New Alain Locke Biography + Richard T. Greener Honored at University of South Carolina

When most people think of the Harlem Renaissance, they probably summon the names of its major literary and visual atists--Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, etc.--and even may note figures who were linked to but critical of some of its aspects, like W. E. B. DuBois. They also may recall the cultural shift under which it unfolded, "The New Negro Movement." But they may not know the name of the man who popularized the term "The New Negro," in a famous essay and in, perhaps most lastingly, in the title of his 1925 famous anthology, and who provided the intellectual foundation, and cultivated the networks out of which the Harlem Renaissance developed.

That man was Alain Leroy Locke (1885-1954), a Philadelphia native who attended Harvard College (AB 1907), became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studied at the University of Berlin, and subsequently returned to Harvard to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. Black, gay, physically unimposing, an adherent of the Bahá'í faith, and a gifted and productive thinker and writer, Locke not only provided the intellectual framework for the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, through his championing of Black art and culture, and the idea of the Diaspora and its links to Africa, but he taught at Howard University from 1918 to 1925, when he was temporarily dismissed for teaching a course on race relations, and then, after reinstatement in 1928, until 1953, training generations of students, including Toni Morrison.

Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor in the Department of Black Studies at University of California-Santa Barbara has just published a new, thorough biography of Locke, a scholar, critic, and cultural worker, situating him with the intellectual, social, political, and cultural contexts in which he lived. Titled The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018), Stewart's study draws upon previously unavailable primary source material and interviews with Locke's colleagues, friends and associates. Divided into three sections, the first focusing on Locke's youth and eduction, the second on Locke's involvement with the Harlem Renaissance and his advancement of ideas of Black beauty and aesthetics, and the third exploring the latter portion of Locke's rich and fascinating life, Stewart's exploration of Locke's life and mind looks like it also will provide a richer illumination of the intellectual foundations of and complex relationships among members of the Harlem Renaissance and its many cultural legacies.

I have ordered a copy of Stewart's biography, which has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and a laudatory review in The New York Times, and am looking forward to reading it. (If I can, I may post a review on here.) I especially enjoyed listening to Professor Stewart discuss it on Midday in New York; you can hear that podcast here. You can also read Eugene Holley's excellent overview of Stewart's book on Publishers Weekly's website. Stewart's previous work includes several edited volumes about Locke, as well as the biography Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History, a text that, like the Locke biography, strikes me as particularly appropriate for our current moment.

***

The unveiling of the Richard T. Greener
statue, University of South Carolina
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Nearly half a century before Alain Locke graduated from Harvard, the first African American to enroll and successful receive a Harvard College degree left his name on the university's rolls, and proceeded to a remarkable life that, like Locke's, is now almost completely forgotten. Richard T. Greener, whom I'd previously blogged about when a contractor discovered a trunk of his belongings in a run-down Chicago home, was that first graduate (A.B. 1870), and, as part of his extraordinary journey, received a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1876, during that brief period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, which meant a brief interlude of integration. From 1873 to 1877, Greener served as a professor at South Carolina, becoming the first African American professor there, and, once Reconstruction ended and white retrenchment and segregation resumed their hold, he moved to Howard University, where he would serve as the dean of the law school, before eventually entering government service as an agent in Vladivostok, Russia.

Democratic Congressman James Clyburn, at the unveiling
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Yesterday, the University of South Carolina unveiled a 9-foot tall statue honoring Greener as one its pioneering figures. Speakers, including Democratic Congressman and Minority Whip James Clyburn, praised his numerous contributions during his brief stay at the university, which included serving as professor of philosophy, while also teaching the classics, mathematics, and constitutional history and serving as USC's first librarian. The statue, by Jon Hair, stands next to the Thomas Cooper Library, which he led. While teaching Greener simultaneously enrolled in South Carolina's law school, graduating with honors, and was admitted to South Carolina's bar in 1876 and the DC bar in 1877. An advocate for racial equality, journalist, and secondary school educator as well, Greener later moved to DC, beginning his career at Howard in 1879, where he taught until 1881.

Evelyn Bausman, a grand-daughter
of Richard T. Greener, poses with
a statue of Greener that was
unveiled at The University of South Carolina.(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

He would go on to open his own law practice, and later, after serving as US Consul to Bombay, India, became the first black US diplomat to a predominantly white country and the first American to hold his Russian post. Throughout, Greener kept writing and advocating on behalf of African Americans; ironically, his daughter, Belle da Costa Greene, would pass as a white woman in New York, and gained the confidence of and great influence with banker J. P. Morgan, becoming his chief manuscript advisor and eventually the first director of the Morgan Library. At a time when US municipalities, public and private institutions, and corporations are rethinking monuments to problematic historical figures and eras, like the Confederacy, the USC unveiling offers and enshrines a powerful and necessary counternarrative.

Richard T. Greener
(photo courtesy of Harvard
University Library)

In 2001, while celebrating its centenary, USC commissioned and staged a play, The White Problem, by Jon Tuttle, about Greener's time on campus. Then in 2013, the centenary of Greener's arrival at South Carolina, the university honored him by reintroducing him to the campus, complete with a ceremony (see below) on his behalf. Among the events to celebrate him, there was an official presentation of his law diploma and law license, which USC purchased from the Chicago trove. As for his first alma mater, Harvard installed a portrait of Greener in   its Annenberg Hall, located in its famous Memorial Hall (opened the year of Greener's graduation). In addition, the Cambridge Historical Commission mounted a plaque commemorating him on College House, in Harvard Square, at 1430 Massachusetts Avenue. You can learn more about Greener's life in Katherine Reynolds Chaddock's biography Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (Johns Hopkins, 2017).

Brazilian Notes: Quilombo Decree Upheld + Borba's "Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL)"

The signs read, "Brazil is quilombo residents;
not one less quilombo"

All over the Americas, when fugitive slaves had the opportunities to escape and set up maroon (marrons in French, cimarrones in Spanish, maròn/mawòn in Kreyol/creole, etc.) communities, beyond the administrative and military grasp of the settler-colonial and slave system, they did so. These communities took different forms in different parts of the hemisphere, but their legacies continue, sometimes in name (palenques in Spanish, maroon towns or free towns in English), sometimes in traces and foundations that are mostly forgotten but still inspire the descendants. In Brazil, these communities were often known as quilombos, the most famous of which remains Palmares, in the interior of the northeastern state of Alagoas, north of Bahia, established by a group of fugitive slaves and warriors led by the great Imbangala (Angola)-descended Zumbi (1655-1695).

Quilombos, from the Kimbundu word kilombo, dot rural areas far from the major metropoles across northern and northeastern Brazil. As anti-colonial and anti-imperial, black-centered zones of resistance, they were targets of the Portuguese and later Brazilian governments in the colonial period, and the state's administrative, bureaucratic, legal, social, and economic war against them has not relaxed in the 20th and 21st centuries. From attempts to seize title to quilombo land to the murders of quilombolas (residents of the quilombos), these communities have had to engage in continual struggle to stay whole, and free. A ruralist coalition of lawmakers, some allied with agribusiness and other powerful interests, has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the increasingly valuable quilombo territory. In 2003, however, then-President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva signed a decree that expanded the quilombolas' rights to title and demarcated their land, empowering the residents to gain legal title in order to keep them.

Brazil's current president, the profoundly unpopular Michel Temer, took office after a soft 2016 coup in which he and the Brazilian Congress impeached and ousted popularly elected president Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, over technical budgeting violations. Temer subsequently began instituting a range of neoliberal policies, under the aegis of pro-market rhetoric, yet Brazil's economy has continued to sputter, and the once expanding lower middle class of the Lula years has increasingly tumbled back into poverty. Among Temer's actions that threatened the quilombos was an order to suspend the titling process for the quilombos, which are supposedly protected by the Brazilian Constitution, until the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) could rule on the validity of the decree Lula signed, which the conservative Democratic Party challenged.

After over five years in court, an overwhelming majority of the justices voted, 10-1, to uphold the decree, finally leading the Democratic Party's leader, Senator Agripino Maia, from the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, to end his opposition. The STF ruling represents a major victory for the quilombo communities and Afro-Brazilians in general, as well as for indigenous Brazilians, who have seen their lands seized and rights threatened, and a significant defeat for the powerful conservative rural interests, and their allies, including overtly racist, homophobic leading far-right presidential contender Jair Bolsonaro (of Rio de Janeiro state), who have strongly supported Temer.

As Black Women of Brazil blog reported (translating a report from the Brazilian media site iG):

Members of the National Coordination of Articulation of the Quilombola Rural Black Communities (Conaq) celebrated the [decision].”This is a first step in the recognition of the debt that the Brazilian State has with the quilombolas, as it also has with the natives,” said Denildo Rodrigues, a member of the association at the end of the trial.

Conaq was one of many associations engaged in lobbying the STF in voting. Among other actions, it organized the undersigned “Not one less quilombo”, which had more than 100 thousand signatures requesting the maintenance of Lula’s decree.

“There is no motive, reason or circumstance today for the policy of titling quilombos to be or remain paralyzed. What is expected now is for the public administration to continue and complete the regularization processes,” said Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at the Socio-Environmental Institute, also involved in the case.

It would be foolhardy to believe that this successful ruling will completely halt outside interests' attempts to gain control of the quilombolas' land, but it does give them an even stronger legal foundation to defend themselves in the courts, even as they battle ongoing violence and other forms of predation.

* * *

Photo © Thiago Borba

Black Women of Brazil Blog (BWBB) is always a trove of current, informative news about Black Brazil. One recent article I enjoyed featured the work of Bahian-born and based photographer Thiago Borba, whose current project, "Black Is Beautiful," so appropriate for Black History Month, is featured at Revista Trip. On that site, in an article entitled "A coisa tá preta" (The thing is black), writer Giulia Garcia discusses Borba's route to the project, which uses the respective English title and hashtag Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL). After turning to photography in 2006 and studying in Spain, Borba could find no jobs in Bahia, so he pursued a commercial career in São Paulo to make ends meet.

Photo © Thiago Borba

In 2016, however, he reconnected with an earlier interest in exploring the topic of blackness in relation to beauty, still so fraught in Brazil, and started a photographic project entitled Paraíso Oculto (Hidden Paradise), melding images of black beauty in human form and natural landscapes. As BWBB regularly points out, contestations over beauty, and valorization of Eurocentric standards, constantly play out not only in interpersonal and intrafamilial spaces, but in the Brazilian public sphere. A number of spectacular, overtly racist incidents, involving denigration of Afrobrazilians' hair, features, color, style, and intelligence, have occurred over just the last year. One irony in all of this is that Afrobrazilians now constitute a numerical majority in the country, with sizable populations in Brazil's north, northeast and southeast.

Photo © Thiago Borba

He returned to Bahia from São Paulo last year, and began focusing on images of Afrobrazilians, particularly darker-skinned ones, who remain the most discriminated against in Brazil--not unlike in the US, where colorism within black communities, and within the larger US society, persists. Bahia is the traditional African heart of Brazil, with the highest percentage of self-identified black ("negro") and brown or mixed race ("pardo") residents, but hierarchies of color, class and ancestry exist there as well. As the Brazilian saying goes, "Quanto mais preto, mais preconceito sofre" (How much blacker you are, the more prejudice you suffer"), as true in Bahia as in pats of Brazil far smaller black populations, like Santa Catarina, in the far south.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

The new project centers "pretos retintos" (dark-skinned blacks), those people who are "mais preto," amid a range of hues; Borba draws his subjects mostly not from the ranks of models, but from his personal and broader social network. (Looking at the photos, though, any of these subjects could or should model, and some, like Vanderlei Nagô, clearly are modeling!) Borba began posting the images on his Instagram page, and from there they gained wider notice and were selected for the state of Bahia's Novembre Negro (Black November) campaign. (November 20 is Dia da Conciência Negra, a holiday celebrated since the 1960s and officially established as a legal holiday in 2003 to honor the death, in 1695, of none other than Zumbi do Palmares, mentioned above. In Bahia, the entire month is beginning to assume the cast of honoring black Brazilian history.)

Photo © Thiago Borba

According to BWBB and Revista Trip, one of the images was even promoted on billboards, on buses and in the metro, among other public spaces. For Borba, this expanded reach was important in helping to amplify, in the eyes of minds of Afrobrazilians and all Brazilians, the representation and representativeness of black people in Brazilian society. It is a battle we continue to fight in the US, in similar and different ways.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

Checking In (Jury Duty)

The view from the Hudson County Superior Courthouse

Time races by these days, as it always has, though I've felt it increasing even more over the last few years, and this fall has been no exception. Last spring was a marathon of sorts, and after recuperating this summer, figuratively and literally, a new race has begun. In addition to chairing, teaching, advising, and mentoring, traveling for conferences and readings, and serving as a referee, second editor, blurbist, and all those good things, I was called up for jury duty by the Hudson County Superior Court in September, just as the fall semester began. On the one hand, I understand that peer jury service is a civic duty, and I strong support this key component of our court system.

On the other hand, it came at a very inopportune time, and because I had already postponed it several times over the summer for medical reasons, I could not get another delay, so I had to appear at the court house and see if the lottery would fall in my favor. It either did or didn't, depending upon whether you think getting selected to serve on a horrifying criminal case for roughly three weeks was a positive outcome or not. I did not, though I can say in retrospect that the experience was enlightening and one I will not soon forget. I also will not forget that the some of the skills need to assess literature critically--judiciousness, an eye for detail, the ability to relate texts to other texts, etc.--and to function decently in the classroom, such as listening carefully, being persuasive in arguing points, carefulness in balancing differing opinions, defusing unnecessary conflict, etc., also come in very handy if you are on a jury, even if you are not the fore-person.

A tip to prospective jurors: some things I learned in the jury selection process are that neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney wants to have anyone involved in psychology, psychiatry, or social work counseling on the jury pool if they can help it. They also do not seem to like people who love police, though expressing concern about police brutality or misconduct does not seem to be a bar to service. Personal experience as a victim of a crime is also no hindrance, though if you were a victim of a crime similar to the one being adjudicated, they will probably politely ask you to leave the courtroom and reenter the jury pool for another case.

Another view, looking out at Jersey City and Manhattan

As for justice being served, I think that is a much more complex issue. We were told not to discuss the case even after we had rendered a decision--and the defendant, I learned from the news, has several more cases pending on very similar grounds, information that was, for whatever reason, not admitted in court--so I will not go into specifics. But I felt that under the circumstances, we were able to come a decision that was just and fair. Extrapolating from our jury discussions and several jurors' almost unyielding opinions, based not on the facts of the case but on personal beliefs and stereotypes, however, I am even more convinced than before that the possibility of justice is foreclosed as soon as a jury is constituted.

Back to blogging, I have begun a number of posts, dating all the way back to mid-summer, but have not been able to finish them as various other deadlines have popped up. I had the idea that I would try shorter entries, but I find that brief posts that aren't photos or short accounts of events almost as tough as longer ones, since I feel I'm not saying enough. But I want to return to blogging a bit more regularly, and not only talk about the events of the day--which now move so swiftly that unless you blog daily or in some cases several times a day, they're already history--but also return to this site's roots, which is literature, the arts, and cultural issues writ small and large.

"My Soul Is Weary With Sorrow"

Trayvon Martin, 1995-2012

"My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to your word." Psalm 119:28

Shortly before we learned last night of the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, C said to me, he's going to be convicted, and I said he would be found not guilty of the February 26, 2012 killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Any number of clues during the trial's run pointed in this direction, but I also thought at that moment of the innumerable times over the span of my life on this earth, of the innumerable times over the nearly 400 years of colonial and US history, during which black and brown people have been killed, with impunity, which is to say, with the support of the state and its various systems, including the law.

I thought about how the killing of black and brown people is a feature of the creation and history of this state, and many others, including our and their laws.

I thought about how we live in a society and in a system in which the concept of justice is often a phantasm, a mere word, often made to function as its inverse, especially when it comes to black and brown people.

I thought about how for so many of us, Trayvon Martin was not and will not be just a name, not just an image, not just an analogy or a metonym, but a young person, a young black person, a young black murdered person whose name we add to a long list of names, too long, that we know we must not and cannot forget.

I thought about how many of us can say that we have been in Trayvon Martin's place and by the grace of God, of luck, of circumstance, we are still able to talk about God or gods, and grace, and circumstance, we are able to talk about the fact that we are still here, but very might not have been.

I thought about Trayvon Martin's parents' grief and sorrow, about how they will never get their son back, how they will never be able to live down the horror not only seeing his body after he was killed but now know that it has become an object of derision, of merriment, for people who had no concept of his humanity and perhaps never will.

I thought about how our friends did not have to testify in court and suffer the humiliation of becoming the subject, the target of attacks, a figure for caricature, a way for people not to deal with the terrific tragedy that unfolded that night in Florida.

I thought about how we have witnessed this story over and over again, about how angry and disappointed and enraged and disgusted and numbed I and others are by it, how it always gets transformed into another story, a story in which the deeper social, political and economic structures that make possible the killing of black children, brown children, black people, brown people, poor people, queer people, women, never get examined or discussed, and people move on to the next thing, and then it happens all over again.

I thought about how this entire fiasco will be turned into a money-making enterprise, how death, especially black and brown deaths, become a spectacle, to be exploited and disposed of when the next new thing comes along, and the fact of this child's death, the seriousness and sadness and solemnity that should attend it, are quickly disposed of.

I thought about how, once again, nothing will change unless we change that nothing into something, how we cannot depend upon "leaders" or laws to ensure the safety and sanctity of our laws, unless they are fully grasp how unsafe and little regarded, we are and are tired of being.

I thought about how low-grade mourning, and frustration, and rage, and indifference, become constants, and how so many of our lives entails not just recognition of but a continuous attempt to manage these feelings, to not be consumed by, destroyed by them.

We cannot be consumed and destroyed by these feelings. We should mourn Trayvon Martin's death, and change a legal system that allows his killer to walk free. But we also have to acknowledge that the society we live in needs to change, and not rest until that happens.

Thursday Hodgepodge (Obama in Osawatomie, Gingrich Ascends, Pujols Departs, etc.)

Very little posting these days, because it's exam week, and it has been a nonstrop reading extravaganza since September, though the pace has accelerated over the last few weeks as so many things appear on my desk and must be addressed, ASAP.  A few thoughts on various things going on, below.

***

I was stunned to read about the shooting earlier today at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University).  According to the most recent accounts I've seen, two people are dead, one a campus police officer, the second the alleged shooter.  I won't comment on what this means or attempt any sort of grand statement, but rather state how saddened I am to hear that there has been another shooting anywhere, but especially on the grounds of any educational institution, and especially on this one, which was the site of a horrific spree in 2007, in which 33 people died and 25 were wounded.  I can only imagine how shaken people at Virginia Tech and their friends and family members are right now. My thoughts and best wishes go out to their entire community.


***

from the New Yorker

I was very happy to hear President Barack Obama's lively, progressive speech at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kansas, reprising some of the themes not only of the 2008 Democratic campaign and of the Occupy Resistence Movement, but also of Teddy Roosevelt's 1910 speech in which he expounded his famous "New Nationalism" ideas, championing a positive government role in domestic affairs.  Reggie H. smartly (as always) pointed out today, and I've seen almost no media mention of it, that Osawatomie also has a deeper resonance. It is one of the towns the (New England) Emigrant Aid Society founded in the wake of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act to ensure Kansas was a free state, unlike its neighbor to the east, Missouri, and it was to Osawatomie that abolitionist John Brown--whose half-sister Florella Adair had already established a home there with her husband, anti-slavery preacher Rev. Samuel Adair--traveled in 1855 to take up the cause of anti-slavery resistance. Brown made the Adair home his base of operations, and in 1856 killed five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek, near Lane, Kansas, an event that was subsequently known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, and which helped to give Kansas, along with Missouri a site of constant skirmishes and later, during the US Civil War, outright battles, between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces, its moniker of "Bleeding Kansas."

I would imagine that as smart as President Obama is, he knows this history, but he is probably doing the right thing by focusing on TR, as as opposed to JB. Now, if he would only stick to the substance of this speech, as opposed to launching yet another attractive Zeppelin that goes nowhere, and if he would begin by firing his Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, one of the chief engineers of his approach to Wall Street and the banks, I think I'd be willing to take him more seriously as TR's (or even JB's) modern apotheosis.

***

Yesterday, Illinois's former Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, was sentenced to 14 years after being convicted on 18 counts of corruption, including attempting to sell off the US Senate once held by President Barack Obama.  Judge James Zagel noted that although Blagojevich had done some good while governor (he was a good advocate for working-class Illinoisans and the elderly), his crimes deserved severe punishment.  He put it this way: "When it is the governor who goes bad, the fabric of Illinois is torn and disfigured and not easily repaired."

Blagojevich's sentencing follows his effective prosecution by US Attorney for Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, who yesterday expressed his utter disgust for Blagojevich's brazen behavior.  An earlier trial concluded with jurors unable to convict on more than just 1 of 24 counts, lying to the FBI.  In the second trial, Fitzgerald snared him on 17 of 20 counts.  What made Blagojevich's situation so outrageous is that he was elected in 2002 on a reform platform, and his immediate predecessor, Republican George Ryan, was convicted of corruption and is still in jail.  Of the four Illinois governors sent to prison in the last 40 years, Blagojevich has received the longest sentence; Ryan only received 6 1/2 years.  He will have to serve at least 12 unless he is pardoned, an unlikely outcome.

What is likely is that he'll appeal, but the wiretaps that helped convict him this time won't be going away, so he had better start preparing for a long stay behind bars.

***

Watching Newt Gingrich ascend to the top of the GOP polls feels like a combination of vertigo and déja vu, but it stands to reason that one of the most notoriously outrageous and corrupt rhetoricians to grace our national politics, a former professor of history, a lobbyist par excellence, a party boss, and, at his professional peak, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has returned, like a horrendous repressed memory or the zombie discourse of the 1990s, with renewed vigor and force, to vie as the Republican nominee for the 2012 US presidential race. There are so many awful things about Newt Gingrich's record, his history of gross misstatements, distortions and lies, his hypocrisy, and so much else, that I would have thought he'd forever disqualified himself from public office, anywhere, including outside the US. But such is the logic of American life that certain people--not everyone--get second or even multiple chances, and if you are rich and famous and outlandish enough, you might even get the biggest second chance of all, to lead the country, including right into the ground. On the one hand I view Gingrich's ascent with a bit of laughter, but he is so unbelievably compromised, to the point of absurdity; on the other hand, I also keep in mind that in my lifetime, my fellow Americans twice elected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, so...well, I'd rather not put that horrible outcome into words.  And let's work to ensure it's not an actuality, either.

***

Albert Pujols, Oct. 29, 2011 (Jeff Haynes / Reuters)

On a far less important note, at least to the majority of people out there who are not Saint Louis Cardinals baseball fans, the wires reported today that Baseball Hall of Fame-bound first baseman Albert Pujols has signed a 10-year-deal with a no-trade provision, for $250 million, with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. (Yes, that is their official name.)  Pujols spent exactly 11 years with the Cardinals, and produced a record that outstrips that of many of the greatest baseball players of all time. The 2001 National League Rookie of the Year and a three-time winner of the National League Most Valuable Player Award (in 2005, 2008 and 2009), Pujols has hit 445 home runs, driven in 1,329 runs, scored 1,291, won a battle title (in 2003, at the age of 23, hitting. 359), led the National League in slugging three times, in OPS three times, and in total bases 4 times. He also was a key player in the Cardinals' post-season success during his tenure; they won the World Series in 2006, and again this year, and made it to the finals in 2004 (losing to the Boston Red Sox), and were repeatedly in the playoffs, in no small part because of his consistently excellent play.  The Cardinals' ownership had offered Pujols around $200 million for 9 years, but it apparently was not enough. Saint Louis's loss is Los Angeles (and Anaheim's) and the American League's gain, but whatever Pujols does after this point, he made his name, his career and his fame in the Mound City.

Reyes donning his new team cap (LM OTERO / AP PHOTO)

Also changing teams was the New York Mets' longtime shortstop and emergent star, José Reyes, who will now play for the Miami (no longer just the Florida) Marlins, who also have a new taxpayer-funded stadium in the city's Little Havana neighborhood. Reyes has said that he never received a firm offer from the Mets, who are still reeling from some of the ownership's involvement in the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme scandal, and who, despite packing the team with all-stars in the mid-2000s, could never seem to go all the way. Reyes has suffered repeated leg injuries over the last few years, but still won this year's National League batting title, and is only 28, so the Marlins should get at least half a decade's worth of good years out of him, and vice versa.  Currently on a spending spree, they also got the Chicago White Sox's best pitcher, my homeboy Mark Buehrle, and their former manager, Ozzie Guillén. If they keep up at this rate, they will be the team to watch next season and for season to come, whether they win or not. The Marlins forbid long hair (???), so Reyes must again cut off his beautiful dreadlocks. (I know, I know, I cut mine off two years ago, so I shouldn't be saying anything, but still...I didn't look like José Reyes!)

The Case Against Harold Ford + Prop 8 Trial Underway + NFL Playoffs

On Twitter, I posted this link (via Matthew Yglesias), to one of Harold Ford Jr.'s (right, NY Daily News) commercials from his 2006 Senate run in Tennessee, in which he lost to right-winger Bob Corker. In the commercial, as in his run, Ford Jr. is so far to the right that you have to remind yourself he's not a Republican. But for anyone familiar with his prior record, his ideological position in the Senate run was no surprise. As a Congressperson (a legacy, no less, inheriting the seat from his father, Harold Ford Sr., who was more politically progressive and underwent an intensive legal assault by Tennessee Republicans and the Reagan administration), Ford Jr. consistently took right-of-center positions, unapologetically claimed to "love George Bush," and after losing the election, in which he was repeatedly race-baited by the GOP, he soon went to head the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which is to say, the Democrat's GOP-lite annex, and to punditry gigs on Fox and then MSNBC, on which he has repeatedly demonstrated that in addition to having a pretty face, his ideological compass remains fairly rightward. (I.e., he's in the mainstream of the US corporate media.) The combo of post-defeat opportunities, which now include an executive post at bailout recipient Merrill Lynch, landed him in New York.

One thing that Ford Jr., as the son of a prominent and wealthy politician, has always possessed, it seems to me, is confidence, or to put it another way, chutzpah, and recently he demonstrated it when, at the alleged urging of various extremely wealthy New Yorkers, including New York's billionaire mayor, Ford Jr. announced his desire to seek the Senate seat currently occupied by Kirsten Gillibrand (below right, NY Daily News). She, readers might recall, is the not especially popular former center-right upstate Democratic Congressperson picked in haphazard fashion by New York's ineffectual and inept governor, David Paterson, after he directed his staff to trash Caroline Kennedy, the presumptive nominee and early patron of President Barack Obama. Since assuming the seat, Gillibrand has moved noticeably to the left, and approximates her senior colleague, Chuck Schumer, in her voting patterns; yet it would seem that a strong candidate from the left, running against the neoliberal, DLC-ish policies of the current administration, might make a case for replacing Gillibrand and pushing an even more progressive, pro-New York agenda. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, one likely candidate, had thought about it before decided not to run. The case for a right-wing quasi-Democrat, bankrolled by Wall Street types, with a longstanding anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and warmongering record, however, appears more difficult to make. In fact, Ford's record and rhetoric have been so far to the right that I would venture he'd have a hard time be electing in any Northeastern state as a Democrat, let alone a Republican, except perhaps in Pennsylvania. Yet he has been huddling with New York's mayor-by-default, Mike Bloomberg, and the Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid, recently came to plead with Bloomberg not to back Ford Jr. As to where President Obama stands on the matter, who knows, though given his tenor of his tenure so far, I could see him backing Ford Jr., whom he repeatedly campaigned for in 2006. (Obama, however, will not be campaigning this week for Ted Kennedy's likely replacement, Democrat Martha Coakley, who is in a tightening race in Massachusetts against Republican Scott Brown. Go figure.)

I have read comparisons between Ford's carpetbagging and Hillary Clinton's, or Robert F. Kennedy's (he was born in New York, however), and am aware of the long history of Americans who've tramped from state to state getting elected (cf. James Shields, 19th century US Senator from Illinois, Minnesota, and Missouri), but the Clinton comparison in particular focuses more on the political contours rather than addressing the specific ideological and policy cases against him running, and winning, in New York State. What would he bring to this race? Do New Yorkers, and black New Yorkers--which seems to be his hook--specfically, see any benefit from electing someone who has repeatedly supported policies damaging to most of them? Ford notes in the commercial that he supported the Patriot Act, defense spending, and against "amnesty" for "illegals." His record shows that he voted against ENDA and for the Iraq War, the Bankruptcy Bill, and the Federal Marriage Amendment. He supported the candidacy of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, and Republican legislation on behalf of Terri Schiavo's parents, against her husband. Ford Jr. did take some mainstream Democratic positions, including standing against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and supported federal stem cell research funding, but had he been elected to the Senate in 2006, his prior record would have placed him at the far right of the Democratic caucus, and to the right even of several Republicans, including Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe.

Despite some recent moderation, which I imagine no one is buying, the main reason I can identify for his candidacy is that his patrons ("executives," to use the New York Times's term) want someone even more compliant with and willing to push even more reliably pro-corporate ("independent"--New York Times) politics from what was Hillary Clinton's and Al D'Amato's (a verifiably right-wing Republican) old seat. This argument mirrors the ones put forward when Mike Bloomberg was mulling a presidential run; I saw no natural mass constituency, only Wall Street and the social and business élites, who quickly coöpted Barack Obama--who made pilgrimage and paid fealty to Bloomberg, don't forget--instead. He has suggested that there needs to be a black person in the Senate (on the grounds of local and national representation and diversity, I would agree, though I don't think it should be him), especially now that Roland Burris will not be returning after this year, and so far no other viable African-American candidate for any of the open Senate seats has emerged. (While I would not to lose a single woman in the Senate, perhaps Barbara Mikulski will decide to step down and Maryland's Lt. Governor, Iraq veteran Anthony Brown, will run for her seat). This is not to attribute bad faith to Harold Ford Jr., but to suggest that there is no convincing case to be made, at least on behalf of the majority of New York voters, or the rest of the country for that matter, for his candidacy for this seat, right now or anytime in the foreseeable future. And I'm not kicking his dog, mind you. Just asking, but at this point in our ongoing national economic and political debacles, how stupid and gullible do the people in power think we are?

+++

Today was the first day of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal trial challenging the constitutional validity of Proposition 8, which the San Jose Mercury News suggests may "be the signature civil rights fight of the 21st century." Depending upon the outcome, it could lead to a landmark US Supreme Court ruling, or Congressional legislation down the road, and as it concerns the most populous state in the nation and the popular reversal by referendum and constitutional amendment of rights underwritten by a court ruling, it's particularly significant.

The trial is underway in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Today the presiding justice, Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker, appointed to the federal court by President George H. W. Bush, heard arguments from both sides; Theodore Olson, the conservative lawyer and former Solicitor General under George W. Bush, along with Clinton administration counsel David Boies, are leading the arguments on behalf of the plaintiffs, two same sex couples, Berkeley residents Sandra Stier and the eponymous Kristin Perry, and Burbank couple Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, who were denied marriage licenses because of the Prop 8 vote. Prominent attorney Charles Cooper is arguing on behalf of the Prop 8 amendment of California's state constitution. California's Attorney General, former Governor and Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, refused to defend the law, saying it should be struck down, while Governor Schwarzenegger has argued that it raises important constitutional questions that need to be addressed.

As noted above, Should Olson, Boies and the plaintiffs win, the case could then move by appeal to the US Supreme Court. The higher court did stay Judge Walker's decision to permit delayed broadcast of the proceedings on YouTube, so for the duration media accounts will have to suffice.

+++

How about those New York Jets, who defeated the Cincinnati Bengals two weeks in a row, this time 24-14 on Saturday. Jets QB Mark Sanchez (right, NJ.com) became only the fourth rookie QB to win a playoff game. The Dallas Cowboys followed the Jets' victory by defeating the Philadelphia Eagles 34-14. The Cowboys' defense was out in full force, as was its running and passing game.

On Sunday, the Baltimore Ravens, long known for their defensive prowess, stopped the New England Patriots cold with a 33-14 victory and stupendous running by former Rutgers star Ray Rice (below left, NJ.com), who racked up 159 yards on 22 rushes, and 2 touchdowns. Later that afternoon, the Arizona Cardinals put on an offensive show and defeated the Green Bay Packers 55-41, in overtime. As the score suggests, there was hardly any defensive play to speak of, though the Cardinals got just enough when they needed it.

The Jets now play the 13-3 San Diego Chargers, while the Ravens play 14-2 Indianapolis, which was rolling towards an undefeated season until the Jets broke up their mojo. In the NFC Arizona plays the New Orleans Saints, who went 13-3, while Dallas plays the 12-4 Minnesota Vikings. I'm pulling for the Jets, but I see the higher seeds (Indy, Saints, Vikings) all winning.