Que Tal, Essay? More Hippie Shit
Kaufman, Alan, editor. The Outlaw Bible of American Essays. Compilation copyright 2006. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
Paul Krassner, The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book
113 - An executive in the publishing industry, who obviously must remain anonymous, has made available to The Realist a photostatic copy of the original manuscript of William Manchester's book, The Death of a President.
Those passages printed here were marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine; hence they do not appear even in the "complete" version published by the German magazine Stern.
115 - Gore Vidal [. . .] On a television program in London, he explained why Jacqueline Kennedy will never relate to Lyndon Johnson. During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, she inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. This disclosure was the talk of London, but did not reach these shores.
116 - Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate responses--witness the puzzled timing of his smile when he speaks of grave matters--but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One that this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw.
[. . .]
She corroborated Gore Videl's story about Lyndon JOhnson, continuing, "that man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realize--there is only one way to say this--he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president."
[Handwritten marginal notes: 1. Check with Rankin--did secret autopsy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?]
The glaze lifted from Jacqueline Kennedy's eyes.
"I don't believe that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with a conspracy, but I do know this--my husband taught me about the nuances of power--if Jack were miraculously to come back to life and sudenly appear in front of Johnson, the first thing Johnson would do now is kill him." She smiled sardonically, adding, "Unless Bobby beat him to it."
Eldrige Cleaver, The Courage To Kill: Meeting the Panthers [blog note: compare this essay to the bell hooks essay below - JH]
124 - Suddenly the room fell silent. [. . .] From the tension showing on the faces of the people before me, I thought the cops were invading the meeting, but there was a deep female gleam leaping out of one of the women's eyes that no cop who ever lived could elicit. I recognized that gleam out of the recesses of my soul, even though I had never seen it before in my life: the total admiration of a black woman for a black man. I spun round in my seat and asw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets, powder-blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes--and each with a gun!
bell hooks, Love as the Practice of Freedom
317 - Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political visionand our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination--imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white-supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conlcude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, and end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. [. . .]
318 - [. . .] The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King Jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had "decided to love" because he believed deeply that if we are "seeking the highest good," we "find it through love," because this is "the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality." And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement, which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist movement, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice--and because it was proufoundly rooted in a love ethic.
The sixties black power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. and it is not surpirising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quinessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed, utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X's bold credo "by any means necessary."
On the positive side, the Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progess was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately,
319 - neither he nor Malcolm loved long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.
320 - M. Scott Peck's self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular [. . .]
Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." [. . .]
His words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love," which also emphasizes choice.
Paul Krassner, The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book
113 - An executive in the publishing industry, who obviously must remain anonymous, has made available to The Realist a photostatic copy of the original manuscript of William Manchester's book, The Death of a President.
Those passages printed here were marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine; hence they do not appear even in the "complete" version published by the German magazine Stern.
115 - Gore Vidal [. . .] On a television program in London, he explained why Jacqueline Kennedy will never relate to Lyndon Johnson. During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, she inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. This disclosure was the talk of London, but did not reach these shores.
116 - Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate responses--witness the puzzled timing of his smile when he speaks of grave matters--but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One that this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw.
[. . .]
She corroborated Gore Videl's story about Lyndon JOhnson, continuing, "that man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realize--there is only one way to say this--he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president."
[Handwritten marginal notes: 1. Check with Rankin--did secret autopsy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?]
The glaze lifted from Jacqueline Kennedy's eyes.
"I don't believe that Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with a conspracy, but I do know this--my husband taught me about the nuances of power--if Jack were miraculously to come back to life and sudenly appear in front of Johnson, the first thing Johnson would do now is kill him." She smiled sardonically, adding, "Unless Bobby beat him to it."
Eldrige Cleaver, The Courage To Kill: Meeting the Panthers [blog note: compare this essay to the bell hooks essay below - JH]
124 - Suddenly the room fell silent. [. . .] From the tension showing on the faces of the people before me, I thought the cops were invading the meeting, but there was a deep female gleam leaping out of one of the women's eyes that no cop who ever lived could elicit. I recognized that gleam out of the recesses of my soul, even though I had never seen it before in my life: the total admiration of a black woman for a black man. I spun round in my seat and asw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets, powder-blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes--and each with a gun!
bell hooks, Love as the Practice of Freedom
317 - Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political visionand our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination--imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white-supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conlcude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, and end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. [. . .]
318 - [. . .] The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King Jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had "decided to love" because he believed deeply that if we are "seeking the highest good," we "find it through love," because this is "the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality." And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement, which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist movement, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice--and because it was proufoundly rooted in a love ethic.
The sixties black power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. and it is not surpirising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quinessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed, utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X's bold credo "by any means necessary."
On the positive side, the Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progess was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately,
319 - neither he nor Malcolm loved long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.
320 - M. Scott Peck's self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular [. . .]
Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." [. . .]
His words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love," which also emphasizes choice.
posted by jlhart7 at 9:52 AM
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