Tag: slavery

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Joan Baez’s Weird Homage to Slavery

Way back in 1971, Joan Baez released a double album called “Blessed Are”, which, in retrospect, may be one of the weirdest album releases of all time.

Blessed Are... (Joan Baez album - cover art).jpg

Joan Baez, in case you don’t remember or weren’t born yet, was a famous folk singer who became a prominent anti-war, anti-racism protest leader during the 1960’s, and an interpreter of Bob Dylan’s songs.  As a result, unsurprisingly, she pissed off a lot of patriotic war-loving Americans who regarded her, along with Jane Fonda, as treasonous dupes of the radical left.  They may not have liked John Lennon; they may have regarded Dylan with hostile indifference; they may have ignored Pete Seeger; but they hated Baez and Fonda with a toxic rage.

“Blessed Are” appears to be a peace offering of some kind, to southerners, patriots, farmers, and, perhaps, country music fans.    It featured a hit for Baez, “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down”, by Robbie Robertson of The Band (and subject of a bitter dispute between him and The Band’s drummer Levon Helm).

Levon Helm says in his autobiography:

“I remember taking him [Robertson] to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”

Helm was so bitterly annoyed by Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down” that he refused afterwards to sing it in concert.  I wonder if he was more annoyed by her politics than anything else.  What musician gets upset when another artist makes a signature song more popular?

Anyway, to make General Lee come out with “all due respect”– all the respect due to a slave-owning General who led the war effort to preserve the institution of slavery– may strike some as a dubious cause.

Look at the lyrics:

Like my father before me, I’m a working man
I’m like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand
Well, he was just eighteen, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood below my feet,
You can’t raise a Cain back up with it’s in defeat

Some claim that the song is sympathetic to the Lost Cause ideology and defends slavery.  I think it does neither.  The fact that it was written by a Canadian should clue listeners in: this is an observational song, not propaganda for either side.  In fact, its observational qualities are acute and beautiful and tragic.

The album also has a song by Jagger and Richards, a paean to the “hard-working” average joe who always gets the short end of the stick.  And a tribute to a southern farmer friend with “the slowest drawl I’d ever heard” showing the narrator and friend around his beautiful farm.  There’s an intriguing song about apocalypse: Three Horses.

But let’s move on to “Lincoln Freed Me Today”.  If “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” seems ambiguous, “Lincoln Freed Me Today” is decidedly revisionist.

Been a slave most all my life
So’s my kids and so’s my wife
I been working on the Colonel’s farm
Aint been mistreated, aint done no harm…
The Colonel’s been right good to me
He’s taken care of my family

The Colonel rode his buggy in from town
Hitched his horse and called us all around
Said he couldn’t keep us here no more
I saw a tear as he walked toward the door

Wow!

I’m sure Baez did not have in mind the idea of rescuing slavery from the dustbin of history, or, giving us the positive side of antebellum culture.  I’m sure she thought, well, it’s a true picture of some slave-owners, and some slaves.  And one must be fair by presenting both sides of the issue.   But the “I saw a tear” is kind of repulsive.  That’s the image we’re supposed to take away from this kindly old slaveholder?

You see how convoluted we become.

The songwriter is variously credited as David Paton, David Patten, and David Paton.  It’s likely David Patton.  There’s very little information out there about him.

 

 

Ian and Sylvia do a just peachy version of this song.

 

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Idiotic Folk Songs

Donovan Leitch, the Scottish folksinger (best known for “Mellow Yellow”) inexplicably recorded an insipid song, “Remember the Alamo” on “What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid”, around 1966 I think. It was always an oddity, released, as it was, in the late 1960’s, amid a plethora of antiwar songs like “Billy, Don’t be a Hero”. As a single, it failed to chart and was withdrawn amid a dispute between record labels. Donovan became the very emblem of 1960’s Flower Child, visiting the Maharishi Yogi, singing about meadows and hurly-gurlies and Jennifer Juniper, who was actually Patti Boyd’s entrancing younger sister.

“Remember the Alamo” repeats the myth of Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword, challenging his men to fight an overwhelmingly large fast approaching Mexican force.

A hundred and eighty
were challenged by Travis
to die…

Doesn’t that put it eloquently?

This is an unusually perverse myth designed to ameliorate the perception that Travis forced his men to die in an utterly futile battle in order to gratify his own perverse ambition.

If only… sure, if there was ever a situation in which a soldier really gave up his life so that others could live or be free, sure, that would be a hell of an honorable thing to do.

It has almost never been done.

It is believed to be done every time a soldier points his gun at someone.

Soldiers are there to kill for their country– not to die for their country. There is not a general in the world who has any real use for a soldier who would die for his country. Certainly Exxon and Dupont and General Motors don’t need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country and kill themselves. They need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country to kill other young deluded males and take their oil.

Even suicide bombers need to do it in a crowd.

Fear not little darling of dying
If this world be
sovereign and free
For we’ll fight to the last
for as long as liberty be

What the hell is the point of “sovereign and free” if you are dead? And is that really what you are fighting for?

James Bowie, incidentally, is described in some accounts as, among other things, a “slave-trader”. This doesn’t get mentioned often, if at all, in other accounts of his life.  It doesn’t get mentioned in the song.

 

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Haiti’s Reparations

I think most people will find this hard to believe. We all know about Haiti, right? One of the poorest, most backwards and unfortunate nations in the Western hemisphere, recently hammered by a massive earthquake, as if they didn’t have enough problems. And, come on, don’t you just know in your heart of hearts that it’s all their own fault?

There are scandals and then there are scandals.

Haiti was founded in the 17th century as a slave colony by the French, who rounded up Africans and hauled them over to this island to harvest the sugar cane, coffee, cocoa, cotton, and indigo, for their French masters. The French masters, out-numbered by the slaves by a factor of 10, use sheer brutality to keep them in line– the trade was very lucrative. This worked for a time. Conditions were so primitive that the slave population actually declined most years, and more slaves had to be imported from Africa or America.

The slaves themselves had classes: the mixed blood slaves, at the time of rebellion, may well have thrown their lot in with their masters, with whom they had more in common, than with the other slaves.

In 1791-93, the slaves revolted. The rebellions were complicated, with Britain and Spain joining in at times, but the result was supposed to be the end of slavery. After many diversions, on January 1, 1804, Haiti was declared a free republic.

Napoleon… gave up on his Western colonies but he sent warships to the harbour of Port au Prince and demanded that Haiti compensate France for the loss of it’s property– the slaves, and other properties– to the tune of 150 million gold francs. Excuse me? You kidnap us. You flog us and beat us. You murder our children. You make us slave away day after day in the sugar cane, back-breaking work. If we rebel, you torture and burn our leaders. We finally liberate ourselves… and then you demand that we pay you to not kill us with your warships.

It’s like the infamous burglar who injured himself when he stepped a child’s toy in the driveway and sued the family he had just robbed. And won. At least, according to urban myth.

Well, Haiti did not have any money. But here’s a lesson for the ages– pay attention, American consumers!– the French banks generously offered to lend the Haitians the money to pay back the French slave-owners. An incredibly generous gesture on the part of the former slave-masters!

As anyone with a credit card and low income knows, large personal debt is slavery by other means.

President Jean-Pierre Boyer signed this agreement, which ensured that one of the richest countries in the world now could now drain the poorest country in the world of whatever remained of it’s meager wealth… One question– why on earth should the future governments of Haiti have honored this agreement? Why didn’t they just say that Boyer did what any man with a gun to his head would do: say whatever he had to say to escape the threat of death. It should have been no more binding than a kidnapping victim’s pledge not to call the police after being released.

We know why: because the WTO and other international bodies of institutional economic power would have brought the hammer down and completely destroyed the remains Haiti’s economy, the way the U.S. threatened to destroy the economies of France and Britain during the Suez Crisis of 1956.

How long do you think this insanity would continue? How about from 1825 to 1947?

So here’s a new definition of chutzpah? You’re a slave owner and when your slaves finally rebel and obtain their freedom, you demand that they pay you for the expense of feeding and clothing them during all those years of enslavement.

Justice is a Hoax

There has been a movement– naturally– to persuade France to repay the approximately $21 billion it extorted from Haiti over more than 100 years, impoverishing the nation for– it seems– eternity.

President Clinton, apparently, did apologize for U.S. interference in Haitian affairs in 2004. The U.S. insisted that Haiti respect regional “free trade” agreements, which means, in practice, U.S. subsidized corn gets dumped on your market while we accept all the cars you can manufacture.

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William Wilberforce: Drug Addict

William Wilberforce, the hero of the abolitionist movement, and patron saint of all evangelicals who hate it when liberals paint them as regressive on social issues, did drugs.

Wilberforce was probably not quite as heroic as portrayed in the film “Amazing Grace”, nor, probably, as insufferably pious. (I kept thinking, as I watched the film, that if Wilberforce had been this maudlin and humourless in real life, I might myself have voted against abolition.) The role of Thomas Clarkson seems historically correct– but the heart of the director isn’t in it. We get clear displays of Wilberforce’s physical sufferings (he had some form of digestive ailment) as if he alone paid a personal price for the abolition of slavery. This is the process of conferring sainthood upon someone who, though eminently worthy of honour, had faults we will soon know nothing about. Unless we think in terms of, “that I cared too much”.

In actual fact, many historians feel that Wilberforce was too gullible and respectful of authority to lead the movement, and that slavery would have been abolished earlier (and without quite so many “exceptions”) had a more forceful leader taken up the cause. In fact, at least one historian observed that Wilberforce was finally moved to lead the movement when his friend, William Pitt (the Prime-minister), pointed out that another leader was preparing to take up that role and he– Wilberforce– wouldn’t get credit for it if that happened.

He was also– wait for it– God help him!– a drug addict.

Yes he was. Wilberforce used opium for most of his life, on a very regular basis. The movie “Amazing Grace” honorably makes a point of showing his regular use of laudanum. Dickens also used it. So did Edgar Allen Poe. Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, was prescribed laudanum for a sleeping disorder. She became addicted. She was later committed to an asylum.

Interestingly, laudanum is still available by prescription in the U.S. It can be used to treat diarrhea.

Anyway, the support cast of “Amazing Grace” is brilliant, and the sets are wonderful, but Ioan Gruffud is a complete disaster as Wilberforce and drags down the entire film.

From Wilberforce’s son’s biography:

His returning health was in a great measure the effect of a proper use of opium, a remedy to which even Dr. Pitcairne’s judgment could scarcely make him have recourse; yet it was to this medicine that he now owed his life, as well as the comparative vigor of his later years. So sparing was he always in its use, that as a stimulant he never knew its power, and as a remedy for his specific weakness he had not to increase its quantity during the last twenty years he lived. ‘If I take,’ he would often say, ‘but a single glass of wine, I can feel its effect, but I never know when I have taken my dose of opium by my feelings.’ Its intermission was too soon perceived by the recurrence of disorder.

All very nice, but unconvincing. Wilberforce’s son is quite careful to assert that his famous dad was “sparing” in the use of a known narcotic, yet he tried and failed several times to stop using it. It’s hard to understand why, if he had no consciousness of it’s effects, he would make the attempt.

What exactly is laudanum?

Added December 30, 2008:  Apparently George Washington took laudanum because of his teeth.