I am in the process of reading Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire while the cases of the Jena 6 and Kenneth Foster are coming to the attention of some Americans. Berman’s book is engaging reading, considering his thesis suggests that the U.S. is “sinking into semidarkness.” It is a “general obituary,” Berman acknowledges, “with some personal observations thrown in.”  These observations, personal and anecdotal narratives, are intended, writes Berman, to deliver a liberating message in a “kind of slow-motion ‘aha!’ experience” for the reader.  I am only in the fourth chapter, but I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped reading to look up and say “aha!”. 

The personal narratives are appealing to me because such narratives force the reader to slow down the pace of reading in order to picture a scene and the characters within.  Most importantly, we can hear and see in the other’s narratives our own similar story.  In our minds, we connect the public with the private, sometimes one person/one story at a time. At the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paul D has decided to “put his story next” to Sethe’s story.  Putting our personal narratives next to others is what makes some of us human. 

Early in Dark Ages America, in fact, three pages in, I am nodding frantically, as I read “America is the ultimate anti-community.”  Before Berman recalls his story of living in Washington D.C. in an unfriendly condominium, where neighbors, day after day and year after year avoid speaking and even looking at one another, I see flashes of scene after scene in which I, too, recognize this state of “anti-community.” 

Many Americans, like America itself, Berman writes, are “running on empty.”  He observes Americans’ addiction to “death” witnessed in the relationship between the quality of life and the fast pace in which Americans live this life. Berman sees this “busyness” as a sprint on an “extremely destructive path,” to nowhere.  Citing a passage from Thomas Zengotita’s The Numbing of the American Mind, Berman argues that “people are addicted to busyness…The feeling of being busy is the feeling of being alive.”

Recently, we have acquired a lexicon of words to describe either who we are or what we are doing as people of this modern era.  The words empire, gentrification, commodification, terrorists, to name a few, are not nearly as disturbing as the word “busy.” It is what we tell each other when we need to establish our identity as something uniquely different from them or when we want to signal a warning similar to a pirates skull and bones flag.  Warning: stay away.  Don’t bother me!  I am busy.  Busy!  In recent years, I have heard this word out of the months of so many people on the phone or in email.  Please don’t stop by to say hello at a home or office! You can’t say hello before the word “BUSY” rolls toward you like a thundercloud.

The focus of this nation has become, with a vengeance, the acquisition of other people’s resources and material wealth.  Profit and more profit for corporations is the name of the game.  Many are running down that path at break speed to catch up and keep up and not be caught without all the stuff/gadgets technology has to offer.

 

The busyness of Black people in the U.S., however, is a little more troubling, considering we are already prone to stress, high blood pressure and heart attacks.  I used to feel inadequate because I, too, was not running down people with my busyness for the accumulation of all the tech-toys.  The busiest people are those with cars — and quite a few have cars.  Sometimes, I can’t figure out if they are actually at work or actually riding around in their cars all day.  Once, a woman asked me how did I get around. She could not imagine how I was able to manage life without a car.  I said I had lived in various cities in the U.S. and for a year, lived in two cities in Ethiopia! I managed.  There are others, too, who can’t imagine walking half a block, and yet, these same people point to their need to exercise, but they are too busy.  To not drive a car is a sign of inadequacy: every adult and sane person has a car! These folks advocate against the Iraq war for oil because, of course, they oppose war for oil.  They oppose the American Empire, but they must have their cars.

A car full of people will have one person on a cell phone, but it is hard to find a car full of people these days. Each car usually has one person and a couple of children or at best, two people, but that driver, if with children in the backseats, will have a cell phone in his or her hand.  Walk instead of ride and walkers and runners all have cell phones to their ears.  Everyone has a cell phone on the bus where there is no opting out of hearing at least three conversations at once. Cell phones, writes Berman, represent the “super-saturation” of the “public space” by privatization.  Most people, he writes, “treat public space as an extension of their living rooms or offices; that they are disturbing the private space of those around them barely crosses their minds.”  While the increasingly rudeness of young Black people is certainly disturbing, I have noted that the emphasis of this display of being occupied while riding the bus or walking is more about the object, that is, the cell phone I have in my possession, rather than the relationship I have with the person on the other end of line.  Folks on the bus have to know that we have a car, but it is in the shop! We talk about the work on our desk at the office, or shout out, repeatedly, commands to inattentive children or a series of expletives to friends — but all this activity is for the ears of fellow riders who will, in turn, see us as just like those folks outside the bus windows. 

We no longer read or consider reading a book; we are too busy.  Book reading is for folks with “leisure” time on their hands.  And consequently, we are in a state of semidarkness, with little if any knowledge about the state of the community or the country.  I fight against the guilt of being too available and not being “busy” enough for the busy people to consider me worthy of their time when they are not busy.  This is crazy indeed.  Resistance gave Black life meaning.  We, as Black people, can’t substitute the experience of resistance with the meaningless pursuit of Manifest Destiny. 

This busyness, for us, has become a competitive, individual enterprise in pursuit of the American Dream for some and individual or familial survival for others.  In other words, it is all about me or my family “getting over” and the hell with the community until someone places a noose under a tree.  Then we are all about the “Black community.”  Do we think other people don’t have eyes to see us running that path behind them? And how much do we contribute to the advancement of Verizon or U.S. Cellular agendum? We used to value the idea of productive work that contributed to the Black community, to its survival within the meat grinder that is American capitalism. 

A few years ago, in Ethiopia, an Ethiopian colleague and I had just gotten inside a car that was to take us somewhere.  He leaned forward and I told the driver something in Amharic, and from behind me, he said in English to me, “I realize for you, time is money.” I felt as if he had hit me in the stomach.  I was feeling sick and angry in my silence.  In my childhood, I had understood that everyone was busy with life.  I was busy being a child and then a teen.  Everyone, from the corner winos on, had things to accomplish each day, even if it was the acquisition of a bottle of cheap wine.  My Nigerian mentor from graduate school (in the 1990s) reminded me (and I was in my forties then) never to “let them see you work.”  In other words, never let them see you sweat.  “Look, do you see me carrying a bag full of books and papers?” He was a prolific writer/scholar and an avid reader.  “When you go home, read in the bathroom!” 

I started ducking this word “busy” and decided to remove it from my vocabulary because it was not something I could imagine my ancestors in the field saying at every opportunity — and yet, they were quite busy.  Masters and mistresses were at leisure. I imagine Malcolm X being busy, but I don’t think he told those around him that he was busy all the time.  We have acquired bad habits that, ironically, make us virtually invisible to ourselves and the world.

Berman’s Dark Ages enters this dialogue between the West, the U.S. in particular, and the “rest of us.”  As a “dichotomy” this “West” and “Rest” reflect “two profoundly different ways of being in the world, one characterized by no meaning, and the other characterized by ‘too much’ meaning.” A Palestinian friend, Berman recounts, regards “Americans as a species of robots,” and yet, at the same time, this friend finds herself “annoyed by her extended family, who expected to be constantly informed of the slightest thing she did or said.”  The friend felt “claustrophobic” around her family.  Cultures that tend to be “tribal” as opposed to secular, according to Berman, value “relationships,” while “individual achievements are secondary.”  One achieves meaning in their lives based on their relationships with others.

In contrast, the “social environment” is treated “impersonally” in a predominantly secular society.  Meaning in one’s live is based on accomplishments, particularly as these accomplishments make visible one’s material possessions, and these possessions, in turn, determine your identity and relationship with others.  As I read how Berman states and represents the West and the rest of us, I found that I could still identify with Berman’s Palestinian friend as I recalled visits many years ago to my family’s home and encountering the eyes and questions about my “change” and the “white man’s world” out there, beyond the neighborhood and community. “We” have something of this narrative of the “rest of us,” too! 

When I am in the company of whites and they speak of “we” Americans or the U.S. and the so-called war in Iraq, when they speak of U.S. aggression there and elsewhere, I am acutely aware that I am and yet I am not of the “we” Americans.  The U.S.’s foreign policy, as a result of its domestic policy of conquest, has brought them face to face with the Middle East.  I did not arrive on the Mayflower nor did I employ fire and gunpowder against indigenous Americans to clear space for the American Dream, the American adventure in the wilderness, or whatever you want to call it.  My ancestors were the Africans kidnapped from their homes by violent force, shipped like cargo across the seas, and forced to till the land for the further advancement of the American Dream.  Citing Michael Hunt’s observation, Berman notes that the “United States, both at home and abroad, always had a system of racial hierarchy in mind.”  He admits that most Americans have either forgotten this or simply ignore it.  Berman writes, "It is amazing to see contemporary American politicians, apparently ignorant of more than a century of lopsided foreign relations, angry and bewildered at resistance to, or attacks on, the United States when ‘we are so good,’ and ‘obviously’ have everybody’s best interests at heart.”

I have listened to this obliviousness to the history of American violence toward other cultures different from that collective defined as “white.” And before I can move with them across the seas to see others, I see, right here in America, Africans and their descendants forging communities of “tolerance,” “relationships,” “human connections” to use Berman’s words about what is in “abeyance” now.  “These intangibles of life, which in fact, he writes, “make it life,” were, as I recall, ironically, what many Blacks have a history of dying for — life.

When Berman asks, “is it purely coincidental…that most of our imperial ventures or wars of conquest, from Mexico in 1846-48 to Iraq in 2003 involved an ‘enemy’ who was nonwhite,” I know he is addressing white readers and trying to elicit that “aha!” experience from them.  Black Americans, on the other hand, have always recognized the truth about the America Dream.  Reading between the lines of this general American narrative about itself, Black people in the U.S., in the West, are losing this sense of community and stand lose it entirely, becoming the American species of robots the Palestinian friend has observed, following others on the path in a mad chase for the “Almighty dollar” or just free-falling silently into the “semidarkness.” 

The experience of a “conscious collective,” to use Durkheim’s phrase, a Black “conscious collective” fighting as a community for life is quickly being absorbed in order to accommodate the dialogue between the West, the U.S. and the rest of us, the Middle-East, specifically, Islam. America’s Manifest Destiny supposes Black Americans are dead, deader than the metaphorically dead white Americans of Berman’s narrative.  His narrative of dark ages in America is the collective Black narrative of the noose, symbolizing our actual deaths and attempts to silence our resistance. 

Whose obituary is being written?  America’s dream of Empire must die or all of us will die with it.  I want to believe in traces and nuances.  How would the story be different if told from the perspective of original storytellers, the 60 million and counting, as Toni Morrison recalls.  The obituary need not be written for all of us, for those of us whose ancestors suffered and sacrificed their lives for the ideas of freedom and democracy, community and life.  Black people in the U.S. are not an anti-community people! We can rise up around those homes still ravished by broken levees or that noose that appeared under that tree when Black children had to ask permission to sit on the earth! Then, look to our larger family, the community of other people of darker hue and bury the ideology of Manifest Destiny. 

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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