Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Seeing the play the Mountaintop turned me toward a book I bought a while back,  “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”  Marable was a Columbia University professor of public affairs and African-American studies until his death in 2011 just days before the book’s publication.  He got interested in Malcolm because the book that made him well-known, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a joint work with Alex Haley, the “Roots” author, seemed to have a lot of lacunae.

It turns out Haley was a liberal Republican and had an agenda, present Malcolm as a critic of racial affairs that his peers could listen to.  Malcolm apparently agreed to the limited scope of the book’s treatment because the parts that were left out often made him look bad, or different from his own mythology.  Example.  His criminal past wasn’t nearly as thuggish as he represented, but merely amateurish.  He and Haley also left out much of Malcolm’s community organizing efforts.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
By Manning Marable
Hardcover, 608 pages
Viking Adult

So Marable spent years going over Malcolm’s life again, re-interviewing and interviewing people in his life, reading his correspondence, much of it lovingly copied and photocopied by the FBI for inclusion in Malcolm’s voluminous file.  His writing is clear, his presentation straightforward if a little bloodless.  He has so much data that it threatens to and often does overwhelm the flesh and blood man whose story is its focus.

I like it a lot.  Malcolm always seemed to have a better analysis of racism and class issues than MLK did.  In this book his deep roots in the Marcus Garvey movement, his mother and father were both organizers for Garvey, and his incredible self-education while in prison for a string of burglaries, show a man hungry to understand himself and the world around him.  He organized working class blacks, knew the life of the criminal underclass as a participant and appreciated the iron power of white dominance.

Malcolm’s eventual conversion to orthodox Islam comes much further into the book than I am now, but his story has already shown me the cyclical patterns of race relations in this country and that King’s achievements, while notable, were the children of earlier and often more radical movements.

Well worth the time.

Spring                                                                   Bee Hiving Moon

15 degrees this morning.  Woolly Charlie Haislet who lives on Sims Lake near Gordon, Wisconsin reports 1 degree and 8-12 inches of snow on the way.  They have 2 feet of ice on the lake.

Beware the ides of April.  Libertarians and certain anti-tax right-wingers (we know who you are tea partiers) ventilate today.  Can you hear the sighs and moans of U.S. citizens forced to chip in for such things as roads, environmental protection, defense, national criminal justice systems, national science and health programs, healthcare programs, national weather services, Congress (well, o.k., Congress is a tough sell right now, but we can still vote the bums out), regulatory authorities?

Just how a complex citizenry, divided up among 50 states, and working in the world’s largest economy would function without national level efforts puzzles me.  But the fevered imagination of those who took the Reagan era’s “starve the beast” rhetoric seriously sees totally free agents doing anything they want personally and economically and being better off for it. At least the anarchists have the underlying idea of co-operation as a value for a functioning community.  The libertarian and tea-party folk apparently believe in a Hobbesian “all against all” and yearn for it.  Picture me scratching my head.

Freedom, by itself, is pointless.  Yes, I said that.  Freedom alone only allows room to act.  It does not, in itself, guide action unless, of course, it is freedom itself that is denied.  Given the paradox that absolute, unfettered freedom would produce its enemies: totalitarianism, constant criminality, or a forever war; then, we have to consider the limited freedom that makes modern civilization possible.  Even within the limits on freedom represented by taxes, speed limits, criminal law and regulation, the opportunity to develop yourself and your family as rapidly and as thoroughly as you wish, exists.