Undulating Ungulate

The moose has been reading The Price of The Ticket: Collected Essays 1948-1985, by James Baldwin. Baldwin was a black american writer who rose to prominence in the 50′s and of course throughout the 60′s civil rights era. Born the son of a poor preacher, he was himself a youth minister before leaving the church. He writes with astounding rage and passion of the situation of his country and fellow man, and yet somehow, through his anger, he comes to great compassion and wisdom in his assessments, and realises recognising the universality of the human condition and uniting honestly is the only hope for redemption and survival.

“And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

(from The Fire Next Time, 1963)

It is very difficult to argue with him, and he is exceptionally quotable. He is a great writer, honest and personal, with an impressive understanding of human nature. Particularly, I don’t think I had the faintest insight into what racism means, experientially, for the victim, before I read The Fire Next Time, nor what it means for the oppressor. Both lose their humanity.

The world he describes is so foreign it is strange to consider much of what he wrote was scarcely a decade before the moose was born. Most interestingly, his analysis of the white man’s wilful blindness to history and the present, and the nature of racism and exploitation, makes an exceptional parallel to our modern times, for the underlying historical drive is the same.

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power – or, more accurately, an energy – which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered – or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price payed by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims – the barbarians – are revolting against all established civilized values – which is both true and not true – and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

(No Name in the Street, 1972)

And that is as eloquent and contemporary a description of our circumstance today as the moose knows.

Filed by billy at 1:55 am under consciousness,quotes,the world
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