Some smoldering war over meaning
On Ta-Nehisi Coates new book: The Message
Hey everyone, today’s post is a book review of sorts. No Worcester news within. Meant to get it up on Sunday, but I was a little too hungover to function after Katie’s big disco night Saturday (and then I conceded that yesterday was not a great day to release it and have it be read in good faith, given the subject matter). Anywho, we raised more than $6,000 for breast cancer research! It was an amazing night.
Thank you to everyone who came out!
And then, yesterday being what it was, I conceded it was not a great day to release this essay unless the intent was to cause a shitstorm, which it wasn’t. I was just too hungover to get it up the day I wanted.
Before we begin, a pitch for subscribers!
All right let’s get to it.
Some smoldering war over meaning
A link arrived in my iMessage the other day to a tweet calling Ta-Nehisi Coates “our truest successor to James Baldwin,” with a video clip of the author’s recent appearance on “CBS Mornings” to promote his new book, The Message, a treatise on writing and narrative for young writers.
Coates: Writing is how we interpret so much of everything that is around us. The Message is a political book, It argues that much of our politics actually happens before we walk into a voting booth. That the choices around us, who we believe is human, who we don’t believe is human, the policies we believe should be in the world, the policies we believe don’t, are actually shaped largely by writing and the stories we tell.
Then, as if to demonstrate Coates’ point, the first question from the three-person assembly line unit of the Consent Factory comes by way of a white guy in the suit who homes in on the chapter about Coates’ trip to Palestine. His question is nothing but a defense of Israel that seems all but contractually obligated. And the way he goes about it is deeply laden with racial and class assumptions, as well as the rhetorical policing of “respectability” in media. It’s darkly fascinating.
White Guy: I have to say when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, then the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.
Coates: Mm.
White Guy: So then I found myself wondering why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, this very talented and smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why leave out any of the details of the First and Second Intifada. The café bombings. The bus bombings. The little kids blown to bits. And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?
Coates: I would say that the perspective you just outlined, there’s no shortage of that perspective in American media. That’s the first thing I would say. I am most concerned always with those who don’t have a voice. Who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly in my interviews whether there is a single network, a mainstream organization, in America, with a Palestinian bureau chief or correspondent, who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world.
The guy, apparently having listened to none of that, presses Coates again on the “right to exist” line in ‘why do you beat your wife?’ fashion. Are you saying no? No they don’t? The “right to exist.” The big hammer in white supremacy’s arsenal of rhetorical cudgels. The strange idea that couldn’t exist if not for an even stranger one: America as the policeman of the world. America, the cop defending the rights of a citizen nation. From this on down to the new line du jour: “de-escalation through escalation.” Coates deftly dismantles all of it.
Coates: No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force. As America did. And so I think this question of ‘right to exist’—Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question I would be faced with about any other country.
White guy: But you write a book that delegitimizes the pillars of Israel. It seems like an effort to topple the whole building of it. ... What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place. And not any of the other states out there.
Coates: I am offended by states founded on ethnocracy no matter where they are.
White guy: Muslim included?
Coates: I would not want a state anywhere where people lay down their citizen rights based on ethnicity.
Coates then describes the tiered citizenship of Israel, where even Palestinian citizens of the country exist on a secondary tier to Jewish Israelis.
Coates: Why do we support that? Why is that okay? I’m the child of Jim Crow. I’m the child of people who were born into a country where that was exactly the case. Of American apartheid. I walk over there and I walk through the occupied territories and I walk down the street in Hebron. And (my guide) says to me “I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion.”
All three of the hosts go to cut him off—the truth of the matter a bit too out there for comfort now—and Coates says “no no no no no! This is extremely important.” And in doing so he reclaims the floor by sheer force of will in the hostile terrain of a U.S. cable news studio. The white guy says “it is, it is extremely important. Lay it down” in a tone suggestive of a rope salesman.
Coates: The person that is guiding me is a Palestinian, whose grandfather and grandmother was born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on certain roads. He can’t get water in the same way that Israelis can a mile down the road. And why is that?
The white guy says “and why is that?” at nearly the same time. Then he takes the floor, and asks a completely ridiculous question: “Why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis.”
What is their role, he asks, in their oppression?
“Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong,” Coates says.
The white guy says “You’re still invited to high holiday. I’ll see you after the show.”
Translation: You are expressing ideas that would get a lesser media figure banished from the club.
In the middle of Coates’ book, incidentally, he writes:
... for much of my time as a journalist, I have been surrounded by people who, on some level, think of me as an exception that does not disprove their theories of white supremacy.
Mm. “Coates,” White Guy said, leveling with him man-to-man, “you’re a smart guy...”
After I’d finished writing the above section I was listening to Chapo Trap House in the shower and to my delight they discussed the clip. Host Will Menaker opens the segment: "Because Coates, who has been “raised up by much of this same largely liberal media to be the voice of truth on the history of racism in America, is now applying those same standards to the racist ethno-supremacist apartheid state of Israel. And because of his position he can’t just be ignored. He has to be contained and confronted in some way. “
Menaker described the clip as one of the more interesting examples of the containment strategy at play here. I remain committed to leaving him as White Guy in the above section but turns out his name is Tony Dokoupil, and he’s a... weird one. But anyway.
Menaker: “This was the guy that clearly got the contract, he was the guy that was appointed: you gotta counter this Coates guy.” Felix Biederman compares the situation to No Country For Old Men: Coates is Anton Chigurh, and everyone in media is absolutely terrified of him. Dokoupil is Woody Harrelson, the bumbling ineffectual wimp posing as a hardass that they send after him.
Apropos of nothing, the Coates line I quoted earlier, about how his colleagues see him as some exception that doesn’t alter their white supremacist worldview, continues this way: “Most of these people are themselves awful writers.”
The episode, which is for paid subscribers only right now, is worth a listen. The guest is Séamus Malekafzali, a journalist with a deep understanding of the Middle East. Most of it is spent correcting the record on the recent Iranian air strike and what it means.
Looking up how to spell Malekafzali’s name had me stumble on a recent piece of his in The Nation headlined “The Rotten Partnership Between the US Media and the Israeli Military.”
Considering the subject matter today, this part is germane:
...the few Western journalists who have been able to enter Gaza have almost exclusively done so by embedding with the Israeli military on heavily supervised excursions into the Strip. The IDF decides where the reporters go, what they are allowed to see, and whom they are allowed to question.
Rather than challenge this obviously propagandistic situation, reporters from outlets like The New York Times and NBC News have instead dutifully played along. The benefit for Israel is clear. Witness a February dispatch in The Wall Street Journal, where the paper’s correspondent brought breathless reports from inside Hamas tunnels under the devastated city of Khan Younis that the Israeli army was more than happy to give access to.
Councilor Khrystian King sent me the Coates clip, actually. Texted it with a note: “Keep doin what u do Bill ✌🏾”
And that was nice to hear for a few reasons.
One, I’ve been hard on him lately, for reasons I don’t feel a bit of remorse about, but it speaks a lot to his character that he’d tell me to keep on keeping on when part of that keeping on involves criticizing him.
Two, in private moments I doubt whether what I do has much of an impact at all, really, beyond the platitudes of speaking truth to power and the foundational myth that journalism shines a light, and light disinfects. Does it, though? Increasingly, as I look around at, uh... the available evidence, let’s just say... I find myself wrestling with that question. And not just with my own work but the whole endeavor of it. The profession of journalism, the craft of narrative nonfiction. The core belief that understanding history prevents the repetition of it. Could be that’s just myth-making, too, and that the crash course we’re on is at the end of the day the one we’re on.
Anyway, I ordered the book, and it arrived a few days ago, and I flipped it open to this:
And it was a gut punch. It doesn’t matter whether I believe in what I’m doing. I do it because I must. Because the “as it is” demands it from me, on a spiritual level. Because if I stopped, I’d lose myself. Wither. A bitter husk, hardened around an absence. For me, and maybe for you as well, the soul is preserved and protected by continually asking why the same way I’d ask my dad about everything when I was a boy: Why, if Santa’s elves build our presents, do they have barcodes like in the store? That’s a question my dad reminded me one time that I asked him. It was one of the better ones, he said. Tough to come up with the parental counter-lie for that one.
The memory of that came back to me as I encountered this line in Coates’ book,
I went to my father and bombarded him with questions, because that was the kind of child I was, always (to the annoyance of my siblings) asking why.
In the first chapter, Coates breaks down a childhood memory: reading in Sports Illustrated the first story that “broke some profound invisible law of justice, one that reigned in all my cartoons.”
The story was that of Darryl Stingley, an NFL wide receiver made quadriplegic when, in a 1978 pre-season game, his spinal cord compressed and several vertebrae snapped upon collision with defensive back Jack Tatum. He stretched out for a pass just beyond his reach, then he awoke in the hospital, unable to move.
I knew football was violent ... But violence was the antagonist in a story with a happy ending. It could never win, could it?
But all around me violence actually was winning.
Coates tracks his life from that unnerving question to becoming a journalist, and, like the line about pestering his dad with why why why, it rang eerily familiar.
Armed with those raw sources and my own sense of how words might be organized—a style I possessed—maybe I could go from the haunted to the ghost, from reader to writer, and I too could have the stars, and their undeniable gravity, at my disposal.
It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded.
Coates, like Orwell, forced by violence into the role of pamphleteer. And I guess that’s where I’m at too, with the little Worcester pamphlet you’re currently reading.
With this book, Coates set out to write about writing in the way Orwell did in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” When I first read Orwell’s essay, as a young working journalist with a veteran copy editor bringing me near to tears on a weekly basis, that essay had a foundational effect. It’s cliché to say but it really did change my life.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
Revisiting it now, I remember that paragraph brought about a lightning bolt revelation: That good writing isn’t simply aesthetic, and to approach it that way reliably makes for bad writing. That, really, good writing reintroduces clarity into a language increasingly bereft of it. That the lack of clarity is manufactured in bad faith toward political ends. The product of a million small rhetorical manipulations over centuries.
Writing well, in the face of that, is a political act. To simply try is to become a soldier in some smoldering war over meaning. The process of that trying, as I’ve learned in the years since, unravels the world and builds it anew. Such as: My copy editor wasn’t, in fact, being a hardass for the sake of it—actually, he was just further along than I was on the journey toward clarity that Orwell describes. He wanted me to catch up. I remember one moment more than the countless others: He called me to ask what I meant by the “move forward” I included in some recap of some board of selectmen meeting. “As opposed to what,” he asked, “up, down, sideways? What does that mean?” Ohhhhh, I thought, having just freshly finished the Orwell essay. I’m allowing the way they talk to dictate how I write. I changed “moving forward” to “in the future.” Because were we really “moving”? And who or what was moving us? And what is “forward”? If we are moving, as the phrase suggests, there necessarily must be a direction and as far as directions go “forward” is perhaps the vaguest one you could supply.
Imagine someone in your life says “get in the car let’s go for a drive” and you say “sure thing I’ve got nothing to do” and you hop in the passenger seat and they pull out the driveway and you look over at them and ask “where to?” and they say “forward.” Serial killer shit right there.
Every time I hear a politician or a business executive or, on a freak occasion, a normal person, say “moving forward,” I smile and think about my old copy editor Mike Sereda.
The way Coates puts this realization is beautiful: “Freed from the biased curation of powerful parties, I now directly saw the sport’s terrible price.”
The biased curation of powerful parties. Now those are some words that truly mean something.
Though I know it exists somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, I can’t immediately recall a parallel to Coates’ world-altering childhood realization in the Stingley story.
What does come to mind, however, is the “music ethnography” trip I took in college to Tobago that was mostly bullshit but in the bullshit nature of it proved darkly revelatory. I should revisit the notebook I kept during that trip sometime, maybe for a future Sunday post.
Late into the night Friday, I took a break from writing the piece I intended for today, about Enrique Delgado-Garcia’s death at the State Police Training Academy and the dark power of the word “accident”—to read more of Coates’ book. In the second chapter, he recounts his trip to Dakar, and then to the island of Gorée, a pilgrimage I wasn’t aware of for the children of chattel slavery—”a monument to the last stop before we were remade,” as he puts it.
And now, approaching Gorée, I was a pilgrim on an ancestral journey, back to the beginning of time, not just to my own birth but to the birth of the modern world.
The way he wrote about this moment, I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of my own, on my and Katie’s recent trip to Ireland. On my mother’s side, the family line is cartoonishly Irish—one of my cousins did a 23andMe that came back like 99 percent Ireland, baby. Erin Go Bragh. A myth and/or fact in my family is that an ancestor was an architect who designed an Irish round tower that famously sits in the middle of St. Mary’s Cemetery, Milford’s most Irish burial ground.
Pause for a moment: I’m going to beg for your trust here that I am not drawing a 1:1 parallel between Irish immigration to the industrial cities of the American East Coast and the centuries-long horrors of the Middle Passage. I am shooting for an observation that pointedly transcends the horrible trope of whataboutism that swirls around the “what about the Irish” question in rotten American political discourse about race. Okay, that out of the way, back to Coates:
Here I was, on this boat from Gorée, my eyes welling up, grieving for something, in the grips of some feeling I am still, even as I write this, struggling to name.
Reading this, I recognized the feeling instantly. For me, it happened at Conor Pass—an objectively breathtaking vista in southwest Ireland.
Up at the pass, there was a local man selling these rocks with hand painted sheep heads on them. I bought one for my grandmother and we got to talking. He told us about how the English would trade and gift parcels of land in southern Ireland, and they’d become absentee landlords of sorts, letting the plots rot and decay. The road that took us up the pass was a long, tight, and winding trek up the mountain then down again. During the famine the road was the product of a make-work program for Irish men, while the local women toiled away in workhouses. Both were paid only in food.
The mortality rate in that part of Ireland was 70 percent, he told us. Down below us he pointed to a formation of rocks that was a settlement evacuated and abandoned during the famine. It looked to me like a grave.
Coates writes, of Gorée:
We know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition.
“Fuck the English,” said the rock salesman, repeating it like a mantra with a hearty laugh.
Okay, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the famine
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no famine
See Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food
Meat, fish, vegetables
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved
And then, in the middle of all this
They gave us money not to teach our children Irish
And so we lost our history
And this is what I think is still hurting me
That’s how the Sinéad O'Connor song “Famine” begins, and it goes on to detail how the legacy of this deep ancestral trauma manifests in broken homes and broken communities and drug abuse.
The colonial force that oversaw that resource extraction of Ireland was the original seed of the modern police department, actually. It’s always been about the maintenance of resource extraction. Learned that in Geo Maher’s A World Without Police. “Robert Peel, the architect of British policing, honed his ideas during the colonial occupation of Ireland.” Then that model was exported across the world. To America, to our Worcester and Coates’ Baltimore. And then funnily enough the American Police Department became the domain of the Irish-American and mostly remains that way.
It wasn’t just the Irish occupation that served as a model, of course. The Pennsylvania State Police’s brutal repression of immigrant miners was modeled on the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. And many of the troops involved in squashing the “insurrection” in the Philippines were veterans of the Indian Wars.
The boomerang of empire returns home via the police first. Maher writes:
When movements take to the streets to insist that Black lives matter, moreover, police cynically appropriate the status of victims, contending that "blue lives matter," that police are the most oppressed minority, and that there is a "war on police.'
What is the "thin blue line," Maher asks, if not a border?
What is whiteness if not a border? What is wealth if not a border? What is Park Ave if not a border? Single family zoning, a border.
In Coates’ third chapter, he tracks how the “war on police” in the wake of the 2020 BLM movement moved from the streets to the library—to book bans and professor firings and school boards across the country taking up the evils of “Critical Race Theory.” Fundamentally, he argues, the battle was over myths. “History is not inert but contains with it a story that implicates or justifies political order,” he writes. The myth at stake in this moment was that America is a force for good in the world, a great republic founded on democracy.
And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones.
But there’s a different history, a different set of myths, currently challenging that drone-sustaining order. And the battle is being waged mostly in the stories we tell. Where the Black Lives Matter movement on the streets may have dried up and withered to history without any marked policy changes, it’s important to remember that policy changes exist downstream of narrative, Coates argues: “A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen.” Good things can happen by way of that, too, it’s important to remember.
A different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here too are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield.
The chapter is mostly structured around a school board meeting in South Carolina, and a teacher who refused to heed to the censorship of the district school board and continued to teach Coates’ Between The World And Me to her advanced placement writing class. He recounts a sea of teachers showing up to support her at one meeting, all wearing blue, all railing against the theocracy of the school district’s censorship.
I was initially surprised by this, but later I understood—school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, that night the faction was Mary’s.
That local politics is a small arena easily dominated by an organized faction is a case I’ve been making for years, and an important one to remember now, in this increasingly fraught moment: What happens in the relative anonymity of city council and school committee meetings really matters, in a way that’s almost cosmic.
They are each of them small fronts in the war over our history.
~/~
Thank you for reading! We’ll be back on Thursday with the Worcester news you pay me the big bucks for. But I hope you liked this essay, and I’m thinking about making Coates’ book the next one for the WCU Local 69 Book Club!
Have you seen Coates’ appearance on Jon Stewart?
Great essay. What you write about Worcester is important every time. And essays like this are wonderfully provoking. I am looking forward to this latest from Coates.