New Jersey has an image problem. The politicians keep trying to improve New Jersey’s image with slogans. Governor Kean replaced the slogan “New Jersey’s Got It!” with “New Jersey and You, Perfect Together.” Then, one-term Governor Jim Florio gave us “New Jersey Works,” which was followed by “New Jersey: What a Difference a State Makes.” Currently the state is pushing the back-from-retirement “New Jersey and You: Perfect Together.”
When asked to contribute possible state slogans, New Jersey’s blue-collar realists suggested:
New Jersey: We Kick Delaware’s Butt
New Jersey: A 55-Gallon Drum of Fun
New Jersey: Gateway to Everywhere Else
New Jersey: Landfill of Enchantment
New Jersey: Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For.
Other contributions included such random ruminations as:
“I like New Jersey because my mother-in-law from Pennsylvania is afraid to come here.”
“I like New Jersey because this is where I learned to swear in Italian.”
“I like New Jersey because a total stranger in Teaneck once flagged down my car to bum a light, and that couldn’t happen just anywhere.”
So when Governor McGreevey gave the green light for the appointment of New Jersey’s second-ever poet laureate, it was with the intention of improving New Jersey’s image. No such luck. The only part of the ensuing mess that surprised Manhattan’s coffeehouse sophisticates was the discovery that New Jersey had a poet laureate. Their ignorance is forgivable.
Twenty-two states have poets laureate. The post of American national poet laureate was created in 1937 and was originally called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. It was changed to “poet laureate” in 1985. The title was a way for poets to commemorate national occasions. The post of New Jersey poet laureate was established by law in 1999. Then-Governor Christine Todd Whitman named Gerald Stern the state’s first poet laureate in 2000. The tenure is two years and includes a ten-thousand-dollar stipend. The honoree is expected to perform at least two public readings annually and to promote poetry in the schools and throughout the state.
New Jersey’s second poet laureate was chosen by a selection committee appointed by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Governor James McGreevey then issued a proclamation naming Amiri Baraka as New Jersey’s reigning poet laureate. It was all downhill from there.
Amiri Baraka has been a vocal exponent of what he calls “Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought” since the 1970s. In October 2001 he wrote a 226-line poem titled Somebody Blew Up America, which was his response to the flying fuel-bomb mass murders of September 11th, 2001. On Saturday September 21, 2002 he read this poem before an audience at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey. Folks in the audience began booing the poet laureate. To this day it isn’t clear whether people were offended by the poem’s message or by its plodding lock-step monotonous drum-beat construction. It had all the poetic qualities of a 1950s Soviet “boy-meets-tractor” propaganda film.
What caught the ears of Jews in the audience were lines such as:
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion
And:
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center
was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the
Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Jews and Jewish organizations cried foul and called for Baraka’s resignation. Baraka told them to stuff it. Soon Governor McGreevey was feeling the heat. He requested Baraka’s resignation. Baraka told the governor to stuff it.
To his dismay, the governor discovered that while some poets laureate serve “at the pleasure” of government officials, New Jersey’s lawmakers had not provided any legal mechanism for removing New Jersey’s top poet. The old rage-against-the-machine politics of the 1960s may no longer resonate, especially at poetry festivals, but Baraka was still raging. Baraka observed: “If they’re gonna name a poet laureate they ought to have some familiarity with his work.” Good point. Baraka can be called many things, but “secretive” isn’t one of them. He has been shooting off his mouth for decades.
Meet the Poet
Amiri Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 7, 1934. From his birth until 1968 he was Everett LeRoy Jones, the son of postal supervisor Colt LeRoy Jones and Anna Lois Jones, a social worker. He did a stint at Rutgers, then transferred to Howard University and flunked out in 1954. He disparaged Howard University as “an employment agency.” Then he volunteered for the Air Force and disparaged the Air Force as the “Error Farce.” In 1957 the Air Force bounced his ass “under undesirable circumstances.” Later that year he moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attached himself to a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists. He promptly “Frenchified” his name to “LeRoi.” The French communist theorists were all the rage just then, don’t ‘cha know.
A year later this restless middle-class black man married a middle-class Jewish woman, Hettie Cohen, and they began to co-edit an avant-garde magazine called Yugen. It was about then that he began to write poetry and prose; he was now a black bohemian with a Jewish wife and two daughters.
In 1965 Jones made the decision to dump his Jewish wife and two kids and reinvent himself as a righteous black supremacist. He moved to Harlem and married a black woman named Sylvia Robinson. That same year he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem which presented Jones’ anti-white plays before black-only audiences. This little hatefest fell apart within months.
Near the end of 1965, when it finally dawned on LeRoi Jones that he would never be accepted as the successor of the slain Malcolm X, he returned to Newark and underwent yet another fashion-name make over. First he began calling himself by the Bantuized Muslim name Ameer Barakat, which means “Blessed Prince,” which is a revealing thing to name oneself. Soon afterward he changed his name again, this time at the suggestion of fellow black nationalist Maulana Karenga, formerly Ron Karenga, the fabricator of Kwanzaa. Now LeRoi Jones was calling himself by the Swahilized name Imamu Amiri Baraka. The Imamu part is actually a religious title with which Baraka anointed himself; it means “Spiritual Leader.” Baraka dumped the Imamu part when, on a trip to Africa, people kept asking him to bless them. Sylvia changed her name to Amina. Fashion makeovers are very big with the leftist avant-garde, even as everything else about them remains utterly predictable.
During the 1965 New York City blackout, Baraka (then Jones) drove around Harlem in a sound truck urging black looters to “rip these stores off. Take everything. Come out and get it.” Baraka was also out and about on the streets of Newark during the 1967 six-day race riot that hurried that city’s decline and cemented its reputation as a place to steer clear of. Before the rise of Black Power, Newark had a population of 405,000 souls; by the year 2000 the population had plunged to 273,546. The smart money left Newark in a hurry, leaving Jones and his fellow Marxist theorists to ponder the future of a city with a vanishing tax base. After the looting festival of 1967 and the rioting that racked the city a year later after the death of Martin Luther King, no business in Newark could get insurance. Newark survives today by sponging the earnings of healthier neighboring communities. The riot that spawned 300 fires, left 26 people dead and cleaned out countless food, liquor, clothing, jewelry, appliance and hardware stores is Newark’s enduring monument to the destructive romanticism of shallow and short-sighted intellects like that of Amiri Baraka.
Baraka chanted the mindless mantra of Black Power over and over again. He later admitted that he had no idea what the term meant. “We had not completely focused on the meaning of the term, but we knew it was correct and ours.” By “correct” he doesn’t mean politically correct, he means “racially correct.” Whatever it was, they knew it was black. Baraka went around spray painting the words “Black Power” on Newark’s walls because it felt good. Rioting soon spread to Englewood, Plainfield and Jersey City. Angry Black Power advocates like Baraka had made rioting fashionable. People who could barely read were convinced that somehow black intellectuals had discovered a justification for looting stores. That was good enough to silence any scruple they may have had that stealing was wrong. A week after Newark burst into flames, Detroit exploded. Forty-three people were killed. Army paratroopers and National Guardsmen were called in to reestablish civilized order.
In 1968, Baraka helped organize the Committee for a Unified Newark, which was dedicated to running non-white candidates for the city council. In 1970, a black alliance ran the Community Choice slate with a city engineer named Ken Gibson for mayor. Among the seven council candidates was a gym teacher from Florida named Sharpe James. Celebrities flocked to Newark to promote the black alliance: James Brown, Bill Cosby, Stevie Wonder, Dustin Hoffman, Beau Bridges and The Supremes were pushing the slate. Jesse Jackson flew in the day before the election to share the spotlight. Gibson won by a slim margin. Sharpe James and two other black alliance candidates also won.
Baraka began spouting Marxist nonsense in 1974. He implored the working class to revolt against the bourgeoisie. White folks ignored him; the black working class was much too busy becoming the bourgeoisie to listen. By this time Baraka’s intellect had exhausted its originality. Henceforth, he would only repeat himself with variations. Baraka wrote his last good book in 1965. His poetry since then has been clumsy agitprop. Nothing will corrode a poetic soul faster than fretting about whether a poem comports with the thinking of the ruling commissariat, even if that commissariat is inside the poet’s own head.
Showdown at the Poetry Festival
Amiri Baraka had been shopping his poem around for almost a year before he was booed at Waterloo. Until then he got the benefit of liberal condescension; he was, after all, “oppressed” and had to be praised for even mediocre efforts. If the things he said sounded stupid or immoral it was because he had made some soulful connection to a black experience that the white bourgeoisie couldn’t hope to fathom. Just ask the gangsta rappers. They’re hip.
But on Saturday, something snapped. Baraka just sounded like a tone-deaf, morally obtuse jerk. The game was finally up. From the beginning, hatred had been Baraka’s specialty. Four decades ago he was pounding out such lines as:
Rape the white girls.
Rape their fathers.
Cut the mothers’ throats.
Black dada nihilismus,
choke my friends.
About the time he dumped his Jewish wife and daughters he began cranking out junk like this:
Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you
love me, jew. I got
something for you, like you dig,
I got. I got this thing, goes pulsating
through black everything
universal meaning. I got the
extermination blues, jewboys. I got
the hitler syndrome figured.
The New York Times must have had this little toe-tapper in mind when its editorial praised Baraka as “a powerful and respected poet.”
Baraka’s bloated opus Somebody Blew Up America doesn’t rhyme or scan. It’s just Baraka pumping out The World According to Baraka. It’s an X-ray photo of his soul and a test of his intellectual worth. That’s the problem: the poem is rubbish on every level. It’s false history in the service of a hateful ideology.
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
What 4000 Israelis? They never existed. Five hundred Jews perished when the towers collapsed. As for Sharon, he was home on business. Baraka says that five Israelis “was filming the explosion and cracking they sides at the notion,” but he has no evidence. Baraka says he believes the story that Israeli, American and some European governments knew of the impending attacks on America but let the attacks happen in order to justify an invasion of Arab nations. A week after his poetry reading at Waterloo, Baraka disclosed his pet theory to the Newark Star Ledger (9/28/02): “The Israelis knew about it just like Bush knew about it, just like the Germans knew about it, just like the French knew about it. Bush couldn’t hope for a better legitimization of his trying to make the Middle East a gas station.”
When pressed for evidence, all Baraka could manage was a feeble “This is all on the Internet.” Who could ask for more proof than that? It’s on the Internet. This is what Marxist poets produce when they search for inspiration with a search engine. Baraka’s poem would also have us believe that whitey created AIDS and assassinated Malcolm X.
Most of Somebody Blew Up America is in the form of questions; 162 of its 226 lines begin with “Who.” For example:
Who do Tom Ass Clarence work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon’s mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
As you can see, the poet laureate of New Jersey had discarded both rhyme and meter as confining bits of Ice People tricknology. “Tom Ass Clarence” is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who has been on the bench for over a decade and who has been hated by black radicals every minute; Baraka and his friends get a chuckle out of writing his name that way. Baraka’s shot at Condoleeza Rice, the president’s very smart national security advisor and later Secretary of State, is equally puerile: Skeeza is black slang for a sexually promiscuous woman. Colin Powell is “the Colon.” Thinking up that one must have left our aging beatnik in stitches. Baraka asks who pays Connelly to be a wooden negro (lawn jockey). It’s a cheap shot at outspoken legislator Ward Connerly, who eloquently argues against race quotas. The black Left hates Connerly with a passion. They are also spelling challenged.
All of Somebody Blew Up Americais written in the call-and-response format so popular in black churches. In this case, Baraka has cast himself in the role of the preacher; the reader is expected to play the role of the well-versed congregation calling out the proper response inside their own heads. Black author Richard Wright remembers: “All us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday School that Jews were ‘Christ killers.’ To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was part of our cultural heritage.”
Black culture was informed by the southern Protestant catechism that was drilled into black children.
Q: Who killed Jesus?
A: The wicked Jews.
Q: The wicked Jews grew angry with our Savior and what did they do to Him?
A: They crucified Him.
(Source: Anti-Semitism in America Leonard Dinnerstein p.198)
Even as slaves, blacks had sung about “De Jews done killed poor Jesus.” In 1948, James Baldwin had confided to Commentary that, among blacks, “the traditional Christian accusation that the Jews killed Christ is neither questioned nor doubted. . .The preacher begins by accusing the Jews of having refused the light and proceeds from there to a catalog of subsequent sins and the sufferings visited upon them by a wrathful God.”
So when Baraka writes:
Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who know who decide
Jesus get crucified
Baraka is playing the part of the preacher; he’s moving deeper into his culture. His well-rehearsed audience knows their expected response by heart. Come to think of it, the libel that Jewish doctors had created the AIDS virus is such a commonplace among blacks that Baraka’s line “Who invented AIDS” is nothing less than a repetition of this libel. Louis Farrakhan is vocal in his belief that AIDS is a man-made disease. In one survey, 29% of blacks, almost one in every three, expressed a belief that the AIDS virus “was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.” (Source: Jennifer L. Hochschild Facing Up to the American Dream p.106)
As Baraka’s infatuation with the Black Power movement increased, so did his unease with his first wife’s race and religion. The man who once wrote about “some hook-nosed woman [who] panted after my fly” finally refused to take his wife to the opening of his play Dutchman. In the end, Baraka proved to be as cowardly as Johnnie Cochran who would take his children, borne by his blond mistress, to social events and tell people that their mother was black. Baraka’s first marriage dissolved because he didn’t have the courage not to embrace the hateful ideology of black nationalism. Right about the time his white wife, Hettie, was bearing their child, another white woman, poet Diane DiPrima, was also giving birth to one of Jones’ children. This makes Jones just another poster boy for hit-and-run fatherhood. Baraka began his anti-Jewish diatribes soon after he discarded Hettie and their children. That’s when he began to berate other black artists for their white wives and girlfriends. What a mature human being.
In the seven years Jones had been married to Hettie, the disapproving stares at their miscegenation were coming less from white folks and more often from black folks. To his dismay, Jones awoke to the new reality that it was no longer Hettie who had betrayed her race, it was LeRoi who had betrayed his race; he was being de-blacked. He took cover in black nationalism; he was too weak to do anything else.
Baraka defends himself against the charge of anti-Semitism by claiming that other poets were even more anti-Semitic. Baraka defended himself by saying that “The two so-called greatest American poets, T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, were the worst anti-Semites in the world. But Allen Ginsberg was the biggest Ezra Pound fan there was.” Which only proves that anti-Semitism didn’t concern Allen Ginsberg. Baraka and Ginsberg were close friends until Ginsberg’s death, which makes the same point. “Do they think Ginsberg and I were friends all these years because I was anti-Semitic?” asks Baraka. Maybe so. Maybe Ginsberg liked abuse. Baraka has spent a lot of time trashing homosexuals and Ginsberg was a life-long pederast; Ginsberg had an unquenchable thirst for boys. So why would Ginsberg hang out with a gay basher like Baraka? Maybe Ginsberg was a masochist also.
In his book Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, author Jerry Gafio Watts contends that gay bashing and woman trashing in Baraka’s writing stems from his efforts to conceal his own history of homosexual encounters. Says Watts: “He knew that popular knowledge of his homosexuality would have undermined the credibility of his militant voice. By becoming publicly known as a hater of homosexuals, Jones tried to defuse any claims that might surface linking him with a homosexual past.” Perhaps the boy-loving Ginsberg sensed a certain shared something in Baraka’s soul. Watts offers Baraka’s Civil Rights Poem as an example of Baraka’s compensatory gay bashing; it’s a direct assault on black civil rights leader Roy Wilkins.
Roywilkins is an eternal faggot
His spirit is a faggot
his projection and image, this is
to say, that if i ever see roywilkins
on the sidewalks
imonna
stick half my sandal
up his
ass
In his assessment of Baraka, Watts is far too kind. Baraka was never a towering talent; he began low and then crawled lower. From the beginning he was a fulminating race-baiter with a talent for media manipulation. White middle-class news reporters mistook Baraka’s raging auto-biographical psychodramas for black eloquence.
Dutchman
Baraka has written several plays, but his signature work remains Dutchman. It’s a piece of protest art. Dutchman reads like something cranked out in a single evening because it was. It is embarrassingly confessional, which was Baraka’s best reason for refusing to take his wife to opening night. Dutchman is only better than his other plays because he hadn’t yet made a habit of giving all the best lines to his black characters.
Dutchman begins with a middle-class black man named Clay sitting in a subway car. He glances out the window and sees a white woman standing on the platform. Intrigued by his stare, the blond temptress enters the subway car. Her name is Lula. Baraka gives the sexually aggressive Lula a bag of apples as her central prop. Throughout the play Lula tempts Clay with the apples, feeding him and then quickly discarding the remains over her shoulder. The reference to Eve’s temptation of Adam is as subtle as a mule kick. Critics have stung Baraka for the condescending ways in which he simplifies his theatrical writing in an effort to make his work more understandable to blacks. It’s theater for the under-educated.
The character of Clay spends the bulk of the play lamenting the existence of “old bald-headed four-eyed ofays” who praise Bessie Smith but “don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying ‘Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass.’” Clay tells us that legendary saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker “would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.” The character Lula exists only as the Blond-Witch-Temptress of popular black mythology; she’s Satan in disguise. Once Johnnie Cochran was able to successfully cast Nicole Simpson in the role of Lula the Blond Temptress and O.J. in the role of Clay, the wandering black guy who had finally seen the light, the O.J. jury was able to accept Nicole’s death as the fitting end of a popular mythic black fable.
Baraka’s ruminations on race, and the play, end when Lula uses some racist slang which challenges the possibility that blacks and whites can ever be friends and equals. Clay is angered by his own surprise at hearing these words, by the very fact that he had even attempted to look beyond race, had even entertained the thought of an interracial relationship. It’s Baraka’s play and it expresses Baraka’s personal pessimism; it’s his personal history dressed up as a black-nationalist cautionary tale. The moral: you can’t trust white folks.
Dutchman was written forty years ago. Since then Baraka’s pessimism on racial matters has only deepened. He went on to embrace black nationalism and black separatism with a passion. Then he embraced Marxist-Leninism with a passion. His imaginary “growth” over the decades has only brought him to the level of parroting the homicidal agendas of those Marxist dictators who advocated mass murder as the best vehicle for promoting the will of the proletariat, whom Jones-Baraka at first identified as black Americans, but later as “African peoples” and later still as all Third World peoples.
To quote Stanley Crouch: “It was a simple evolution: All whites - and Jews especially - should be murdered; then all Negroes who did not submit to his agenda; then all homosexuals; then all capitalists; then all who did not agree that the Western world and capitalism should be destroyed.” Baraka has wasted decades celebrating mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, ranting all the while about what bad hosts capitalist democracies are to black folks. He has done this from a comfortable apartment in Newark, a city in worse repair after 33 years of black leadership that Baraka helped initiate.
Amiri Baraka’s profound hatred of white people is illustrated by his personal response to one earnest white woman who only wanted to do some good. Baraka recalled: “A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn’t any whites help? I said, ‘You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.’” Baraka the poet called for “dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews.” He wanted “poems that kill.” He wanted
“Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them
dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to
Ireland. . .And so forth. The runaway husband would later refer to the mother of his two daughters, in the poem For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet, as “a fat jew girl.”
So, right about now you might be asking yourself how a tireless race baiter, Jew-hater and gay basher like Baraka landed a choice gig as New Jersey’s poet laureate. Surely, in the state that gave the world Walt Whitman, the Bard of Camden, and Joyce Kilmer, who wrote nice stuff about trees, the competition for the top poet position must have been fierce. Well, if you think that, then you’re not from New Jersey. This is the state where a Democrat-friendly State Supreme Court, some of whom were party contributors, allowed the Democratic Party to unplug Democrat candidate module number one (Torricelli) and replace him on the ballot with Democrat candidate module number two (Lautenberg) long after the black-letter-law legal deadline for such a change had passed. Politics here is a blood sport.
The selection committee for the poet laureate position included Jim Haba, a representative of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; Beth Vogel, a representative of the arts council; Judith Pinch, a member of the humanities council; Charles Johnson, a poet and newspaper copy editor and Gerald Stern, the only previous poet laureate of New Jersey. Stern had enthusiastically promoted Baraka for the position because “I thought it was important for the black community to get recognition.” The selection committee agreed with Mr. Stern. They wanted to be progressive. No person other than Amiri Baraka was ever considered for the position of poet laureate. No one other than Baraka was suggested to the governor as a candidate for the position. In other words, Amiri Baraka was an affirmative action hire. He filled a race quota.
In Somebody Blew Up America Baraka-as-preacher asks the congregation “Who decided affirmative action had to go.” A fitting response would be: anyone who cares about high-quality performance and solid achievement. Crowning Mr. Baraka the Poet Laureate of New Jersey is evidence that no such people participated in his election.
Multiculturalism Bites the Governor
New Jersey now had a widely recognized moral monstrosity as its very vocal poet laureate. The joke was on New Jersey’s liberal Democrat governor, who carelessly rubber stamped Baraka’s application. The joke was also on a legislature that didn’t provide any legal mechanism to remove its undesirable poet laureate. Now they were scrambling to amend the law so they could dump Baraka. They stopped payment on his ten-thousand-dollar stipend. The governor’s request that Baraka resign was met with derisive laughter. Baraka told supporters at the Newark Public Library “I will not apologize. I will not resign.”
Baraka struck back at critics from the stage of a downtown Manhattan poetry cafe. He demanded to know “why the Anti-Defamation League is not registered as an agent of a foreign power.” (New York Times 10/18/02) Baraka called the League “running dogs of imperialism.” For almost an hour at the Bowery Poetry Club, Baraka criticized Jewish groups for their involvement in politics, a process some of us call active participation in the democratic process. Cafe employees distributed Baraka’s written statements that criticized Jews who had criticized black Democrats who had criticized Israel. When Baraka repeated “I have no intention of resigning” his too-cool-to-clap audience burst into spontaneous finger snapping to signal their approval. They cried out “Teach. Teach.” It was, like, so cool, man. Manhattan sophisticates could get down with a cat who could write such groovy lines as:
I got the extermination blues, jewboys.
At a poetry reading in Newark, Baraka said that his critics were trying to “repress and stigmatize independent thinkers,” which is a laugh. Baraka hasn’t thought outside the cramped Marxist-Leninist box in decades; his blather is peppered with stale phrases such as “running dogs of imperialism.” His stuff reads like out-takes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
New Jersey’s first poet laureate, Gerald Stern, has chimed in, saying that removing someone as poet laureate “smacks of state control.” “The poet’s worst enemy,” cautioned Stern “is the state.” Huh?
No one is hustling poor little Amiri off to some windswept gulag and no one is denying him his compulsively exercised right to share his hateful thoughts with the rest of us. All the elected representatives of the people of New Jersey are doing is distancing themselves, and the reputation of New Jersey, from Baraka’s hateful, homicidal, opinions. It’s a bitter-sweet irony that New Jersey’s State Council of the Arts and Council for the Humanities deliberately chose a “person of color” for poet laureate because they cherished diversity. What they got was a man who has spent decades disparaging whites, Jews, women and gays as the foot soldiers of Satan. Would any white man be considered for the position of poet laureate if he had written “I got the extermination blues, black boys”? Not in the anticipated lifespan of the universe.
When the writer is white, the critical standards are high. When the writer is an affirmative action hire so damaged by his history of oppression that he can only sputter weird conspiracy paranoia harvested from the Internet, then he is hailed as an authentic voice of his people. Baraka has been typecast by the arts council as a victim even though he has enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing in a two-parent home, attended two universities, received critical acclaim for his work and now lives in a comfortable apartment in Newark with a wife who loves him; he is adored by countless black bigots who share his twisted vision of the world. Liberals are eager to demonstrate that they are not “racists” by setting the bar lower for black people. They want to be helpful; they don’t see the lowering of standards for what it is: condescension, a pat on the head for their less-fortunate little brown brothers. It’s all about white people wanting to feel good about themselves. The fact is, there are lots of talented black people, but there will not be lots of talented black people available to fill every post at every moment. Sometimes there aren’t enough talented black candidates to go around. Insisting that the position of poet laureate be given to a black person is as arbitrary as a quota for the left-handed. Where are the Chinese-American poets laureate? Where are the hermaphrodites?
The biggest fool in this whole mess is Democrat Governor James McGreevey who chose a bigot as his state’s celebrity poet on purpose. As a well-scrubbed, rather dull and pale-faced Irish-American liberal, McGreevey was eager to curry favor with the most disaffected segments of New Jersey’s black communities. To further his purpose he chose to put his seal of approval on an angry black artist, because every liberal knows that the most-angry blacks are the most authentic blacks. By choosing someone who rants against America, the governor could reinforce black folks’ perception that Democrats feel their pain while simultaneously reinforcing their grievances, which helps to turn out the black vote for Democrats like McGreevey. It was a time-proven formula.
Unfortunately for the governor, multiculturalism has a dark side. Some cultures define themselves in opposition to other cultures. American black culture does this with a vengeance. The last thing any black teenager wants to be accused of is “acting white.” Black adults don’t care much for the accusation either. In this regard Amiri Baraka shares a common sensibility with other New Jersey black folks. What upset the governor is the flagrant way in which Baraka offended another cherished Democrat constituency: Jews. In Democrat-dominated New Jersey it’s permissible to express open hatred for white people and for America, but never hatred for a cherished Democrat constituency.
Legislation was proposed that would have given the Arts Council the power to dump a misbehaving poet laureate. This legislation had the advantage of allowing the governor to push responsibility for firing Baraka off onto the Arts Council. That way the governor could be rid of his embarrassing appointment without seeming to be responsible for his dismissal. In the end, a Senate panel acted to abolish the post of poet laureate altogether. The bill cleared the Senate State Government Committee in a unanimous vote. Baraka has threatened to take the matter to court if he is denied his honorary title and his hoped-for $10,000 stipend. State Senator Garry Furnari observed: “The state poet laureate position was created to promote and encourage poetry in New Jersey. Unfortunately, the current holder of that title, Amiri Baraka, used his position to promote hatred, anger and divisiveness. Mr. Baraka has every right to keep on expressing his opinions, but not while holding a state position.” Well said. Baraka can be a hate monger on his own nickel.
Newark Loves Amiri
As Baraka’s reputation among the educated took a nose dive, those people who endorsed his world vision embraced him with renewed vigor. In an act of defiance aimed at the state’s political establishment, the Newark school board anointed Amiri Baraka the school district’s poet laureate. The vote was unanimous. Many Newark officials praised the board’s decision. Councilman Donald Bradley said he thought the move would bring much-needed attention to Baraka’s body of work. “Even though he’s written some controversial things, he has his First Amendment rights,” said Bradley. At a previous meeting the board had passed a resolution calling on the State Legislature to read all of Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America. Newark Superintendent Marion Bolden defended Baraka’s appointment as the city’s poet laureate, which was announced at a November 26th meeting complete with the unveiling of a Baraka portrait that will hang in the district’s headquarters.
In an amazing display of ignorance, Baraka’s supporters fretted about his “free speech rights.” “It sends a chilling message not only to other poets but to all of us who cherish civil liberties and civil rights,” intoned Lawrence Hamm, chairman of People’s Organization for Progress, of the effort to dump Baraka. “He’s not alone in this struggle, we are with him and he has our unqualified support,” added Mr. Hamm, calling on “people of conscience” to support the 67-year-old Baraka “in his struggle to exercise his freedom of speech rights.” Say what? No one has tried to silence Amiri Baraka. All the legislature wants is for this grizzled bantam-rooster motor-mouth to take his hysterical hate speech somewhere else.
Fredrica Bey, executive director of Women in Support of the Million Man March, vowed to fight lawmakers who were trying to rescind Baraka’s title. “This move is the highest insult to the black community,” she declared. Baraka himself renewed his denunciation of his critics; he read a statement in which he referred to the state legislators as “nincompoops.” He said the debate over his poem “makes one think that a few of the legislators are either illiterate, agents of a foreign power, dishonest cowards or simply dangerously ignorant.” At the Bowery Poetry Club on the Lower East Side, Baraka said that President Bush knew in advance of the pending attack on the World Trade Center. Baraka barked: “If you don’t think President Bush knew, man, you are back in the cartoon days.”
White Liberals Talkin’ Trash
In a short essay published in the Newark Star Ledger two English professors, Laura McCullough and Michael Broek, tell us that “We may find the poem [Somebody Blew Up America] problematic, may even find it lacking in literary craft, but we must support an artists’ right to free speech. Hence, Baraka should not resign.” In other words, even if a poet writes crappy poetry and spouts rubbish he should cling like death to his titled position. It’s the sort of world view one would expect from tenured professors. Again: no one has trampled on Amiri Baraka’s free speech rights. People are just calling him a nasty jerk and refusing to lend their approval to his hateful sloganeering. Baraka’s critics are simply exercising their free speech rights. The professors have confused criticism with censorship; they should know better; they need to take a crash course in Constitutional law. Baraka’s poem has been published; it is all over the place. You can read it yourself: just go to www.google.com and type in the words “Amiri Baraka” “Somebody Blew Up America”.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution restrains the government from censoring the free speech of citizens, but Baraka was never censored or restrained in any way. The elected representatives of the people of New Jersey have simply withdrawn an honor they had bestowed on him. They just want Baraka to go back to being the private-citizen hate hustler that he was before he was named poet laureate. The previous poet laureate of New Jersey has likened the position of poet laureate to that of dog catcher, so why the fuss? Maybe liberals are stung by the fact that Baraka’s opinions are out of fashion. Perhaps that makes liberals feel old and unneeded.
In another short essay in the Star Ledger, Rabbi Clifford Kulwin says: “I remained quiet during the fallout after the poem’s public debut because, as he is a poet laureate of the state - like it or not - I found censure of him uncomfortably close to stifling free speech.” The rabbi has an underdeveloped survival instinct. Criticizing a lying hateful paranoid propagandist like Amiri Baraka is not even close to stifling free speech; it is simple generating more free speech. The rabbi wasn’t threatening Baraka with a bayonet; he only wanted to take issue with Baraka’s statements. Welcome to the turbulent open forum of ideas, Rabbi Kulwin.
Baraka denies that he is an anti-Semite. He says he’s an anti-Zionist. He says, “Zionism is a form of racism.” He praised “the movement among middle-class Jews to become straight-up Americans,” and said that “shedding their ‘Jewishness’ represents a progressive trend.” This is strange talk from a man who has made a cult fetish of blackness. Would Baraka dream of asking black folks to “shed their blackness” as a necessary prerequisite to becoming “straight-up Americans”? Would he consider that be a “progressive trend”?
The liberals who defend Baraka need to wake up to the fact that he is a racial supremacist and a fascist. He has spent decades of his life praising dictatorships that crushed free speech at their inception. When Trent Lott offered a lame-brained speculation about a long-ago presidential election the liberals wanted to send him to Mars on a rocket, but now, suddenly, Amiri Baraka, who has been continuously spouting hateful nonsense since 1957, is a sainted genius whose insightful speculations must be protected at all cost.
Baraka has had a good run. He’s made a nice living for almost fifty years just by talking trash. But what sounded edgy, even revolutionary, in the more civil 1950s now just sounds nasty, stale and more than a little pathetic. Baraka contributed nothing that was essential to black improvement during his lifetime. He was able to indulge himself with radical bombast because social restraints had already relaxed. By the 1960s, being a big-mouth provocateur was commonplace. Even radical-chic white kids could groove to Baraka’s poem Black People!
. . . you cant steal nothin from a white
man, he’s already stole it he owes you
anything you want, even his life. All
the stores will open if you say the magic
words. The magic words are: Up against
the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!
In 1990, when Rutgers University denied Baraka tenure he denounced the tenure committee as “white supremacists” and “powerful Klansmen,” whose “intellectual presence makes a stink across campus like the corpses of rotting Nazis.” We can expect a similar tantrum when the New Jersey legislature sends Amiri packing. It will be pure poetry.
From New Jersey
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2003
1/16/03
New Jersey’s governor, Jim McGreevey, was in a bind: the Democratic Party’s two most volatile and outspoken constituencies, blacks and Jews, were at loggerheads over the state’s poet laureate, Amiri Baraka, who had capped off a creative lifetime of sniping at Jews and white folks with a tedious propaganda poem that included a false accusation that Israeli intelligence agents had warned Jews to avoid the World Trade Towers on September 11th. It was vintage Baraka, full of spite and spleen; a mile wide and an inch deep.
Democratic strategists implored the governor to keep a very low profile on the matter lest his administration appear to be pandering to the Jews. In the General Assembly several black Democrats declared that they were offended by the call to give the boot to the post of state poet laureate. Democratic leaders blocked a Republican attempt to put the issue up for a vote, even though it already had 56 co-sponsors and only 41 votes were needed for passage. Joseph Donnelly, a spokesman for Assembly Democrats, predicted that the bill to eliminate the position of New Jersey state poet laureate would come to a vote in the final session before the summer recess.
When the governor called for the poet’s resignation, Baraka had refused. The governor then tried to fire the poet, only to discover that New Jersey law did not give anyone the authority to fire the state’s poet laureate. The governor then froze Baraka’s $10,000 stipend and pressed legislators to abolish the position of state poet laureate altogether. When the Senate voted on the matter in January, nineteen senators abstained out of sheer cowardice. The billed passed with 21 votes.
Black assemblyman William Payne, who grew up with Baraka in Newark, said that race and religion had distorted the issue. Said Payne, “This is a matter of literature. I mean, are we going to go back to the days where we’re taking books back out of libraries and burning them? Is this Germany in 1936?” Payne’s attempt to defend New Jersey’s most notorious anti-Semite by making reference to history’s most notorious anti-Semitic political movement added a curious moral twist to the debate. It was the sort of witlessly inflated out-gassing that we have come to expect from Jesse Jackson. No one was censoring Baraka or burning copies of his hateful scribblings. The responsible representatives of New Jersey were simply telling Baraka to take a hike. Why should the tax-paying citizens of New Jersey pay for a pulpit from which Baraka would endlessly spew his signature brand of racial and ethnic hostility?
The dispute left black legislators in a tight spot because Baraka was so beloved in the black neighborhoods of Newark. The Newark school board promptly named Baraka the district’s poet laureate. It was a fitting honor, coming as it did from America’s most intellectually impoverished troop of educators. Newark was in a state of educational collapse, why shouldn’t it be in a state of moral collapse as well?
The governor, correctly, said that government should not restrict artists, but Mr. Baraka had misused the imprimatur of the state to lend legitimacy to statements that were untrue and anti-Semitic. Baraka responded by announcing that he intends to sue the governor and the state legislature.
Said the governor: “What was particularly disconcerting, the designation of poet laureate granted an aspect of official recognition or an imprimatur to his poetry. And the statements were patently false and clearly the state needed to clearly and unequivocally reject them.” Baraka responded that “This is sleight of hand to get rid of me. What they are doing is blowing smoke up the public’s nose in repealing the position. It means nothing to my poetry. They cannot do anything more to me unless they come and shoot me. What they need to do is pay me my money!”
He kept demanding the cash. His threat to sue the government rang hollow. New Jersey tort law prevents an individual from suing the state unless he can demonstrate gross negligence. That didn’t keep Baraka from ranting: “This is a clear violation of First Amendment rights and when the governor is foolish enough to sign it, I plan to sue. This is another kind of lynching; it makes New Jersey look like Mississippi North.”
Is that true? Is asking a bigoted poet to move to another street corner really “another kind of lynching”? Has Baraka retracted his unfounded accusation against the Israelis? Of course not. Said Baraka, “I contend still that Israeli citizens were warned.” After all, he read it somewhere on the Internet; that’s good enough for Baraka. He recently recited Somebody Blew Up America six times at what he describes as an international poetry festival in Columbia “to standing ovations,” then Baraka publically scoffed at an invitation to attend the International Poets Festival is Israel. Said Baraka with a sneer, “We’re not answering that until Israel removes itself from the West Bank, until they stop building illegal settlements,” which exposed his larger agenda.
The propagandist-as-poet has always been with us, from the Communist Pete Seeger to the opportunistic Bob Dylan to the Nazi-sympathizing Ezra Pound to the Irish poet Tom Paulin, who advocates the murder of “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers in Israel. Paulin was recently honored by the Harvard University English Department, an enclave of leftist ideology whose coffeehouse-and-Chianti declamations prove once again that everything changes but the avant garde.
Now that New Jersey has abolished the post of state poet laureate, we can look back and see the whole Amiri Baraka embarrassment for what it was: a cautionary tale in political pandering and witless affirmative action. Members of Baraka’s selection committee were outspoken about their conviction that they should choose a black poet; the complexion of the state’s poet laureates should reflect the state’s racial demographic. The politicians concurred; they wanted to curry favor in New Jersey’s inner-city black wards.
Baraka hit the nail on the head with his retort that the entire body of his work was not a secret. Everyone who participated in his selection had ample opportunity to discover that he had spent his lifetime pounding out hateful agitprop. It was not unreasonable for Baraka to assume that he had been selected because of the tone and character of his poems. Even after the abolition of his state post, Amiri Baraka remains New Jersey’s poet laureate of hate.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2003
September 4, 2003