I was on the Twitter yesterday, and the blue checkmarks were positively aflutter over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “devastating” essay on Kanye West’s support of Donald Trump. Michael Barbaro wrote that it was “the single most powerful — and devastating — piece of essay writing I’ve read in ages.” Sherrilyn Ifill: “Brilliant, self-revealing, devastating.” The piece is “such a singular devastation of truth,” said Amber Tamblyn, by which she means the opposite. There were lots of beautifuls, stunnings, and wows, too.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but Coates’s argument that West is a traitor to his race by supporting Trump seemed rather pedestrian to me. Coates says West has chosen “white freedom” over fighting for his people. Instead of becoming a “black champion,” he has sold out to whites. Coates tries to gin this observation up with a bit of hysterics. What happened in America in 2016, he writes, “has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country that specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.” Coates goes on to compare his limited experience with fame with West’s. Fame separates us from “regular” people, which is, of course, true but not particularly “devastating.” The best parts of the long piece are mildly touching. The worst are inflated and predictable.
I could say more, but it’s predictable to criticize Coates, too, so let’s move on: How about those crazy surrealists? Laura Freeman reviews Desmond Morris’s The Lives of the Surrealists: “When Salvador Dalí came to lecture at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, he arrived with two Russian wolfhounds on leads. He wore a deep-sea diver’s suit and carried a billiard cue. A jewelled dagger hung from his belt. The subject of his lecture was ‘Paranoia, The Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms’. The audience couldn’t hear him through the diving helmet, so it was not immediately obvious that Dalí was suffocating. When friends did eventually sound the alarm, they found the bolts on Dalí’s helmet stuck fast. Send for a spanner! By the time they’d taken the helmet off, Dalí was close to death. All in the name of surreal art. Nothing was too silly, too sensational, too childishly scatological for Dalí, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and the squabbling Surrealist gang.”
Rodin and the art of ancient Greece: “What struck him most forcibly was what might be termed ‘the poetry of imperfection’. Unlike the Neoclassicists who preceded him, Rodin was not interested in flawlessness or Winckelmann’s idea of an ideal body as indicative of an ideal society; rather, it was the sculptures’ very fragmentariness that was so evocative.”
W. H. Auden, the “conservative, disenchanted realist”: He was “convinced that our civilization has taken a wrong turning, with very little likelihood of ever finding its way back. As he wrote in the conclusion of a commissioned essay on the fall of Rome that Henry Luce could not bring himself to print, ‘I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labeled capitalist, socialist, or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.’”
It was recently alleged by the Bulgarian government that French theorist Julia Kristeva was an agent of the “Communist-era intelligence apparatus, the fearsome Committee for State Security, which worked hand-in-glove with the KGB.” But what she may have done in private was not as bad as what she did in public argues Kevin Williamson in Commentary: “For decades, she lent her intellectual prestige and her powers as a writer (and propagandist) to some of the most repressive and vicious regimes of the second half of the 20th century. And she did so as someone who had first-person experience with real-world socialism as it was practiced in what was arguably the single most suffocating regime in Eastern Europe.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Joshua Hammer writes about an attempt to steal nearly $1 billion from the central bank of Bangladesh:
“Until about a decade ago, Bangladesh’s central bank was stuck in the analog age: Staff members sent international payment instructions via a teleprinter, an electromechanical typewriter that sent and received messages over standard phone lines and other channels. But since a new bank governor took over in 2009, the institution had gone digital. Its international transfer orders are now dispatched via Swift, the Brussels-based electronic network used by 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories. Inside a 12-foot-by-8-foot glass-walled chamber, under the scrutiny of closed-circuit security cameras, staff members log into Swift and dispatch the payment orders with encrypted communications. With a few keystrokes, a complex process is set in motion that sends millions of dollars zipping across continents.
“Bin Huda was the duty manager that morning, which meant he was tasked with scrutinizing printouts of transfer confirmations, routine queries and other Swift messages that had come in overnight. Friday is a bank holiday in Bangladesh, but a dedicated printer still generated hard copies of digital transfer messages. A few dozen would usually come in over the course of a day, but that morning Bin Huda didn’t see any on the printer. He assumed it was a technical glitch and decided to deal with it on Saturday.
“At 9 o’clock the next morning, he returned to the office. This time, he found that the Swift software — the program that launches the messaging service — wasn’t functioning, either. Each time he tried to open it, a disconcerting error message appeared: A file is missing or changed. He and his colleagues huddled over the dedicated Swift computer, following directions on the monitor on how to get the software running again. Shortly after noon, he was able to retrieve three messages from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and to print them out one by one. The New York Fed is, in effect, the gatekeeper of much of world banking, and hosts accounts for 250 central banks and governments with deposits of about $3 trillion. A Fed employee had written to Bangladesh, asking for clarification about 46 payment instructions received over the past 24 hours. The Fed had never seen orders like that or a total so large from the bank — nearly $1 billion.”
Photo: Fundatura
Poem: Rachel Hadas, “Looking On”
Forthcoming:
Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (Amistad, May 8): “In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.”
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