Southern Bookman

Times Literary Supplement gives authors' summer reading plans

In the June 26 Times Literary Supplement, well-known writers list the books they're reading this summer.

The TLS feature, matching a holiday reading survey, gives a voyeuristic thrill. The cheerful comments of authors like Hilary Mantel, Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Enright make them seem just like us.

A common motif is that because of the coronavirus, authors will be doing their summer reading at home this year rather than at exotic beaches or idyllic country retreats. Another theme is reading children's books to sons and daughters unable to go to school.

While the authors do seem like regular folks, they don't go in for the light reading associated with the lazy, sun-dazzled season. Oates, for example, is embarking upon Dostoevsky after finishing "War and Peace" and other Tolstoy tomes.

With the coronavirus out of control, Trump's daily outrages, and racial turmoil, the old idea of pleasurable summer reading looks superfluous. Yet, I more and more seek to escape the news, especially the gloom bearers of MSNBC. I agree with them of course, but the strident Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow get my a-fib a-fibbing.

Spurred by the ambitious reading of the TLS authors, I might try again to finish "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." But Gibbon would seem too much like cable news.

 

Rick Atkinson's "The British Are Coming" tells vivid story of American Revolution's start

Right after the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, the revolution's death appeared imminent.

After taking control of Boston, the American army headed to a series of defeats, most ignominiously the loss of New York City because of the blundering of George Washington and his compatriots.

The British crossed the Hudson and chased the battered, poorly equipped Yankees through New Jersey to Trenton, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the American capital. The British paused for the holidays, confident that the Americans were already whipped, and just needed finishing off.

Rick Atkinson in the richly detailed "The British Are Coming: The War For America, Washington to Princeton, 1775-1777," tells the story of the beginning of the revolution, and how Washington came back from disaster to save the American cause in the winter of 1776.

The first of a projected three-volume history of the American Revolution, Atkinson takes an in-depth look at the causes of the colonies' revolt, and the American army's initial triumphs, causing the British to abandon Boston.

Early battles Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill come alive, as do subsequent clashes. Atkinson also gives an epic rendering of the American invasion of Canada, which turned disastrous after initial success, and victories in the Carolinas.

Washington's tribulations and triumphs are the heart of the book. In a complex portrait, Washington is shown emerging from the fire of the military defeats in New York to take charge as a daring, charismatic military leader, one of history's greatest generals.

As winter fell in 1776, Britain's overconfident Hessian troops encamped in Trenton, just across the Delaware from where Washington's desperate, depleted forces shivered in Philadelphia.

Beset by disease, desertions, and deteriorating supplies, the American troops feared an imminent British assault. Instead, on Christmas Day 1776, Washington audaciously decided on a surprise attack against the complacent Hessian troops in Trenton.

Despite setbacks crossing the ice-strewn river, Washington's attack succeeded. A subsequent battle in Trenton, and another surprise attack at the British stronghold in Princeton, turned the tide of the revolution. Thanks to Washington's daring, the colonies believed they could beat the haughty British empire.

The most venerated Founding Father, Washington along with contemporaries like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is receiving condemnation because he owned slaves.

Although Washington requested in his will that his slaves be freed, his widow, Martha Washington, resisted doing do. And, during his life, he sought to return to bondage a slave who had gained freedom because of the British. Overall, he was a steadfast supporter of slavery.

In Atkinson's narrative, the British exhibit the most enlightened views on slavery, while the American colonists vociferously support owning other humans.

Out of all of the British and American personalities that Atkinson vividly portrays, Washington stands out, a fascinating mixed portrait of cruelty and magnanimity, brilliance and obtuseness, finesse and arrogance.

His personality displayed the contradictions of the American character. In the end, he exemplified the best of us.

Stone Mountain carving should fall to nature, Ryan Gravel says

Let natural vegetation cover the Stone Mountain monument.

That's one of several proposals made by Atlanta Beltline progenitor Ryan Gravel and historian Scott Morris to diminish the power of the gigantic sculpture of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.

Gravel and Morris in an opinion article in the British-based The Guardian say they want the 150-foot carving removed altogether, but admit that it's too large for that to happen. Instead, they call for immediate actions that would obstruct public viewing.

"The sculpture is an irreparable scar on an ancient mountain with a long history of habitation and use by indigenous people," according to the article written by Gravel with historical information from Morris.

The article points out that although the carving originated in the early 20th century, it was not completed until 1970, a symbol of Georgia's defiance to federal civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions. The carving was completed as Atlanta built a national reputation as "the city too busy to hate."

Without periodic maintenance, trees and plants would grow from the carving's mountain crevices, Gravel says. He even wants the state to blast soil into the carving to enhance the vegetation's growth. The monument overgrown with vegetation would symbolize the collapse of the Confederacy, he says

He also wants to stop mowing of the Memorial Lawn, the gathering spot for viewing of the park's laser show, cast upon the monument. With the lawn eventually turning into a forest, the laser show would cease.

I doubt that Gravel's proposals will ever be adapted, but I'd love to see trees and brush growing from the hateful sculpture of the three Confederate leaders on horseback.

One of Gravel's proposals should be carried out with little opposition: Removing all references to the Confederacy in the park, such as renaming Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Stonewall Jackson Drive.

The article concludes with a call for long-range planning so that the park represents all of the state's citizens. Gravel points out that demographic changes will give Georgia a majority non-white population in a few years.

That Gravel published his article in the American edition of a British publication raises the question of why The Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn't print it instead of its usual banal opinion pieces. Did the AJC think Gravel's proposals too controversial for conservative suburban readers, if any remain?

Perhaps our fine local newspaper is doing a major article on Stone Mountain's future and why Georgia glorifies the Confederacy at its major state park.

 

 

 

 

Stone Mountain's impregnable Confederate memorial

As the Georgia Legislative session comes to a merciful end, no calls have risen to sandblast the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain.

The massive sculpture of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis carved into the mountain will remain, rising above the kitschy state park now closed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Stacey Abrams in her unsuccessful gubernatorial race against Brian "Pandemic, What Pandemic?" Kemp called for the removal of the monument, completed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to demonstrate Georgia's resistance to integration. Work on the monument began with the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century.

The state would have to pay millions to blast away the sculpture, an even more unlikely expenditure in the wake of massive budget cuts following the pandemic shutdown. With schools and hospitals losing funding, the Confederate memorial appears invulnerable.

As other racist icons tumble, Georgia's monument to white supremacy will last forever.

 

John Bolton's stinkbomb explodes

John Bolton's "The Room Where It Happened" has landed.

It seemed pointless to read reviews by Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times and Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. Revelations in the book about Donald Trump's corruption, mental instability and cozying up to dictators had already appeared in The Times and WSJ's news columns. Why waste any time reading the book?

Despite Trump's lawsuit against release of his former national security adviser's White House expose, the WSJ published an excerpt in its Saturday Review section. Although the WSJ's editorial page frequently defends Trump, albeit turning against him more and more recently, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper disclosed some of Bolton's most damaging accusations about Trump's dealings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump responded to the book's arrival with his usual fulminations, claiming that Bolton is one more enemy who should be thrown into Trump's fantasy jail.

Slate's Fred Kaplan said that Bolton's own foolhardy views disclosed in the book are as disturbing as the Trump vignettes. Bolton shows himself as more extreme than Trump on Iran and North Korea, Kaplan said.

Kaplan cites a passage from the book that pictures Trump  as having the attention span of a 2-year-old. Trump's unable to focus on one subject, continually veering off to pursue bizarre associations in his mind.

Kaplan's piece made me wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda can take action against Bolton for appropriating the"room where it happens" lyric from Miranda's smash musical "Hamilton."

It sounds like Bolton's memoir should have been called "the room where it didn't happen."

 

 

Charleston makes new reckoning with past in removing Calhoun statue

Charleston has taken major strides to atone for its slavery legacy, but I never thought the city would remove the John C. Calhoun statue.

Mayor John Tecklenburg and the Charleston City Council decided last week to take down the 115-foot-tall Calhoun monument, which towers above Marion Square about three blocks away from Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church, where a white supremacist slaughtered nine church members five years ago.

Vice president during two presidential administrations, a cabinet member and a prominent U.S. senator, Calhoun was a leading spokesman for the South and slavery as conflicts with the North deepened in the 19th century. A series of congressional compromises failed to prevent the Civil War.

Although Calhoun died 10 years before the Civil War began, he was revered across the South as one of the fathers of the Confederacy for his theory of nullification, which held that a state could reject federal law.

Erected in 1896 when Confederate monuments were placed throughout the South following the end of reconstruction, the Calhoun statue standing upon a massive Doric column was a symbol of the Confederate "lost cause" and the return of white supremacy.

The statue's site is one of Charleston's many history-drenched spots. The Citadel military school was located at the square from 1842 to 1922. Its barracks is now an Embassy Suites Hotel.

Once the parade ground for Citadel cadets, the grassy square is now a gathering spot for  tourists and College of Charleston students. A Saturday morning farmers market is a pleasant ritual.

Named for Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the square is owned by two exemplars of the city's military tradition dating back to the early 19th century, the Washington Light Infantry and the Sumter Guards. In the 1950s, the grand old military companies stopped plans to turn the square into a parking lot. The bastions of old-time Charleston oppose the Calhoun statue's removal, as does the Charleston Post-Courier, which published an editorial calling for a historical interpretive plaque.

Under Tecklenburg and the council's plan, the monument will be moved to a museum, if any can be found to take it. The statue will be toppled first, and then the column taken down in stages rather than having another statue placed upon it.

Perhaps the Daughters of the Confederacy's Confederate Museum will take the statue, although it would probably have to be placed outside, again giving Calhoun a prominent spot.

If protests against dismantling the statue falter, it will likely molder in a landfill or warehouse somewhere along with other Confederate monuments.

 

 

Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard blasted for hasty judgment in Rayshard Brooks investigation

Leave it to District Attorney Paul Howard to shift public sympathy to the police officers charged in the Rayshard Brooks slaying.

Howard's swift investigation led to 11 charges, including felony murder, against former Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe, who shot a fleeing Brooks in the back after an altercation in a Wendy's parking lot. Officer Devin Brosnan was charged with aggravated assault and lesser charges. Rolfe was fired and Brosnan placed on administrative leave.

The district attorney's rash news conference announcing the charges prompted The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's editorial board, whoever they may be, to issue a stern editorial accusing Howard of political motivation. That was the second recent awakening of the board, which castigated governmental officials following the June 9 primary election fiasco. In recent years, the AJC has rarely issued editorials.

Following that blast from the newspaper's anonymous editorial board, AJC columnist Bill Torpy pummeled Howard even harder, accusing him of stirring up the public in an effort to win re-election.

The target of a GBI investigation into charges he pillowed his salary with city funds intended for a youth program, Howard is battling to remain in office. He and former assisstant D.A. Fani Willis are headed to a runoff election Aug. 11. Willis finished ahead of Howard in the June 9 primary and leads him in fund-raising.

Along with the Howard probe, the GBI is also investigating the Brooks slaying. Because of the GBI ethics investigation against Howard, he shouldn't be involved in the Brooks case, critics say.

Howard issued his charges without waiting for the GBI to finish its investigation into the Brooks slaying and didn't even notify the GBI about his news conference, the AJC reported.

U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, running for the U.S. Senate, called for Howard to recuse himself from the Brooks case and for Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr to appoint an independent prosecutor.

That would make two district attorneys removed from investigating killings of young black men in their counties. Glynn County District Attorney Jackie Johnson recused herself from the Ahmaud Arbery slaying in Brunswick because one of the accused killers worked as an investigator in her office.

Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes' office was appointed by Carr to take over the Arbery case, and presumably wouldn't also be given the Brooks slaying. DeKalb District Attorney Sherry Boston, another black woman, would be a good bet to handle the Brooks investigation.

The Atlanta police department is suffering low morale from the stress of controlling the George Floyd killing protests and the fallout from the Brooks slaying, which led to Police Chief Erika Fields' resignation, the AJC reported. A number of police officers called in sick to protest the charges against Rolfe and Brosnan, according to reports. 

The public's morale isn't too strong either. Most of us are already home, so we can't call in sick.

 

 

Changing country's racial legacy will bring difficult choices

The dead hand of the Confederacy has shaped my life.

Like other Southern boys, I grew up venerating Robert E. Lee as a paragon of manly virtues. I was a graduate of  Robert E. Lee High, located on Lee Drive, one of several streets in Baton Rouge's bucolic Southdowns neighborhood named for Confederate generals.

Protests a couple of years ago led to the school's name being changed to a generic Lee High, and its athletic teams being called the Patriots rather than the Rebels. But no one has called for the renaming of Lee Drive, Stuart Avenue and Pickett and Hood streets. I doubt that many Baton Rouge residents know for whom the streets were named.

At LSU, I stayed in the notorious Kirby Smith Hall, named for the last Southern general to surrender, and the P.G.T. Beauregard dormitory. Raphael Semmes Road ran in front of the LSU Union. But LSU now renounces its Confederate ties.

My mother took me to see "Gone With the Wind" when I turned 16, a rite of passage for Southern children at the time. I loved the movie's lurid colors, the spectacle, and the smoldering romance between Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara.

Sadly I admit that the glorification of the Confederacy and slavery didn't bother me. The success of the South's "Lost Cause" propaganda made such views part of American culture. College history courses and the reading of black authors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and James Baldwin led me to radically change my views of the Confederacy and white racism.

Hattie McDaniel's Academy Award-winning performance as Mammy was a blatant stereotype, but she displayed wit, ingenuity and intelligence. McDaniel didn't come to Atlanta for the movie's premier, and she had to sit at a separate table at the Coconut Grove during the Academy Awards ceremony, the subject of a fine Rita Dove poem. Did her Mammy differ so much from William Faulkner's Dilsey?

I couldn't stand watching "Gone With the Wind" today. Butler rapes Scarlett as brutally as Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski assaults Leigh's Blanche Dubois in "Streetcar Named Desire."

"Gone With the Wind's" depiction of blacks would be unbearable, the exaltation of the South disgusting.

HBO-Max's decision to remove "Gone With the Wind" brought back my conflicted impressions of the film. Now it appears the 80-year-old Hollywood monstrosity will return to the new streaming service with some kind of trigger warning from a professor. It's hard to imagine anyone younger than 70 wanting to watch the movie these days. I suppose cinema buffs find it of interest, similar to that of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation."

The protests over the George Floyd killing have brought a surprising rejection of institutional racism.

Gen. David Petraeus in an Atlantic article called for Army bases honoring Confederate generals to be renamed. The proposal drew support from Army officials, and a typical blast of ignorant bombast from Donald Trump, the Braxton Bragg of presidents.

I was most amazed that LSU officials and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards agreed to black students' demands to change the name of the university's Troy H. Middleton Library. 

Like William Tecumseh Sherman, Middleton was a U.S. Army general who served as LSU's president. Middleton, an acclaimed World War II soldier, was best known for his leadership in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1962, he tarnished his career by writing a letter to the University of Texas' Harry Ransom declaring that black and white students would remain separate on the LSU campus and that black athletes would never play for the university.

The plan to remove Middleton's name from the library follows the university's renaming Semmes Road to Veterans Road and the pending demolition of Kirby Smith Hall and the 1960s-era Lockett Hall, named for a Confederate officer.

Other American and Southern monuments will receive scrutiny. How far should the nation go in removing parts of its legacy exposed as racist?

Historian Douglas Southhall Freeman glorified Lee as upholding the legacy of George Washington. Freeman saw Lee as a patriot rather than a traitor, choosing loyalty to his state over the nation. Like Lee, Washington ardently sought to preserve slavery. But while Lee is dishonored, Washington remains largely admired for defeating the British empire and serving as the nation's first president.

If you win the revolution, you're considered the father of your country. If you lose, you're a traitor.

Lee is rightly vilified for defending slavery. But Washington did as well. According to The New York Times' 1619 Project, awarded a Pulitzer Prize although disputed by leading historians, preserving slavery was a main purpose of the American revolution. Considering Washington's upholding of slavery, should the nation's capital be renamed?

Atlanta honors "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell with the Mitchell House, an esteemed cultural center. However, her novel, praised by Pat Conroy, gives a positive view of the Klan and romanticizes the Confederacy.

As with the removal of Lee's statue in New Orleans several years ago, the nation should stop honoring those who fought for slavery and upheld white supremacy. But how far the changes should go will make for difficult choices.

 

 

 

 

World hurtling toward environmental disaster, reports indicate

Humanity keeps racing toward destruction beyond the coronavirus pandemic, recent reports say.

The globe's sixth mass extinction rushes forward unabated, according to a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences. The study focused on the alarming loss of vertebrates as their habitat is destroyed by human development. The species extinctions threaten human life, the report warns.

"The ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible," the study said.

"Thousands of populations of critically endangered vertebrate animal species have been lost in a century, indicating that the sixth mass extinction is human caused and accelerating. The acceleration of the extinction crisis is certain because of the still fast growth in human numbers and consumption rates"

Climate change is also bearing down, another report found.

Carbon dioxide levels in May rose to their highest level in human history, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced last week.

The amount of carbon in the atmosphere rose to a once unfathomable 417 parts per million, as recorded in May by the Mauna Loa Observatory in the Pacific. That's the highest atmospheric level of CO2 in millions of years, the report noted. The world breached the ominous threshold of 400 parts per million in 2014.

Carbon emissions have declined during the pandemic economic shutdown, but not enough to change the amount in the atmosphere.

"The rate of increase during 2020 does not appear to reflect reduction in pollution emissions due to the sharp, worldwide economic slowdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic," the report found. "The reason is that the drop in emissions would need to be large enough to stand out from natural CO2 variability, caused by how plants and soils respond to seasonal and annual variations of temperature, humidity, soil moisture, etc.

"These natural variations are large, and so far the emissions reductions associated with COVID19 do not stand out. If emissions reductions of 20 to 30 percent were sustained for six to 12 months, then the rate of increase of CO2 measured at Mauna Loa would be slowed."

With the United States and the world reopening their economies, emissions will again climb. There are no ventilators for the world.

As scientists sounded their alarm. the Trump administration carried out another assault on environmental laws. Using the coronavirus as a pretext, Trump issued an executive order to halt environmental impact statements for pipelines, highways and other infrastructure projects. Such assessments are the hallmark of the Environmental Policy Act signed by Richard Nixon 50 years ago.

Trump might love Nixon's law and order tactics. But he hates the GOP president's groundbreaking environmental legislation as much as he does Obama's programs.

 

 

 

 

Along with Tom Cotton's disastrous article, New York Times publishes Stacey Abrams, Keisha Lance Bottoms

Two days after publishing the disastrous militaristic piece by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, The New York Times ran an op-ed article by Stacey Abrams, a leading candidate to be named the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee.

Abrams' article followed an anguished outcry against police violence toward young black men by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, another rising black female political leader from Georgia reportedly on presidential nominee Joe Biden's vice-presidential list.

While I understand Times staffers' anger at the factually incorrect and poorly reasoned Cotton article, I support Times op-ed editor James Bennett's efforts to publish different points of view.

A Times review found that the newspaper published the Cotton piece too hastily, and that the editing didn't meet Times standards. A rigorously edited article on presidential mobilization of the military would have been valuable.

Cotton's piece calling for the Army to crack down on protesters in American cities touched off a rebellion among Times news reporters and editors. At first, Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Bennett defended the error-filled article with dubious freedom of the press arguments.

But with staffers threatening a strike, the Times leaders admitted that Cotton's piece didn't meet the newspaper's standards. The Times, which fired many of its copy editors a few years ago, promised to tighten its editorial standards.

Hired by the Times from The Atlantic and the brother of U.S. Sen. and former presidential candidate Michael Bennett, Opinion Editor Bennett admitted that he hadn't read Cotton's piece before it was published.

Bennett, who said the Times ran Cotton's alarmist piece to provide an alternative viewpoint, also weathered staff protests for hiring right-winger Bret Stephens as a columnist from the Wall Street Journal and giving a forum to other controversial right-wing voices. Years ago, the Times was blasted for hiring Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew speechwriter William Safire as a columnist.

The Cotton piece was commissioned by Adam Rubenstein, a 25-year-old editor who formerly worked for the conservative Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard, according to his Wikipedia bio.

Accepting Cotton's assertion that Trump's mobilizing of troops to suppress protests of the George Floyd slaying would be like John F. Kennedy's deployment of the military in the civil rights era, Rubenstein asked a photo editor for pictures of the Ole Miss riots in 1962. The photo editor refused Rubenstein's request on the grounds that Rubenstein was making a false historical analogy, according to a Times article.

Kennedy called out troops to support the integration of Ole Miss by James Meredith. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett violated federal law in refusing to allow Meredith's admission, a distinction ignored by Cotton and missed by the Times' haphazard fact checking. White Mississippians sought by massive resistance to prevent Meredith from attending the university.

As the Georgia Floyd protests continue, reports rise of police violence. Reporters have been attacked, as the Times reporters cited in condemning Cotton's article.

Abrams' article gave a passionate defense of voting, expressing concern that black disgust at the legal and political system would discourage going to the polls. Bottoms' piece called for changes to stop wanton police killing of black citizens.

As the controversy over Cotton's piece rose, former Marine Gen. and Trump Cabinet member Jim Mattis blasted the president for his threat to call out troops.

Longtime Times readers might wonder why The Times missed out on publishing Mattis' article and instead ran Cotton's duplicitous rant.