The Breaking Time

The old gold cross: The mutation of the American political convention

William Jennings Bryan, carried victorious through the 1896 Democratic convention

If I walk out the door from where I live, away from downtown and into the rich, quiet part of town, I will encounter an old house where William Jennings Bryan spent his summers. According to local legend, he had a soundproof room where he could practice his oratory.

In the summer of 1896, Bryan — then a young, populist Nebraska congressman — took his famous booming voice to the Chicago Coliseum, where the Democratic Party was holding its convention.

The Democrats at the time were deeply divided on a number of topics, most immediately whether to issue coinage in gold or silver as well. It sounds dry, but the issue was one of those political icebergs, striking at deeper problems of class and power. With no certain nominee for President, Bryan took the stage, broadening his condemnation of gold into a fiery attack on the power of the wealthy:

We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

---

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Forget the currency issue; Bryant's genius was to capture common outrage so perfectly that it's still energizing to read.

Thundering to the assembled delegates, he declared "you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He finished, arms outstretched, and the crowd went wild.

The results were a populist wet dream: "the Great Commoner" Bryan won the nomination over fat cat incumbent Grover Cleveland and became the first liberal to head the Democratic Party. The convention was one for the books: a genuinely suspenseful battle for control of the country's politics.

Now, I'm leaving for Charlotte, just down the mountain, where the Democratic Party — 116 years later — will again have its convention. To say "they don't make 'em like they used to" is an understatement. The nature of the event is the mirror opposite from Bryan's day, and how the American political convention stumbled from popular decision point to stage-managed spectacle is a revealing story.

Zombies, Mutants, Cyborgs and Aliens: Fight for the Future

Welcome back Damien Williams for a riveting rant on, well, the aforementioned bogeymen, and what kind of future our culture is choosing.

Please pick another apocalypse. Image by Quidditch.

I don't like zombies. I don't mean I'm afraid of them, or that they skeeve me out. I mean that I don't like the current use of them as trope, or a modern cultural cipher. I told you this the last time we spoke, and I told you that I'd tell you why.

You see, back in the day, when Romero was using zombies to talk about consumer culture and the death of individual preference in the face of mass markets, a zombie horde was a potent symbol. It was crushing, endless, homogenizing death. Why do you think Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall? It was a terrifying indictment of what Romero believed was happening to our society.

Later, when the zombie symbol came to be applied out to Western society as a whole, and not just its consumerist leanings, the fast zombie became the stand-in for the hyper-connectivity and infectious nature of concept, idea, and emotion. Unthinking Rage just spreads and spreads.

That was all well and good. The problem is, zombies don't represent that anymore. Honestly, so far as I see it? Zombies don't represent anything anymore. The modern zombie is an empty symbol, representing only itself. The fight against zombies is now only the pure expression of futility, of never giving up in the face of odds which will defeat us. Zombies are just about Fear. They are collapse and terror and, yes, also the changes that survival of terror wreaks on people. But, in the final offing, I think that's boring.

I'm what some might call a pop culture junkie. I'm interested in all aspects of the popular media (even if, as I say, I don't exactly enjoy every single one of them), because I believe that our pop culture is reflexively connected to the wider culture. It tells us what we're thinking, it tells us how we're feeling, and in turn it influences those thoughts and emotions.

Pop culture amplifies and exaggerates our existing beliefs, distilling them down and reflecting them back to us in a glittering panoply of spectacle and story. What this means for you and me is that, as long as I'm here at The Breaking Time, I'll very often talk to you about the nature of our society — and our perception of its imminent and immanent collapse — through the lens of our pop culture and what it is doing for and to us. If the ascension of “Reality” television is Jean Baudrillard's nightmare scenario, then the rise of zombie apocalypse narrative is mine.

Gongs and drums: Political manipulation in seven acts

McKinley/Roosevelt campaign poster, 1900

"Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point."

-Sun Tzu

1912 short film from the Woodrow Wilson campaign attacking the Taft administration. According to PBS, "it is the earliest known example of a political party or candidate using the medium of motion picture to communicate with voters." Via The Daily Dish.

1930s film produced by the U.S. government advertising the achievements of the New Deal.

Kennedy campaign theme song, 1960.

"Nixon Now," theme song from his 1972 campaign

Reagan's famous "Morning in America" ad, 1984

Bush/Cheney "Wolves" ad, 2004

Horde Hop

So in my infinite wisdom, I chose to relaunch the blog on the week of the largest street festival in the Southeast happening right in my f'ing neighborhood. Luckily, this is also the same week I'm getting a major story ready for print, so time to search for an appropriate poem is completely lacking.

In lieu of written poetry, take this bit from the Polish band group Donatan RÓWNONOC, who have managed the, er, inevitable fusion of hip hop and medieval re-enaction (this must become a trend). Our Friday poetry tradition will have to wait another week to come out of hibernation. In the meantime, it's a strange and fascinating world: go pillage something.

All Times Break

I was extremely happy when Damien Williams agreed to become a contributor here and submitted this piece for our relaunch. In his own wonderful style, it pulls together classic lore, poetry, mysticism, and pop culture for a fascinating meditation on this blog's core theme.

They tell you never to start a story with a quote, so I won't. I'll start with two. Here we go:

“It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, 1716

“. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .” — "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats, 1920

And then there is, of course, the ever-popular I-Ching Hexagram 23 (~1,000 BCE), aptly titled Breaking Apart:

This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.

The right behavior in such adverse times is to be deduced from the images and their attributes. The lower trigrams stands for the earth, whose attributes are docility and devotion. The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is stillness. This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.

 We have always lived in the breaking times. We have always felt that every period of major upheaval is the end of the world, the final days, the utter Apocalypse, come at last. And we're right. Every major shift of perspective ends the world in which we lived, and brings to bear a completely new perspective. In fact, most often that perspective is necessarily new, because the only ones who survive the shift (or collapse, as some would have it) are those who can adapt to the radically altered contexts in which they find themselves.

As ever, we must adapt, or we will perish, and this isn't news.

Poems for Friday: Ulysses

I must apologize, readers, for the fact that I've let the last few Fridays go by without a poem here. Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses is an old favorite, to the extent I can't believe that I haven't posted this here before. It's old-school: long and word-rich in that way that leaves the reader stuffed, almost too much. But, hell, they're incredible words.

July's simmered over the landscape, from D.C. to Asheville. One might be forgiven for the bits of this poem that drift up, complete with a sense that younger days are long past, and the sword rusted more than any want to admit.

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink 

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments, 

Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,-- 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

I am a part of all that I have met; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! 

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life 

Were all too little, and of one to me 

Little remains; but every hour is saved 

>From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 

to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,-- 

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill 

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild 

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 

Subdue them to the useful and the good. 

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere 

Of common duties, decent not to fail 

In offices of tenderness, and pay 

Meet adoration to my household gods, 

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. 

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,-- 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. 

Death closes all; but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; 

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 

'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

 

"Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents"

Clio rolls her eyes at your historical ignorance. Painting by Pierre Mignard.

A column from Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker on America's lack of historical knowledge drops some essential wisdom:

The federal government has spent nearly a billion dollars in the past ten years to teach history to history teachers, but the money is no match for countervailing initiatives and trends—No Child Left Behind, and its emphasis on reading and math; the rise of social studies; the tyranny of the unobjectionable textbook; widespread faintheartedness in the face of cultural and political discord; and stronger pot.

And yet it may be that, while kids aren’t getting better, they’re not getting worse. The history of history-education evaluation is littered with voguish pedagogy, statistical funny business, ideological arm wrestling, a disproportionate emphasis on trivia, and a protocol that insures that each generation of kids looks dim to its elders. “We haven’t ever known our past,” Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. “Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.” He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. (And it’s not just Americans: an infamous 2004 survey revealed that a small percentage of Britons aged sixteen to twenty-four believed that the Spanish Armada was vanquished by Gandalf.)

Admittedly, Gandalf vs. Armada is pretty awesome. It's particularly ironic that the perpetual scare over the next generation's lack of historical knowledge is itself ignorant of history. For at least a decade I've seen an e-mail purporting to show the decline in educational standards compared to an 1895 eighth-grade test (Snopes has a debunking). Of course, the reason the history part of the test is partly indecipherable is because it relies on ways of grouping epochs that were the voguish pedagogy of the 1890s. That even the historically educated don't remember those is no particular loss.

I lucked up on history. I had a natural talent and interest furthered by some incredible teachers. In retrospect, I think I got just about the best historical education available in public schools. I ended up with the highest possible score on my AP US History exam, and a year's worth of college history credit (my struggles with math are a contrasting story).

Paumgarten's column is dead-on on a number of fronts. History remains contentious (if you doubt this, go look at the YouTube comments for any video relating to the Civil War or Ireland). Parents want some control over their school systems and, in America, they have it through school boards.

So the really juicy, interesting parts all too often get left out in favor of bare-bones facts with little context. If my teachers hadn't had tenure, I don't like to think about what would have happened to them after some of their lessons. I wrote my final AP exam, for example, on labor struggles in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, including the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Can you imagine the outcry in some quarters against any teacher that honestly addressed that topic?

With its competing interpretations and ambiguities, history makes for a tougher sell than the clearer nuts-and-bolts answers of hard science education. Its benefits, while quite real, don't measure easily in terms of the economic development that obsesses many reformers.

Beyond that, is the fact that better historical education is essential to deal with the rapidly changing world we inhabit. But that's not commonly a hallmark of most educational systems, and the way tests are geared ensures a steady supply of statistical talking points to bolster the Woe-is-Us industry, just as it did in the last century. Improving that doesn't involve going back to some bygone era, but an actual evolution forward, in the teeth of those who would rip out of education everything that doesn't fit on a damn balance sheet.

Poems for Friday: With god on our side

This is definitely an intermission-tastic poem day, due to the pace of the work week. Bob Dylan's birthday was this Tuesday, and WNCW marked the occasion by playing covers of his work. Like Leonard Cohen, Dylan's poetic style has proved wonderfully infectious, with some of the covers exceeding the originals.

The one below, "With god on our side," by the Neville Brothers, is one of the best Dylan covers I've heard. The video is mediocre, the song superb. Happy Friday, everyone.

Rapture time: Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies

In case you were wondering, here's a chart. Larger version here.

According to some calculations, most seeming to stem from the fundamentalist preacher Harold Camping, this Saturday, May 21 is the Rapture. Among those who do not hold with this, the typical reaction seems to be "party!"

While predictions of imminent apocalypse have a long pedigree, and one not just confined to Christianity, the Rapture is a recent and mostly American invention, arising out of 18th century Puritanism.

Growing up in the rural part of the Bible Belt, where mainstream and open-minded denominations rubbed shoulders with the more esoteric fundamentalists, this idea in particular always struck me as among the strangest. I remember a particular religious bookstore with a bargain bin of apocalypses, containing predictions that Gorbachev, hippies, AIDS and computers, among others, were signs of an imminent end.

At one point, around 4th grade, I acquired the sort of fascination with the concept that only a child can muster. After taking down a Bible and skipping forward to Revelation, I decided that the world would end the next week, around 10:40 in the morning, during the language arts portion of class. I waited quietly at my desk, inwardly relieved when the appointed time arrived and my teacher was not devoured by serpent beasts. Or harlots, for that matter, who I assumed were some type of badass female supervillain.

Later, I understood the roots. Poverty and upheaval are key to the American story, creating fertile soil for visions — not just religious or Christian — of sudden triumph. It is a hard world, and those who endure long enough would dearly love for the sky to open in their favor, just once.

In best secular fashion, more and more people are getting in on the celebration, and NPR is even asking for a soundtrack. After all, in my lifetime, we've had the Bomb, homegrown terrorists, Y2K, foreign terrorists and economic strife. As long as I can remember, things far more real than Rapture have loomed.

But here we are, still alive, throwing a party. Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies.

Ode to apolitical scientists

I'm mostly tied up with journalism work this week, but it's a good time to highlight this classic gem from Tom Lehrer, an ode to Wernher Von Braun, patron saint of "apolitical" scientists. It's funny, and a lovely thing to keep in mind the next time someone idealizes science without all those inconvenient "limits," or, for that matter, tries to pretend that the estimable profession is something more than humans, pursuing a human method of understanding.