Bubbles

I had the distinct pleasure of benefiting from the resources of two of New York City's elite high schools.  I attended Brooklyn Technical High School in the late 1950s, and then, after an already long career teaching English in other schools, had a twelve-year stint at Stuyvesant High School from 1992 until 2003, when I retired.   Although my formal education had been in the humanities, I have had a life-long interest in science, particularly in astronomy and physics, and, so, I came to enjoy the opportunity to have informal conversations with my students about some of the issues about which I had questions.  I can recall one such conversation in which I shared with a group of students my dismay and annoyance at the way science text books represent reality.  Based on these conversations, I got the impression that in the forty years (1959 to 1999) that had passed since I was a student that while science had changed a great deal, pedagogy had not kept pace.

      What exactly is a wave?  Throughout all of our schooling we are taught about waves--sound waves, light waves, radio waves, ripples in ponds and waves in the ocean.  The stylized radio antenna depicted above has been reproduced in countless texts.  What this iconic image purports to show is an antenna emitting radio waves.  What we actually see is a series of broken concentric circles with their source at the tip of the antenna.  I could never understand how those broken circles even came close to actually depicting waves.  If anything, I suspected, a more accurate depiction would be a series of concentric spheres, in effect, bubbles within bubbles emanating from the antenna.  Similarly, the often offered alternate image of ripples made by a rock thrown into a still body of water, a pond, seemed to have a similar drawback.   While it is true that, in this case, we seem to have advanced to both concentric circles and the standard image of a wave, if we take the added step of visualizing the ripples in cross section, our cross-section seems restricted to the surface of the water.  That is, the trough of the ripple/wave still does not depict what may be going on beneath the surface.  Even the oscilloscope, another standard device that is understood to depict waves electronically, seems merely to be a line of light having a certain amplitude and frequency (height or intensity and time period between pulses).
     Thus all three of the most common depictions of waves, namely fret lines, ripples, or squiggly lines of light on an oscilloscope's screen, seem merely to be shorthand methods of showing us what a wave is.  I struggled to find some way to better understand and visualize what was actually taking place.  I imagined a light going on in a room or a hand clapping.  In both cases, whether I was considering light or sound, it was obvious to me that there was no linear wave emission from either source.  Whether at the speed of light or the speed of sound, whatever was being created at the source reached everyone in the room regardless of where they were. Some way of illustrating something akin to an expanding sphere of some force or energy seemed to be called for.

When I found the image on the left, of a guide in a children's museum blowing bubbles within bubbles, what was going on seemed closer to what my instincts told me actually emanated from a point at which light or sound (and thus anything said to take the form of waves) might be depicted.  At this point, however, I had the sinking feeling that a knowledge of calculus might be a good thing to have.  I knew enough about the construct underlying calculus to know that it dealt with objects in motion.  Had I arrived at one of those junctures where only mathematics could express what was going on, and that what I wanted to see simply illustrated no more surrendered itself to pictorial explanation than all those rubber sheets and curving graph lines through black space could succeed in depicting Einstein's theory of General Relativity?
     I searched for one more common device that might help--a cheap fiber optic lamp.  (I have even bought one online so I can stare at it and await enlightenment.)  This last seems closest to what I envision happening when any object emits or even reflects light.  But where is the wave?
    I applied myself to the problem.  It now seemed to me that a combination of the bubbles within bubbles and the fiber optic lamp might offer a solution.   But there are problems.  If you turn on the lamp, you instantly see the points of light emerging from the end of each plastic fiber.  Given the speed of light, one would not expect to see the photons gradually traveling from their source to the end of each individual fiber.  It would be ideal, I thought, if one could make two important modifications to my table-top toy: first, slow down the speed of light to a degree that one could see the light travel from its center to the end of the fibers, and, second, so increase the number of fibers so that, rather than seeing pinpoints of light, the lamp would ultimately produce something closer to a perfect sphere of light.  If the light were traveling slowly enough what one would see is a gradual transformation--from a small sphere at the moment one turned on the lamp, to a larger sphere whose radius would be determined by the length of the fibers.
     You have probably guessed that my "solution" raised more questions than it answered.  When, in my conversations with students, I shared some of these speculations and offered that, ultimately, if we could actually see all of the waves in the room we were in, radio waves, television waves, X-Rays, ultra-violet rays,etc., coming into the room, bouncing off one another, reflecting one another, we would find that we were in a dense "soup" of bubbles and intersecting bubbles, (are those the strings of string theory?), a cosmic foam of bubbles, several of them told me that, "Hey, there are some scientists we have heard about who also believe in bubbles.  You're not alone."

...to be continued.

                                 

Still in the Labyrinth after Fifty Hours of Youtube Videos on Quantum Physics

“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” 

--Galileo Galilei

Perhaps some of my blog correspondents will recognize the equation in the illustration to the left.  It is a very famous equation, almost as famous as Einstein's e=mc2, and it appears on tee-shirts available in college book stores.  Recognize it?  It's Schrodinger's equation.  You may recognize the name even if you didn't recognize his equation since he is famous for his thought experiment involving a cat in a box which, we are told, illustrates that, on a quantum level, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.  Really.  Alive.  Dead.
      Although Schrodinger may be a bit esoteric, everyone has by now heard of the Big Bang Theory--even if only as the title of a TV sit-com.  (I will defer to another time the task of deconstructing that show for what it tells us about how the usual American stereotypes about science and scientists have "evolved" in the homeland.)   Ever since Einstein became science's first media star, it has become impossible to keep certain phrases from entering the vernacular.  Terms like black holes, inflation, the standard model, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, even, of late, Higgs bosons, CERN and particle colliders appear almost daily in the media.  Thanks to PBS's Brian Greene, we may add to the list talk of string theory, multi-verses, eleven possible dimensions and so on.  Millions have not only heard of Stephen Hawking and recognize the man in the wheel chair with the robotic voice; his book, A Brief History of Time sold 10 million copies.  (A remarkable publishing phenomenon, since just about everyone who has read the book admits to not being able to follow it at all.  More of this later.)  I guess it was inevitable that even Oprah managed to get into the act.  She invited physics professor Leonard Susskind onto her show a few years back to discuss the until then esoteric view that, contrary to Hawking's theory, all that seems "real" to us is actually a holographic projection of a two-dimensional matrix surrounding a black hole.  Which brings to mind movies like The Matrix, just one of a host of movies that, in a long film tradition, borrows freely from science and science-fiction alike.
      Now, let's get to Youtube.  There is no doubt that it is a wonderful resource.  A little patience circumventing a lot of clutter can reward you with a valuable companion to Google for the kind of learning one can achieve outside of, let's say, a university classroom.  In fact, both of these internet resources often allow one a kind of access to what is available inside our most prestigious universities.   Yale comes to mind, for example, as an institution that has placed on the web lectures by some of its most acclaimed faculty.  (The lectures on history are particularly good, often serving as a reminder of the limitations of lectures many of us attended as under-graduates.) Youtube allows you to watch everything from very short video material to full-fledged lectures lasting over an hour on a wide variety of subjects.  Given the luxury of free time, we are free to follow our own unique learning curve, surfing from one site to another, rejecting some material, lingering on others for hours.
     I have always been fascinated by cosmology and the knowledge claims of twentieth century physics.  Here, then, I hoped, was my opportunity to see if I could actually understand concepts like relativity, space-time, the wave/particle dichotomy.   I mean really understand, not just on the surface level that, for all their virtues, PBS and the BBC present, but with real insight.  And herein lies the rub.  What did I learn after fifty hours or so watching those Youtube lectures?   Not a heck of a lot.
     I am not ready to blame Youtube for my frustration.  Perhaps there are sites that would allow me to prepare better by spending time acquiring the necessary background in advanced algebra and calculus that would open more doors for me.  Because herein lies the rub.  There is simply no way that one can understand what it is these talking heads from the physics community are talking about without--to borrow the popular phrase--doing the math.   It has become a fixture of talks designed to explain science to the lay public that, undeterred, presenters will bend over backwards to assure their audiences that they will not be called upon to understand any of the math, any of the equations that are intrinsic to really understanding the subject.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? 
 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

--from Wikipedia entry on C.P. Snow
 

      The above quotation is from a lecture delivered in 1959 by C.P. Snow which he titled, "The Two Cultures." I would argue that in the ensuing six decades since Snow gave his lecture very little has changed.  If anything, science has become more esoteric and thus even less accessible to the vast majority who are--dare we admit?--mathematically illiterate.  While, on the one hand, the only remedy to this problem seems to be the obvious, which is to say that, if you really care, you have no choice but to take the painstaking steps to acquiring the language of science, yet, and this is the real point in my writing this piece, I believe that more can be done, a great deal more.
     While Snow was presenting his thesis in 1959, I was a student at Brooklyn Technical High School where we were told by our English teachers that, (on the assumption that we were destined for careers in science and engineering), as future scientists and engineers, we had an obligation to learn how to express ourselves clearly.  While it was true that most Tech students would go with the program, stubborn recalcitrants like myself were placed in what they called the College Prep Program, a track that accomodated boys (only boys attended in those days) whose aptitiudes were more in the humanities.  We were bluntly told that scientists and engineers were notorious for their poor writing skills and their inability to communicate with anyone outside of the fold.  We were going to be different.  No one had to twist my arm to make me believe that this was not just a malicious stereotype since I found that both in the way math and science were typically taught as well as in the way math and science text books were written rote learning ruled.  All of my childhood curiosity soon dulled.  I was one of those boys who always took things apart to see how they worked, whined until I got a Gilbert chemistry set for Christmas, looked at the night sky with wonder, read science-fiction and loved dinosaurs.  At Tech, my grades in math and science nose-dived.  Rebellious and resistant to authority even as a child, I felt that my science texts were more catechisms than guides to true understanding and discovery. There is one bit of business in science texts which, though seemingly trifling, always left me frustrated and angry.

     ...I will discuss this and conclude this post in a blog to follow.

      

2001: Where's Stanley?

In 1968, and for several years earlier during the period in which Stanley Kubrick was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, the time, many believed, was ripe to take a stand on the war in Vietnam.  This seemed particularly to be expected from an auteur who had made two earlier films (Paths of Glory and Strangelove) which, if they were not exactly pacifist statements, certainly seemed anti-war.  (Wikipedia's notes on Paths of Glory, in fact, reveal that the film so tweaked the noses of the military hierarchy in France and Germany that it was banned in those countries for years.)  Fans of the director just knew that if he set his mind to it, Kubrick was capable of making a devastating statement on the war.  Yet it took Kubrick another two decades before he got around to making a cinematic statement on the war in Southeast Asia (Full Metal Jacket, 1987).   In the first throes of absorbing 2001, it seemed that Stanley had decided instead to go cosmic on us, to take the decidedly longer view.   Kubrick, in fairness, was never a "topical" film maker; his work was literary, not journalistic.  He had, in fact, often turned to the novel for his source material.
     When, years later, it was reported that Kubrick's magnum opus was chosen to be ranked first among the Vatican's selection of the forty-five most influential films of the twentieth century, and that Pope John Paul II had hosted a private screening of the film, the news was greeted among many Kubrick fans with a reaction somewhat akin to the reaction that an earlier generation had greeted the Hitler-Stalin pact.  (Or, if that comparison seems a bit overblown for you, think Bob Dylan turning to Jesus.)  By that point, however, we were not entirely surprised; we had had time enough to digest the fact that, great as the man was, grateful as we were to him for so much that was unforgettable in his work, the Stanley of our youth had proven to be a fiction.

     As I alluded to in an earlier post, these musings were triggered anew for me when I attended a screening of The Shining hosted by the New York Times.   I had some time ago come to the conclusion that essentially all of Kubrick's work played out on the level of dream rather than reality, and, of course, once one is prepared to view a film as a dream sequence, there are very few rules with regard to verisimilitude.  Certainly,  Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick's last work, was far from cinema verite.   But there is a scene in The Shining that brought home for me Kubrick's essentially supernatural vision.  After attacking his wife, Jack Torrance is subdued by her with a swing from a Louisville Slugger and then dragged to a food locker for safe keeping.  Now, most of this film can be viewed as a psychological drama, the scenes being played out for us taking place in the fevered imaginations of the main characters.   Jack's escape is pure magic.  Almost as if out of embarrassment at using the plot device he descends upon to get Jack out of the locker, Kubrick does not show the bolt on the lock miraculously ascending; instead we only hear it jolting out of place.  Ghostly twins and rapids of blood may exist in characters' minds, but locks don't get unlocked by themselves.  We have left the realm of psychological drama and entered a metaphysical realm.  Or at least it was a metaphysical realm until Heisenberg and quantum mechanics asked us to accept that anything is possible.  While you are calculating the probability of a lock opening by itself, let us turn back to 2001.

I put out my cigarette, and went back into the theater to see just where Kubrick would take us on that memorable night in April of 1968.  You may recall my having turned to my wife and saying during the film's intermission, "If the second half of this movie is anything like the first..."  Well, by the movie's end, (yes, I know, I'm calling it a movie), Keir Dullea's fetus was spinning and filling the amniotic fluid of the cosmos, mankind reborn.  My head was spinning, too.  What hath Stanley wrought here?  Was this poetic metaphor or were we being asked to believe in divine intervention?
     And then reality overtook poetry.  We crowded out into the night air of Times Square, and I saw a passing pedestrian, his head buried in a copy of The Daily News bearing the bold headline, KING DEAD.   It took me a moment, unbelievably, to figure out which King the headline referred to, but any doubt about who had died could not have survived the subway journey on the A train back to Brooklyn Heights in a subway car filled with silent Black men and women barely able to contain their rage.  We rushed home to turn on our television set, our first Sony Trinitron, newly capable of showing--in living color--television newsmen reporting from one American city after another against a backdrop of red/orange flames reminiscent of one of Hieronymus Bosch's visions of hell.  Just a typical twenty-four hours in 1968.  Life had become more vivid than art, had overcome art to the point where even Kubrick's call for attention would have to wait.  There were still eight more months of 1968 to live through.  1969 would bring the abyss--Nixon, Chappaquiddick, Woodstock, the bombing of Cambodia, and, of course, the landing on the moon.  Rumor had it that Kubrick had helped stage the event on a Hollywood sound stage.  Who knows?  Post-modernism had begun and in the closing days of that year, it was announced that Valium was the most prescribed drug in America.  And so it goes.

Existential Nausea Comes to the Movies

In the instant that tall, slate gray monolith miraculously appears for the first time in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I learned what it meant to be overcome by the chill recognition of lost love and betrayal.
     By 1968, events in the real world had begun to catch up with Kubrick's prophetic cinematic visions of where we were going.  In a real sense, we had been prepared for the insanity of the war in Vietnam and the military industrial complex first in Paths of Glory and later in Strangelove, and the streets of cities around the world were now filled with Hobsbawm's "primitive rebels."  Young, bright-eyed Kirk Douglases were everywhere leading their cohorts out of (at least mental) slavery from Prague to Mexico City to Paris and New York, playing out their own version of Spartacus.  The cataclysmic events that shook the world in 1968 were only beginning in April of that year--far, far too many to list here, but just as a reminder: we witnessed the assassinations of both M. L. King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (among others), the Tet offensive, the Democratic National Convention, the Prague Spring, the massacre of students in Mexico City, the Cultural Revolution in China in full swing, the Paris Riots, the police attack on Columbia University.  One came to fear calls in the night for what they might report.  The year came to fully earn its label, "the year the world ended."
      It is difficult to recreate the excitement and anticipation with which many of my generation looked forward to the release of 2001.  It had the promise of being Kubrick's masterwork.  Rumor had it that it was so long that Kubrick was still editing the film up to the very eve of its release.  It would have its New York premiere in one of the large movie houses in Times Square that still dotted the area.  At the time, my wife was working for Cambridge University Press, and I was teaching in what was then called a ghetto junior high school.  We planned the evening carefully.  I would meet her in front of Carnegie Hall, just outside of the 57th Street subway station, timed to get a bite to eat before the movie and then walk over to Times Square.  The events of that evening came to forever encapsulate for me the experience of the sixties.



 Left: President's Daily Diary for April 4, 1968 indicating that at 5:09 p.m. he would board the presidential helicopter in Central Park's Sheep Meadow.  He was in town for the installation of Cardinal Cooke, who succeeded Cardinal Spellman.





    When I emerged out of the train station and took a seat on the steps of Carnegie Hall, New York Times' article on Kubrick in hand, I found that 57th Street was lined with police barricades.  A by-stander told me that the president was in town and his motorcade would soon be passing by.  Within a very short time, black limousines began to appear, red lights flashing.   Someone pointed out the presidential helicopter hovering above and then descending into nearby Central Park.  The air was electric.  By this time in his administration, Lyndon Johnson was everywhere being greeted by mobs of young people chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  On this occasion there were no crowds in evidence.  Soon, a long entourage of dazzling police motorcycles signaled the approach of the presidential limousine, and, colorful flags waving, lights shining, it suddenly appeared.  LBJ and Lady Bird must have had the limo's interior lights on because one could clearly make out the president and his wife, smiling and waving at curbside onlookers.  (Whenever I saw the president at a demonstration in New York, I always marveled at how handsome he appeared, his tan skin set off by an almost blindingly white shirt.)  One young man standing at my side made a move that seemed intended to throw himself at the president's car, but he was instantly pushed back by a cop.  For a split second, it seemed the president reacted.  And then the show was over.
     When my young bride arrived just a few minutes later from her office, she found me in an excited state that seemed excessive even for a Kubrick aficionado about to see one of his movies.  We walked across Seventh Avenue to a small restaurant, and, over a hastily consumed meal, I told her what I had witnessed just moments before.  My hands were shaking.  I ordered a scotch.
     In the event, 2001: A Space Odyssey turned out to be at least as prophetic as Kubrick's earlier work.  The problem, as we shall see, is that he would himself be party to those events, events which would eventually prove to leave the "Left" everywhere besieged and cast into disarray.  2001 was, in effect, a shot across the bow of an entire intellectual construct that, in 1968, the smoke of rebellion everywhere in the air, seemed to promise revolutionary change.  We would come to look back and realize that Paths of Glory ends in the death of innocents, Spartacus ends up crucified on a Roman road, and Slim Pickens' misguided (no pun intended) patriotism triggers our Mutually Assured Destruction.  Humanity seemed incapable of altering its condition--at least without divine intervention.
     If we turn to one of the fractals of American culture in the years leading up to this sea change, we might find in another science-fiction work popular with the young of the time, television's Star Trek, a swan song for classical Marxism and materialism.  Star Trek, at least in its earliest manifestations, was almost pure science, almost always drawing writers for its various episodes from the Old Left.  Aside from occasional lapses into silly plots designed to keep up ratings, what happened on the show, strange as those events may have seemed, at least had some roots in material possibility.   After 2001, however, the floodgates of Hollywood opened to a deluge of barely disguised mysticism.  George Lucas's Star Wars was warmed-over Christian myth pretending to be science fiction.   From that point on, until this very day, American culture has been drowning in vampires, ghosts, angels and superheros with superhuman powers.  But it was not in the United States alone that the phenomenon occurred.
      Science, until this period, was a construct at least popularly held to be in rational opposition to virgin births, resurrections and other such products of fevered human imagination.  In the world of physics, it would turn out, only Albert Einstein (who would come to be somewhat pejoratively--if not pathetically, labeled a "neo-realist") would attempt to hold the fort against a quantum world in which we are told that anything is possible.   With Einstein spiritually at their side, some left theoreticians would struggle to point out that historical materialism was never purely deterministic, that Marx's materialism was dialectic rather than some simple-minded linear cause and effect.  They proved to be voices in the wilderness, lost in one of the alternate universes that the sages at MIT and the Planck Institute had theorized.  Heisenberg, already hated by the left for his cozy relationship with Hitler and the Nazi's minister of armaments, Albert Speer, replaced the long arc of history steering toward justice in one blow with his Uncertainty Principle.

     The movie was spectacular.  Shown on a vast wide-screen in a huge theater, it overwhelmed the viewer with its images, its music, its view of the future both playful and deeply profound.  Because it was so long, there was an intermission.  The first half of 2001 was already like no "movie" anyone had ever seen.  As we watched an animal bone ascend--now thanks to the intervention of the monolith having morphed into its inevitable function as tool (or, more accurately, weapon)--we saw summed up for us 2,000,000 years of human evolution.  And oh, that spinning wheel of a space station on a screen so large and wide it seemed to engulf the viewer, luminescent against the blackest space, being approached by a space vehicle to the strains of a Strauss' Blue Danube waltz, further summing up all human accomplishment.  On to Jupiter!  I turned to my wife, reaching for a much needed cigarette and said, "Honey, if the second half of this movie is anywhere near as good as the first half, we are going to be blown away!"  And, as we shall see, we were indeed.

Here's Stanley!

       In 1996, to commemorate the first centenary of motion pictures, the Vatican published a list of 
                45 films that it considered of special merit.  Heading the list was Kubrick's 2001.  Indeed, Pope 
                John Paul II hosted a screening of 2001 at the Vatican on the occasion of the movie's worldwide
                release during the year 2001. 
                                                                     
                                                                          -- Gene D. Phillips of Loyola University, in his introduction 
                                               to The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, written by Phillips and Rodney Hill.



The New York Times Theater gave a special showing of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining last night, and I found that my patience with one of my old heroes had finally reached the breaking point.   The honeymoon, or perhaps more accurately, the artistic marriage was finally over.  Nevertheless, I will always owe Kubrick a great deal for the changes his work wrought within me as far back as my early adolescence.  What had gone wrong?

     For many teenagers growing up in the 1950s, "going to the movies" was a Friday night ritual.  Loew's Premier (pronounced pree-mee-er by the locals) was located on Sutter Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  Not the most baroque movie house, not nearly as elaborate as, for example, the nearby Loew's Pitkin in Brownsville, the Premier was nevertheless an archetypal movie palace replete with baroque trappings and an unforgettable Italian renaissance pool of goldfish in the center of the lobby.  Each Friday night saw the place filled with teenagers present as much to scope one another as the latest reels from Hollywood.  Everyone dressed for the occasion, doused themselves in perfume or cologne (Chanel on the girls; Canoe on the boys) and puffed away on Kent cigarettes looking, we trusted, every bit as cool as the movie stars who were our models.  Today, a white teenager would stand out on that corner of Sutter Avenue about as much as a giraffe in Antarctica, but in those days the street was a lower middle class version of the Miracle Mile, resplendent with ungated shop windows lit through most of the night for the perusal of strollers.  (I was recently rewarded for my trip back to the old theater to find the vista of an empty, rubble-strewn lot amid the surrounding ruins of what was once a vital thoroughfare.  An idle group of black men looked on curiously as I got out of my car to take a picture.)  To no small extent, Kubrick's genius lay in the fact that the virtually cataclysmic events that would, among other things, spell the end of American cities as we had known them, come to resonate in one after another of his films.

      And film is the key word here.  I no doubt missed the distinction between movies and film through many earlier trips to the Premier, but for me and many others of my generation,  at least those of us who read books, Kubrick's Paths of Glory was a breakthrough event.  Although our jaws dropped merely by virtue of its cinematography, its screenplay played out more like literature than a movie.  We had seen Kirk Douglas many times before, as a cowboy, a boxer, even a Viking, but we had never before seen him in a role that made him more the protagonist of serious novel than a mere leading man or movie icon.  The scenes of battle resembled newsreels more than staged events--grainy, jumping about in a manner that suggested a hand held camera even before we were aware of its possibility as a technique.   More than anything else, though, the poignancy of the injustice it portrayed excited our newly emerged, raw, adolescent awareness of the evils of which authority was capable.   For us, Kubrick was a man who dared to tell the truth, the eternal holy grail of adolescent seekers.
    Paths of Glory (1957) was released when I was in my first year in high school.  Eisenhower was in the White House and the young Elvis was debuting on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Kubrick's next major film, Spartacus (1960), came out just as I was starting college and a fairy tale prince was entering the White House.  If there was a ticking time bomb barely audible beneath the surface of events during those much vaunted "happy days," (nightmarish echoes of The Great Depression and World War II that--in spite of every effort to deny, repress and sublimate--clearly lingered alongside, within a very short period of time, the real bomb, Korea, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Rosenberg executions, growing racial tension and the "Beats," just to cite the most obvious),  that bomb would finally explode with, to switch metaphors, young Jack's brains bursting forth like the newborn Athena out of Zeus's head, shouting a call for violence and war.

      Like all works of genius, Kubrick's pre-1963 films came to seem prophetic, at least well ahead of their time.  My generation, later to be labeled "the New Left," during that time had yet to be tutored by the Old Left of the 1930s to more fully understand the politics of Spartacus; we had not yet heard of Rosa Luxemburg or read E.J. Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels or the essential Marx and Lenin.  Nor should one overlook the fact that it was during this same period that students and college educated Americans were being exposed, in the then still extant abundance of small "art houses" complete with complimentary espresso and cookies served in their lobbies, the emergent post-war products of the Italian, French and, outstandingly (even if somewhat surprisingly) one particular Swedish director.   The work of such as Fellini and Antonioni, Truffaut and Bergman clearly consisted of films rather than movies and were treated with the appropriate reverence.  Yet, for American film lovers, Kubrick had a special status.  He was an American; he was ours; he came to speak for us.

     Kubrick's first post-Kennedy assassination film was Dr. Strangelove (1964).    By 1964, a mere seven years after the release of Paths of Glory, enough admirers of Kubrick had gathered to create an atmosphere of great anticipation when word got out that another of his films was to be released.  Even before Strangelove, a good part of the excitement about Kubrick that had begun to form was that he was, in a word, a child of the left, at least if being a leftist was synonymous with being anti-war, anti-establishment and anti-Hollywood commercialism.  His films seemed to be in a symbiotic relationship with the young left who were still honing their ideological mind-set, at the same time influencing our thinking and giving us, shall we say, moral support.  By the time, at the conclusion of Strangelove, Slim Pickens rides a nuclear ICBM waving his cowboy hat on his descent to oblivion, we were convinced that Kubrick spoke for us.  Embedded in the trappings of a dark comedy, Kubrick had exposed the military industrial complex and subjected it to a kind of derisive laughter that not even Chaplin had achieved in his pre-war satire of fascism, The Great Dictator.  And, though satire, Kubrick had also embedded in this latest work, once again in black and white, chilling, jarringly realistic scenes of battle (as U.S. troops attempt to take back one of their own bases from a paranoid general determined to take out the Soviet Union) that prefigured the television footage from the jungles of Vietnam that would soon be seen every night on the news for the greater part of a decade.
     Four years later, in 1968, Kubrick would release the film that would later be cited by the Vatican as first among the forty-five most outstanding films of the twentieth century.  2001 was released in a large movie house in Times Square.  On that very same night, crowds left the movie, still somewhat dazed by its impact, to receive yet another shock. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated,shot to death on the balcony of  a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
     The year 1968 would come to be called "the year the world ended."  One thing that certainly ended for my generation, as we shall see in the next post, was our adolescent fantasy of a marriage, even a marriage to art, that was free of complications.

Lunatic Fringe Gets Closer

With Paul Ryan now potentially the proverbial heartbeat from leadership of the most powerful war machine on the planet, the lunatic fringe is even better poised to take power than I had feared. (See earlier post, "A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power"). To borrow Hannah Arendt's insight, the reaction of the mainstream media in this country is to treat evil as banal.  Paul Ryan is universally described, even by his supposed opposition among Democrats as "a nice guy," as they feel behooved--in spite of being perfectly aware of his fanatical extremism--to reassure the public that this guy is mainstream.  Some commentators point to his collegiality with his Democratic Party counterpart, the talented Democratic congressman, Chris Van Hollen, as evidence.  I don't know how many Americans have watched the two together on C-Span broadcasts of House budget hearings, but to mistake for chumminess the behavior of Van Hollen, who relates to Ryan the way any individual would who is forced to work with a maniac, would be to miss all the obvious signs.  "Look, I have to deal with this guy, so it is only politic to pretend that he is normal."  Even the president has taken this line.  "Great family man, buuuttt..."
      Ryan is no Sarah Palin.  He may prove more a deficit than a benefit to the Romney campaign, but he knows you can't see Russia from Alaska.  No doubt hand-picked and destined for his present role as high priest of the "starve the beast" school by virtue of his undeniable intelligence, quickness and fundamental conservatism, Ryan got his education at the feet of Jack Kemp and the National Review cabal.  He bears some remarkable similarities to the late William F. Buckley, even possessing some of Buckley's sometimes alarming physical quirks--the leering smile in the face of evil, the eyes shining with the one true faith, the barely restrained mean-spiritedness, everything but that serpentine tongue-lolling that, in Buckley, signified that he could pick up the scent of evil with the tip of his tongue, rather like a rattler in the presence of rodent prey.  Like Buckley, Ryan is Roman Catholic.  This, in itself, gives rise to some interesting aspects of both the present ethos as well as the dynamics of the upcoming election.  With a Mormon and a Catholic the Republican nominees, this will be the first time in American history that neither candidate for these high offices will be Protestant.
     The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that still runs this country has apparently decided, during these dark times, to retreat to their country clubs, foreign villas and pieds-a-terre with just occasional excursions to Bilderberg conferences to keep an eye on things.  Five of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic.  Once about as popular with elite WASPs as they were with the KKK, Catholics and Jews are now everywhere in the corridors of government.  Both groups are perfectly suited to the role of gatekeepers in society where the mob (You know, like those Europeans who take to the street at the drop of a hat) may rise up with its pitchforks or, in this country, where it is perfectly acceptable to own such weapons, AR-15s and Ak-47s.  Though not universally held ideas within Judaism and Catholicism, there are major strains within both faiths or cultures that portray the average person as child-like, not fully developed, in need of restraining influences.  For Jews, the vulgar expression of this sensibility is summed up in the expression a goyische kup, strictly translated, a gentile or Christian head, and therefore, well...frankly, not too bright.  For Catholics, the vulgar expression is actually also the dominant one.  Their spiritual mentors are called "Father" for good reason.  Born with original sin, they tend to keep on sinning, confessing, sinning again, infant baptism having only the briefest cleansing effect.  They need to be controlled, for, given the least opportunity, they descend into all sorts of chaotic behavior, particularly of the sexual variety.  Thus the church's stand not merely against abortion, but also its seemingly perverse stand against contraception (which, though it provides an answer to unwanted pregnancies, also allows one to have worry-free, if not guilt-free, sex).
     The danger exists that the Republican handlers will do their best to keep the real Ryan under wraps, that is to keep the American people from seeing a fanatic acolyte of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, until the election is over, and it is too late.  But, to those who can decipher his barely disguised code, Ryan seems unlikely to be able to stop himself.  One of his earliest pronouncements is that “America is more than just a place…it's an idea. It's the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not government."  One has to wonder even in this case if a handler persuaded him to put "nature" first, giving God second billing.  Embedded in the statement is the ongoing struggle of the right to convert the founding fathers to good, orthodox Christians, rather than the children of Rousseau and the Enlightenment, deists and pantheists that they actually were.  Thus the sidelong reference to nature, effectively preserving Ryan's intellectual credentials while counting on the right wing base to slough over the nature bit and only hear mention of the godhead.  Good, old-fashioned, sterling silver demagoguery.  Or, at the risk of seeming to grind an anti-Catholic axe, such delicate conceits are reminiscent of nothing so much as the tactics of that sect within the faith that once led proper Protestants to coin the term "bejesuited" as a term of opprobrium.
     Most of the corporate media is already well under way to "cover" the issues in the upcoming election--cover, that is, in its primary sense of conceal, rather than expose.  We have immediately been made the victims of a flood of stories on the supposed meaning of Ryan's candidacy only to find that attention is paid to his influence on blue states and red states rather than to his extremist ideology.  Let us look forward to the debates.  Joe Biden, perhaps the last Roosevelt Democrat holding any office, treated Sarah Palin gently, being the gentleman that he is, but, hopefully, we will have a Joseph N. Welch vs. Joe McCarthy moment in which the old war horse will expose Paul Ryan for the fanatic he really is.  If we are going to regress to a medieval, feudalistic society, at least let us make clear to those tempted to vote for Ryan and Romney what it is they will actually be voting for.
     The solution to debt, deficits and entitlement programs gone out of control is no more mysterious or unattainable that a formula for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.  As we hear time and time again, every sane person knows what the final package should look like.  This isn't about money.  There is endless talk about money, nevertheless, and most of what comes out of Republican mouths are shameless lies (lies in the defense of liberty being no vice apparently).  It remains to be seen whether or not there will just one moment in the next two months when we will hear a bald expression of what all this smoke is really about.

Is Batman a Republican?

Look, I don't know.  Maybe I am just wasting my breath.  Maybe thousands before me have written about who our childhood heros really are.  There are all those sarcastic lines out there in the culture since the 1960s belittling universities that grant advanced degrees for dissertations on comic books, so perhaps if I do a search of all those dissertations, I can relax and go on to another topic.  Maybe it's already been said.  And maybe the impulse to write about the latest Batman artifact, The Dark Knight Rises, grows out of the massacre of innocents that took place in that movie house in Colorado during a screening of the film.  This story begins with my decison to go see the movie.  I didn't go to be entertained since I don't find puerile, adolescent adventure films anything other than painfully long and boring.  I went because I wanted to see what the heck is going on out there.  By the time I had brushed off the seven-dollar popcorn crumbs, threw open the swinging doors and hit daylight, I knew I had to go into print on this one.

I thought back to the first of these Batman films that I had seen with my youngest son, then about nine years old.  Every seat in the theater was filled, mostly by kids my son's age plus or minus a few years.  Like many parents dutifully escorting a child to a de rigeur event, I enjoyed the inside jokes, the allusiveness of the set design, the campiness of a typical, post-modern cinema comic book aimed, I assumed, at the adults in the audience since most nine year-olds haven't yet gotten their liberal arts degrees.  Yet, bereft of degrees as they may be, something happened at the end of the movie that frightened me because it proved to me they had gotten the real message while I was busy deconstructing the wall paper.  Batman stands triumphant, god-like, atop a tall building while the night sky is illuminated by the projected image of the bat.  In hoc signo vinces!  No sooner did this tableau hit the screen than a guttural, visceral roar emerged from the gathered children.  Dear God, these kids had been programmed!  It was the kind of sound I associated with Hitler rallies or gatherings of some alternative quasi-religious cult.  How had this happened?

Until going to see The Dark Knight Rises, I had not seen any of the other Batman films since the 1989 version I had attended with my son. Well, it is obvious that Hollywood has been hard at work keeping up with political currents over the last almost quarter century since then.  The villain of TDKR is a Darth Vader simulacrum named Bane (a choice typical of the adolescent level of metaphor employed in the film) who is loosely patterned after a grungy Occupy Wall Street "terrorist."   I guess the semiotics of Bruce Wayne in this context would have his nearest analogue in Michael Bloomberg, our billionaire, benevolent-despot Mayor.  Actually, it would be impossible to list here all but a few of the quasi-literary allusions in TDKR, since just about everything--from the pagan chants of ersatz Carmina Burana to hokum Star Wars spiritualism and levitation--has been sunk into this production.  It appears that snickering ivy league snobs, facing diminishing job opportunities in the post 2008 world, when they aren't extending the double-speak glossary for Republican politicians in Washington, are being employed as screenwriters to mess with the minds of our children.   And this stuff is probably benign compared to what kids take in from video games and internet sites most adults (certainly this one) don't have a clue about.

If the years since Bush took office can be credited with one important contribution to our society, it is a blindingly bright transparency about who we really are.  One by one, we are being stripped of our illusions.  When the killings in Aurora took place, I am probably not alone in being reminded of H. Rap Brown's observation that "violence is as American as cherry pie."  We didn't need Bush to teach us that lesson, but the suspension of our constitutional rights and the determination to make government synonymous with evil makes it a lot harder for some of us to overlook the fact that the comic book heros of our youth were basically vigilantes, not as raw as Rambo, Travis Bickle, Dirty Harry, or Charles Bronson's forgettably named Death Wish character, but who in their colorful, seemingly wholesome, other-worldly toon dimension were just as effective in getting across to us that you really can't count on government institutions like police departments to protect you from evil.  In fact, you can't count on government for much of anything.  True salvation comes from sources above and beyond the law.

(Which is not to say that we are not also drowning in TV cops who daily struggle against increasingly evil foes, but few would accuse even the typical Jerry Burkheimer fare, the most refined expression of the genre, of eliciting rapturous roars from their audience.  Gloomy, not inspiring.  The one toon cop who made it to the screen, the venerable Dick Tracy, for all the post-modern trappings of the 1990 film, could not even generate a Dick Tracy II.  Interestingly, New York's finest are, after a considerable period of virtual entombment in TDKR, given their moment of glory in the film, but only after being released by our hero to take place in a full frontal assault on the Occupy Wall Street grunge-orists that depicts them as an army out of the period of Gladiator or Braveheart.  I guess the writers wanted to keep the men in blue on board and thought they would enjoy the scene.)

TDKR's Bane succeeds in penetrating the New York Stock Exchange in a hail of bullets.  When he has succeeded in his assault, he rises to announce that he has set the people free, put the people in power.  He even establishes a court clearly meant to elicit both visually and thematically the court of Robespierre (lines from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities to follow later in the film).  Having dispatched the evil empire, the right is now free to resume its apparently tireless attacks on the French Revolution, a revolution which did a bit more than spill some tea into Boston harbor. 

The one saving grace in all this political stew would seem to be that--given the educational achievement of most American kids--they won't get any of the references.  The danger is that the message will get through anyway.  I don't want to be around when those enraptured roars I heard back in 1989 at the end of the first Batman epic are heard not in movie houses but in our streets.

    

 

The Great Game: Part II

In a prequel to the twentieth century's Cold War shenanigans between East and West, the world witnessed a lengthy period of tension between the Russian Empire and the English Empire over control of Central Asia.  That conflict has been labeled by historians as "The Great Game."  Now that the Soviet "experiment" has collapsed, Russia appears to have reacquainted itself with its old Tsarist roots and once again taken on the trappings of empire.  Its opponent in the region is now the American rather than the British empire.  The conflict between the two empires appears far more dangerous, a far greater threat to world peace, than what now seems the cozy Cold War standoff (MAD or "Mutually Asssured Destruction") whereby the two opponents agreed not to totally annihilate the planet in a nuclear conflagration.  Of course, both empires continue to warehouse thousand of ICBMs, missiles that are still targeted on such places as Moscow and New York.
     RT.com, the Russian news outlet, is daily full of stories chronicling the growing tension between Russia and the U.S. replete with arms build-ups, CIA machinations and op-ed pieces tearing the veil from the United States' presumed preoccupation with human rights and democracy in the region.   While these stories, many of them quite lurid, have been coming out of Russia for months now, the U.S.'s major propaganda outlet, the New York Times, can go for days without drawing much attention to the crisis. 
    Many see the move to destabilize and to bring about regime change in Syria as a necessary preliminary to making a move on Iran.  As far as this game goes, we may well be approaching the endgame.  All that we have seen since the turmoil in Tunisia initiated what came to be called the Arab Spring seems to suggest that the phenomenon should more accurately be called the "Arab Springboard" to the West's ultimate goal of accomplishing its two primary foreign policy goals: the complete domination of the oil-producing world and the encirclement of our two most estimable opponents, Russia and China.

     No effort has been spared in this campaign.  If it meant abandoning old friends like Mubarak in Egypt, delivering humanitarian aid to Libya via "no-fly" zones, (actually zones in which U.S. fighter jets can bomb a nation with impunity), and initiating a sustained propaganda campaign in which Syrians armed by the U.S. were portrayed as non-violent protesters, these were small prices to pay for such lucrative rewards.
     The apparent unanimity in the West (How can one disagree when even formerly pesky France and the venerable Kofi Annan seem to be on board?) blithely flies in the face of any concept of national sovereignty or international law.  The U.S. has claimed for itself--in a psychedlic expansion of the concepts of manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine--the absolute right to install regimes compatible with its interests.
     The suspicion arises that one explanation for the appearance of unanimity among our client states is that we have held their feet to the fire, in this case the economic conflagration brought about by Nobel Prize-winning derivatives geniuses.  It is not just the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) that teeter on the edge of financial ruin.  England and France live with daily protests against the austerity measures they require to avoid bankruptcy.  At the long conference tables at which national leaders periodically gather, U.S. economists no doubt remind skeptics that half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives out there represent, to use a favored phrase, an existential threat.  We had best show a united front, circle the wagons, and be ready for the worst.  Should the Russians or the Chinese--or even nascent India--achieve parity with regard to assets like oil, the sun may set on the two-century long domination of the West.

“segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever”

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

--Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, “Getting Away with It,” New York Review of Books,”  July 12, 2012. 

Paul Krugman must be given a great deal of credit for his constant efforts in the pages of the New York Times to get policy makers to listen to reason and take the steps necessary to turn the American economy around.  For those sympathetic to his view, however, there has been frustration about his reluctance to, shall we say, name names, to allow himself to even speculate in print about why it is the Republican Party has resorted to its gridlock strategy.   Now, in a review titled “Getting Away with It,” in the current New York Review of Books, (NYR), Krugman has gone on the record.  Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, herself a respected economist and journalist, co-authored the article.  What they have together produced is a devastating indictment of Republican ideology and tactics.

As one reads their article, it becomes clear why (as they do in the first line of the excerpt above) the authors choose the euphemism “awkward” to describe the position they and their colleagues are in when it comes to candidly describing the wellsprings of  Republican strategy.  In a word, it is all about race.   Outright “dangerous” would probably be a more accurate word to describe the position one puts oneself in this country for merely suggesting that racism is a lingering cancer in America.  It must have taken considerable courage for Krugman and Wells to write this piece.  They are to be commended for it.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, right wing opposition to him and to his policies has become more and more virulent.  Such zealotry and fanaticism, such eye-rolling, hair-pulling and submission to raptures has not been seen in this country since the Civil War. Here is what I wrote in “A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power” on June 17:

The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

 The NYR piece is a review of three books:  Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists, (“an inside account of Obama’s economic team from the early days of the presidential transition to late 2011”), Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire (in which Frank describes the current crisis as “something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times.”), and Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity.   It is Edsall’s thesis, namely that the divisions we are seeing are a consequence of scarcity, that finally prompts Krugman and Wells to retort that:

    The truth is that the austerity Edsall emphasizes is more the result than the cause of our embittered politics. We have a depressed economy in large part because Republicans have blocked almost every Obama initiative designed to create jobs, even refusing to confirm Obama nominees to the board of the Federal Reserve. (MIT’s Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, was rejected as lacking sufficient qualifications.) We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs.

So where does the embittered politics come from? Edsall himself supplies much of the answer. Namely, what he portrays is a Republican Party that has been radicalized not by a struggle over resources—tax rates on the wealthy are lower than they have been in generations—but by fear of losing its political grip as the nation changes. The most striking part of The Age of Austerity, at least as we read it, was the chapter misleadingly titled “The Economics of Immigration.” The chapter doesn’t actually say much about the economics of immigration; what it does, instead, is document the extent to which immigrants and their children are, literally, changing the face of the American electorate.

As Edsall concedes, this changing face of the electorate has had the effect of radicalizing the GOP. “For whites with a conservative bent,” he writes—and isn’t that the very definition of the Republican base?—the shift to a majority-minority nation [i.e., a nation in which minorities will make up the majority] will strengthen the already widely held view that programs benefiting the poor are transferring their taxpayer dollars to minority recipients, from first whites to blacks and now to “browns.”

And that’s the message of Rick Santelli’s rant, right there.

      This is, of course, by no means the first time that undercurrents—or, more often, outright paroxysms of racial conflict have changed the political landscape of the United States.  The Civil War dealt the Confederacy a crushing blow, but it changed few hearts and minds in the South.  The rights and freedoms given the former slaves after the war through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (the so-called “Reconstruction Amendments”) vanished as soon as the U.S. army of occupation left the South.  As late as 1963, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation,  George Wallace could still make the blood of Alabamans boil when he talked about the “infamous, illegal fourteenth amendment. (The great state of Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995.)  A rigged presidential election in 1876 put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, ended Reconstruction and initiated a century-long reign of terror imposed on Black Americans—replete with Klan robes, lynchings, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.   Even now, in the twenty-first century, many of the gains and accomplishments made by Black Americans during Reconstruction have not seen their equal.  In 1963, just a few months prior to Martin  Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” on the steps of the Lincoln monument, the good citizens of Alabama greeted George Wallace’s inaugural speech proclamation, “segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever” with enthusiastic applause.

     Wallace's inaugural address is well worth reading in its entirety.  Nearly half a century later, it may be read essentially as the philosophy and program of the 21st- century Republican Party.  The so-called Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and '70s was in effect a second Civil War.  It is easy for many Americans to forget that it was only the use of Federal troops in the South that finally forced change.  There is little reflection either on the hundreds of American cities that had erupted into insurrection during that period, with tanks rolling down American streets a common occurrence.  But just as the South responded to the Civil War and Reconstruction through terror, there would be push-back to the reaffirmation of our laws that was accomplished through the Civil Rights Act.  Wallace had issued the call:

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest (sic) reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

     It would take until 1980 for the reorganized forces of Southern reaction to finally have their way.  Wallace's call to like-minded citizens outside of the South would finally be realized.   Following the Civil Rights Act, the South abandoned the Democratic Party and became solidly Republican.   The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a fundamental redrawing of the political map.  Barack Obama is not only the first Black president, he is the first Northerner to take the White House since John F. Kennedy.  With the exception of Gerald Ford, an accidental president, Sun belt and Bible belt have dominated now for half a century.  Southern politicians stashed their white suits and Panama hats and went to Brooks Brothers for their pin-stripes while the Northern white working class--frightened, frustrated, often forced out of their homes through block-busting--cleaved to Ronald Reagan as their savior, abandoning the Democratic Party wholesale.  The premium placed on suburbanization and the assault on unions would permanently alter the character of the Democratic Party.

     There are those on the left who demur from laying the blame for what has happened in this country to race, insisting that it is all about class.  While they proceed to split hairs, the end result has been that few if any Americans will frankly confront the cancer that has festered in our nation since its inception.  Some may feel, (including our Black president), that the issue is too volatile, a skeleton best left in the closet.  Better to be polite and hope that reason will prevail.  Even our Black citizens are wary--and this in spite of the fact that they have suffered more than any other Americans through the recent crisis.  One analyst stated that it would take 500 years for Black America to regain the wealth that it lost after 2008.