Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race
Landess, Thomas & Quinn, Richard
JESSE JACKSON AND THE POLITICS OF RACE Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn/Jameson Books/$17.95 Philip Terzian "immediate use of the American navy and air force." At the same time, Niebuhr...
...Before Pearl Harbor, Niebuhr was a member of both Norman Thomas's Socialist party and William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies...
...This record adds up to a profile of a thoughtful neoconservative, a liberal mugged by reality...
...Is there any, for that matter, who has celebrated his hyper-impressionistic tendency to approach that genre as a well-nigh erotic object as blatantly as has Kael, with such titles as I Lost It at the Movies, Reeling, Taking It All In, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies, and When the Lights Go Down...
...The uniform was unchanged, the voice was the same, and so were the jokes...
...Kael's critical method is implicitly founded upon the hypothesis that the sort of distinction I've just made is a spurious one...
...But not for Pauline Kael, who's been reviewing movies in the New Yorker since 1968...
...only the Syrians would find him worthy to be manipulated...
...The authors are especially skillful in their examination of the Jackson mythology, his irresistible rise and unquestioned mastery—one might say intimidation—of the media...
...But I think I know...
...It is scarcely an accident that his language is so wild and imprecise, that exaggeration is his form of emphasis...
...Lingering socialist postulates clouded Niebuhr's view of the "Soviet Union through the 1930s...
...A Socialist ideologue informed Niebuhr of his inconsistency and said that "this war is a clash of rival imperialisms...
...She lives them, she breathes them, she worships them, she is at once their high priestess, devoted spouse, and in-satiably aroused mistress: such, at least, is her public image...
...Spectacle can be interesting, and curiosity is easily piqued...
...In short, as Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn make painfully clear, Jesse Jackson is a liar and a fraud, even a usurper, a demagogue minus a message, a hypnotic performer whose spell is lifted without the snap of a finger...
...He condemned the churches for giving ad-vice that, if followed, would ensure "an easy Nazi victory" and for escaping the war issue by spinning "utopian plans" for the postwar world...
...there are recent films that move us to uncritical raptures with their beautiful scenery, beautiful faces, or all-Mozart scores...
...Nowadays he has traded the garment of the agitator for the wardrobe of a pimp...
...The language of electronic celebrity is noise, and the currency of blab is emotion not meaning...
...Dutton/$22.50 Bruce Bawer 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...Not long before his death, I made a pilgrimage to a strip joint in Washington to watch George Jessel perform...
...Civil rights is conventional wisdom, not an exclusive preserve, or the strategy of a private army...
...Niebuhr agreed: "So is a clash between myself and a gangster...
...the Western allies should be prepared for it...
...In 1943 he said that any viable postwar settlement would require the continuing commitment of U.S...
...and leadership, he seems to think, is something seized rather than earned...
...Words mean for Jesse Jackson what he wants them to mean, no more and no less...
...She's perceptive, she's sensitive, she knows a great deal about film technique, she's intelligent (though, it must be said, she invariably applies her critical intelligence more generously to the articulation than to the formulation of her critical opinions...
...A war against Russia, he said, was possible...
...The United Nations, like the failed League before it, was at best a frail reed and at worst an illusion...
...Though he had been critical of certain Soviet practices since the early 1920s, as late as 1936 in Radical Religion he called the Soviet Union "the most thrilling social venture in modern history...
...I would even argue that he is a symptom of national health...
...The problem, of course, is that now there is no movement...
...The press was mystified by his devotion to Louis Farrakhan, but only the press would entertain such expectations...
...He was in South Carolina for the same reason George Jessel used to show up at the Friar's Club: No one knew quite why or how, but he had to be there, and it was too much trouble to keep him away...
...He directed his anger against the evils of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and against the idealists, utopians, and rationalists who could not comprehend tragedy and evil in the world, and the cynics who didn't care about the fate of freedom...
...His ordination was honorary...
...indeed, he was close to dismissal from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when James Earl Ray intervened on his behalf...
...To name one: being a critic who STATE OF THE ART Pauline Kael/E.P...
...In her tenth book, State of the Art, in which she has gathered her reviews of 117 movies released in 1983, 1984, and 1985, both her considerable strengths and her lamentable weaknesses are in full flower...
...The details are fascinating: He grew up in comparative comfort, not the Third World squalor he characteristically invokes...
...play-by-play account of her sensual engagement with them...
...row...
...In a 1953 essay often overlooked by liberal revisionists, "Why Is Communism So Evil...
...A rain-bow coalition that is painfully monochrome—who would notice...
...His theological education—the foundation of the "Rev...
...If he is not the black leader, he is a black leader...
...What provocation will capture the six o'clock news...
...He has careened from one gimmick to another, the author of a series of false starts and broken pledges...
...One must allow for foibles, contradictions, and ambiguities in any seminal thinker, especially one as turbulent and torn as this preacher turned political philosopher in the crucible of a world menaced by the totalitarians...
...Alas, the answer is found on every doorstep: the press...
...It is true that the differences that divide Americans pro-vide a kind of grist for social upheavaland evolution...
...He was especially critical of the "subservience" of Communist parties to "Russian diplomacy, in all its tortuous turnings," adding that the "trouble with all the comrades and semi-comrades" was that they had "made Communism their Christ and Russia the Kingdom of God...
...Black nationalism is no more likely to endure than white nationalism, and while Jesse Jackson is alive and Martin Luther King is dead, it is Jackson who is the anachronism...
...There was a time when civic banquets and organizational get-togethers were in-complete without his bogus uniform, sonorous voice, and familiar one-liners...
...He speaks in measured tones, occasionally raising his voice for emphasis or biblical citation...
...In 1945 he said that if the divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western allies continued to widen, the United Nations might become "irrelevant...
...He repeatedly attacked "the illusion of world government" and in 1949 wrote an article by that name in Foreign Affairs which remains a testament to his profound understanding of world politics...
...Success came quickly, perhaps unexpectedly, in social as well as legislative form...
...The difference is between a tribune and a spokesman, between fighting for right and lobbying for ad-vantage...
...not to analyze films but (to draw a fine but fundamental distinction) to give us a Bruce Bawer writes on writers and fiction for the New Criterion...
...Jackson is ten years older than McNair, and they probably never met...
...conservatism: Robert Taft, Ronald Reagan), but it is also misleading...
...He is at his best when least eligible, most brazen: Mikhail Gorbachev nodded gravely at the plight of Soviet hymies...
...superiority in nuclear arms was the "chief deterrent of a Russian venture to conquer Europe...
...What was once People United to Save Humanity is now People United to Serve Humanity...
...He promptly quit the Socialist party...
...He says one thing, means another, and both are untrue...
...It has transcended politics...
...Niebuhr was impatient with the idealistic planners of the postwar world...
...Was there ever in all of history, one wonders, a critic as famous for his love of the genre under his scrutiny as is Pauline Kael...
...Jesse Jackson, who takes himself nearly as seriously as the authors of this otherwise admirable book, likes to believe he is the inheritor of the mantle of Martin Luther King: America's preeminent, perhaps America's only, black leader, whatever that may mean—a moral authority in the gown of a visionary reformer...
...It is convenient to divide ideas into personalities (liberalism: FDR, Hubert Humphrey...
...For that, at least, we can be thankful...
...From the moment Martin Luther King lay murdered, Jackson's career has been a whirlwind of airport connections, jerry-built alliances, proclamations, and press conferences—leadership by news release...
...And, as the whole world indubitably knows, Pauline Kael loves going to the movies...
...Take away the marketing techniques...
...No law bears his imprint, no doctrine boasts his name...
...In the eighteen years since King died, the movement he personified has missed its crowned head...
...They are distressed by his insincerity, startled by his company...
...He may not have satisfied his listeners in the room, but he- spoke to a wider audience...
...All of this is true, but little of it is important...
...Niebuhr drew his wisdom from the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—from the Hebrew prophets, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Mar-tin Luther—and, less consciously, from American statesmen like James Madison and Abraham Lincoln...
...But no one bothers to read the label...
...At the same time, Niebuhr maintained a running criticism of the mainline Protestant churches for their perfectionism and neutralism: "If modern churches were to symbolize their real faith they would take the crucifix from their altars and substitute the three little monkeys who counsel men to `speak no evil, hear no evil, and see no evil.' " Anticipating the current debate over moral symmetry, Niebuhr charged the Christian perfectionists with blurring the moral distinction between tyranny and democracy, and with espousing "perfection without pity, goodness without discrimination and responsibility, and loveless love...
...But time passes, and the mills tend to turn out bread rather than more grist...
...Blacks don't need Jesse Jackson—no more, at least, than the Democrats—and the futility of concern about personal leadership is summed up in the incoherence of his journey since 1968...
...Why read about him...
...Of course, the delegates listened, and some even wept, but they are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 37 Democrats, and self-mortification is a religious ritual in that particular sect...
...He must journey to Cuba to be treated as a head of state...
...On the contrary...
...power and that an Anglo-American alliance "must be the cornerstone of any durable world order...
...So, too, are her characteristic prejudices...
...And that is the heart of the matter...
...This remarkably consistent affirmation of political realism and responsibility persisted until the mid-1960s, marred only slightly by the not fully examined assumptions of his Marxist past...
...It was an extraordinary, but not altogether unfitting, home port into which he had sailed...
...The Democrats may have held him in unaccustomed esteem, but their electors avoided him in droves...
...Just last February he surfaced in South Carolina eulogizing Ronald McNair, the black astronaut who died in the shuttle explosion, and conferred upon the poor deceased a signal compliment: a connection with himself...
...King's progress was not a cult of personality but a crusade of ideas...
...Which leads us to the real question, why...
...His appearance is especially eloquent: A decade ago he was resplendent in afro and dashiki, chained and bemedaled, loud and insistent...
...and what is left...
...When Jackson spoke to the Democratic National Convention in 1984, he came as a forgiving conqueror, having lost every contest he entered, and by some distance...
...His success tells us more about ourselves than about his guile, which is self-evident, even flagrant...
...Niebuhr castigated Marxist arrogance, Soviet brutality, and the "timid spirits" who will not acknowledge "this universal evil of Communism...
...This is not to say that Jackson is insignificant, or that time and energy are wasted on figuring what he is about...
...Convinced that Soviet expansionist policies were the major threat to freedom and world peace, he became an unabashed Cold Warrior, agreeing with Churchill that U.S...
...Where he will go and how he will subsist, I cannot say...
...By 1938, however, he was comparing Stalin's "dictatorship" to Hitler's, and in 1940 he predicted the possibility of postwar Russian expansion into Europe...
...Jackson is a kind of minor irritant, a boil in the social hind quarters...
...There are old movies by the score that we remember fondly not because they are great examples of cinematic art but because we first saw them with people we loved, because we once had pubescent crushes on the stars, because our mothers loved them...
...Communist dogmatism creates an ideological inflexibility" that reinforces "the monolithic political structure" of the Soviet Union, he said...
...No cause but Jesse Jackson has his unqualified allegiance...
...For that matter, McNair's academic credentials were genuine, whereas Jackson's are problematic at best...
...When he spoke some contrite syllables to an audience of Jews, he switched glossaries, and the expedient worked...
...that punctiliously precedes his name—was fitful, incomplete, and unrewarded by any sort of diploma...
...The rest of us may have wondered: If Jesse Jackson did not exist, would it be necessary to invent him...
...This is not to deny, of course, that Kael is an unusually engaging writer—a fun writer—and, in many ways, a highly gifted critic...
...In fact, I am inclined to think that if he has picked up any fallen standard it is George Jessel's, the late toastmaster general of the United States, and a ubiquitous presence if not a moral authority...
...The fact that he fascinates, or an appetite persists for his image and message, is the perverse side of human nature...
...They detect a pattern of deception and suspect unworthy motives...
...What rhetoric can maintain interest...
...To her mind, manifestly, her role as a film critic is not to attempt to transcend subjectivity but to exult in it, to exalt it...
...It's less true, in other words, to say that Kael writes about movies than to say that she writes about going to the movies...
...The success of the civil rights movement has no more eloquent testimony than the elusiveness of"black leadership...
...In this instance, the media—and, to be fair, academia, Congress, the social statisticians, and others who should know better—have never fully grasped what is otherwise so obvious: When ideas take root, they form the common mind...
...It's all this that makes the job of movie reviewing—the job, that is, of getting beneath the subjective associations and the visceral experience and judging the film as a work of art—particularly challenging...
...He embodied Churchill's provocative assertion that "facts are better than dreams...
...Will Herberg, a former leading intellectual in the American Communist party who was converted by Niebuhr into a Judeo-Christian realist, asserted that one could establish a kinship between Niebuhr's conservatism and that of Edmund Burke...
...The authors are concerned that Jesse Jackson represents a disturbing phenomenon...
...Contempt for democracy is often an article of faith among the sages and brokers of politics, but Jackson is important where it doesn't count...
...like most confidence men, it is his victims who measure his progress...
...It is often forgotten that Martin Luther King was nearly redundant at the time of his death, misconstrued by reactionaries but scorned by radicals...
...Let's talk black talk, he said to a black reporter on one memorable occasion, and lapsed into the vocabulary of anti-Semitism...
...The Democrats who make any difference—that is to say, those who vote—resolutely declined to take him seriously...
...The demolished automobile will slow down traffic, but novelty wears off easily...
...Where will Jesse Jackson be tomorFor most of us, it's difficult at times to look at film critically...
...Vintage Niebuhr, then, is indeed a man for all seasons...
...He was neither King's chosen deputy nor anointed successor...
...Jesse Jackson is his modern equivalent: He seems to be everywhere, but especially on television, reciting his motivational doggerel, rhyming "hope" with "dope," turning up in such unlikely places as Damascus or Geneva or Havana, where he cannot always tell the good guys from the bad, lending his celebrity presence where it may or may not be welcome...
...The moral, then, is in the subtitle: the politics of race...
...Save, serve—what's the difference...
...I like to think that Jesse Jackson will continue to entertain, rather than disturb...
...Self-promoting, double-crossing, scene-stealing, he seems to have learned the value of publicity from his putative mentor, but little else...
...He acknowledged this flaw in a 1952 essay, "The Tiriumph of Experience Over Dogma," in which he said that he clung to shreds of Marxist dogma long after he supposed himself free of such illusions...
...He and McNair, he said (and so Time and the New York Times reported), had been classmates at North Carolina A & T University, when in fact they had been nothing of the sort...
...A decade later he declared that Soviet Communism was far more dangerous than any authoritarian regime—it was "a pretentious scheme of world salvation, a secularized religious apocalypse...
...The Democrats were alternately bullied and seduced, but Jesse Jackson is just another Balkan prince dividing their unhappy kingdom...
...Philip Terzian, a TAS contributor since 1975, is writing a book on the American Century...
...Indeed, if a bad book is only a bad book, a bad movie—if you're sitting in a theater that has a huge screen, an excellent sound system, and a first-rate, unscratched, color-perfect, 70-millimeter print—can nonetheless be a terrifically powerful visceral experience...
...After all, we grew up on movies in a way we didn't grow up on serious art or music or literature: the genre is full of sentimental associations for us...
...No institution endures because he laid the foundation...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
