THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Life Goes On Over a dozen readers sent in to THE STANDARD READER articles about Emmanuel Asare, cleaning man and unwitting art critic, who, tidying a London gallery on Oct....
...BY J. BOTTUM Can a book miss its moment so badly it actually curves back into relevance...
...At last someone sees his work for what it is...
...R.D...
...Everything from missiles to canned goods is being sold these days by reference to the events of Sept...
...11, but West's attempt at promoting sales deserves notice...
...Fanon the Flames His hour comes around again...
...E-mail it to standardreader@weeklystandard.com...
...Hirst has gained headlines and wealth by immersing sheep, sharks, and cows in formaldehyde, and calling the result art...
...11, an extraordinary number were present in the Paris of the 1950s existential-ists—where they were gathered up in an incoherent but lethal combination and offered to the Middle East in The Wretched of the Earth...
...Especially now, as a whole country has the blues...
...Daniel Pipes, in a 1995 First Things article "The Western Mind of Radical Islam," pointed out the number of terrorists educated in the West...
...It's another medium...
...But one has to move outside the West to find Fanon's thought still fully alive...
...He died in 1961 at 36 and didn't live to see the result of his theory of therapeutic murder or of his claim that America is Europe's sickness made manifest...
...Does anyone still remember those halcyon 1960s days when Fanon loomed large for the American Left...
...Take David Macey's Frantz Fanon, a recent biography of the black psychiatrist from Martinique who, sent by his colonial masters to run a mental hospital in Algiers, became the intellectual cheerleader for the Algerian revolt against the French...
...Of the intellectual threads that led to the attack on Sept...
...We can gain great insight from a blues people," he explained...
...Meanwhile, other readers clipped the Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Harvard professor Cornel West, whose music CD, Sketches of My Culture, is about to appear...
...Of course, Asare was helped by the fact that it was garbage—literally: used cups, dirty ashtrays, candy wrappers, and newspapers spread across the floor...
...It was when the hijacked airplanes came smashing into New York and Washington that the faded Frantz Fanon returned to relevance...
...Fanon's name ought to have survived in America as the shorthand way of explaining how racial victim groups displaced the proletariat in the iconography of the Left...
...Fanon wanted an Algerian nation severed from the "sickness of Europe" and an Algerian people who had overcome through violence the psychological restraints induced by their colonizers...
...But the cleaner nonetheless deserves credit...
...Laing's The Politics of Experience, Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man: High on the list of such forgotten tomes is Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth—with its once-notorious introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, which declared, "Shooting a European means killing two birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at one and the same time: There remain a dead man and a free man...
...And I'm excited to be part of the black-music tradition," said West...
...In his 1990 Atlantic essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Bernard Lewis noted Islamic radicals' embrace of the anti-Westernism of high European philosophers...
...Spot something THE STANDARD READER should note...
...Macey hasn't done a bad job of biography, and the Fanon who emerges is valuable as a marker for that moment in the early 1960s when European Marxists made common cause with Third World anti-colonialists—turning revolutionary doctrine from an economic theory to an anti-economic dogma...
...16, bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 8
