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I dropped out for lack of cash, worked three jobs, returned to school for a couple of years, dropped out broke again. When the friends I’d met as a freshman graduated to begin their careers in corporate finance and accounting, and my girlfriend left for a magazine job in New York, I mostly sat around drinking wine alone in the afternoons. I was as confused as I’d ever been, which is saying something. I’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars — much of it borrowed, some of it earned by my own labor, some of it a gift from my grandfather — into a journalism education, but my scholarship had been revoked when I didn’t finish my degree in four years. Internships at the Fargo Forum and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine had left me sour on the strictures of deadline hackery and service-mag pap. I didn’t want to be a cops and courts reporter; I didn’t want to be a mutual-fund guru, a blue-chip stock watcher. I wanted to be a novelist. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about writing a novel, and it was clear that even if I started tomorrow I’d be a long time in earning a dime from writing novels. I did what many before me have done in such circumstances: I became a bartender. This offered all the intellectual stimulation you’d imagine, which is to say none. The pleasures were other. I met party people. I drank on the job.
One night my telephone rang. It was the old man, of all people. He’d tracked down my home number. I never did learn how. The number was unconnected with my name, since I was living with my girlfriend’s gay uncle Charlie, who’d offered to put me up rent-free so I’d have time to write the great American novel, in compensation for which he merely asked that he appear, lightly fictionalized but still identifiable, as a demon lover with a giant cock in my great American novel. I’d overcome the residual homophobia of my Catholic boyhood by then, thanks in no small part to Charlie, whom I’m very happy to describe for posterity as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, as well as a demon lover with an enormous and stunningly beautiful cock.
lmao
In practical terms, his example — the first such of my life — made me reluctant to pursue my sexual attractions with any gusto, which prevented my college years from becoming the sexual smorgasbord they were for a lot of my contemporaries. I had seen a man’s face contorted by lust unconsummated — I’m talking up close and personal — and it was not a pretty sight. A smoldering passivity became my style, and a tendency toward long-term serial monogamy with women who made the first move. Which, when I thought about it later, may have been a blessing, considering the kind of woman with whom this involved me, typically horny and radiant with self-confidence, the kind of woman you want to remain a friend even after you split.
I promptly cashed the check and booked a plane ticket to Amsterdam for the holidays. Out of the country for the first time in my life, loose on the Continent with a Eurail pass, I spent every dime of that dirty money as frivolously as I could — champagne in Paris, dope in Amsterdam, ephemeral pleasures of one sort or another from London to Venice — shadowed the whole time by a mixture of exhilaration and shame, that familiar cocktail of emotion in all my dealings with the old man, almost from the beginning: the exhilaration of having got away with something, the shame of having let him off the hook for one more gift of cash.
He had at last made of me an American hustler, just not the kind he’d hoped.
That summer, home for a funeral, I drove to his house and knocked on his door.
Old buddy, he said when he answered. I can’t believe it’s you.
Believe it, I said.
Why don’t you come in? he said.
I don’t want to come in, I said. You know why I’m here.
All right, he said, trying to remain friendly. How about we go have a drink downtown. My checkbook is at the bank. I’ll pick it up on the way.
How about I meet you at the bank, I said. We can skip the drink.
Ten minutes later I had a check in my hand for $1,000.
I never saw him again.
jesus
After the ABFF screening, the baffled audience stuttered their questions. “What message are we supposed to take from this film, Spike? And my second . . .” one audience member said before he was cut off by the director, who exclaimed, “I don’t talk about the meaning of my films anymore, I haven’t for fifteen years, I stopped doing that.” Lee, with his trademark intimidation, stifled debate over his intentions before it even began. The director was willing, just barely, in the most canned responses, to allude to the film “being about addiction” in an ever more addiction-prone world. Perhaps these banalities hid a deeper problem — that the movie was an allegory of Lee’s own addiction to high society, his need to preserve himself above the black filmmakers whose work he wouldn’t abide. Or, perhaps, an allegory for the New York he helped turn into a luxury product he neither desires nor understands.
Fuck George Jefferson, it’s Spike Lee who has moved on up. He didn’t want to be like Melvin Van Peebles, trumpeting the accomplishments of one movie he made forty-five years ago in some tattered sweatshirt he wore around the apartment — a nice one in Columbus Circle, bought with Wall Street speculation money. He didn’t want to spend thirty years trying to get his first movie distributed and bumming around Africa, as Charles Burnett has, asking dictators and strongmen for funding. And he didn’t want to be like Bill Gunn, thumbing his nose at the genres he was expected to make. He wanted to be noticed, to make a lasting impact on a broader cultural stage. He wanted to gentrify Black Brooklyn himself. He didn’t want slumming, Sundance-hungry white filmmakers — like Oscar nominee Benh Zeitlin, or Slamdance winner Keith Miller, or filmmaker-brand Quentin Tarantino, or any other white liberal making inauthentic stories about black poverty or bondage or struggle — to do it for him. Then he gave up. He moved to the Upper East Side, the story goes, and got citizenship in the Republic of Jaguar commercials, the brand of “Brooklyn” emblazoned on limited-edition Absolut Vodka bottles with his name underneath.
It was Marx’s genius to argue that capitalists were not fundamentally different from the feudal landlords who preceded them, since each took percentages based on an arbitrarily declared “ownership” of factories or land. Profit has no more divine justification than rent, and if you can fight a landlord who calls himself a king, you can fight one who calls himself a capitalist.
damn
I suppose this was what they call repressive tolerance. You could read what you liked — no one would stop you — but you would be met with incomprehension if you said anything that smacked of the New Left Review rather than the reliably liberal Philosophy & Public Affairs: “reify” or “heteronormative” or, indeed, “decolonize.” It was tiring to have to swaddle every utterance in layers of irony, to carry on as if the trouble with racists and sexists was their vulgarity, to go along with the idea that earnestness and stridency (“ranting”) were best left to the uncouth.
In the end, my assimilation into this attitude — three generations of collabo blood will tell — was easy. There was no need for an announcement; you just went quiet and got with the program, which was to make the world safe for social democracy with British characteristics. If you had a different program, you retreated to dark basements to read your Said or Ambedkar or Fanon and were never heard of again. For a while, it was fun to be in the mainstream and speak its language of liberty and equality. Everyone was quick, everyone was clever, most everyone was nice. I kept all my promises: I got my First; I kept off the opium; I did not rant. I would apply for a doctoral program and stay at Oxford for six more years.
Rhodes Must Fall was picked up in Oxford by student activists during my last term there, in response to a landscape just as marked as Cape Town by Rhodes and his money. They set their sights on similar goals: “the plague of colonial iconography,” the “Euro-centric curriculum . . . which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge,” the “underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black and minority ethnic (BME) amongst Oxford’s academic staff and students.”
It was about more than a statue, of course, but the statue wasn’t incidental. Its continued presence, they write, “is incompatible with a community that posits itself as progressive, enlightened and intellectually honest.” That last bit is mischievous, raising the excellent question of what you’d expect the physical environment of Oxford to look like given everything it says in the prospectus. (The short answer: fewer statues of colonialists, and those that remain framed to reveal just what they thought and did.)
For the first time, I had a student in my John Stuart Mill class wanting to talk about the East India Company rather than the harm principle. It can be hard to know what to do when you get what you want. There were awkward conversations with other scholars of my vintage and older: Why had we been so quiet, so complacent? What were we scared of? And why did we, most of us, settle for the centrist-parties-and-think-tanks vision of engagement, for being seminar-room-only insurgents, for assuaging our political consciences with monthly donations to approved charities? It took effort not to get defensive, not to retreat into irony, to be happy that someone was saying out loud what I’d felt and had found unsayable.
The usual apologists appeared in the broadsheets with the usual arguments (it’s complicated; we gave them the railways; we shouldn’t erase history; who’s next once Rhodes falls?), and it’s impossible to go through the rote replies (not as complicated as all that; the railways weren’t a gift; whose history?; Winston Churchill, probably) without an acute feeling of déjà vu. More generally, the movement had the effect on the mainstream press of all student protests: consternation at the fact that the students were holding up placards and no attempt to read what was written on them (This Is Not “Rhodes” House, Make Rhodes History, Take It Down). Everyone was talking about universities as a way of not talking about colonialism.
If Oxford is worth reforming, as activists must believe it is since they’re not demanding that we tear it down and start from scratch, then it must be because it can be reformed, that this can be effected by argument and persuasion. But we should keep our expectations low. Oxford — and the mainstream British political culture it feeds — is formidably well armored with defense mechanisms and comforting fables. The easygoing liberalism of Oxford life, for all that it implies of right-on attitudes and Guardian readership, is somewhat stretched when dealing with anger, censure, and the call for reparation. Its institutions of student welfare can’t help translating what are at base political demands to the kind of things a well-meaning bureaucracy can deal with: more therapists, a couple more black writers on the syllabus.
In such circumstances, moral arguments by themselves have about as much effect as telling a brat to go stand in the corner and think about what he’s done. There won’t be a redemptive gesture, just a series of accommodations with history, some of them honorable, some squalid, most of them mercenary. No one should be holding their breath for an apology.
But if Oxford must keep its statues of dead imperialists — and it will, for a while yet — it had better be up to something in all the silence: bringing the rest of its physical environment into line with its professed principles, making the question of its own complicity in the history of empire itself the focus of sustained academic attention. What Oxford will not do — and quite literally cannot do without gutting itself — is divest itself of its relations with power. [...]