Novel as Experiment in Whitehead's Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was one of the most famous novels of 2016. In this novel, a young slave Cora escapes from Georgia on the Underground Railroad, and eventually...does she make it? I won’t spoil the ending. But in this novel the Railroad is really a railroad, with railroad cars on tracks running through tunnels.

One impression is inescapable, and intentional. The amount of deliberate suffering inflicted by slave owners and slave hunters on the slaves, and even on other whites, is almost infinitely brutal. In this novel, slave hunters would kill and rape white abolitionists. Slave owners would put the eyes out of a slave who tried to learn to read. A white daughter turned in her parents to be hanged for hiding a fugitive slave (Cora), in return for an elevation of her social status. One slave hunter wore a necklace made out of human ears. One slave owner tortured his male slave by cutting off the slave’s manhood, stuffing it in the slave’s mouth, and sewing it shut.

Remember, this is fiction. Many of these things did not actually happen. For example, it makes no economic sense for slave owners to torture and kill their slaves for minor infractions; slaves were expensive to buy and maintain. Slave owners would, in the real South, treat slaves like animals, but not usually worse. But Whitehead achieves the novelist’s purpose, to make the reader hate slavery, and to see how it turns slave owners into devils.

And then I realized that this was the point. Most of these brutal things occurred at some point in history, but not all at once. During the lynchings after the Civil War, whites would indeed torture blacks. In doing so, they were not losing any money, the way slave owners would have. Whitehead took actual events from the lynching period and stuck them into the time of slavery. Whitehead also created a superficially nice-looking South Carolina, where black escapees were treated nicely, but it turns out that they were being sterilized in the name of scientific eugenics, and being used in scientific experiments. These things actually happened in the first half of the twentieth century. By placing the brutalities of fictional Georgia and North Carolina alongside the superficial niceness of the fictional South Carolina, Whitehead was inviting us to compare them. Were eugenics and scientific experimentation (as in the Tuskegee experiments), any less brutal than slavery? We usually don’t ask that question, because they occurred separately in history. Whitehead lines them all up during one brief time in Cora’s life. He performs an experiment with history. Hypothesis: eugenics is less brutal than slavery. Conclusion: No, they are both brutal.

I tried this kind of literary experiment when I was in junior high. I wrote a short story in which I divided England into two counties, Rupertshire and Spratleyshire, and I gave them two different forms of government. I set them side by side and allowed a traveler to directly compare them. That’s all I remember about this story, which might be in a box somewhere.

The Underground Railroad will certainly stir your fury. The young escaped slave Cora did not take every opportunity for revenge that came to her. I found myself wishing she had tortured and slowly killed the slave catcher in Indiana, rather than leaving him alive and tied up. That is, Whitehead stirred my desire for revenge then confronted me with mercy. This literary theme will never grow old.

Colson Whitehead broke up the timeline of history in a way that is forbidden in most historical fiction: he altered the historical context. But he made this broken timeline into parallel segments and compared them, as in a scientific experiment.

Militant Trumpsters: How Much of It Is Hot Air?

Donald Trump and the militant Republicans have said lots of alarming things that, if they actually did them, would lead us toward a dark age from which we might never recover. But much of it might just be hot air. Here are some examples.

Anti-Muslim bias. Trump has been a very vocal attacker of Islam, in all of its forms, peaceful as well as violent. He promised to start a Muslim registry and to keep Muslims from even visiting the United States. But his pick for the United Nations, Nikki Haley, rejected this idea (see here).

Oil, oil, oil. Trump’s conservatives seem to think that America should scrap all of the progress it has made toward renewable energy production and rely totally on coal and oil. One might think that his choice for Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, would believe this also. But, although Rick Perry is one of the principal anti-environmental voices in the world today, he also promoted renewable energy (especially wind energy) when he was governor of Texas. Parts of Texas are devoted solely to oil (such as the Midland-Odessa region) while others (especially Sweetwater) have invested heavily in wind energy.

Federal land giveaway. The federal government (that is, you, the taxpayers) own millions of acres of wild lands, primarily in the west. Congressional Republicans are poised to hand over much of that land to state control (see here) which means that some states might sell it off to private interests. Trump will probably agree to this. But it appears that Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, says that there will be no selloff of federal lands. This might be a technicality—transferring land to state control is not a selloff—but it might be that Trump is just spouting rhetoric, knowing that his cabinet will not actually implement what he says.

Global warming. Trump has also famously said that global warming is a hoax—in fact, a hoax started by the Chinese. However, Ryan Zinke says that global warming is real and that he will believe what the scientists say about it (see here).

Torture. Trump campaigned on the idea that we should torture political detainees. Then, after the election, he reversed his opinion, no doubt in part due to the fact that his nominee for Secretary of Defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, made it clear that torture does not work (see here).

The most famous example of all is the huge wall that Trump said he would build along the border with Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it. Ha, ha, he was just joking. We all fell for it like suckers: his supporters lapped it up, his opponents such as myself got all bent out of shape.

What this means is that we have no idea what Trump will really do. Trump courted the idiot vote and got it. But when it comes to actually governing a country, he has already discovered that he cannot legally do many of the things he boasted that he would do.

Happy Columbus Day, Part 1.

In this set of two essays I explain why we should hate Christopher Columbus rather than revere him, and why the celebration of Columbus Day is an insult to all human decency.

First, about Columbus. I have used William Least Heat-Moon’s book Columbus in the Americas as the immediate source of this information, but have confirmed much of it elsewhere. Christopher Columbus made the first European contact with Native Americans on October 12, 1492. It was, from the very start, genocide. Here are the reasons.

Columbus’ deep motives. Christopher Columbus seemed fascinated by his first encounter with what he insisted all his life was India. It seemed like a Garden of Eden to him, and he wrote glowingly about the sweetness of the flowers, which is something that single-minded conquistadors do not generally do. He also admired the Tainos, the Natives who lived in the vicinity of his first landfall. He marveled at their friendliness and their willingness to give him gifts, which further enhanced the image of a Garden of Eden. This does not sound like the writings of a man whose immediate thought was to kill them. He also admired some of their technology, most notably hammocks and canoes (the latter word coming from the Taino language). Perhaps most significantly, the Tainos showed great empathy and energy when they helped Columbus and his men gather up the wreckage of the Santa Maria to use for constructing the first European city in the New World, La Navidad.

But, right from the start, Columbus did have the subjugation of the Tainos in mind. From his very first encounter with them, he wrote that they would make good servants for the Spaniards, and he speculated that fifty armed Spaniards could easily conquer them. Therefore he immediately began thinking of them as resources, not persons. And it was not merely the gold and servitude that they could provide to the Spaniards that fascinated Columbus. He noted glowingly that most of the women were entirely naked. Historians concede that, were it not for Tainos sharing their food, all the Spaniards would have starved. Columbus noted, “They love their neighbors as themselves,” but rather than reflecting on how much more Christian the Taino behavior was than the behavior of the Spaniards, he seems to have considered this evidence that they were ripe for easy enslavement.

And while Columbus himself apparently did not go around raping and pillaging, he was certainly complicit in these actions. One of his men was a childhood friend, Michele de Cuneo, whom Columbus allowed to capture a Native woman. Apparently she was Carib, rather than a compliant Taino, and she screamed and scratched when de Cuneo tried to rape her in his room. De Cuneo beat her with ropes until she complied. Once she complied, she might have thought that she could get more resources from de Cuneo by pleasing him, and, in de Cuneo’s words from a letter he wrote home, “She seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”

Was Columbus’ motivation to establish a colony for Spain? No, it could not have been. Even with his fourth and final voyage, there was no pre-planning for agriculture. A few colonists came, but the people were overwhelmingly men who wanted gold and slaves. The cities that Columbus and his men established were called “trading posts” precisely because of this objective. The entire motivation was rapine and plunder. Colonization came later, after the Natives were slaughtered and, for some tribes, sent into extinction.

Columbus’ actions. While Columbus seems to have made sincere efforts on his first voyage to create goodwill and cooperation with the Natives, his motivation seems to have entirely disappeared by his second voyage. He used war dogs to kill resistant Tainos, and captured as many Tainos as he could. He sent 500 Tainos to the Seville slave market under cramped fetid conditions that most people associate only with the African slave trade. He gave another 500 Tainos to his men for whatever use they desired to make of them. And he allowed about 500 to flee into the mountains.

And Columbus was extremely brutal in his punishments. A Native caught pilfering could have his ears cut off or be beheaded. But the most horrifying example of Columbus’ cruelty is the story I am about to relate. If you have a sensitive stomach, stop reading now. As a matter of fact, if you have a sensitive stomach, you have no business learning anything at all about the realities of history. You should just spend your time fantasizing about what a blessing the whites have been to the rest of the world.

Columbus required each Taino male over 13 years of age to bring in a hawk’s-bell volume of gold each three months. Those who failed to do so had one of their hands cut off.

Think about that. Columbus must have intended this as torture and terrorism. Cutting a man’s hand off will not make him better able to gather gold. You would have to be fucking stupid to believe that. Columbus was not stupid. He knew what he was doing. I can only conclude that Columbus, perhaps slightly less so than his men, got a sensual thrill out of torturing Natives.

The net result of Columbus’ direct and indirect actions was, according to his son Ferdinand, that a Spaniard could go anywhere on Hispaniola that he desired and take all the food and women he wanted, without fear of danger. And the effect on the population of Natives was predictable, not only because Spaniards killed them but because the natives killed themselves out of despair. The basic food of these Natives was cassava, which has to be processed to remove bitter poison. Many Natives drank the poison rather than to become slaves. Also, in one case on a later voyage, when Natives were locked into a slave hold on a ship, they found ropes and hung themselves, even though there was not enough headroom to do this: they had to hold up their knees while the ropes suffocated them. Here are the population figures for Natives on Hispaniola:

                        1492                300,000

                        1496                200,000

                        1508                60,000

                        1548                500

                        Before 1600    Extinct

Columbus’ binary classification. Columbus classified everyone into two categories: the Europeans, whom God was blessing, and the “Indians,” whom God was delivering into the hands of Europeans. He noted, but gave no importance to, the differences among tribes.

The main distinction Columbus saw right away was between Tainos and Caribs. The Caribs were cannibals who preyed upon the Tainos. The Caribs would capture Taino women and children. They would caponize the boys (cutting off their genitals) so that they would grow up tender. But they would impregnate the women in order to produce the ultimate Carib delicacy: roast baby. In at least one instance, Columbus rescued Tainos from Carib captivity. Once his men captured a naked Taino woman, but Columbus ordered her sent back (clothed) to her tribe as an act of goodwill. (The fact that the Caribs were evil people does not make their enslavement and eradication justified.) Native Americans had as much diversity as Europeans. But in the end Columbus, despite his initial admiration of the Tainos, treated all natives the same; it was Taino captives whom he sent to the Seville slave market.

Spain’s motives. Even though Columbus appeared to have a streak of decency, Spain did not. Ferdinand and Isabella barely gave Columbus enough resources to launch his first voyage, because they were skeptical of his prospects. But they richly endowed his second voyage with lots of ships and resources. The reason was that Columbus had proven to them that “India” was a promising source of gold and slaves. There appears to have been very few resources dedicated to starting up an agricultural economy and a self-sustaining Spanish colony. The Spanish cities, of which only Santo Domingo continues to exist, were meant as places for gathering slaves and gold. Had it been otherwise, the ships of the second voyage would have been provisioned differently. The main nonhuman animals on the ships were war dogs, which the Spaniards could unleash on Natives to kill them. Incidentally, the money to fund the second voyage came from resources taken from the recently-expelled Jews.

It didn’t take long for the Natives to resist. Before returning to Spain on his first voyage, Columbus established La Navidad. When he returned he found it had been destroyed. He discovered the reason for it: the Spaniards had raided Taino villages and stolen women as sexual slaves; each Spaniard had four or five sex slaves.

Another aspect of the Columbus story that is interesting to scientists is that Columbus used a method often called “cherry-picking” to prove that he had, indeed, reached Asia. He ignored all contrary evidence. And he grabbed at any shred of evidence that could be construed to prove he was in Asia. He assumed that one Taino place name was a variant of Mangi, a province in China. And when he heard of a tribe whose leader wore a white tunic, he assumed this man was a descendant of Prester John. But Columbus went beyond this. He forced all his men to sign a deposition stating that they were, in fact, in Asia; and the punishment for a man saying that they were not in Asia was that his tongue would be cut out. This was Columbus’ scientific method of determining truth.

Next entry: how conservatives sanitize and sanctify Columbus.

Untitled

Throughout history, emperors and dictatorial leaders have used violence and torture upon their foreign and domestic subjects. Homo sapiens has been the most violent and bloody species in the evolutionary history of the Earth. Far from limiting this tendency, religion has mostly made our human evil more potent. I do not mean that this is all that religion does; it does some good things too. But its principal fitness advantage in human evolutionary history has been to enhance the power of dominant people. That is, religion evolved primarily as a means of suppression. For our species, it is evil, since we know the difference between altruism and oppression, between love and hatred. A wolf is just a wolf but a violent man is evil.

Many of us grew up with the belief that the United States of America was different, that America was a force for good in the world. Of course, we should have known that this is not true. I should have known this because of what the United States government did to my Cherokee ancestors and to members of every other tribe of Native Americans. And we all should have known that America was not a good country because of government approval of slavery and later of oppression against black people.

Some of us dared to hope that America is not like that anymore. Although much oppression and police brutality remain, the government no longer kills Natives or enslaves blacks. But the recent release of the Senate report on brutality against detainees after September 11, 2001 must cause us to reconsider whether our government is a force of good. Our government’s response was not just to track down terrorists and bring them to justice, but also to grab Muslim men at random and torture them. A detainee is simply someone who has been thrown in prison, without regard to evidence of guilt.

CIA operatives, in some cases, did their best to degrade detainees by “interrogation techniques” that had absolutely no chance of yielding useful information. Torture is not just evil but is scientifically worthless. CIA operatives:

• Used rectal injections on detainees as a method of torture, with no medical justification.
• Subjected detainees to up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation.
• Stripped detainees naked, hooded them, and dragged them down the prison hallways.
• Forced detainees with broken feet or legs to stand in stressful positions.

And the list goes on. Now, suppose I were captured in a random sweep of white American men by a Muslim government and subjected to these tortures. I would confess to anything to get the pain to stop, since it would be clear that this would be the only way to stop the pain. I would confess to being a secret agent from Mars.

As if this news was not bad enough, Dick Cheney has gone on record as saying that he had no regrets about having the CIA do any of these things, and that he would do them again in a minute. He is proud that we torture people to force them to say what we want them to say. This is what the former Vice President wants the world to think about the United States.

Cheney proclaimed that we should not have been nice to the people who attacked us. But the people who actually attacked us on 9-11 were dead. And some of the detainees were guilty, and some were not; torture did not yield any useful information regarding which was which. It would be like terrorists grabbing random Americans and torturing them—which is, in fact, what they do, and something that, until now, we have pretended we did not do.

Okay, so we were not as bad as many other countries, such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And today we are not as bad as, let me think, North Korea. But that is not the point. We claim moral superiority, that we are a good nation fighting against bad ones. The fact that our government differs from evil governments in degree rather than quality is of little comfort to those of us who wish we could be proud to be Americans.

Not all Americans are bad, of course. Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. At least he has some respect in the world. But the world also knows the utter and pure hostility with which Republicans confront Mr. Obama. And there are millions of other good Americans, some of whom are reading these words. But what difference does it make? They hear what Mr. Obama says, and they hear what the CIA has done, and they believe the actions rather than the words. And for every Barack Obama saying peaceful things, there is a Dick Cheney proclaiming that America will do whatever it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants.

Having Dick Cheney be the face of America in the world right now proclaims one thing and one thing only: America is strong only because of its force and wealth. The moment that we falter, economically or militarily, we deserve no cooperation or mercy from the rest of the world, which we have disdained. Because of this, I am ashamed to be an American. I am not ashamed of good Americans, including some who are very rich but who spend their wealth to try to eradicate diseases such as malaria that afflict millions of poor people in the world. But the actions of my government cause me to hang my head in shame.

Islamic extremists claim, You call us barbaric? You call us evil? While this does not justify their continued acts of terrorism, it is perfectly clear why they hate us. And I can make no defense for the official actions of the United States of America. Of course we are not as evil as they are (e.g. shooting Malala Yousafzai in the head; she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize the same day that the report was released). But they are terrorists, and we are supposedly the nation of goodness and peace, so the mere fact that we are not as bad as they are means nothing for our image.

We are strong in the world because of our military power and our wealth. That is all. We cannot expect any respect from other countries, but only fear. They will be nice to us because they don’t want us doing something evil to them. We spend more money on military activities than all other countries combined, so it is clear that we can wipe the floor with anybody’s asses if they stand against us. We are the Babylon, the Roman Empire, of the modern world. And that is pretty much all there is to it.

Can you see why I cannot think of a title for this essay? What word or phrase could encompass the profound stain that permeates America’s image now?