"Yes, but ..." Doxy gets even more pretentious: As bad as Baraka's piece is, the same should not be assumed of other pieces of art based on the 9/11 attacks. Eric Fischl's sculpture, "Tumbling Woman," taken down last month by its sponsor, the Rockefeller Center, was a shocking piece of art in the truest sense, as were the "Falling" cutouts by Sharon Paz mounted, then removed, by the Jamaica Center. Just as Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" is an expression of the anger we felt as we saw the towers collapse, both art pieces were designed to evoke the terror present in the immediacy of that moment last year. (Images of both works can be found here.)

Regarding her work, Paz says,

My interest was to explore the moment of falling to bring the psychological human side of the event, the moment between life and death. Falling is one of the basic fears of human but in the same time we dream to fly.

I found the images of people falling the most disturbing and wanted to deal with them, to overcome the fear, I felt the need to explore this moment, to bring out the reality within the memory that this event burns into our mind. I created the shadows of the images and placed them in a vertical line on the Jamaica Center for the Arts & Learning windows. I tried to bring the freedom of this horrible moment where in fact there was no choice for these people.

It is in the nature of art to collect experiences, to turn them to the light and observe the results. Tragedy propels art; in a sense, tragedy is art. (Imagine Doestoyevsky as a cheerful Anglican prelate, creating a very different Raskolnikov!) These works were not tendentious screeds like "Somebody," nor attempts to profit from a tragedy; they are genuine efforts to crystallize that day by reducing it down to its barest essentials: the sight of a human body, flung from the windows, tumbling unstrung to earth.

Is it disturbing? Is it shocking? Does it leave us alone in the immensity of that day? If so, if it turns our faces ever back to a day we would rather leave in the faintest of watercolors, then we should thank the artist, if only for a moment.

 
Wise Whys: Amiri Baraka is not always a bad poet, as such things go, though he is never a good one. Some of his work is arresting -- the ambivalent, ever-open parentheses of "Balboa, the Entertainer," and the terrible, flat syncopation of "Incident" both stand out in his corpus -- but the linguistic play all but inevitably gives way to a derivative and hackneyed Beat malice that wastes itself in hatred of whites, Jews, women, gays, and any black Americans who don't subscribe to his prejudices. (Small wonder Ralph Ellison held him in contempt.)

A child born into a middle-class home, LeRoy Jones came to espouse a hatred of capitalism. A voracious reader, educated in majority-white schools and at Howard University, he deliberately writes down to his audience, who he seems to consider intellectual inferiors. A man who married a Jewish woman despite its illegality at the time, his poems now bristle with the hatred of women and Jews. Inspired by the beatnik poets, part of Ginsberg and Kerouac's circle, he spends interminable lines accusing other people of being "faggots." And, though he unilaterally claims the mantle of the Voice of Blackness, he subscribes to the essentialism of Senghor's negritude, which insists on an anti-intellectual, emotional bias in blacks; in "First Fire," he makes violent revolution a natural collorary of black essentialism: "And dont be frightened by the storm of rhythm the sky turns into, let it tear into you and sing whatever comes into your heart."[1]

Much of Baraka's work should have served as a warning for his political patrons:

"All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!"
("Black People!")

"Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured."
("For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet")

"This bitch [heroin] killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced to a pitiful imitation faggot ... feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your hysterectic laughs while your flesh burns and your eyes peel to red mud"
("Babylon Revisited")

"The Revolutionary Theatre must teach [whites] their deaths. ... It must kill any God anyone names except common Sense. The Revolutionary Theatre should flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln's face. ... WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP IN HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL! ... The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise. ... The play that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA."
("The Revolutionary Theatre," commissioned but refused by the New York Times)

"Atheist Jews double crossers stole our secrets…They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves."
("The Black Man Is Making New Gods")

"Setting fire and death to whities ass. Look at the Liberal Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat & puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr There's a negroleader pinned to a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting in hot flame"
("Black Art")

Fourteen years after he asked for "Another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth" ("Black Art"), Baraka supposedly repudiated his anti-Semitism. However, that mea culpa came with a qualification: "The movement among middle-class Jews to become straightup Americans, shedding their 'Jewishness' represents a progressive trend among Jews" ("Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite") However admirable Baraka considered the subsumation of an ethnic Jewish identity into a generalized American identity, the same did not apply to blacks, as his writings make clear: "do not let your children when they grow look in your face and curse you by pitying your tomish ways" ("Black People!").

The same evasions appear in Baraka's work from last year, "Somebody Blew Up America" (available here; one has to wonder if Horowitz is paying royalties to Baraka), a long and incredibly dull screed that suggests Israel and the Bush Administration were behind the September 11 attacks:

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion 
And cracking they sides at the notion ...
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed 
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers 
To stay home that day 
Why did Sharon stay away? 

"Somebody" touched off the predictable firestorm, of which the latest news is that NJ Governor James E. McGreevey is asking the legislature to stop the payments on the $10,000 honorarium being made to Baraka, who was recommended to the post of poet laureate by an independent arts council earlier this year. Of course, neither the legislature nor the Governor's office should have approved the nomination, but politicians may still think of poetry as a harmless exercise carried out by neurotic Anglophiles, excusing somewhat their failure to investigate.

As bad as "Somebody" is, as undistinguished is his history of hatred and verbal violence, the simple truth is that Baraka has wasted the talent that he does have. Eventually, the legislature will get around to removing him from his post, and no doubt Baraka will cite that -- as he did his denial of tenure from Rutgers -- as proof of a conspiracy against him. But it would be better if he would simply heed the doggerel of the Newark Star Ledger:

Of poets one hates to be critical
But not when they're anti-Semitical
And that's why Amiri
Of whom we've grown weary
Should quit, heeding pleas non-political.

 
Actress, Interrupted: This is not a celeb story. (And for the record, neither is this.) But mischaracterized evidence, a bizarre charge of carrying a generic version of a drug one has a prescription for, a felony prosecution for a crime often plea-bargained into misdemeanors, and a "lead deputy DA postpon[ing] a murder trial so she can fulfill her duties prosecuting a shoplifting charge" certainly deserves some consideration on a blog largely devoted to political and legal concerns.

Certainly so. Ahem.

The initial complaint can be found here, and a press release -- even in Los Angeles, there can't be many DA's announcements that include a filmography -- here.

 
Glass Governors' Houses: The Philadelphia Inquirer digs up an interesting tidbit regarding last year's gubernatorial race in New Jersey:

With acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco under fire in an ethics controversy, the GOP leadership persuaded him to withdraw from the primary and replaced him on the ballot with former U.S. Rep. Robert Franks. The GOP, which controlled the legislature, passed legislation delaying the primary for three weeks to give Franks time to run a campaign.

Franks, who entered the primary an overwhelming favorite to defeat Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, instead lost in a landslide. Party leaders attributed the loss to voter backlash.

"I think voters will react the same way this year as they did to our fiasco last year," said William Palatucci, finance chairman of the New Jersey Republican State Committee. "We learned our lesson last year that it was wrong, and voters rejected that attempted switch."

He and other Republicans viewed the Franks candidacy the way Democrats view Lautenberg - "great integrity, name ID, and lots of money. We thought it was a lay-up, and we couldn't make the shot."

Are there differences? You betcha. It was a state election, DiFrancesco dropped out 41 days before the primary election was held (and one day before the absentee ballots were to be sent out) and the three-week extension pushed the June 5 election date to June 26 (the bill text can be found here), putting Franks in the statutory safe zone.

The legal realist in me has to wonder if last year's acts prompted the state Supreme Court's ruling as a way to prevent ballot switchouts from being the sole perogative of the party controlling the legislature. It doesn't make their ruling any more palatable to me, but the GOP's rather selective dudgeon leaves as bad a taste behind.

 
The Torch gutters out: There is a great deal that deserves to be said about the Dems' successful plea to have Torricelli replaced on the ballot after the expiration of the statutory deadline. It can be said, for example, that there is no verbiage specifically outlawing substitutions after the passing of the 51 day deadline. It can also be said that legislative review of the law shows that it was revised in 1985 to change the limit from 34 days to 51 days specifically to give election officials more time "to attend mechanics of preparing for general election," suggesting legislative intent to deny substitutions after that deadline.

Furthermore, although the state Supreme Court may consider the 51-day deadline arbitrary, there's another date to be considered. N.J. Stat. § 19:57-11, which I think (given my brief review of the New Jersey civil code) is controlling, states that civilian and military absentee ballots "shall be ... forwarded as soon as practicable after the 40th day preceding the day upon which any election is to be held." The Torch flamed out four days after that deadline, which arguably represents a more significant bar than the 51-day deadline at N.J. Stat. § 19:13-20, since absentee ballots were already in the mail at the time of the announcement.

One can also only wonder at the creation of what seems to be a new judicially-developed right, the right to a two-party election, which appears in its entirety, like Athena from Zeus' forehead, in the middle of the opinion without any attempt to explain its genesis. It often seems that the assertion of a right serves only to cover lapses in legal reasoning, and this one is papering over a massive chunk of space.

This doesn't mean the GOP will have any success in prosecuting its claim. I haven't seen the petition for the writ of cert to the Supremes, but I don't think an Equal Protection claim over the absentee ballots is a slam dunk in terms of claiming standing. Perhaps the GOP could claim that the court's decision violated Art. 1, Sec. 3 (In relevant part: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years.") or Sec. 4 ("The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof."). In any case, what's the harm being claimed, especially if absentee ballots can be sent out again and resubmitted?

Thankfully, I'm not qualified to answer any of those questions. However, the excellent Jane Galt has been spending a fair amount of time watching this controversy, including lots of updates from readers. Check 'er out.

 
Les curieux: In these parlous times, when illegal videos of homeless men who "stomp and pummel each other until bloody" make millions for their creators, concerns about the Western Canon or political decor seem strangely, touchingly out of place. So John Luckacs' lament over the passing of the American intellectual, Salon's query if George Will has any relevance in the political culture of the modern Right, and First Things' encomium for a theory of rationality that seems more suited to discussing medieval theories of relations than the vitriol of today's humanities despartments have a bittersweet tinge to them.

Returning to the rough and tumble of current politics, Christopher Hitchens has evidently severed his relations with The Nation, saying that he can no longer associate himself with what he calls "the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden," and an anonymous WaPo writer bids a not particularly fond farewell to Dick Armey: "Who cares about civility and decency? We need copy."