BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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"Remember the Alamo," "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too," have evolved
into what we now call the sound byte.
One of our most serious problems, however, is that our difficulties
are far too complicated to fit into an era demanding that all messages last
no longer than a commercial break, far too intricate to be explained
clearly to an audience interested in hearing little more than two or three
sentences which are supposed to function like some sort of auditory bal–
ing twine, capable of holding the protean heap of American blues in place
long enough for the mythic garbage trucks of our nation to haul them
away. But swirling through all of this political and intellectual fast food is
a set of manifestations that says much about the condition of the Ameri–
can soul as it relates to the issue of rethinking the Western tradition in
terms of politics and society in our world. I would first like to look at
some of them and then tum to what I consider our perpetual American
reserves, those ever-green ideas and impulses that have allowed us to
make it this far and will surely help us to get beyond where we are now.
We find ourselves looking at a terrain on which Louis Farrakan
comes close to draining all political, social, and moral seriousness from
Mro-American affairs. He stands in Washington before perhaps a million
men, to whom he explains what the icons and numbers on dollar bills
supposedly mean. The multitudinous audience for his lunatic numerology
and incoherence is made possible by an organizing apparatus extending so
far outside of his racist cult that it includes churches and sororities. The
exceeding bulk of that network of organizations was probably introduced
to Farrakan by Benjamin Chavis, a skirt-chasing minister and sanctimoni–
ous hustler whose Christianity took a backseat to his affection for
demagoguery, and whose fumblings and fondlings during his brief posi–
tion as executive director of the NAACP nearly brought the organization
to ruin, its concern for integration almost incinerated by racial animus.
Our American press, ever paternalistic and given to treating Negro
Americans as though they are never more than savages pitifully shaking
voodoo dolls at the heavens, looked upon the Million Man March as
some sort of grand moment, or at least one that could be condescended
to with the kind of talk about unity and self-esteem reminiscent of the
antebellum barrels of molasses passed out to the slaves at the end of a
good season. But there is something amiss in our country when so many
fairly well-off black people, seeking some sort of unity as an answer to the
ravages of urban life, gather around the ineloquent briarpatch of Far–
rakan's lingo, which can include stories about his own space travel and
claims from his minions that the Nation of Islam has developed a cure for
AIDS.
It
is snake oil and racial paranoia in one package.
