Reading the U.S. As a Text: A Dispatch from Copenhagen

DATELINE--COPENHAGEN, DENMARK. Viewing the United States through the lens of another country's culture is always an enlightening project. A sign of a good reader is the reader's ability not to read a text on the author's terms. And, to be sure, America has done a fabulous job for many years getting people--especially Americans--to see America and its culture on its own terms. This has been particularly true for American popular culture, most notably American movies, who have never been particularly good at realism or critical inquiry. "American cinema," writes Alfred Bazin, "has been able, in an extraordinarily competent way, to show American society just as it wanted to see itself.” Indeed, American cultural production has always been good at dictating the terms by which America gets read and interpreted.

At present, The Weekly Rader is on the road in Denmark, where the Democratic primaries continue to be a topic of international conversation and interest. The campaign--its scandals, and the mainstream media's obsession with making (as opposed to covering) news-- takes on an odd but compelling texture when viewed from the Danish perspective. Known for its progressive social programs, the contentedness of its people (Danes are supposed to be the happiest people on the planet), and its high taxes, Denmark seems an odd place for the world's least cranky populace. And yet, what an interesting context in which to revisit America's unfolding text that is the presidential campaign.

How do our candidates sound in Denmark, the home of worlds happiest people, at a time when Americans are at their unhappiest? Can the U.S. become more line Denmark? Do Senators Obama or Clinton have it in them to transform the American psyche?

Most social scientists cite the lack of an income gap as the main reason for happiness among the Danes. An artist, banker, and garbage collector all earn about the same salary, which creates a sense of equality. When there is a level cultural and financial playing field, there tends to be a lack of unmet expectations. This particular campaign finds the United States experiencing one of the worst income gaps in recent memory. The rich continue to get rich, and the poor continue to go to Wal-Mart.

So much of America's national narrative is about the lacuna between what we think we deserve and what we actually have. So, when news comes out as it did last week, underscorring what Americans already feel--that consumer confidence is at an all-time low--our inability to buy, spend, and acquire can affect how we see ourselves within the American conversation. Listening to Senators Obama and Clinton from Denmark reminds how frequently American identity is tied to economics and how individual happiness seems part and parcel of met expectations.

There are fair criticisms from home and abroad that our two-party system is flawed; that at their core, the Republicans and Democrats are really not all that different, but one difference that being in Denmark throws into relief is how Republicans tend to look for solutions within the American conversation, within American values, while the two Democratic candidates are (in this campaign at least) trying to change the terms of that conversation.

From this perspective, that sounds hopeful.

The Poetics Of Miscegenation: How Poetry Can Speak To Issues Of Race

IN THE PAST MONTH, race has strolled down the red carpet of American popular culture in recognizable but surprising garb. On the one hand, the overwhelming popularity of the website Stuff White People Like has foregrounded the icons of bourgeois whiteness through humor and self-mockery. On the other hand, Barack Obama's candidacy for president, the views of his pastor, and the various comments and strategies by Senator Clinton, her husband, and their staff, have lit America's preoccupation with race from a different angle. Most of the time, Americans tend to turn to journalism, history, or sociology to get a better glimpse of the nuances of race, but with National Poetry Month around the corner and with a recent release of a special gift edition of Natasha Tretheway's 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, Native Guard, this seems an appropriate moment to explore the matrix of poetry, American culture, and race--especially the nearly taboo issue of miscegenation.

Senator Obama has talked a great deal about being a child of an interracial marriage, and his prominence has made the issue of mixed relationships and miscegenation part of a national discourse for the first time in decades. One of America's greatest writers, Langston Hughes, asks important questions about miscegenation and misogyny in his daring 1927 poem, "Mulatto:"

O, you little bastard boy
What's a body but a toy?
The scent of pine word stings the soft night air.
What's the body of your mother?

It would appear that one of the goals of Tretheway's book is to answer Hughes' provocative questions. Tretheway, whose father is white and whose mother (now deceased) was black, explores the tensions and violence at the heart of mixing races. In her short but powerful poem "Miscegenation," she maps the transgressions of her parents as they leave their home state of Mississippi to marry:

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.

Though her parents no doubt believed they were engaged in a kind of exodus of liberation and love, Tretheway can't help but hear the resonances of foreboding (sin and mis) in their escape, as if the long-armed ghosts of history were the puppeteers of her parents' relationship.

Indeed, for Tretheway, miscegenation is all about crossing borders, sometimes, even the border of the body (as Hughes suggests). Tretheway's mother was murdered by her second husband, and though Tretheway does not draw a direct line between her murder and the legacy of violence against the bodies of African American women, one senses through poems like "What The Body Can Say," "What Is Evidence," "Myth," and "After Your Death," that the poet may see her death as the culmination of a chain of events that began with that first exodus from Mississippi. When Hughes asks, "What's the body of your mother?," one wonders if Native Guard is Tretheway's probing and deeply felt answer. That said, Tretheway masterfully avoids making easy assumptions or tying off the narrative with over-simplified palliatives; instead, she leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots of history, land, violence, and love.

Though no one would expect a book of poems to unlock the complex problems of race in America, Native Guard does provide some measure, some lineament of understanding of the effects of racialized America on an individual. It may also allow Americans to see the person who could very likely be their next president through a different and clearer lens.

Reading the Plains: A Close Look at the Oklahoma and Kansas Primaries

IN A NIGHT OF many surprises few were more puzzling than the shockingly different outcomes in the Democratic primaries in Oklahoma and Kansas. As I write this on Tuesday evening, my home state of Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama 54% to 31%. On the other hand, the Okies' neighbor to the North--some would say their virtual demographic twin--went for Obama, who snatched an amazing 73% of the Democratic votes across the border in Kansas.

How is it possible that two nearly identical states with so many things in common (values, agriculture, a strong rural base, lots of wheat, a hatred of Communists, and bigger hatred for all Nebraska sports teams) embrace such different candidates? Of course, Obama's mother was born in Kansas while her father was in the Army, so that may have had some significance; but it's hard to imagine that a transitory birth in the 40's actually affected people at the polls in 2008. Rather, I suspect it has something to do with the very different role that race has played in the ontology of the two states.

Kansas has enjoyed a long history of being among the more progressive Plains states in regard to race, particularly slavery. The so-called "Free Staters" of Kansas fought immigrants from Missouri and other Southern states (sometimes called "Border Ruffians) who hoped to make the new territory a slave state. Bolstered by their own immigrants from the Northeast, the influx of pro and anti-slavery forced reached a head in 1854, and pre-War skirmishes broke out over the next four years. Guerrilla fighters on the side of the Free-Staters during these wars became known as "Jayhawkers," which is now the mascot for the University of Kansas. Eventually, Kansas entered the Union as a free state, and Kansas has nourished a long legacy of racial tolerance.

Not so for Oklahoma.

In terms of both African American and Native American racial issues, Oklahoma has a complicated and difficult past. This began when the Eastern half of the state was set aside as Indian Territory, eventually becoming the termination point for the Trail of Tears. Even up into the 20th century, Oklahoma was a major site for Indian removal and relocation. In addition, Oklahoma bears the burden of the nation's largest race riot--the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921--in which over 300 people were killed. Indeed, at times, there was a kind of triple-segregation in Oklahoma: red, black, white each together, each apart.

Though it is the 21st century and Oklahoma's racial issues are less incindiary than they were 100 years ago, a legacy of cultural memory remains, as do important symbols. For example, I wonder if the University of Kansas logo (Jayhawks) serves as a constant visual reminder of the values that helped found Kansas, and as such daily reinscribes into the consciousness of Kansans their anti-slavery history.

Similarly, I wonder if the OU mascot (Sooners, named after the people who sneaked early into the Land Rushes) serves as a different kind of indicator of the State's troubling history of segregation and Indian Removal. White Oklahomans didn't really engage in wars to keep Oklahoma "Native" or to protect African Americans. In fact, race has always percolated under the surface in Oklahoma; never fully ignored but never fully tapped either.

This is not to say that Kansas hasn't had it's own racial issues; to be sure it has. And, in recent years, Oklahoma has tried to do better with its Native heritage. But, we see daily the many ways in which American culture and values were shaped by its earliest settlers and their cultures and values--in a country of states, should we expect them to be any different?

And so it is that two States who should embrace the same presidential candidates are among the most diametrically opposed in this regard. We think that the past has passed, but as William Faulkner noted, our past is often our future.