Schools, News Media, Awareness, and Meeting the Challenges
I begin with three apparently random observations.
First, this morning I read about a local school district near Houston, Texas voting to remove chapters from school texts, texts whose publishers had already been forced by the state to eliminate so-called “wokeified” elements. The state board didn’t want young children learning, for example, that Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.” But the board of a district near Houston, Texas – a district in which nearly 80% of the students are people of color, thinks that the state board did not go far enough. They removed chapters from five texts – the board member proposing the change said the deleted chapters “were inappropriate for students because they discussed ‘vaccines and polio,’ touched on ‘topics of depopulation,’ had ‘an agenda out of the United Nations’ and included ‘a perspective that humans are bad.’” Better, the argument goes, that students not learn anything that might unsettle a particular world view.
Second, I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in small West Texas towns. I was thinking recently of my awareness – actually my lack of awareness – of so much that was going on during my childhood and teen years. I knew that JFK was assassinated in Dallas — I have a rather vivid memory of the school PA speaker suddenly coming to life in Ms. Pena’s science classroom, just as a radio announcer was saying that the President had died. But I knew virtually nothing about the early work of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Nothing about the Montgomery bus boycott. Nothing about the Greensboro sit-ins. I was talking earlier this week with someone five or six years older than I – someone who grew up is small Texas towns a lot like the ones I grew up in – who said that we didn’t know those things simply because local news didn’t report those things. She knew virtually nothing about the Civil Rights movement until she started college. This observation reminded me of the summer that I lived in Odessa, Texas years later. It was the summer of the Watergate Senate hearings. If the hearings revealed negative information about Nixon, the local paper — the Odessa American — simply didn’t cover it. I realized then that I had to seek out national news to learn anything of substance about the Senate hearings. Again, the thinking seems to be that if we don’t report it, then it didn’t happen.
The third observation comes from Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life. I’ve already offered one reflection based on this book. This morning I read Gornick’s brief essay about the life and work of Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and the other beat poets. Gornick reports that Ginsburg’s poem Howl was explosive in American culture: After Ginsberg “arrived at last in San Francisco in 1954 …, the American city experienced as most open (that is, farthest from the seats of Eastern power), he wrote his great poem, read it aloud one night in October of 1955 — and awoke to find himself famous” (pp. 140f). The establishment response to Ginsburg, his poem, and the other beat poets was brutal. As Gornick reports, Norman Podhoretz said that “the Beats … were the barbarians at the gate, rabble-rousers who ‘embraced homosexuality, jazz, dope-addiction and vagrancy’ (he got that part right) at one with ‘the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns’” (pp. 141f). Podhoretz and other authorities didn’t want the Beats crashing their party. They thought they had no right to be there. If we don’t like them, then we don’t want to listen to them.
I know next to nothing about Podhoretz (there’s that isolation of my youth again!), but one of his books is now sitting in my TBR pile. The book, published in 1999, is in the pile merely by virtue of its title: Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.
Three apparently random observations – one from today’s news, one from my teen-age years, and another from a book published in 2008 with observations of life in the 1950s. But I’d say that in another sense they aren’t random at all. In each case, people are attempting to hold onto a world that they fear is slipping way. Gornick provides a hint of what that might look like, describing Jack Kerouac’s response to criticisms such as Podhoretz’s: Kerouac, she says, “wrote to complain that the Beats were about beatitude not criminalism; they were here to rescue America from corporate death and atomic bomb politics, not destroy her” (p. 142).
The title of Podhoretz’s book suggests that he didn’t accept Kerouac’s response. And, in fact, Wikipedia suggests that he has drifted farther and farther to the right, even moving in recent years from being anti-anti-Trump to being rather strongly pro-Trump:
[T]he fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left… His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America.
So, Podhoretz has joined the ranks of those who would make American great again. I trust I don’t have to repeat here the standard observation that the desire to make American great again comes with particular understandings of both “great” and “America.” It seems to me that the true greatness, such as it is, of America, such as it is, will emerge we confront the shortcomings of our community and challenge one another to meet these challenges head on. But we can’t confront those shortcomings if we refuse to acknowledge them. And acknowledging them requires that we learn about them.