Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique” and the End of the Vietnam War

Three historical dates frame the analysis that follows. The first is 30 April 1975. This is the day the United States evacuated its embassy in Saigon, thus ending more than 20 years of American military interventions in Vietnam. The second is 25 June 1975. This is the day that Mozambique achieved independence from Portugal after hundreds of years of colonial meddling and direct rule. The third and final date is 5 January 1976. This is the day that Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s Desire, an album that contains an upbeat song about tropical beaches and casual romance called “Mozambique.” The song was recorded just a month after Mozambican independence, and Dylan included it in the set lists of the Rolling Thunder Revue tours that occurred on either side of Desire’s release.

Critics and reviewers have largely overlooked “Mozambique” as little more than a bit of lighthearted fun in a mix of otherwise earnest, innovative compositions. Writing in Rolling Stone shortly after the album’s release, reviewer Dave Marsh reduces the song’s significance to “a bit of travelogue.” The review considers many of the other songs’ themes and metaphors, but “Mozambique” warrants no further consideration. More recently, Andrew Kirell, senior editor at The Daily Beast, wrote that the song was written as a competition between Dylan and co-writer Jacques Levy “to see who could find the most words rhyming with the southeastern African country’s name. As breezily as the song came to exist, it’s perhaps as easy to overlook.”

These dismissive responses to the song are understandable. “Mozambique” is the shortest song on the album, and its lyrical content of “couples dancing cheek to cheek” and “magic in a magical land” are indeed reminiscent of a bit of travelogue, as Marsh suggests. One could even argue that it resembles the sorts of advertisements we have come to associate with the tourism industry, if not the sort of romanticized depictions of the Global South that proved so intoxicating to many colonists. And yet the question remains: Why did Dylan focus on Mozambique if all he wanted to do was infuse Desire with a bit of exoticism? Unless Kirell is correct that Dylan and Levy simply wanted to test their rhyming abilities — a suggestion that does not hold up under the fact that Mozambique is only rhymed three times in the entire song, and then not particularly well — there may be something more to Dylan’s interest in Mozambique.

There are two potential answers to this question. The first is that “Mozambique” is indeed a work of escapist fantasy, but it is a fantasy that fits within a larger pattern of escapism that pervades Desire‘s other songs, as well as the Rolling Thunder Revue tours. This escapism is related to the frustrations that had developed within the postwar movements for peace and social justice, as well as within ordinary American society, by the mid-1970s. The second potential answer is that “Mozambique” offers a problematic yet optimistic — and perhaps even utopian — gloss on the movements for national liberation that spread throughout the Global South during the second half of the twentieth century. The most important of these, from the American perspective, was Vietnam, so when Dylan sings of “the lovely people living free / Upon the beach in sunny Mozambique,” he extends the possibility of a similar freedom to the beaches of a newly liberated Vietnam as well.

There is, of course, a political dimension to what I am suggesting, both in terms of Desire’s escapism and the relationship between Mozambique and Vietnam. However, as with so much else in  Dylan’s life and work, there is an enigmatic quality to how the album’s lyrical content works. With the exception of the album’s opening track, “Hurricane,” a song that draws attention to the racially-motivated wrongful conviction for murder of outspoken middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, the album is devoid of protest or other explicitly political content. But that does not mean that it is devoid of political significance. The tropes of transcending a troubled present and/or traveling to exotic places, and especially the image of reveling on the beaches of a liberated land, are significant when measured against the political realities of mid-1970s America.

Those realities were grim. The Dylan scholar John Hughes argues that, by the mid-1970s, the previous decade’s “sense of cogent critique and future possibility had in crucial ways collapsed in the larger culture, as the times had become overshadowed by political failure, and the demeaning realities of Watergate, the oil crisis, the Kent State shooting, and the redoubled racism that appeared endemic in a social fabric that also would not hold together” (63). What is missing from Hughes’s account is, of course, the bitter end of the Vietnam War. But this is not something that Dylan omits when remembering this same period. In the opening moments of Martin Scorsese’s film Rolling Thunder Revue, an aged Dylan remembers the period: “Saigon had fallen. People had seemed to lost their sense of conviction for just about anything. A lot of arguments about why America was chased out of Vietnam in such a humiliating way. Two people tried to shoot the president in one month.”

Dylan’s recollections are consistent with what Tom Engelhardt describes in his book The End of Victory Culture, which argues that the enduring legacy of the Vietnam War on American culture was a pervasive sense of “victimhood and aggrievement” that came as a sort of bodyblow to a generation of people who had been raised in the afterglow of America’s victory in WWII (274). He writes, “The war mysteriously robbed Americans of their inheritance [of American exceptionalism]. On screen and off, they were transformed from victors into, at best, victims; from heroes into, at worst, killers… They had become the world’s most extraordinary (because least expected) losers” (254). Engelhardt relates this disillusionment to captivity, both the literal captivity of the prisoners of war who had became emblematic of the sense of victimhood that many Americans came to associate with the failures of US policy in Vietnam, but also to the captivity of the American psyche to the feelings of futility and defeat that, by the mid-1970s, had come to displace the more optimistic sense of possibility that characterized the 1960s. 

Dylan’s response to this sense of captivity was to embark on a series of whimsical tours he billed as The Rolling Thunder Revue. With dozens of his friends and fellow musicians in tow — including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and poet Allen Ginsberg — Dylan embarked on a series of carnivalesque variety shows that featured what Larry Sloman described as a “traveling band of gypsies, hobos, lonesome guitar stranglers and spiritual green berets.” A major motivation for the tour was Dylan’s desire to rekindle the magic from his Greenwich Village days, a desire to turn back the clock to a less disillusioned time. To that end, the tour engaged in a healthy dose of the carnivalesque, with Dylan and fellow travelers adorning themselves in face paint and a variety of colorful costumes. Hughes compares the Rolling Thunder tours to “a vaudeville or commedia dell’arte troupe, a gypsy caravan, a wagon train, a cowboy gang, a rodeo, a hobo boxcar, a shaman’s tribe, a strange pageant, a crazy pilgrimage” (70). Whichever term one prefers, the Rolling Thunder Revues self-consciously aligned themselves with the exotic, with a sense of outlaw whimsey, with an escape from the captivity of victimhood and aggrievement that Englehardt associates with the end of the Vietnam War. 

This is reflected in many of Desire‘s lyrics as well. Hughes makes the point when he claims that “freedom had become more a form of escapology” for Dylan, as can be seen in “Hurricane,” with Carter pining for freedom from his jail cell; or in “Romance in Durango,” with the lyrics “Me and Magdalena on the run / I think this time we shall escape”; or in the psychedelic fantasy “Isis,” with its character who dreams of escaping “to the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong” (71). There is a way in which all of these songs imagine an escape to another time or place, where the constraints of the current moment fall away and one can know that, as “Romance in Durango” repeatedly insists, “Soon you will be dancing the fandango.” The same is true of “Mozambique,” though rather than dancing the fandango in Durango, we will all be dancing “cheek to cheek / … / Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.”

As Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates in his classic study of the carnivalesque, Rabelais and His World, circuses, carnivals, parades, pageants, comedy troupes, and other related happenings have always exhibited an impulse to escape the mundane realities of what — in Rabelais’ day, as well as Dylan’s — could be a demoralizing social reality. By cultivating a sense of the absurd, of comedy, of whimsy, the carnivalesque orients its participants toward freedom. Bakhtin repeatedly refers to this as the “freedom of laughter,” noting that this freedom has a “utopian character oriented toward the future” (86 and 89; 33). I would suggest that the Rolling Thunder Revues — and especially the first tour, with its “novelty of the gypsy caravan” and “multi-layered theatrics,” as Sean Wilentz described it — were engaged in promoting a freedom of laughter, and that the song “Mozambique” shares in the “utopian character oriented toward the future” that Bakhtin identified with spirit of the carnivalesque. 

The contrast between the song’s lyrics and upbeat, optimistic tenor, on the one hand, and the political events unfolding in Mozambique at the time of the song’s composition, on the other, is striking. Under the leadership of the National Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or Frelimo as it was more commonly called, Marxist-Leninist militants had waged a victorious war for independence against the Portuguese colonial regime. While the United States officially recognized Mozambique as an independent nation the day after they declared independence, there was much hand-wringing over the fact that an independent Mozambique fell within the Soviet sphere. New York Times headlines from the weeks following Mozambican independence include: “Mozambique Sets a Radical Course,” “In Independent Mozambique, the Struggle to Implant Marxist Policies Begins,” and “Soviet Tightens Grasp in Africa.” The last of these articles worries that a liberated, socialist Mozambique “could serve as a springboard for black guerrilla movements in Rhodesia, South-West Africa and even South Africa.” This sounds very much like the domino theory American officials used to justify the military occupation of Vietnam, but by the time Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revues — singing his song “Mozambique” in cities and towns across America — those dominoes had already begun to fall.

The question I cannot answer is whether Dylan consciously intended for the song to comment on victorious national liberation movements, including in Mozambique and Vietnam. But it does seem significant to me that Dylan would write, perform, and record such a song during the time that these countries were achieving independence and establishing communist states, especially considering the impact that the United States’ defeat in Vietnam had on the American people’s collective psyche. In his memoir of the Rolling Thunder years, Larry Sloman notes that “People were attacking Bob, claiming that he had abandoned his social conscience, you know, that he didn’t write an antiwar song during Vietnam” (350). This is true. He did not write an antiwar song during Vietnam. But he did write a song that suggests that wars for national independence may end in freedom and love rather than the tyranny and immiseration suggested by government officials and newspaper headlines. By focusing on Mozambique, Dylan obliquely challenged the dominant discourse on Vietnamese independence and national unification.

Finally, there are three complicating factors I would like to work out at some point. First is that while Desire may not contain any anti-war songs, it does make a number of explicit references to racial injustice. This is most notably the case in “Hurricane,” but it is also true of the song “Joey.” I mention this because it is worth considering that Dylan was less interested in using Mozambique to parallel Vietnam than he was in holding forth the idyllic beaches of Mozambique as an example of what is possible with black liberation. The second is that Dylan represents a free Mozambique as a nice place to visit and fall in love. But national wars for independence are not fought to make beaches safe for tourists. The song fails to avoid this fairly obvious pitfall. Finally, the third complication is that the years following Mozambican independence were not as peaceful and free as Dylan imagined them in his song. In fact, the country was gripped by a civil war that lasted from 1977 to 1992 and during which widespread war crimes were committed by both sides in the conflict. Mozambique is at peace today, but it endured many years of tragedy since independence.

But in a way, this is beside the point, for I am not arguing that “Mozambique” was meant to be prophetic. What I am arguing is that it was meant to buoy people’s spirits at a time of frustration and aggrievement by offering an escapist fantasy about how some of the most violent conflicts of the Cold War would ultimately end. As the radical Situationists said during the May 1968 uprisings in France, sous les pavé, le plage. Beneath the paving stones, the beach. There is something of this sentiment in Dylan’s “Mozambique,” as if the song is meant to reassure listeners that on the other side of what appears to be a demoralizing series of defeats is paradise.

Sources:

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984.

Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Hughes, John. “‘This Time We Shall Escape’: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Period.” Rock Music Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, 62-79.

Krill, Andrew. “‘Desire’: Bob Dylan’s Sloppiest Masterpiece Turns 40.” The Daily Beast. 31 January 2016, updated 7 December 2020. https://www.thedailybeast.com/desire-bob-dylans-sloppiest-masterpiece-turns-40

Marsh, Dave. “Desire.” Rolling Stone. 11 March 1976. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/desire-255500/

Mohr, Charles. “Mozambique Sets a Radical Course.” New York Times. 26 June 1975.

—. “In Independent Mozambique, the Struggle to Implant Marxist Policies Begins.” New York Times. 2 July 1975.

Sloman, Larry. “Bob Dylan and Friends on the Bus: Like a Rolling Thunder.” Rolling Stone. 4 December 1975. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-and-friends-on-the-bus-like-a-rolling-thunder-233962/

“Soviet Tightens Grip in Africa.” New York Times. 14 December 1975.

Note:

I presented a version of this paper at the South Central Modern Language Association’s 79th Annual Conference in Memphis, Tennessee on October 14, 2022. My presentation was delivered virtually from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Copyright: Micah Robbins 2023

    

      

Chesterton’s Three Satirical Types

A colleague of mine has been encouraging me to read G.K. Chesterton for some time now. He loves Chesterton’s classic spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy, but he also speaks highly of his short biographies of William Blake, Charles Dickins, Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Francis of Assisi, among others. When he lent me the William Blake biography last semester, I read it with interest, and I have since turned to Heretics, which I want to read before moving on to Orthodoxy. The essays in Heretics are dated, engage as they are in early-twentieth century intellectual debates, but Chesterton has a knack for teasing out the deeper truths within his contemporary moment, and this makes his writing feel relevant even these many years after its original publication.

Chesterton also engages in the odd bit of analysis that happens to speak to my particular interests. For example, in his essay on James McNeill Whistler, he identifies three distinct types of “satirists who are also great men.” Chesterton is interested in the intersection of morality and aesthetics, which leads him to reflect on the way that satire reflects something about the inner disposition of the satirists themselves. This is an interesting approach and a reversal of the common practice of studying satire to understand something deeper about the subject being satirized.

The first satirical type that Chesterton identifies is motivated by an “overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger.” The satirical attack is joyous and expressive of a tendency toward nonsense. This is the satire of Rabelais, a “satire which is voluble, which is violent, which is indecent, but which is not malicious.” Interestingly, Chesterton characterizes this type of satire as being rooted in the Christian imperative to love one’s enemy, where the satirist’s love of enemy grows stronger the more antagonistic their relationship becomes. This satirical impulse is full of authentic humor and rooted in feelings of intimacy with the human condition, no matter how flawed that condition may be.

The second satirical type is outraged by the gross stupidity of humankind and thus hurls satirical darts at everyone within sight. The satirical attack is energized by an unshakable sense that the state of the world has taken a terrible turn for the worse, and the satirist wants to put things right by exposing those responsible for the wrong. This is the satire of Swift, a writer who “is maddened by the sense of men being maddened” and whose “tongue becomes an unruly member, and testifies against all mankind.” But what is interesting about this satirical type is that the satirical impulse expresses a form of self-loathing. As Chesterton argues, Swift is bitter toward others in part because he is bitter toward himself. In attacking all mankind, the satirist exposes himself to the attack.

Chesterton’s third satirical type is at once respectful and condescending. It sets the satirist above that which is satirized, but it does so in a way that acknowledges the subject’s value before satirizing its weakness. This is the satire of Pope’s “Atticus,” a poem that satirizes qualities belonging to exceptional people. Chesterton considers this to be the most honorable satirical type because the satirist “takes pleasure in pointing out his enemy’s strengths before he points out his weakness.” And yet this satire is still condescending because it takes pity on the satirical subject. There is almost a quality of friendship in this approach. Unlike the other two satirical types, which are so clearly focused on attacking an enemy, this final type simply wants to reform what the satirists genuinely admires.

Most of my work on satire has focused on its development toward militant, degenerative ends during the post-WWII period, but I have always found the categories of Menippean, Juvenalian, and Horatian satire to be useful in thinking about contemporary satire, and I am interested in how Chesterton’s satirical types may help me think more productively about my scholarship. I cannot say that I fully appreciate Chesterton’s argument regarding Whistler, largely because I do not know much about Whistler’s work, but that is beside the point. Like so many other moments in Chesterton’s writing, the digression on satire branches out to related areas of interest that, with a little thought and application to other subjects, proves unexpectedly fruitful.

Source:

Chesterton, G.K. Heretics & Orthodoxy: The Companion Apologies. Mockingbird Press, 2018.

Copyright: Micah Robbins 2022

The Yoke of Truthfulness

Yesterday afternoon, I posted about Michael Wolff’s bad-faith claim that Norman Mailer has been canceled. Wolff’s accusation is based on hyperbole and what now appears to be manufactured evidence, but that did not stop the usual culture warriors, but also more serious people such as Joyce Carol Oates, from jumping to Mailer’s defense — a defense he does not need because no wrong was done him. Sufficiently annoyed by the spectacle, I decided to write a few words about how ridiculous I find some of these so-called “cancel culture” outrages to be. This is not to say that I deny the new orthodoxy around identity that has gained prominence in some circles. I have expressed my distaste for it on this blog. I do, however, deny the extent of the problem. More often than not, when people talk about cancel culture, what they are really talking about is public criticism. To discredit this criticism, they mischaracterize it as doing something that it is not, in fact, doing. In this regard, many accusations of cancel culture are fundamentally dishonest and manipulative. I have written about this as well in my response to the Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate.

A few hours after writing about the Mailer controversy, I read two interesting New York Times op-eds that touch on some of the themes I developed in my post. The first is a piece by Ross Douthat titled, “Try Canceling Joan Didion.” Douthat is a regular columnist for the New York Times and a frequent contributor to one of my favorite podcasts — Left, Right, and Center — and while there is plenty to disagree with in his ideas, he is consistently thoughtful in his commentary and criticism. His recent book, The Decadent Society, is also very good and offers much to ponder about contemporary American culture. He is, in my opinion, among the most intelligent conservatives writing today. That is why I was disappointed to see him fall into Wolff’s trap. He acknowledges that both Random House and the Mailer Estate deny that Mailer was canceled, but that does not stop him from entertaining the accusation anyway, and in doing so, he gives it credibility it does not deserve. This is a shame. Serious writers of all political persuasions should repudiate the practice of privileging sensationalist assumptions over basic facts. The truth may not be as sexy as Wolff’s gossip, but that does not change the fact that the truth is the truth.

But what makes Douthat’s article particularly annoying is that he uses Wolff’s false accusation to argue that if Didion attempted to publish one of her essays today, “it would certainly be deemed reactionary, a get-thee-to-Substack offense, the sort of verbal violence that can run only in either the right-wing press or Harper’s Magazine.” In other words, he uses a manufactured scandal to create a hypothetical that has no basis in reality, and then use that hypothetical to illustrate the dangers of cancel culture. The fact is that Didion is a much loved and celebrated author, and when she died last month, there was an outpouring of grief among liberals and progressives. These people understand Didion’s complexity. They see the conservative elements in her work, and they accept them. That does not mean that they always agree with her, but to suggest that if Didion published an essay in the New York Times today, she would be railroaded by a woke mob strikes me as completely out of touch with how things really are. Again, the reality may not be as exciting or politically useful as the hypothetical, but it is still the reality.

So why does Douthat — a smart, articulate, thoughtful writer — posit such a hypothetical? One possible answer may be found in the second op-ed that caught my attention: Rebecca Solnit’s “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” I do not know much about Solnit, other than that she has a recent book about George Orwell that I intend to read, but her op-ed makes a powerful point (borrowed from Hannah Arendt) about the relationship between cynicism and gullibility in authoritarian political movements. When the cynicism of authoritarian leaders and the willful gullibility of their followers meet, what suffers most is what she calls “the yoke of truthfulness.” She writes:

Distinctions between believable and unbelievable, true and false, are not relevant for people who have found that taking up outrageous and disprovable ideas is instead an admission ticket to a community or an identity. Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their worldview or justify their aggression. I sometimes think of this straying into fiction as a kind of libertarianism run amok — we used to say ‘you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.’ Too many Americans now feel entitled to their own facts. In this too-free marketplace of ideas, they can select or reject ideas, facts or histories to match their goals, because meaning has become transactional.

I do not think that Douthat peddles lies in order to gain admission to a community or identity, or not at least in the way that Solnit describes it. He is a vocal critic of Trumpism at a time when it is unpopular for conservatives to criticize Trump and/or Trumpism, and he is generally careful to avoid the sorts of sensationalist interpretations that have become all too common across the political spectrum. I give him credit for that. But I do think his op-ed shows the extent to which a fundamentally distorted and deceptive discourse ends up infecting even those who do their best to remain rooted in reason and moderation. Surely Douthat understands that Wolff’s article is unreliable, yet the combination of his desire to claim Didion as a conservative writer and his contempt for progressive social causes leads him to seize on what he knows is false — or at least unverifiable, as is also the case with his hypothetical about Didion — in order to confirm his pre-existing biases.

Lies have a way of seducing people into their service. Evidence of this abounds all around us. I agree with Solnit that one of the reasons this is so is because lies can galvanize political identities. But I think the problem cuts deeper than that. The yoke of truthfulness is a heavy burden to bear because the truth can be both unpredictable and intractable, and in one way or another it subverts all of our biases. To carry the yoke means being willing to admit the limits of our own understanding and to take ownership of our own errors. It means admitting that identity politics can be censorious, while also acknowledging that much of what is described as censorship today is really just people exercising their own freedom of speech to criticize those with whom they disagree. To occupy such a liminal space can be disconcerting, not only because it deprives us of a potential identity, but also because it makes us vulnerable to a truth that refuses to conform to our own desires. But even so, it is a space worth occupying, for while useful fictions may bring temporary gratification, the truth has a way of prevailing in the end.

Sources:

Douthat, Ross. “Try Canceling Joan Didion.” New York Times, 5 Jan. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/joan-didion-conservative.html.

—. The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success. Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Robbins, Micah. “When Every ‘No’ = Cancel Culture.” Drone Hive Strange, 5 Jan. 2022, https://dronehivestrange.wordpress.com/2022/01/05/when-every-no-cancel-culture/.

—. “A Woke Mea Culpa.” Drone Hive Strange, 5 Nov. 2021, https://dronehivestrange.wordpress.com/2021/11/05/a-woke-mea-culpa/.

—. “Power and the Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Drone Hive Strange, 8 July 2020, https://dronehivestrange.wordpress.com/2020/07/08/power-and-the-harpers-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” New York Times, 5 Jan. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/republicans-trump-lies.html.

—. Orwell’s Roses. Penguin, 2021.

Copyright: Micah Robbins 2022

When Every ‘No’ = Cancel Culture

The independent publisher Skyhorse has acquired a posthumous collection of political essays by Norman Mailer after Mailer’s long-time publisher, Random House, declined to publish the book. Many factors inform a publisher’s acquisition policies, most of which would bore the average reader, but in our hyper-partisan culture, Random House’s decision to pass on the Mailer book was immediately transformed into a pressing political issue. This is largely due to the unscrupulous journalist Michael Wolff’s claim that the collection was canceled due to the title of Mailer’s most famous essay, “The White Negro” (Wolff). Both Random House and the Mailer Estate deny this accusation, but the truth hardly matters when so many people are pining for a fight and are willing to seize on the slightest pretense to justify their political hostilities (Alter and Harris). And so, thanks to Wolff and a number of other social media personalities, Random House’s decision has been pulled into the abyss of the culture war.

Like so much of his work, Wolff’s essay is based on a combination of hearsay and a mode of reading between the lines that borders on sheer assumption. The assumption here is that Random House declined the book in order to avoid controversy. After all, Mailer was and remains a troubling figure. And so, Wolff connects two ideas to yield a weak yet politically useful syllogism: Mailer is controversial + Random House declined to publish his posthumous political writings = Random House canceled Mailer to avoid controversy. Never mind the fact that Random House continues to publish Mailer’s sizable backlist and is planning a significant promotional campaign to celebrate the centennial of his birth (Alter and Harris). None of that matters. Instead, Wolff would have us believe that, by saying ‘no’ to a single project, Random House is attempting “to disappear Norman Mailer” (Wolff). No other possible motives are to be considered.

This is not to say that major publishers have not canceled books to avoid controversy. The two most prominent recent examples are Hachette’s decision to drop Woody Allen’s memoir after its employees objected to publishing the title, and W.W. Norton’s decision to drop Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after Bailey was accused of sexual misconduct. Skyhorse eventually acquired both of those titles, so it is not unreasonable for someone to ask what the fate of the Mailer collection shares in common with the Allen and Bailey books. But that is not what Wolff and others are doing. Rather than ask honest questions, they actively rush to the most controversial conclusion.

Two examples from Wolff’s essay illustrate how this works. The first is when Wolff claims that a Random House employee cited the objections of cultural critic Roxane Gay as a reason that Random House declined Mailer’s new book. He admits that Gay denies this, noting that she is on the record as stating that she knows “next to nothing about Norman Mailer” and that she has never read his work, but that does not matter to Wolff because he assumes that she — or someone like her — may object. See how this works? The assumption that a new Mailer book will be met with controversy leads to the assumption that fear of controversy is why Random House passed on the project, even though there is evidence contrary to both assumptions. And yet these assumptions are used as evidence to support the assertion that Mailer has been canceled. In other words, Wolff’s argument demands a leap in logic. To say that Random House has canceled Mailer by declining to publish his new book is like saying (as Wolff does) that the fact that Gay has never read Mailer is equivalent to “eliminating him from the modern canon.”

The second example is when, after citing an unnamed television executive who defines the mission of his network as being “to support fiction or to support a kind of retrospective ‘true’ narrative that has the benefit of enough time for the heat of political and cultural conflict to have dissipated and for an audience to be open to a more nuanced, broadly contextualized perspective,” Wolff writes:

If one senior-most executive at a top-most buyer in a heavily consolidated industry is saying ‘avoid all controversy,’ reasonably most others, to the limited extent that there are others, are feeling the same. Who doubts that the upshot of Netflix’s tortured defense of Dave Chappelle is not going to be more Dave Chappelles but fewer.

Well, I have serous doubts about that claim. Every time I turn on Netflix, I see Dave Chappelle’s face. I also see him appearing on high-profile platforms throughout the media ecosystem, and I see him being embraced by a cross-section of the cultural elite as he gathers accolades and awards, including the Mark Twain prize for lifetime achievement in comedy, which he was awarded at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in front of the crème de la crème of the entertainment industry. What profit-seeking media company would not want to embrace more Chappelles? After all, Chappelle has made a considerable amount of money — for both himself and for his sponsors — by marketing himself as someone who has been unjustly punished by political correctness, even as he continues to be rewarded for telling controversial jokes.

But again, the reality of Chappelle’s success is less important than what the culture warriors want to believe about Chappelle. A similar abuse of the truth is apparent in Wolff’s characterization of the “senior-most executive,” who is accused of “saying ‘avoid all controversy’” simply because he defines his company’s product as fiction and history rather than politics and journalism. Wolff finds this unacceptable. Like so many other political journalists, he wants controversy all the time, and when confronted by people who prefer to avoid controversy, he simply manufactures it. This is how I see the faux controversy over Random House’s decision not to published Mailer’s forthcoming collection of essays. It is part of a larger movement that not only claims to oppose cancel culture and defend free speech, but also actively insists that the entertainment and education industries promote controversial figures and opinions whether they want to or not — so long as those figures and opinions do not offend the movement’s political sensibilities. When that happens, it is time to get state legislatures involved in passing curricular and book bans (“Schools Are Using”). Now that is a strange kind of freedom indeed.

Sources:

Alter, Alexandra, and Elizabeth A. Harris. “Was Norman Mailer Canceled? His Publishers Say No.” New York Times, 4 Jan. 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/books/norman-mailer-random-house-skyhorse.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Books.

“Schools Are Using Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws to Ban Children’s Literature.” Anti-Defamation League. ADL.org, 12 Oct. 2021. https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/schools-are-using-anti-critical-race-theory-laws-ban-childrens-literature.

Wolff, Michael. “Michael Wolff on Random House’s Cancellation of Norman Mailer.” The Ankler, 3 Jan. 2022. https://theankler.com/p/michael-wolff-on-random-houses-cancelation.

Copyright: Micah Robbins 2022

The Weekend

One thing I had a hard time adjusting to when moving to Dubai was the change in weekend from Saturday and Sunday, as it is in most of the world, to Friday and Saturday, as it is in some Islamic countries, including the United Arab Emirates. The rhythm of the week is not something I gave much thought to until I moved here, but after experiencing a Sunday through Thursday work week, I came to realize just how deeply engrained that rhythm is. Even after living in Dubai for six years (with a significant hiatus not long ago), I am still not adjusted to the difference. I often make the mistake of thinking that my mid-week meetings are on Wednesdays, when in fact they are on Tuesdays, and it has never felt right to begin the work week on Sunday. The Monday through Friday work week feels almost like a native language to me. It lives deep inside and will never die.

This particular problem is now behind me. The ruling authorities in Abu Dhabi and Dubai have decided to adopt a new work week. Working hours will now be Monday through Friday morning, with the weekend covering Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday. The stated reason is twofold. First, the authorities want to align the UAE economy with global markets. This makes sense. By maintaining a Friday and Saturday weekend, the UAE not only cuts itself off from international markets on Friday, when the rest of the world is busy trading, but it also does so on Sunday, when it is open for business but its trading partners are closed. Second, the expansion of the weekend is intended to boost productivity while also improving the quality of life for those living in the UAE. I cannot speak to the economic dimensions of a shortened work week, though I understand that a lengthy experiment in Iceland showed promising results. What I can say is that the UAE has implemented a number of policies designed to boost happiness, including the creation of a National Program for Happiness and Wellbeing. The change in weekend is being marketed, in part at least, as fitting within the nation’s happiness agenda.

But there are more complex social and religious reasons behind adopting a two-and-a-half day weekend. Friday is when Muslims attend their mosques for the week’s main prayers and sermons, and Emiratis often meet with their extended families on Friday afternoon. Converting Friday from a day of prayer and family to a day of work is a bold act of social engineering, and the leaders of Abu Dhabi and Dubai are no doubt wise to set at least half of the day aside for worship, reflection, and fellowship. One of the last informal writing assignments I gave my students in the Fall semester was to share their opinion on the change in weekend, and their reactions were mixed. Many welcomed the decision, but others expressed reservations about how it would affect their families and culture. Only time can answer that question, but based on my experience living through a change in weekend, it is going to take a long time for them to adjust.

There are a few caveats worth noting. First, this is not the first time that the UAE has changed its work week. Until 2006, its work week was Saturday through Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday being the weekend. It was only a couple of years after they officially changed their weekend that Saudi Arabia followed suit, and then — as is often the case — the rest of the Gulf Coast countries fell into line. It will be interesting to see if a similar trend happens this time as well. Second, at least one of the other emirates, the more religiously orthodox Sharjah, has adopted a three-day weekend. Their people will not have to worry about work interrupting their religious and cultural traditions. Third, these policies are only mandatory for the public sector and public and private schools. Private businesses and universities are free to set their own hours. Many have opted for an extended break on Friday afternoon rather than a half-day off. It remains to be seen how religiously observant Muslim’s will react to having to return to work or study after attending their Friday prayers.

As for me, I welcome the change. It will restore a sense of normalcy to my week, while also putting me on the same weekend as my family and friends in the United States. Communicating with them can be difficult considering the time difference, and the disparity in weekends does not help. Hopefully this will bring us a little closer, even though we remain very far apart. The new Saturday and Sunday weekend will also allow me to observe the Christian holy day if I choose, though I regret that this comes at the expense of my Muslim friends. This afternoon, I was able to tune in to the the Canterbury Cathedral’s celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany in real time, which was nice. Perhaps I will even consider joining a brick-and-mortar church for some Sunday services this year. But more than anything else, I am simply astonished at how easily the UAE government is able to mandate far-reaching social changes. Like the odd weekend, this is something to which I many never fully adjust.

Copyright: Micah Robbins 2022

Hindu Nationalism, the American Right, and the Persecution of Christians in India

A number of years ago, I posted a conference abstract for a paper I was writing about Neel Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, and the troubled state of Indian democracy. The abstract begins with a critique of how easily Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was able to persuade multinational business interests to dismiss his history of human rights abuses, including his persecution of religious minorities, in favor of opening Indian markets to Western investors. There was a time when Modi was an international pariah. He had even been denied a US diplomatic visa due to his role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—a heinous riot that left thousands of Muslims dead at the hands of Hindu extremists. But all was forgiven when he rose to a position of power over the Indian economy. His visa was restored, President Obama invited him to the White House for a State Dinner, business boomed, and the persecution continued unabated.

When I shared a link to the abstract on Facebook, it was met with immediate backlash from my right-wing friends, most of whom also happen to be Christians. I no longer have a Facebook account, so I cannot offer direct quotes, but the gist of their comments was a full-throated defense of Modi’s pro-business policies and his purported strength as a populist leader who is unafraid to stand up to liberal elites. This was just after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and many American Christians were in the throes of right-wing nationalism. The rise of populist leaders such as Trump and Modi, along with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Victor Orbán, were being celebrated as evidence of a global movement against liberal institutions run amuck, and despite their differences, these elected leaders were being treated as a unified block. A slight against Modi was a slight against Trump, and that simply could not go unaddressed.

During his short time in office, Trump did all he could to boost Modi’s popularity. As Thomas Crowley noted shortly after Trump and Modi signed a multi-billion dollar arms deal, “No longer just a neoliberal alliance, Trump and Modi have cemented a bond over machismo-infused right-wing nationalism.” They offered each other public praise, and they even went so far as to host each other for mass rallies in their respective countries. As could be expected in the age of MAGA rallies, the speeches at these events were tinged with bigotry, including Islamophobic dog whistles. When Trump spoke at a rally in Gujarat, he received the most enthusiastic applause when he lashed out against “radical Islamic terrorism.” There is nothing wrong with condemning terrorism, but the context for these remarks is important. Not only is Gujarat home to the pogrom noted above, but at the time of Trump’s visit, India was experiencing violent clashes between Hindu extremists and those protesting a discriminatory new citizenship law that targeted Muslims. “Radical Islamic terrorism” was the primary justification for this new law, and the violence that unfolded during Trump’s visit included orchestrated attacks against Muslim homes, business, and places of worship.

Trump downplayed the violence, arguing that Modi was doing everything in his power to protect religious minorities. The evidence does not bear this out, but for right-wing populists, evidence is often beside the point. Trump knows that he can manipulate the xenophobic tendencies in his base—including his base in the Christian community—to lump Muslims together with immigrants, globalists, liberals, and the press as enemies of the people. The sad truth is that, as a result of post-9/11 political developments in the Republican Party, many Americans have come to identify Islam as an existential threat, thus making it difficult for them to recognize how ordinary Muslims are disproportionately victimized by religious extremism. That extremism often comes from rival sects within their own religion, but it also comes from Orthodox Jews in Israel, Buddhists in Myanmar, and Hindus in India, among others.

This turn against Muslims, which is a crucial plank in right-wing populism, has led some Christians to embrace religious intolerance. They are very sensitive about their own religious liberties, of course, and they have a long history of manufacturing nonexistent conspiracies against Christianity (the so-called “War on Christmas” comes to mind), but they hold a contrary—and contradictory—view when it comes to the religious liberties of their Muslim neighbors. By reducing Islam to its most extreme tendencies, they deny it the same tolerance and respect they give other religions. And this, in turn, leads them to support figures such as Modi, whom they perceive as taking a firm stand against the Muslim threat.

The problem with this position is that Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are also anti-Christian. Jeffrey Gettleman and Suhasini Raj have a harrowing story in the New York Times about the sharp increase in religious persecution against India’s 30 million Christians. Under Modi’s watch, the BJP has adopted a wide-range of anti-Christian policies, including a law that places legal restrictions on religious conversion. These policies have resulted in a general atmosphere of hostility toward Christians that has become increasingly violent. Hindu nationalists “are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers. In many cases, the police and members of India’s governing party are helping them.” In addition to anti-Christian violence, Hindu nationalists are also subjecting Christians to devastating economic boycotts, denying them access to communal wells, barring them from visiting Hindu homes, and banning them from celebrating Christmas. The social ostracization some Christians are experiencing borders on the absolute.

Such persecution is driving Christianity in India underground. Gettleman and Raj tell the story of Vinod Patil, a Pentecostal pastor who performs his ministry under cover of darkness in order to ensure his congregation’s safety. After receiving a series of death threats from Hindu nationalists, he shuttered his Living Hope Pentecostal Church, which has 400 members, and began to hold small, clandestine services in the homes of his congregants. He does not want to meet the same fate as Balram, an evangelical preacher in Uttar Pradesh, who was arrested for performing unauthorized conversions. The police “punched him in the groin, smacked him with wooden poles and yanked out clumps of his hair.” He and other pastors now face serious charges under the anti-conversion laws. But they are the lucky ones. As Gettleman and Raj warn, “Other preachers have faced worse. A Pentecostal pastor was bludgeoned to death in June in the small norther town of Sangohi.”

The movement against Christianity in India is part of the illiberal populism that brought Modi to power. This movement’s hostility toward religious minorities was no secret, of course, but because the religious minority that experienced the brunt of its hostility was Muslim, and because the relationship between Modi and Trump was perceived as consolidating a global right-wing populism, many Christians in the United States gave it their tacit approval. The tragedy here is that the transformation of right-wing politics in America, away from conservatism and toward populism, has led a significant number of Christians to lend their moral support to people who are actively persecuting Christians in other countries, so long as those people are perceived as allies in the populist cause.

This should give us all pause. How is it that politics can become so overwhelming that it causes people to lose sight of their deepest principles and loyalties? Partisan commitments should not force people into compromised, contradictory positions, but the more I think about contemporary politics, the more I am convinced that partisanship depends not only on dividing us from each other, but also on dividing us within our very selves. It is impossible to support a political movement, party, or leader with the sort of loyal fervor that has become increasingly common today while at the same time maintaining a coherent intellect, a stable set of principles, a generous and welcoming spirit, and a deeply-held sense of personal autonomy. This impossibility has led some Americans to side with overtly anti-Christian forces abroad, but it has led us all into one compromise or another, and I fear that this trend will only accelerate as partisan divisions grow deeper and evermore antagonistic.

I do not believe that American Christians self-consciously support the persecution of Christians in India. That is not my argument. I do, however, think that American Christians all too often align themselves with interests and policies that run counter to Christian principles, and that those interests and policies are sometimes even explicitly anti-Christian. The Evangelical community’s support for inhumane immigration policies is one example. Their support for Israel’s apartheid regime is another. It is almost as if they are incapable of recognizing that the immigrants crossing the southern border are overwhelmingly Christians, and that significant numbers of Palestinians are not Muslim, but are in fact disciples of Jesus Christ. But hardline immigration policies and uncritical support for Israel are part of right-wing orthodoxy, and so—in the name of partisan fealty—many Christians end up treating their coreligionists with contempt. The same is now true of the persecution of Christians in India. By throwing their support behind the global rise of right-wing nationalism, American Christians have given their blessing to a movement that is actively persecuting the largest Christian community in Asia.

The Leavers

Lisa Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers, tells the story of Deming, the child of an undocumented Chinese immigrant who, after being abandoned with his mother’s boyfriend (also an undocumented immigrant) at the age of 11, is placed into foster care and eventually adopted. The couple who adopt him are white, middle-class professors who teach at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. They offer him what his birth mother could not—economic security, freedom from the tyranny of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the social mobility that comes with higher education—but they also efface his cultural origins and, through a lack of curiosity that is really a form of willful ignorance, suppress the circumstances of his mother’s disappearance. The result is that Deming is divided between his loyalty to his adoptive parents and his love for his birth mother, Polly, whom he remembers well and misses terribly.

Deming’s struggle with this division makes The Leavers a compelling read. Ko succeeds in capturing the pain he experiences after his mother fails to return from her job at a nail salon one day. Everyone assumes that she abandoned him for a job in Florida, which she had been discussing over the objection of her boyfriend Leon, with whom she and Deming cohabit, or that she had simply grown weary of life in the United States and decided to return to China. This sense of abandonment haunts Deming. He wonders about his mother continuously, and his belief that she made a conscious choice to leave him for a better life robs him of any sense of belonging with his adoptive parents, his friends in upstate New York and New York City, or the Chinese immigrant and Chinese American communities. His story is one of complex emotions, personal failures, and a quest for identity in a multicultural world.

Polly’s story is equally complex. Her pregnancy with Deming is unplanned and unwanted, and she seeks out an abortion, though the clinic in her hometown of Minjiang refuses to perform the procedure without her father’s consent. She decides to keep her pregnancy hidden and flees to New York, where many of her peers have gone to work in textile factories. Once there, she again seeks an abortion, but is again refused, this time because her pregnancy is too far advanced. She finds it exceedingly difficult to raise Deming while working full-time and living in shared accommodations, and she repeatedly considers abandoning him, even going so far as to place him in a paper bag and leave him alone in a public park, though she soon returns to reclaim him. She wants a better life for herself, but the reality of menial labor and single parenthood, and the insecurity of living in the shadows of the immigration system, makes achieving this dreams impossible.

One may sympathize with Polly’s decision to abandon Deming, if that is what she had actually done, but the truth is far darker—and more immoral—than that. Contrary to what most of the novel’s characters believe about Polly throughout the narrative, she does not willingly walk away from her son. She is taken from him. After a disgruntled employee reports Polly’s employer for immigration violations, ICE storms the nail salon and arrests all of its undocumented employees. Polly is detained, subjected to the absurdities of the immigration courts, and deported back to China. The fact that her young son is an American citizen is, sadly, irrelevant to this process. He is simply left to fate, which includes the indignity of never even being informed of what happened to his mother.

Lisa Ko’s The Leavers

Ko got the idea for The Leavers from the true story of Xiu Ping Jiang, a mentally ill Chinese immigrant who was held for over a year in a detention facility, often in solitary confinement, while her case worked its way through the legal system. Her son, who was seized by immigration officials and placed into foster care, was eventually adopted by a family in Canada. The novel is, in this regard, a timely rebuke of North American immigration policies, especially those that separate children from their parents. The lifelong trauma Deming suffers is a clear indictment of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, which left thousands of children without their parents. Many of those families have yet to be reunited.

But there is a way in which Polly’s arrest undermines one of the novel’s most powerful critiques, namely that raising a child in America is, for many people, extraordinarily difficult. Rather than follow through on the social and economic challenges that have made parenthood undesirable (or impossible) for an increasing number of people, Ko shifts the blame to immigration enforcement. The status of immigrants in America today is important, and The Leavers shines a worthy light on that condition, but the vast majority of children in the foster care and adoption systems are not there because their parents have been deported. They are there because their parents cannot properly support them. The decision to surrender a child is deeply personal, I am sure, but the dwindling access to family planning services, the stubborn resistance to social safety programs, and the precarity of life under global capitalism drive some parents to make just such a decision.

By shifting the narrative’s focus to the cruelty of deportation, Ko evades this painful reality. The Leavers will no doubt continue to be celebrated for what it says about American immigration policies. Both Arifa Akbar and Amy Weiss-Meyer positively review the novel on this basis, and I suspect that literary critics will soon be writing favorably about Ko’s representation of the immigration system and transnational adoption, if they are not doing so already. But I agree with Gish Jen when she says that The Leavers “takes risks but then hedges its bets.” This is especially true when it comes to Polly, who so clearly struggles with the choice between seeking a better life for herself and performing the role of a committed mother to Deming. The choice is made for her when she is deported. This opens up a tragic story about immigration and injustice, but it also saps the novel of its primary tension, which is that many parent cannot live up to their responsibilities due to economic and social constraints. We need stories about this aspect of contemporary life, and Ko almost gives us one, but in the end she opts for something that both demands and delivers less.

Dizzy for President

I have been reading Clarence Lusane’s book The Black History of the White House. It is a well-researched study that tells many interesting stories about the experiences of African Americans in the White House, ranging from those of slaves and domestic laborers to that of the 44th president of the United States. Many of these stories are tragic, but the overarching narrative that the book develops is deeply inspiring. It is one of courage, persistence, pride, and love of neighbor and country that should serve as a model for all Americans.

While I was familiar with some of the material in the book, Lusane tells some stories that I found surprising. For example, the penultimate chapter focuses on all the times that Black men and women have run for the presidency, including Marcus Garvey’s effort to establish a Black House in Washington, D.C. Among these candidates were mainstream politicians (i.e., Democrats and Republicans) such as Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Doug Wilder, Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Alan Keyes, but they also include fringe candidates such as Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, Dennis Serrette, Lenora Fulani, Ron Daniels, Cynthia McKinney, and legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Dizzy Gillespie for President

I must admit that I find the idea of a Gillespie presidency to be delightful. I took a deep dive into jazz in 2020, listening to a new jazz album every day of the year, and I have since become a huge fan of the genre. It is almost all I listen to anymore. So the thought of a jazz musician in the White House sounds wonderful. Jazz is such a characteristically American, democratic art form, and the skills of improvisation and free-form responsibility to the group have served, and will continue to serve, the nation well.

The 1964 Gillespie campaign started as something of a joke. He and a group of supporters founded the John Birks Society (Gillespie’s full name was John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie), a satirical jab at the far-right John Birch Society. They attempted to have Gillespie’s name added to the California ballot but eventually decided to conduct a write-in campaign instead. Managed by jazz critic Ralph Gleason, the campaign mobilized against racial injustice and human rights abuses, both at home and abroad. Gillespie advocated for unilateral disarmament and the abolition of the FBI, and he raised a considerable amount of money for civil rights organizations such as the Congress for Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

While these are serious progressive positions, the Gillespie campaign cultivated a whimsical side as well. According to Lusane, after the comedian Dick Gregory suggested that Gillespie select Miles Davis as Secretary of State, Gillespie announced the following ministerial posts: “drummer Max Roach as Minister of Defense, bassist Charles Mingus as Minister of Peace, Malcolm X as Attorney General, composer Duke Ellington as Minister of State, pianist Mary Lou Williams as Ambassador to the Vatican, Louis Armstrong as Minister of Agriculture, and singer Ray Charles would be in charge of the Library of Congress.” He also proposed changing the name of the White House to the Blues House.

Alas, a Gillespie jazz presidency was not to be. Instead, the United States elected Lyndon Johnson. But that was a minor setback. Jazz lives! I was just telling one of my children that the greatest contribution the United States has made to the world is the invention of jazz. I really believe that. So failing to win the presidency says very little about Gillespie’s contributions to his nation. He probably did more for people blowing his horn than he ever could have if her traded in the trumpet for the Oval Office.