I wonder if the bureaucrats who decided to alter his image of himself ever really listened to his music -- ever realized that the hellhounds on Robert Johnson's trail were also on theirs. Below is a link to a Boing Boing post about the removal of cigarettes from historical images of literary and pop culture figures: The Cigarette Police As a kid I remember being horrified to learn that the Soviet government would rewrite the "factual" content of encyclopedias to reflect the current political climate. Now Western governments and corporate entities (like there's a difference between the two) are tidying up history to reflect current policies of social hygiene. You may see a big difference between these two forms of historical revisionism but the phenomena are intimately related in principal -- both involve large state and corporate interests appropriating history and changing it at will. They are, in other words, staking a claim to the ownership of history, and by extension reality. Friday, May 4
OUT OF THE PAST
by
Lloydville
on Fri 04 May 2007 12:16 AM PDT
 As opposed to murder mysteries (for example), which are basically intellectual puzzles organized around a frisson or two, great suspense thrillers -- which include many different kinds of movies, from Hitchcock to classic film noir -- are rarely about their nominal subjects. Their plots are constructions designed to investigate and expose various modes of existential dread which would be too uncomfortable to face directly but which are thrilling to experience when disguised as mere amusement. The process is very similar to what happens in dreams, in which we find visual and plastic equivalents to inner tensions which the conscious mind prefers to avoid confronting head-on. There's a smooth continuum between the suspense thriller and the horror film, the latter category being reached when the subject of death, bodily decay and destruction is foregrounded and taken right up to the edge of what the mind is willing to process within a work of entertainment. (Convention and the age of audience members plays a large part in determining where that edge begins.) The film noir tradition, which began during and flourished just after WWII, expanded the limits of dread which American movie audiences would accept -- and obviously the horrors of the global conflict played a determining role in this development. Film noir reflected a new cynicism about politics, since politicians had failed to prevent the war, about civilization, which had been exposed as a veneer beneath which savagery lurked, and about human nature, because ordinary people did unspeakable things to each other in the course of the war. But most of all, film noir, at its heart, reflected a new insecurity about manhood.  Charles Lindbergh, before the war, wrote of his fear that a truly global conflict would sap the virility of the civilized world and create a vacuum in which demons would breed. He wasn't just talking about the young men who would be killed but the young men whose experience of war would exhaust their spirits -- leave them unfit for the business of domestic life, the hard work of peacetime civilization. I think this was a profound insight, and helps explain the crisis of manhood which afflicted 50s America and which came to fruition in the epidemic of divorce in the 60s, along with a general retreat from male responsibility to the institutions of marriage and the family. The greatest generation had given all it had -- its reserves of service and sacrifice were used up.  This also helps explain the disaffection of youth in the 50s and 60s, the nihilism of the Beats, the rebellion of rock and roll, the search for newer and more authentic male role models like James Dean and Elvis Presley -- all of which culminated in a radical rejection of older male paradigms in the 60s, in the de-sexing of the male which began with the adolescent image of the early Beatles and ended with the long-haired male flower child.  There was much that was positive in this cultural shift, but its root causes and possible consequences remained largely unexamined, along with its dark side -- which was an increasing fear and hatred of women, who could not help but represent an accusation aimed at male uncertainty and insecurity. It's curious, I think, in an age which celebrates feminism and the new sensitivity of males, that our popular culture degrades and commodifies women to a far greater degree than earlier, frankly patriarchal societies. Camille Paglia provided the key to this paradox when she observed that the status of women today is determined not by a patriarchy which has gown too powerful but by a patriarchy which has collapsed, grown unsure of itself. Film noir is the place to begin a study of this whole, strange phenomenon. Look at a film like Out Of the Past, one of the classics of the tradition. On one level it's a crime thriller, an exposé of social corruption, an exercise in cynicism about everything. But this level is superficial. At the heart of its tension is a vision of things gone horribly wrong between the sexes -- the dream of a lost romantic paradise, the fear that real partnership and co-operation were no longer options, the nightmare of a fraudulent and impossible romantic redemption.  At the center of most great films in the noir tradition is the femme fatale -- a tough, independent, alluring figure who's dangerous precisely because she exploits the impotence of her male counterpoint. The collapsed male projects, as he always must, his own inner chaos onto the female who exposes his weakness, his existential nullity in a culture that no longer knows what it means to be a man. Check out the image below, where Robert Mitchum holds on to his inadequate cigarette-phallus and Jane Greer seems to ask, "Is that it -- is that all you've got?":  Cigarettes are almost always more than cigarettes in film noir. The tough guys always reach for them when they're trying to be hard and cool -- and when a woman smokes a cigarette, she's usually getting ready to un-man somebody. The femme fatale of the film noir tradition is the mother of our modern world. It has no father.  Monday, March 12
FASHION AND DEATH
by
Lloydville
on Mon 12 Mar 2007 12:43 AM PDT
 Fashions in clothing, Walter Benjamin speculates, always involve a dialogue with death. Fashion, with its mercurial shifts in style, its preoccupation with novelty, seems to thumb its nose at the eternal stasis of death, defiantly proclaiming life . . . but at the same time, by investing material things, articles of clothing, with the illusion of life, and especially with the illusion of erotic life -- "the sex appeal of the inorganic" as Benjamin calls it -- followers of fashion embrace death in a danse macabre, a merry whirl with a corpse. Even to thumb one's nose at something means always staring it in the face. The investment of clothing and other material objects with erotic life, a kind of fetishism that serves the marketing of commodities in modern capitalism, extends its pathology, for men, to the female body itself, which becomes a commodity, becomes essentially inorganic. If an old man can sleep with a young woman, he can deny death -- since he is not sleeping with an individual human being who will age and die, but with the image of her youth. She must be interchangeable as a partner, lest her individuality, her subjection to time, rob her of her commodity value as an elixir of immortality. Always the corpse haunts the male vision of the female -- and this, as Benjamin points out, finds expression in the tendency to dissect the female form and worship its component but severed parts. "I'm a breast man," you will hear men say, or, "I'm a leg man," or, "I'm an ass man." But breast men and leg men and ass men are all butchers. So in movies you have the phenomenon of body doubles -- offering dislocated parts of themselves in close-up to stand in for the naked being of a modest star. The use of body doubles is, I think, one of the few phenomena in our culture which can be designated as indisputably obscene. We worship the exposed female body in our culture, but in a sick way -- a way that robs it of life. Now might be a good time to turn our eyes backwards to another culture that worshipped the naked human body, both male and female -- that of the ancient Greeks. There was idealization in the Greek nude, but no gross exaggeration of component body parts. Its models were real youths not radically endowed in any particular way but pleasing in toto as images of the beauty of the human body. Almost any of us can look at them and think, "With a little exercise, even I . . ." or "When I was twenty, I . . ."  As obesity, a kind of spasmodic surrender to somatic despair, claims more and more of us, and breast enhancement seduces more and more young girls, it should become clear that the image of the "genetic celebrity", of the "perfect" body, as the fashion of the day sees it, is a demonic phantasm, the shadow of a corpse, very specifically designed to lure us into a dance with death -- with the only incarnation of death which is truly terrifying . . . the kind that happens before we die. Note that the Venus de Milo at the head of this post and the woman at her bath below are both images of Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love. In our society, many might consider both to be candidates for cosmetic surgery -- breast enlargement in the case of the first, liposuction in the case of the second. But both show that there was an age when men expended extravagant amounts of time and discipline and genius on the loving memorialization and exaltation of their "deficient" forms.  Wednesday, March 7
DIXIE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 07 Mar 2007 12:40 AM PST
 From my sister Lee: In 1985, I went to see Doc Watson perform at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, North Carolina. When summoned for his encore, he announced, “Now I’m going to sing America’s second national anthem.” And he began to play Dixie. The audience went insanely wild, feet stomping, hysterical cheers. It was thrilling. I was totally swept away. And for years after, it continued to bother me. Why was it so thrilling? What did it mean? I just couldn't figure it out. The Civil War seemed to be so simple for Northerners, and still so complicated for the rest of us. So I forgot about Doc Watson and Dixie, felt embarrassed by it, and rather guilty too, and chalked it up to another mysterious, uncharted connection to my “country.” Then, last summer, after leaving the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville with Lloyd, my mom and my two kids, with my head full of ghosts, and a vision of Robert E. Lee swinging his hat over his head, his eyes gleaming with victory, I asked Lloyd if his miraculous i-pod contained within it the song Dixie, and if so, to play it. It did, and he did. Since then, I have located Bob Dylan’s version of Dixie. And I play it a lot. But I’m careful to close all of my windows, so that no one can hear it. My neighbors are African-American. I like them, and I’m worried they will think it is racist to listen to this song. I pause it when the mail man is close to the house. It’s like a dirty secret. And this gnaws at me. So I did some research into the history of the song Dixie, and, like the song itself, I found it both comforting and disturbing. The authorship is generally attributed to Daniel Decatur Emmett, of Turkey in the Straw fame, an Ohioan who allegedly wrote the song in 1859 while living in New York City. A competing account tells us that the song was really an old African-American tune revived by the black musician brothers Ben and Lou Snowden, whose joint tombstone proudly declares “They taught Dixie to Dan Emmett.” Either way, the song was a smash hit, particularly in the North. When Abraham Lincoln first heard the song in Chicago, he shouted “Let’s have it again! Let’s have it again!” By all accounts, it remained one of his favorite songs, before, during, and after the Civil War. “I just feel like marching, always, when that tune is played,” he said. When the war was over, he made a special point of requesting it at public events. “That tune is now Federal property and it is good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again...I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it..and that it is our lawful prize.” It is unconscionable that almost a hundred years later, psycho white supremacists used the song as a sparring partner for We Shall Overcome during the Civil Rights Movement, associating it (really, I believe, for the first time) with institutionalized racism. It was a despicable and cowardly answer to Lincoln’s generosity. But if “possible use by psychos” is a litmus test for a thing’s viability, then we shall have to throw out a good many things, the Christian church and our own government for starters. In my research, I stumbled on this quote from Howard Sacks, and despite the fact that he is an academic, I quite liked it. He says, “What [Dixie] tells us is that black, white, male, female, southern, northern, slave, free, urban, rural--these aren’t separate realms. The story of the American experience is the story of the movement between these realms.” Which, naturally, brings Elvis Presley to mind. Clearly, it was no accident that Lloyd’s astoundingly brilliant Navigator preceded our tour of Chancellorsville with a visit to Graceland. Elvis sang Dixie, and if there was ever any American who was not a racist, it was Elvis. His heart and his instincts on that score were pretty near perfect. So here’s what I’m wondering: If Abraham Lincoln claimed Dixie as his prize of war, why can’t we reclaim it as a prize for our heartbreak? Heartbreak that we ever tolerated slavery in our country for even a nanosecond, heartbreak that we ever took up arms against each other and heartbreak that all too often we let Lincoln down. I don’t see why we can’t do that. Dylan's version of Dixie can be found on the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack album. |
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