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the-final-straw-blog · 3 years

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Palestine and Challenging Settler Colonial Imaginaries

This week on the show, we’re airing a portion of our 2018 interview with filmmaker and activist Yousef Natsha about his film about his hometown, Hebron, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. We invite you to check out our full interview with him from March 25, 2018, linked in our show notes and we’re choosing to air this right now because of the flare up in violent evictions, home destruction and the assassination of around 100 Palestinian residents of Gaza by the “Israeli Defense Forces”. Podcast image by Yousef Natsha. [00:10:24]

Then, we’ll be sharing a panel from the 2021 UNC Queer Studies Conference called “No Blank Slates: A Discussion of Utopia, Queer Identity, and Settler Colonialism” featuring occasional Final Straw host, Scott Bransen alongside E. Ornelas and Kai Rajala. This audio first aired on Queercorps, on CKUT radio in Montreal. If you’d like to engage in this project, reach out to [email protected] [00:24:05]

Also, Sean Swain on aparthied [00:01:48]

No Blank Slates: A Discussion of Utopia, Queer Identity, and Settler Colonialism

Presenter(s)

Scott Branson, E Ornelas, Kai Rajala

Abstract

Under the neoliberal regime of multiculturalism, the settler colonial project has relied on the assimilation of certain subaltern communities into its project for the effective dispossession and control of indigenous lands. This discussion will present ideas from a book project we are collaborating on in order to invite conversation around the intersection and tension around ideas of liberation and forms of appropriation and oppression. Our main challenge for radical queers is to rethink the kinds of futures we try to include ourselves in, and how our liberatory work can subtly replay exclusion and erasure. How do neoliberal utopian gay politics perpetuate settler colonial erasure and genocide? How do politics that seek inclusion and representation--in other words assimilation--disavow the work by indigenous self-determination movements, which are also poised on the frontlines of planetary self-defense? The workshop will be divided up into short presentations by each writer, followed by a structured discussion facilitated by the presenters.

Description:

The utopian project that underwrote the Canadian/American settler colonial states that still exist today was eventually transmuted into a neoliberal utopian sense of identity. The entire concept of space and self that we inherit is imbued with utopian longing for a time and place that we can fully be ourselves. This kind of rhetoric is largely at play in mainstream identity-based movements, like gay rights. But this longing often works in favor of the regime of violence and dominance perpetrated by the modern nation state. We can see how the attempt at inclusive representation of queer cultures leads to assimilation and appropriation. What gets included in regimes of representation ends up mimicking the norms of straight/cisgender heteronormativity, in terms of class aspirations, behaviors, and family structures. This therefore contributes to systematic erasure of Black and Brown queer folks, who are still the most targeted “identities” for state violence and its civilian deputies. With images of diversity that appeal to bourgeois urban gays, businesses and governments can pinkwash their violence.

A radical queer politics that relies on unquestioned utopian and dystopian visions risks aligning itself with a settler colonial imaginary of terra nullius or “blank slate” space. On the one hand, dystopian and apocalyptic visions perpetuate the unquestioned assumption that a societal collapse is impending, as if the continual degradation of human and more-than-human communities has not already arrived. Particularly dangerous in this assumption is the kind of crisis rhetoric that fosters opportunities for settler colonial sentiments of insecurity and, in the face of this insecurity, assertions of belonging and sovereignty in land and lifeways. Furthermore, visions of radical utopias as-yet-to-be-realized (or, as-yet-to-be-colonized) discount the ongoing presence of Indigenous alternatives to the current settler colonial dystopian reality, and instead preserves a view of geographic and social space as blank and ready to be “improved” with a “new” model.

Here we have a problem of erasure of the oppressions and resistances that have been ongoing in different iterations, in favor of the blank space of the utopian frontier. We argue against these linear progression narratives of societal and environmental collapse which promise to bring about a future idealized world of rainbow-diverse identities. Instead, we propose ways for radical politics, particularly those espoused by non-Indigenous people, to disavow such settler colonial mindsets. There are a few ways to offer a glimpse into the lived realities—what we might still call utopian moments—that make up the non-alienated, revolutionary life: queer and indigenous histories of resistance, rituals and moment of community care and mutual aid, and science fiction revisions of the world. We argue that this other world does in fact exist—has existed and has not stopped existing—if only in the interstices or true moments of communing and inhabiting the land alongside friends and family.

This is not an argument in favor of utopia, but one that seeks to bypass the utopian/dystopian divide. The world we inhabit is clearly dystopian for most, and utopian for some, and in many estimations, constantly on the verge of ending. The disaster scenarios, repeating the puritanical eschatology that helped settle the colonies in America, perpetuates the history of erasure of ways of life that aren’t in fact gunning for that disaster. We still argue that the purpose of dreaming, of envisioning alternatives, is to make action possible today, through recognition of the power we do already hold. Our discussion will interrogate the settler-utopian impulses that get hidden within apparently liberatory movements, such as radical queers and strands of environmentalism, as well as the way these identities and politics are represented in narratives of liberation that rely on the same logic they claim to oppose.

Bios

E Ornelas (no pronouns or they/them) is a Feminist Studies PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies. As the descendant of a survivor of the Sherman Institute, a Native boarding school in Riverside, California—and therefore robbed of cultural, linguistic, and tribal identity—E’s research interests focus on the continued survivance and futurity of BIPOC communities, particularly through the use of literature. E's dissertation illuminates community-based, abolitionist-informed, alternative models of redress for gendered, racialized, and colonial violence by analyzing Black and Indigenous speculative fiction. When not on campus, E can be found reading feminist sci-fi, making music, baking vegan sweets, and walking their dog. [00:45:06]

Kai Rajala (pronounced RYE-ah-la) is a queer, nonbinary, white-settler of Finnish and mixed European descent. They are a writer, and an anarchist anti-academic working and living on the unceded territories of the Kanien'kehá:ka peoples on the island colonially referred to as Montréal, and known otherwise as Tiohtià:ke. They are currently pursuing studies as an independent researcher and are interested in sites outside of the university where knowledge production occurs. You can find Kai on twitter at @anarcho_thembo or on instagram at @they4pay. [00:57:28]

Scott Branson is queer trans Jewish anarchist who teaches, writes, translates, and does other things in Western so-called North Carolina. Their translation of Jacques Lesage De la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison is coming out with AK Press this summer. Their translation of Guy Hocquenghem’s second book, Gay Liberation After May 68, is due out next year with Duke University Press. They edited a volume of abolitionist queer writings based on two iterations of the UNC Asheville queer studies conference, due out with PM Press next year. They are currently working on a book on daily anarchism for Pluto Press and researching a book on the institutionalization of queerness in the academy. They also make books of poems and artwork. You can find Scott on Instagram @scottbransonblurredwords or check out sjbranson.com for more of their work or on twitter at @sjbranson1. [00:30:41]

. ... . ..

Featured tracks:

Dabkeh Melody by Mecky from The Combination Soundtrack

Born Here by DAM from The Rough Guide To Arabic Revolution [00:20:21]

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

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battleforgodstruth · 1 year

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Preparations for Sufferings - Puritan John Flavel / Full Christian Audio Book

00:00:00 00 Epistle to the Reader 00:03:45 01 Wherein the text is opened and the doctrine propounded. 00:10:04 02 Shews, that although God takes no delight in afflicting his people, yet he sometimes exposeth them to great and grievous sufferings; with a brief about why, and how he calls them thereunto. 00:24:07 03 Shews that it is usual with God to premonish his people of approaching trials…

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#Audio Books #Christian #christian audio books #christian audiobooks #Christianity #God #Jesus Christ #pastor #preacher #Presbyterian #presbyterian authors #presbyterian books #presbyterian ministers #Puritan audio book #Puritan audio books #reformed christian audiobooks

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revlyncox · 5 years

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Origin Stories

Looking for truth in foundational narratives on the eve of Indigenous Peoples Day. This sermon was delivered to the UU Church of Silver Spring on October 13, 2019.

Has anyone seen the movie, Captain Marvel? You know I did. The nostalgia for the music of the mid-1990’s alone was enough to get me in the door. I don’t want to spoil it for those who are waiting for a quiet evening to watch it at home, so I’ll try to speak in general terms.

The movie opens with an interstellar super soldier named Vers, who is having trouble with memory, but nevertheless goes out on a mission with her team, part of the Kree empire. Throughout the movie, she learns more about where she comes from, and more about the origins of the conflict with the people she thought were her enemies. Once she has come around to a different understanding of who her people are, the personal qualities she has been criticized for are reframed, and she can draw from them as strengths. This revised worldview moves her to an entirely different sense of her mission in life, as well as a different sense of connecting and belonging.

The paradigm shift that the main character goes through in Captain Marvel reminds me of the paradigm shift that some within U.S. culture could work toward when it comes to observing Indigenous Peoples Day tomorrow. The holiday some still know as Columbus Day told one story of the origins of the United States of America, yet that version of the story is infused with myths and half-truths, and depends on the erasure of the historical and contemporary perspectives of Native Americans, among other groups of people.

The story of this country or this continent is not a single story, and yet I hope we can use the opportunity of this day to add more truth to our understanding of those stories, our understanding of who we are as the residents of this place. To the extent that we can understand ourselves as a people, or as a coalition of peoples, accurate origin stories help us to live into becoming the people we aspire to be. Knowing truly where we have come from as a country will help us to connect with those who share a home or an identity. We can hope that origin stories rooted in honesty will help us heal some of the harms of the past, or at least help us avoid continuing to make the same mistakes.

In her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz suggests that it is the very foundation of how we learn, teach, and think of our history that must be transformed. She writes:

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.

Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story.

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to say:

Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.

Incidentally, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is this year’s UUA Common Read. A discussion guide is due out later this month for congregations that would like to study it in book groups and other programs. It’s available as an audio book.

The story of European colonization of the place we now call the United States has been framed in one certain way. The way we tell that story has been reinforced with legislation, with racist criteria in academia and in publishing, and with commercialization of holiday traditions. The values we are supposed to gain from the history of 1492 onward is that hard work and commitment to freedom will be rewarded with an endless upward march of progress.

When we look more broadly, that progress doesn’t materialize across the board. The commitment to liberty never applied to everyone, despite what the textbooks have been trying to teach; expansion, prosperity, and freedom to roam for people of European descent came at the expense of the lives and liberty of Indigenous people and enslaved people and their descendants, among others. For those of us who are white, even if we and our direct family ancestors never personally abused or exploited anyone, doors were opened to us and closed to others because of this history of settler-colonialism. To repeat from last week, some are guilty, all of us are responsible for making a change. I am curious to find out how we could come into a new spirit and practice of values if we stop propping up a false narrative about our national origins.

To bring it a little closer to home, let me go back to the second half of that last quote from Dunbar-Ortiz:

In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.

With the Puritans involved, now we’re getting closer to the origin stories of our faith movement. In the early 20th century, the history of Unitarianism began to be described as a grand sweep of development propelled by devotion to the values of freedom, reason, and tolerance. Following consolidation in 1961 for the United States incarnations of Universalism and Unitarianism, this rubric of freedom, reason, and tolerance was infused into nostalgia looking back on both sides of our history.

This idea that the Pilgrims were an advance team into this continent, divinely ordained to bring religious freedom to these shores, fits right into the Unitarian narrative of freedom, reason, and tolerance. Unitarians in America in the 1800s were direct descendants of Puritans, in church organization and often in family lineage. In telling the story of the Puritans, the themes of violence, stealing, and broken treaties that characterized their presence on this side of the ocean are de-emphasized. Through this silence, the theft of land and liberty is tacitly approved. Crimes against Indigenous people are not supposed to matter if they are part of the project of allowing people of European descent to worship in a way that allows “complete mental freedom in religion.” (This quote is from Earl Morse Wilbur, the early 20th century scholar who is credited with coining freedom, reason, and tolerance as a framework for Unitarian history.)

When we put together the pieces, uncover the horrors that have been papered over, and review the whole history of Unitarianism and Universalism in America, we come to understand that the destructive path of settler-colonialism is tangled into the roots of our faith. Knowing that, we can go back and re-evaluate what our central values really mean to us, and try to imagine how to actually live them in a way that Unitarians and Universalists of the past may have missed.

For many of us, particularly those of us who are white, reconciling the whole story of the United States versus the version of history we were taught is a spiritual and emotional challenge, but one that I believe we are up to. It is a reckoning that I believe we must engage with if we are to be authentic in our faith. When we come to terms with the understanding that this country has not upheld the values we said it did, we may wonder how to move forward. What do we do when the country whose values we hold dear has not yet existed? How do we become the people we want to become when we realize the foundations we build on are not what they were proclaimed to be? Communities that have always been in the margins have wisdom here, if we are willing to listen and to center their experience.

In her article for The 1619 Project for the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on the American flag that her father flew in front of their home, and how she felt about that flag growing up as an African-American in a country brimming with racism. She writes:

Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter …

My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us ….

Toward the end of the article, she reflects:

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good ….

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did … For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

What I hear in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ article is affirmation that we do not need to be deluded in order to work toward the future of democracy. We can work toward the idea of the common good, a society that includes and cares for all, a democracy where the most vulnerable have a seat at the table of power. A nation of truth and justice and opportunity is not yet who we are; we can get closer than we are now.

On the other hand, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes: Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.

We might not get to a perfect story arc with a satisfying resolution. If what we’re seeking is redemption for the atrocities of the founders of the United States, that may not happen. If we stop focusing on the reputation or the feelings of people who have historically had power, and focus instead on being authentic and justice-oriented, we may begin to open up space for something better than what has come before.

Life and history are never as neat and tidy as they are in the movies. We don’t always see the hero prevail. Sometimes we don’t even have a hero. Yet sometimes there are deeper truths, even if the story did not happen exactly that way. In Captain Marvel, it caused a crisis of faith and identity for the main character to learn hidden origin stories, yet bringing together the multiple truths led to finding new strengths. Studying actual history that is outside the approved narrative can change lives and societies. It won’t be comfortable for some, it won’t be easy for anyone. Moving into a future of justice and authenticity will require courage and commitment. May we awaken to the possibilities of truth.

So be it. Blessed be. Amen.

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justincaseitmatters · 5 years

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Contagious Vacations: Sarah Vowell on Hawaii’s History

Rewind from KCActive.com by Dan Lybarger

In her books, audio essays (for public radio’s This American Life ) and speeches, Sarah Vowell may be the only person on earth who can describe her vacations or recall historical events without making listeners sleepy.

That’s probably because not many vacationers frame their tales as entertainingly as she can. Vowell uses her journeys to explain how our country has developed, and she resurrects the fears, excitement and intrigue that our ancestors faced.

In her latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, she explains how the past and present meet in Hawaii. When she comes to Unity Temple on The Plaza, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri at 7 p.m. on Sun., April 3 (tickets are available at Rainy Day Books), don’t be surprised if she makes you want to visit the same places she’s been or dig through the same musty documents she’s read.

Contacted by phone in San Francisco before her Kansas City appearance, Vowell explains, “Doing a reading is different from writing a book. You have to be cognizant that people are sitting there wanting to go home. That’s what most audiences are, people who want to go home. They have laundry to do, dinner reservations, whatever.

“Because I’m an audience member, I want to go home myself. There are certain sections of the book that are better out loud, things that are perhaps a little funnier that merely informational.”

A Nephew’s Help

It probably doesn’t hurt that she often joins her fraternal twin sister Amy and her outspoken young nephew Owen on her trips. The lad often says things during the journeys that wind up in his aunt’s books and essays.

She recalls, “It wasn’t really an intentional thing. I don’t know how to drive, so his mother has always been kind enough to come with me on some of my reporting trips to drive me around to places that have less than adequate public transportation. When Owen was born, you know how kids need their mothers, so he would just come along.

“When he first started talking, he would say a lot of quotable things. Some of it was the joy of childhood malapropisms. I needed his mom to drive me to Ohio when I was writing about assassinated presidents (in Assassination Vacation) and going to the cemetery where President Garfield is buried. After he got home from that trip, he told his mother he wanted to go to the cemetery. He called it, ‘a Halloween Park.’ He captures the weird appeal of cemeteries because they are sort of park-like.”

Even as he matures, Owen remains a valuable collaborator. “Sometimes he brings me down to earth because I get so sucked into what I’m researching.”

When she recalled to him how whaling ships frequently stopped by Honolulu harbor, the youngster was horrified by the slaughter of the animals and didn’t share his aunt’s obsession with Moby Dick. “He couldn’t stop being offended by the entire thing. So when I told him to lighten up because pretty soon that petroleum would be discovered in Pennsylvania and then the whole world would go ape for fossil fuel, he just said, ‘Good.’

“He didn’t know anything about whaling, which means to me that he didn’t really read the Moby Dick popup book I game him,” she adds.

No Dry Text

In all of her work, Vowell attempts to make recalling the past in a more visceral manner than history teachers did in school. Vowell is a huge fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, and her own tales have much of the same intrigue.

In The Wordy Shipmates, she expertly recalls how Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, left Massachusetts in order to escape deportation for his radical beliefs (he felt church and state should be separated because the latter would corrupt the former). He wound up receiving an urgent but secret warning.

“He was (Williams’) friend. When the official militia wants to stick him on a boat and send him back to England, (Williams) wasn’t at home because someone had warned him. It was later revealed that that someone was (John) Winthrop (the Massachusetts governor and the leader of that militia). I would do that for a friend, even one I disagreed with. It made them seem less far away or a Puritan cartoon. That made them seem like they were two guys who were buddies.”

Similarly, in recounting how June Carter Cash came to co-write her husband Johnny Cash’s hit song “Ring of Fire,” she makes listeners feel both their forbidden desire (both were married to others at the time) and their very real fear of facing fire and brimstone. Reese Witherspoon may have won an Oscar for playing June in the movie Walk the Line, but Vowell’s account of their relationship is far more powerful than the film. In case you doubt me on this, got to the This American Life site to hear for yourself at the 47:30 mark.

Vowell can also make seemingly staid subject matter hysterically funny. Her high-pitched nasal voice and her droll, deadpan delivery make anything she says sound more amusing. Even in print, she’s a riot. In Assassination Vacation, she attends the musical 1776 in the same theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. While liking the performance, laments, “Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food.”

In Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell recalls how 19th century Hawaii went from being an isolated kingdom to part of the United States. She recalls how both whalers and New England missionaries fought over the destiny of the islands. Naturally, she finds an engaging way to retell the feud. In describing how a French voyage to the islands included collecting data on social diseases spread by previous European sailors, she muses, “Typical — the only thing more European than spreading VD is documenting it.”

Toward the end of the monarchy, one almost begins to side with the colonists because King Kalakaua was paying for his massive gambling debts with the public treasury. It’s no wonder the kingdom fell two years after he died in 1891.

Before you start to celebrate his demise, Vowell cautions that Kalahaua also preserved important aspects of Hawaiian culture like hula dancing which could have been lost because missionaries disapproved of them. She adds, “Yes, he was corrupt and inept. But his contemporary over here, President Grant, happened to be presiding over one of the most corrupt administrations in our history. It was ‘The Gilded Age.’ There’s this golden sheen over an ugly face.”

Forced Diversity

Our current president, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii, and his multi-ethnic ancestry is actually typical of the region. With the 19th century rise of sugar plantations, the owners recruited from around the globe to find the multitudes needed to grow the labor-intensive crop. According to Vowell, it wasn’t political correctness that made them recruit workers from Japan, the Philippines and other remote locales.

“The reasons the plantation owners wanted all these different kinds of people were that they intentionally built their own little Towers of Babel in the Pacific because they didn’t want their workers to be able to talk to one another because they didn’t want their workers to organize against their overlords.”

A Woman of Many Faces

If you’ve never heard of Vowell or her books, there’s still a good chance you’ve either heard or seen her. She’s been on dozens of talk shows and has appeared on the TV show Bored to Death and in the movie Please Give. In that film, Catherine Keener can be spotted reading The Wordy Shipmates, and then Vowell can be spotted as an indifferent customer in Keener’s shop.

Most people, however, know her as the voice of the invisible Violet Parr in the Pixar classic The Incredibles. Vowell says that she prefers to be typing her books instead of appearing on camera, but says her readings and acting career help her find new readers for her unusual but rewarding texts.

“Being a salesman enables me to keep writing the little books I do. Part of the reason I can write these books that sound like ones that nobody would want to read,” says Vowell. “I went to graduate school and wrote a graduate thesis, and I think one guy, the one who was grading it, read it. I couldn’t contain my rage that this was something only one person would read. It seemed like such a waste to me. Before I’m a writer, I’m a reader. A book doesn’t exist unless someone’s reading it.”

#sarah vowell

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thereturnofthedirtyblog · 5 years

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Paranormal reality show blames Witch community for hauntings

By Heather Greene | January 7, 2018

WOLF CREEK, Ore. — The paranormal reality show Ghost Adventures (2008- ) blamed a local Witch community for the hauntings being reported in a Oregon ghost town. Airing Sept. 23, the episode “Golden Ghost Town” finds the Ghost Adventures crew in an old mining town in southwestern Oregon. The old town, which is currently in a state park and being restored, is well-known for its hauntings, which the show labels as being demonic and “unleashed” by local Witches.

As is explained in the show and by various websites, Golden, Oregon was once a mining town established by Chinese immigrants. The promise of gold attracted William Ruble, who eventually purchased much of the land and established the town with the post office opening in 1896. Ruble was reportedly very religious and kept Golden dry.

However, the town only lasted until1920, when the post office officially closed. The area was abandoned, leaving only dilapidated structures and, apparently, some ghosts.

When the September episode of Ghost Adventures opens, the crew, made up of Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Billy Tolley and Jay Wasley, is driving into the abandoned town. One of them feels an immediate sensation, saying his stomach hurts. Later, several of the interviewees say the same thing.

Bagans then interviews local religious official Archbishop Cloud, who claims that he heard rumors of “occult activity” taking place in the church after it was abandoned. This activity, as he explains, has “desecrated” the sacred space. This type of religion-based narrative is not unique to this show or to paranormal reality stories. In fact, such a narrative structure provides the baseline for a large percentage of ghost-related fictional works. In these stories, a sacred space of some sort, as typically-defined by Catholic theology, is violated, misused, or abandoned, consequently attracting evil. In other cases, it is only the sacred that can save.

However, in this particular show, the ghost adventure goes so far as to blame modern Witches for the haunting, rather than only dead ones from some long ago past.

After experiencing an encounter at night in the abandoned Golden church, the archbishop and Bagans discuss “what might be feeding the malevolence that permeates the entire area.” Bagans asks Cloud, “Have you ever heard about this sanctuary out here in the woods somewhere that is very close to this? They do these rituals; I know it’s Witchcraft. It said Pagan rituals. Have you heard about this group?”

Cloud answers he has and that the Witches are all over, and that the ritual practices are “steeped in Witchcraft,” and that he is sure that “they are conjuring demons.” Another interviewee later confirms that by saying that she “knows” it is caused by the local Witches.

During the discussion between Cloud and Bagans, there are flashes of various images of people at night in the woods obscured by branches and trees. The entire sequence, which includes hanging stick figures and dramatic sound, is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project (1999).

“Could the unusual number of violent acts in this area be caused by the dark entities conjured by this group of Witches?” asks the narrator.

Interestingly enough, there actually is a Witch camp not far from Golden. Bagans is right; the area does have modern Witches performing modern Pagan rituals.

It is Free Cascadia Witchcamp, one of Reclaiming’s annual retreats. Last year, the week-long event happened in late June, quite possibly at the same time the show was being filmed. However, that has not yet been confirmed.

During the show, Bagans claims that he attempted to interview and meet the 100-plus people at this Witch camp, adding that his request was denied. They are a “very secretive group,” he explain, “Which raises the question what are they doing? What are they conjuring?” It also has not yet been confirmed whether he actually did reach out to anyone from Reclaiming, or any modern Pagans in the region.

Like many paranormal stories, the entire Ghost Adventures episode feeds off of the theme that the Witch activity is feeding whatever was once conjured back when the church first shut down. The absence of the protection of the church, so to speak, leaves a void for evil, as the story goes.

The show concludes that the hauntings are mainly due to these “man-made” conjurings, both old and new, and they have affected the region’s animals and have enchanted the forest.

While elements of Witchcraft are commonly recalled in paranormal reality stories, this one points very directly to modern Witchcraft practice in an accusatory manner, and has Pagans, who regularly enjoy such shows, deeply concerned.

Peter Wize told TWH, “I have been an avid watcher of Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures for some time. In one of their recent seasons I have noticed an increasing level of anti-Wiccan /Pagan bias on the show.” Wize found the episode “offensive and openly hateful toward Wiccan, Pagan and Heathen people.”

“I have also noticed that in recent months the Travel Channel’s other ghost hunting show Dead Files has also had a radical traditional Catholic influence to it as well,” Wize adds. “The RTC Christian sect has had a history of paranormal investigation going back to Elizabeth and Ed Warren of ghost hunting fame who called themselves ‘religious demonologists’. Needless to say they take a dime view of witches and occultism in general.”

As Wize notes, the Warrens were famous or infamous for their religion-based paranormal research. Their stories have inspired many fiction films, such as The Conjuring (2013), Annabelle (2017), and perhaps the most famous, Amityville Horror (1979). The concept of the paranormal in such stories pits Christianity, as the safe and sacred, against the occult, as the evil and the ruin of humanity. This is an age-old duality of good versus evil, noted by other Pagans who showed concern.

Like Wize, Yaya Nsasi Vence Guerra is a fan of paranormal reality shows. She explains that, as a medium, she enjoys watching them and critiquing them. “They are entertaining,” she says.

However, Nsasi also recognizes the problem. In an email interview with TWH, she wrote, “Rather than educate, many of these paranormal shows prey on this nation’s puritanical and traditional views of religion. They demonize that which is considered ‘other.’ They give any practice that is non-Abrahamic as ‘occultism.‘”

Along with being a medium, Nsasi is a Yaya Nganga in Palo Mayombe, and a devotee of Santa Muerte. She says, “Many religious denominations view the occult as being anything supernatural or paranormal which is not achieved by or through the god of the Bible, and is therefore considered the work of an opposing and malevolent entity. This is how we then see all paranormal activity connected to demons. Altars are portrayed as gateways to Hell or other dimensions. It gets tiresome.”

“Ghost Adventures is sensationalistic and is constantly naming Satantic practices as the reason house have demon entities,” Nsasi continues.

“This is not to say that there aren’t demons. However, it doesn’t take into account that some entities are not demonic. Some entities are just plain dark, lower-level entities that are operating on low frequencies. There isn’t an exploration of the metaphysical components of the given aspects of all entities; frequencies, how frequencies work, elevated spirits versus lower spirits. It’s always Satan and demons.”

However, according to a 2016 TWH interview with Paranormal Lockdown stars Nick Groff and Katrina Weidman, the reason is not always one of disrespect.

In that interview, both Groff, who once himself starred on Ghost Adventures, and Weidman said that they are not personally religious at all, and that they are very aware of the modern Witchcraft community. However, they both noted that the language of paranormal research is steeped in Catholic theology. It is just what is used, for better or worse.

When asked if they ever consulted or worked with Witches or Wiccans on their show, they said that they had, and welcomed the opportunity. One such person that they cited was author, medium, psychic, and television personality Michelle Belanger.

Belanger is best known in the paranormal world for her work on A&E’s Paranormal State, but she is also considered an expert on paranormal research and the occult in general. One of her books dives into the intersection between occult and the paranormal disciplines. That book, Ghost Hunter’s Guide to the Occult,was published in 2013.

The book’s advertising blurb reads, “How do you tell the difference between the symbol for the Order of the Eastern Star and a pentagram? What does a Wiccan mean when she says she practices Witchcraft? Paranormal State’s Michelle Belanger explores the complex and sometimes confusing realm of the occult, outlining the history of the Western tradition, defining key terms, and exploring the meaning of a variety of icons and symbols.”

The need for such an explanatory text appears to be important considering Groff and Weidman’s statements concerning the language used in paranormal research, which has lead to or has supported the negative, or at the very least confused, portrayals of occult practices, including Witchcraft.

Outside of the religious aspects of the paranormal shows, Nsasi also notes her concern over the treatment of the dead. She says, “Sometimes it gets frustrating because they don’t respect the spiritual realm.”

“Many of the ghost hunters have this hubris about them,” she goes on to say. “They are the living; they have audio recording devices, ghost meter sensors, electromagnetic field radiation equipment, digital spirit voice detectors and, what not. Here, they are all powerful mortals. When the truth is, that these spirits are more powerful than we are and our alliance with them can create beautiful and wonderful things.”

Despite these concerns, many Pagans join the general viewership in being fascinated with ghost hunting and the paranormal. Many of those that we spoke to said that they enjoyed seeing the reality of spirits recognized in the mainstream media.

Alpandia, a Strega living in South Florida who likes going to haunted places herself, says that she enjoys the stories. “It’s another connection to a time past and people who lived before. And seeing the look on the face of the investigators when they are in the moment and have what they feel is a genuine interaction is always fun.”

Emrys, a Witch in Pennsylvania, agreed. She said, “I enjoy the historical and biographical aspects of these shows. They tend to share stories of everyday people you wouldn’t learn about in regular history classes.”

In a 2017 TWH interview, paranormal researcher Brian Laythe did say, however, that “not a single T.V. show […] practices anything close to a reliable scientific method for verifying paranormal claims. Producers want ratings and excitement, not valid science. Thus, most (if not all) shows promote shoddy practice and their own paranormal perspective. Not anything that would come close to science.”

While that may be the case, paranormal reality shows, such as Ghost Adventures, are undoubtedly popular and have been since the early days of television. There is a basic human fascination with this type of storytelling experience whether it is accurate science or not, from the fictional horror films or television serials, to the reality-based shows, or to the lived experience of legend-tripping fun.

Nsasi said, “At the heart of this interest in paranormal shows is the search and/or need to find proof that life isn’t random or prescribed (depending on the spiritual/non-spiritual path of a person). Also that we have less control over things than we thought we did. Also, it adds credibility to the stories we all grew up with about things that go bump in the night. [They] are an actual intersection between science and ‘spirituality.'”

Laythe, who wants to see more occult and magical studies used within actual paranormal research, said, “A scientist is a scientist. We respect all religions, practices, and faiths. Most people don’t separate phenomena (what physically occurred) from the interpretation (whether Christian, Pagan, or otherwise). Any legitimate parapsychologist should be able to separate the two. In other words, something floating is something floating. Whether it was [the Abrahamic] god, the devil, an angel, or Odin is a function of peoples[sic] interpretation of the event.”

In that light, the general fascination with what is termed “the paranormal” is not really much different than the enduring fascination with the occult. The two have more in common than they do different.

Credit: @ourxrayspecs

Link: https://wildhunt.org/2018/01/paranormal-reality-show-blames-witch-community-for-hauntings.html

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elisaenglish · 5 years

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Words Fail Me

In a recording for the BBC on 29th April 1937, this is how Virginia Woolf began an episode of the series ‘Words Fail Me’, with a talk called ‘Craftsmanship’. Only 8 minutes of audio now exist, and it is believed to be the only surviving recording of one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century. The text was published as an essay in “The Death of the Moth and Other Essays”. Listen to the recording on the BBC website, or read the transcript of the audio below.

“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.

The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence.

Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas”. To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least 100 professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote 400 years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticised, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan?

Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order.

But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different.

They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society.

Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.

Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light… That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no – nothing of that sort is going to happen tonight. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!””

Source: bbc.co.uk (9th July 2014)

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 6 years

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As New York rapidly approaches the Revolutionary period, political life becomes a confusing whirlwind of populist factionalism.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 36: What About Livingston?

Last time, we looked at two periods of factionalism in colonial New York, the merchant-landowner rivalry of the 1710s and ‘20s, and the Morris-Cosby dispute of the 1730s. During these decades the various elite factions within the colony were slowly learning how to appeal to popular opinion, as a weapon in their fights against each other.

Today, we’re going to talk about the final few decades of New York’s colonial history, from the 1740s to the 1760s. Once again, there will be two separate rounds of factionalism. The first will be like the Morris-Cosby dispute, a battle between elites which goes public. The second round will be a confusing whirlpool of different interest groups aligning and dealigning with each other as New York goes through increasingly rapid changes in the run up to the American Revolution.

But first, a few words on how New York has changed over the last several decades, just to put things in perspective.

The population had grown from 19,000 in 1700 to 80,000 in 1750, though plenty of other colonies were still bigger.

The Dutch domination of Albany was declining sharply, thanks in part to the influx of men to fight in the wars with Quebec. According to the historian Michael Kammen, “One measurable result was that the proportion of voters with Dutch surnames in Albany County declined from 82 percent in 1720 to 57 percent in 1763.” So the old Dutch-English split was still there, but becoming less important with each passing decade.

Literacy was growing, and the colony was becoming more cultured. The first college in New York, which would become Columbia University, was chartered in 1754, a full 118 years after Harvard in Massachusetts. Print culture was starting to develop as well. The first public library was opened in 1754 and an increasing number of books were published within the colony. And twenty two different newspapers were printed in New York during the colonial era, almost all in New York City. These were mostly weekly newspapers, with just a few pages per edition. But they were widely read.

And the press paid an increasing amount of attention to politics as time went on. According to Kammen, during the 1750 election there were 40 political titles published. During the 1761 election, 59 titles. And in 1769, 135 titles.

So, just like how New England was becoming less Puritan over time, I think that New York was becoming less mercantile. It was still very focused on trade, but the other aspects of civilization were being brought in as well.

So that’s New York in general, but let’s get into the narrative for this episode. To begin with, I need to introduce the leader of one of the two factions that are about to form, James DeLancey.

DeLancey, born in 1703, was the son of Stephen DeLancey, founder of one of the leading merchant families in New York. As a young man he studied law in England and come back to America to work as a lawyer there. Thanks to his family’s connections, he was made a member of the council at age 26, and a member of the supreme court soon afterwards.

Now, you’ll remember from last episode that Governor Cosby got into a fight with Lewis Morris, the chief justice of the supreme court, and he had Morris removed from the court altogether. Well, that was good news for DeLancey. When Morris was fired, DeLancey was promoted to be chief justice at age just 30, an office he’d hold for the next 27 years.

So DeLancey was already in a great position for such a young man. But he wasn’t content to merely hold one of the most powerful posts in the colony. He was also determined to build up a network of supporters, and with the help of his family he did just that. The DeLanceys became one of the most powerful families in the colony, and his father and two of his brothers all served as Assemblymen at various periods. A bit like Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts, I suppose.

And on top of all that, DeLancey was also very well connected in London. He and his sister had both married into very prominent English families plus he had economic and personal ties with other important Englishmen. In fact, DeLancey was so well-positioned that he was often thought to be more powerful than the governors were.

But although he was accumulating all this power, he wasn’t using it to oppose the government. Instead, the best path for him was to support the governors, since that was the way to get even more power. So when a new governor, George Clinton, arrived in 1743, he received a warm welcome from DeLancey, who promised to use his network of supporters to back Clinton. In return, Clinton appointed several of DeLancey’s friends to the Council, which increased his influence even further. DeLancey became Clinton’s chief advisor.

(Governor Clinton, by the way had served as an officer in the navy for the last 35 years and he’d also been governor of Newfoundland for a time.)

But although DeLancey and Clinton started off as close allies, within just a few years, the two had a serious falling out, probably thanks to the start of King George’s War. Now, no one in New York was looking forward to another war, especially considering how the last wars had been ruinously expensive disasters. So none of the New Yorkers were looking to prosecute the war with any vigor. They wanted minimal involvement.

Governor Clinton, on the other hand, since he represented British interests, was duty bound to push the fight as hard as he could, to goad the colonists into supporting the war even against their will. But almost none of the local politicians wanted to back him on this, including DeLancey. They were all hemming and hawing, hoping to avoid publicly supporting an unwanted war.

And so, after DeLancey declined to attend an important conference with the Iroquois about the war effort, Clinton replaced him as chief advisor with another man who might actually help him fight the war.

That other man was named Cadwallader Colden. Colden had been born in Scotland, and he studied medicine there before setting off for America. In America, he did well for himself, becoming a scientist of some note, and corresponding with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Like many scientists back then, he was also active in political life. In fact, Franklin had encouraged him to remain involved in politics, and not just retreat to his study to conduct his research in private.

But he had a reputation as rigid and pugnacious, and he had managed to offend many prominent men in the colony. Normally that might be a problem, but I suppose in this case it was an advantage, since Colden didn’t have much to lose by helping the governor do unpopular things. He was already used to picking fights, so this was no different.

But the point is, DeLancey was out and Colden was in. However, no matter which advisors he had, Governor Clinton’s popularity was bound to decrease. So an opposition began to form, and naturally James DeLancey stepped in as leader. It was an obvious choice for him: of course you should oppose the governor who had spurned you and who was now leading an unpopular and unsuccessful war effort. It was all upside. DeLancey took his network of supporters and used them to assemble a broader coalition of different groups opposed to the war. Albany merchants, farmers worried about economic disruption, and so on.

But actually, King George’s War ended in just a few years, when the factionalism was only getting started. So at first, Governor Clinton wasn’t too worried. He figured that with the end of the war he could easily win the colony back to his side. He started by removing supporters of DeLancey from the upper house and replacing them with his own men. That was simple enough, but the lower house was a harder nut to crack. The Assembly was thoroughly controlled by DeLancey’s faction. In order to govern effectively, he was going to have to fight for control of the Assembly, and that meant appealing to the people.

It was an uphill task. DeLancey had much deeper roots in the colony that he did. But Clinton set his advisor Colden to work, replacing many of the appointed officials throughout the colony with his own men, that he might have better control over the election process. By 1750 he was ready to call for a new election. Both sides fought hard, going after each other in the newspapers. DeLancey himself went out into the countryside to encourage supporters to vote.

Well, according to Governor Clinton’s faction, DeLancey wasn’t just out in the country to shake hands and be nice, he was out there to browbeat people into voting for him. Supposedly, DeLancey even threatened to forcibly enlist men in the army if they didn’t support him. In fact Clinton’s faction made numerous accusations like that, saying that the DeLanceys were threatening and bribing voters, as well as shipping in people from outside to cast votes in elections they weren’t supposed to vote in. Whether or not those accusations were true is hard to say. A lot of the evidence that we have comes from unreliable partisan sources. But there were a lot of accusations like this being thrown around, and I have to imagine that at least some of them were true.

In any case, whether through fraud or genuine support or both, DeLancey’s faction won the election handily. Governor Clinton was so depressed by the results that he wrote to London asking that either he or DeLancey be removed from office, as “it is impossible, that I can maintain his [Majesty’s] Prerogative in opposition to the Influence & crafty Wiles of him at the head of the faction”.

However, Clinton wasn’t recalled from office yet, and so that next year he decided to try again. He dissolved the Assembly and once again called for elections. But once again, he and his men were thoroughly defeated.

However, fortunately I guess, in the spring of that next year, 1753, Clinton was relieved of his office. Officials in London had decided that the only way to fix the colony’s problems was with a fresh start. Finally his tribulations were over. So goodbye Governor Clinton.

A new governor was sent to New York to fix things, but as it turned out the new guy was very depressed over his wife’s recent death and he hung himself just a few days after he arrived in the colony. With the new governor’s suicide, DeLancey, who had recently been appointed lieutenant governor, now became acting governor, a position he’d hold for most of the rest of the decade.

The opposition was now the government. Now that he was in command, DeLancey took steps to lower tensions within the colony. He reached out to his rival Cadwallader Colden and the two were easily reconciled. Pretty soon all the old rifts were healed. Which just goes to show that the divisions had never been all that big to begin with. There were some real issues at stake, in particular the war effort, but mostly this was just a personal rivalry which ended as soon as one of the leaders involved had left the colony.

Anyway, DeLancey ruled New York for the rest of the decade, as powerful a figure as the colony had ever known. But in 1760 he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 57. The loss of such a powerful figure put New York in a state of what you might call uneasy calm. No one quite knew what politics would be like in a post-DeLancey world.

With DeLancey gone, Colden now became the acting governor. As I’ve already said, Colden was always a pretty offputting figure to a lot of New Yorkers, and that didn’t change now that he was in charge. Simply put, he lacked tact and restraint. In particular, Colden made several attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He raised the possibility of giving the King greater control over judges, and he undermined the authority of juries to decide cases on their own. These actions alienated him from the lawyers of New York City, who were becoming an influential group by this point.

But perhaps most importantly, he was a strong defender of the royal prerogative. When the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, it was just as unpopular in New York as in New England, but Colden felt compelled to enforce it anyway, which alienated everyone else in the colony. Soon, New Yorkers were burning Colden in effigy. Only five years after DeLancey’s death, they were back at it again, fighting over politics

So, that brings us to the next phase of factionalism in New York. Well, the last phase of factionalism before the Revolution. It’s a confusing period and I’m not even sure that people at the time were entirely sure what they were fighting over, but I’ll do my best to make it simple.

First, we need to describe some of the most important groups within New York at this time.

To begin with, the Livingston family. I’ve mentioned them a few times before, but only in passing. The Livingstons were one of the biggest landowning families in the Hudson Valley. As a result, many members of the family were politically active within the colony, although never quite important enough for me to mention by name. Well, that was starting to change. Back in the elections of 1758, just before DeLancey had died, a full four members of the Livingston family were elected to the Assembly. They didn’t yet form a coherent faction or anything. In fact, they often voted against each other.

But over time, they were starting to come together. The DeLancey family were merchants, and under DeLancey’s rule, the merchants within the colony had been ascendant. Well, now the landlords were regaining their political footing, forming a faction of their own, with the Livingstons in charge.

Some of the most prominent lawyers in New York City sided with this faction as well, because they were opposed to Colden for the reasons I already mentioned. Plus one of those prominent lawyers was himself a Livingston, so there was a family connection as well.

And while this elite opposition was growing, popular opposition was rising as well, thanks to anger over the Stamp Act. The unhappy colonists formed a group called the Sons of Liberty to fight back. The Sons of Liberty soon spread throughout the thirteen colonies.

Within New York, the elite faction of Livingstons and lawyers decided to ally themselves with the movement. They hoped to harness the unrest for their own benefit, by taking over leadership for themselves. But their attempt didn’t quite go according to plan. The passions of the people overtook them. Within just a few months, the Sons of Liberty had split into two groups, the moderates and the radicals. The Livingston faction sided with the moderates, but they were left controlling only half of a protest movement.

And unfortunately for them, a new figure used that opening to jump into politics himself, James DeLancey, Jr., the son of the late James DeLancey. DeLancey, Jr. had served as a captain in the British infantry during the French and Indian War, but after his father’s death, he returned to New York City to manage his family’s affairs. Now, he wanted to become a politician just like dad. He made his entry into the political arena by siding with the radical faction of the Sons of Liberty. This was a very opportunistic move on his part. As we’ll soon see, DeLancey had no real commitment to radicalism.

But in any case, the battle lines were being drawn. DeLancey Jr., backing the radicals, and the Livingston/landowner/lawyer faction backing the moderates. You’ll note that there was no faction in favor of Colden and the Stamp Act. Colden was so unpopular he hardly had any support at all. So these two factions are the important ones.

It’s hard to concisely state what these two groups were all about. After all, both factions were in large part alliances of convenience between popular movements and small elite factions looking to capitalize on those movements for their own reasons. You had two elite groups, and two popular groups, and which elite group sided with which popular group was more or less just coincidence. If history had gone slightly differently it could’ve been reversed. There was no ideology holding them together. For convenience's sake, I’m going to call them the radicals and the moderates, but again, there’s a lot more to it than that, and not all of the radicals were really that radical.

But actually, the Stamp Act was quickly repealed and a new governor came in to replace Colden, so the issues which had caused this factionalism had gone away, at least temporarily. However, the factionalism remained. As we’ve seen before, partisanship can continue on long after the root causes have faded into memory. It doesn’t have to continue, but it can.

And within a few years, it was time for new elections, since now they had to be held at least once every seven years. The new governor would’ve preferred not to dissolve the current Assembly, but his hands were tied.

And so, both sides geared up for battle. I’ve already described how New York elections worked in general, so let me focus in on one election in particular, the election in New York City, so we can explore some of the details.

Now, New York City sent four delegates to the Assembly, but instead of holding four separate elections, there was one big election all the candidates ran in. The top four vote-getters would become delegates.

In this particular election, there were seven candidates running. Two of the candidates had no real shot at winning, so we can ignore them, which leaves five real candidates to discuss. The two leading men were Philip Livingston, a moderate, and James DeLancey, Jr himself, supposedly a radical. Of the other three candidates, one was a moderate lawyer, while the other two were radical merchants allied with DeLancey.

This was a complex election, which required some serious strategizing if you wanted to win. The radical faction decided to let Livingston win a seat without challenging him. He was already popular, and so he was likely to win no matter what they did. That way they could focus all their attention on the moderate lawyer. If they could attack him successfully, then DeLancey and his two allies would all win seats in the Assembly, thus coming out ahead three to one.

So they went after the lawyer as hard as they could. In pamphlets and in newspaper articles, they argued that he was unfit to represent New York City. Firstly, he was a lawyer rather than a merchant, and New York City, being a commercial town, ought to be represented by merchants. Secondly, as a lawyer, he had ties to landowner families who opposed the interests of New York City. In fact, he had represented some of them in court in their lawsuits against poor families. Thirdly, it was a bad idea to elect lawyers in general. “[It] would be more gross and dangerous to choose Lawyers than other Men, in Proportion as they have more Cunning, Ability and Temptation to injure us, than other Men have. The more eminent their Abilities are, the more ought we to dread and avoid them, for we may be assured, that all those Abilities will be exerted against us, if our Folly should give them an Opportunity.” (By the way, you may be interested to know that these days, over a third of members of congress are lawyers, although the numbers have been dropping for a while.)

Anyway, the moderates tried to push back against these attacks, but they were always on the defensive.

Soon enough, the polls opened and voting began. In fact, the polls were open for five days straight, giving New Yorkers plenty of time to go vote. During that time, both sides were busy trying to woo voters as best they could. In fact, campaigns like these were becoming pretty expensive, given the need to entice voters with food and alcohol. According to the historian Patricia Bonomi, at one tavern alone, DeLancey had to pay for “248 “meals of victuals”, 134 bottles of wine, 106 ½ “Double Bowls of punch,” 117 “mugs of Beer and Seyder” and a variety of other beverages.”

The moderate lawyer also went around town scrounging up votes, though in a less grandiose fashion. Instead of buying food, he offered to bribe voters directly, supposedly even offering to buy someone a canoe in exchange for his vote. He also threatened to sue someone if he didn’t vote for him. Or at least he was accused of doing those things. As always, it’s hard to know for sure.

In any case, the clever strategizing by DeLancey and the radicals paid off. Livingston won his seat as expected, but they won the three other seats, by a very comfortable margin of a few hundred votes out of around 6000 cast.

Outside of New York City, the radicals weren’t quite as successful, though they still did reasonably well. Roughly speaking, a third of the winners were moderates, a third were radicals, and a third were unaffiliated with either side, and might support one group or the other depending on the situation.

However, this Assembly lasted less than a year. Already there were new problems with Britain flaring up. Parliament had just passed another set of hated laws aimed at America, the Townshend Acts, and once again the colonists were in an uproar. When the Assembly began to challenge the Townshend Acts, the governor quickly dissolved the Assembly and called for new elections. The Stamp Act may have been repealed, but none of the problems with Britain had been solved at all.

So that brings us to 1769, just 7 years before the Declaration of Independence. Once again, the factions were gearing up for the next election. The moderates, seeing how well the radicals had done with their simple arguments -- “lawyers bad”, “Stamp Act bad” -- decided to come up with a simple argument of their own. They decided to use religion as their issue.

Let me briefly talk about religion in New York. The relationship between church and state in New York had always been complicated. Officials in London wanted the government to promote the Anglican church, but Anglicans were always a minority within the colony, so in practice compromises had to be made with the Dutch, with the Puritans, and so on. In 1693 the Anglican church had been sort of established as the official state religion, but only in a limited way. For the most part, toleration was the order of the day. There was some discrimination -- Anglicans were always privileged -- but not that much discrimination.

Now, as it happened, right around this time there was some discussion of sending an Anglican bishop to America for the first time. America had never had a bishop of its own, just priests, and many dissenting Christians were happy to keep it that way. They feared that a bishop would increase the Church of England’s control over them, that it might lead to greater intolerance over time.

And so the moderates thought that this might be a good issue to latch on to. They hadn’t challenged the Stamp Act enough for voters, but maybe they could challenge the idea of an American bishop, and link the radicals with the evils of Anglican control. As it happens, the DeLancey family were prominent Anglicans, so there was at least some surface plausibility to the accusations. If it worked, the moderates would suddenly seem like the real opponents of English oppression, not the radicals.

Sadly for them, though, it didn’t work. I think that it was just too much of a stretch, too obviously opportunistic. It sounds like all they did was alienate Anglicans without attracting enough dissenters. The real issue was still the colony’s relationship with the British government, and on that count, the radicals were bound to be much more successful than the moderates.

Let me go over the next election in New York City, to compare it with the previous one.

After the moderates only managed to win one of the four seats in the previous election, this time they proposed a compromise with the radicals: instead of campaigning, why not agree to each nominate only two candidates? Wouldn’t that be much easier for everyone? But of course, to the radicals, that compromise meant losing a seat, so they refused. Instead, they made a counteroffer where they would nominate 3 candidates and the moderates would only nominate one, which would leave things the way they were. However, the moderates refused that offer, and so once again both sides had to fight it out.

By this time, caucuses were commonly held by various factions to nominate candidates for upcoming elections, but typically this was done behind the scenes, in those proverbial smoke-filled rooms. But this time, both factions decided that it would be in their interests to include the public in the nominating process. Hopefully, that would increase their support when the election came. So the moderates held a large gathering of several hundred people in one of the fields around the city, while the radicals met indoors. Both sides nominated four candidates.

But this time, the radicals did even better. They won all four seats by a comfortable margin. And they improved their performance outside of the city as well, winning a solid majority of seats. Anti-British agitation was becoming very popular very quickly.

And the radicals used their power to strengthen their control even more, by having several of the Livingstons expelled from the Assembly. They passed a law which excluded members of the Supreme Court from sitting in the Assembly, which got rid of one Livingston. They then kicked out another Livingston because he wasn’t a resident of the district he was elected from. They also expelled Lewis Morris III, grandson of the Lewis Morris we talked about last time.

By kicking all these enemies out, the radicals gained a much more absolute control over the Assembly. However, the so-called radicals in the Assembly were also rapidly becoming less and less radical. It wasn’t really the radicals who had won, it was the DeLancey part of the radical coalition. And now that they controlled the Assembly, they were detaching themselves from the real radicals. So although the election had been won on the grounds of fighting British tyranny, the Assembly soon began governing in exactly the opposite way. Naturally, everyone felt betrayed. The real radicals became even more radical.

As a matter of fact, by the time the Revolution came around, in just a few years, the DeLanceys and the Livingstons had basically swapped places. The DeLancey faction became conservative Loyalists who rejected independence, while the Livingstons were more on the side of the radicals, although they weren’t really radicals themselves. Not only that, James DeLancey Jr. himself wound up in exile in Britain, just like Thomas Hutchinson. So you can see why I said that his alliance with the radicals was purely opportunistic. He betrayed them at the first opportunity, as soon as they seemed to be more of a liability than an asset.

Hopefully, now you can understand why John Adams called New York politics “the devil’s own incomprehensibles”. Ideologies, family loyalties, class interests, regional interests, were all mixed together in one big political stew, and you never could know what the next bite would taste like.

I think that I’ll end the story here. The political landscape was still shifting, but we’re already almost to the Revolution itself. I’ll leave New York in a state of flux for now. This whole confusing sweep of ever-shifting factions would only be ended thanks to the question of independence, which clarified things in a way that nothing else could. New York will be the last colony to declare for independence, but it’ll get swept up in the war just as much as everywhere else.

So that brings us to the end of New York’s colonial history. A lot has happened, so let me give a quick recap. In the 1690s and 1700s you had the feud between the Leislerians and anti-Leislerians. In the 1710s and 1720s you had the feud between the merchants and the big landowners. Then in the 1730s through the 1750s you had several different instances of factionalism, all of which centered around local leaders enlisting local support in their fights against the governors. Court vs. country, basically. And finally, in the 1760s you had a much more confused round of factionalism, as I just described.

And those are just the biggest examples of factionalism, there were plenty of smaller instances as well, which I didn’t have a chance to discuss.

But apart from what happened in New York, I’d also like to draw your attention to something equally important: what didn’t happen. There was a lot of factionalism in New York, but there were just as many issues that New Yorkers could have fought over, but didn’t. I mean, many of the problems which confounded politics in New England barely left a ripple in New York. For example, although in the early 1700s New York had had a big problem with its debt and with its paper money system, unlike in New England, New York managed it much more successfully. There were difficulties in the 1710s, but by the 1720s the government had a handle on things. There was much less inflation and there weren’t those big swings in the value of money that you saw in Massachusetts.

Another big difference was the Great Awakening. In New England, with its close union of church and state, the Great Awakening was a super big deal. But in New York, it passed almost without notice, at least outside of the Puritans of Long Island. New Yorkers were just not a very religious people.

I haven’t talked about Pennsylvania yet, but things were different there too. In Pennsylvania, many of the divisions were over ethnicity and religion, as new groups of immigrants came in and began taking over from the Quakers, who had become a small minority within their own colony. Obviously nothing like that applied to New York.

The point is this: in all of these colonies -- at least in the North, since the South was a bit different -- in all of these colonies the issues being fought over were very different, but the overall political developments were similar. Factions became more organized over time, and they started to appeal directly to the people, even if they weren’t yet real parties. The colonial legislatures became more assertive and powerful. Despite their different cultures and histories, they were all on the same track.

Something to keep in mind as we approach the Revolution. Often it can seem like these colonies were in their own separate worlds, with nothing in common but the English language, but in fact they were converging politically in many ways, which no doubt helped them to cooperate when the time came.

This was often, but not always, more of a top down process. In the beginning, every colony had this network of elites in which disputes were supposed to be resolved internally, within the elites themselves. But sooner or later, one group of elites realized that they could gain an advantage by appealing to the people. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had elected governors and elected upper houses, popular support was all you needed in order to take power.

If the governor was appointed, things were a bit more complicated. Popular support helped, but it was insufficient. If all you controlled was the Assembly, then the most you could do on your own was block legislation. Then, maybe the governor would negotiate with you. But if he refused, then you could keep blocking all of his legislation. That would make him look weak and incompetent to officials in London. Then, you might convince the Board of Trade to have the governor removed from office and replaced with someone more to your liking. So in a colony like New York, you didn’t want to win popular support for its own sake. It was really a way to send a message to London: “This governor sucks and we refuse to work with him.” The will of the people thus only had an indirect effect.

But either way, there was still an advantage in appealing to the people. Whoever did so successfully had an edge over everyone else. And that meant that politics in every colony became more democratic, more populist over time. In order to appeal to the people, you actually had to offer them something. Sometimes, like with James DeLancey, Jr. supporting the radicals, that something was offered cynically and in bad faith. Other times the offer was more sincere.

But again either way, the changes produced were similar. Once candidates were regularly appealing to you for your vote, it naturally seemed to you like you had the power, not them. The elites had invited the people in for their own short-term benefit, but the people had no intention of leaving. What had begun as a top-down process became more bottom up over time. And then elected officials had to change their mindsets to match the new reality as well. They could compete for popular support or risk losing office or even being attacked by a mob.

But I don’t want to imply that if the elites in each colony had never sought popular support then this could have been avoided. I’m certain that sooner or later the people would have realized their power and started to organize on their own behalf. After all, the New Lights in Connecticut were bottom up from the very beginning, so it was certainly a possible alternative.

If you have a broad franchise and if elected officials have real power, then sooner or later someone will try to appeal to the voters in order to wield that power. It might be top down, it might be bottom up, but sooner or later it’ll happen. These divisions within the elite accelerated the process, I think, but they weren’t essential.

But still, that’s how it happened, and I think that that’s the best way to understand events in New York. All of that factionalism may seem like random noise, but if you take the long view, it really was building towards something: populist democracy.

Next episode, we’ll skip over New Jersey and jump straight to Pennsylvania, to see how William Penn and his fellow Quakers are faring in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, and to see how they slowly lose power after being swamped by new waves of not-so-pacifist immigrants. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

The podcast is on twitter, @earlyoftenpod, or go to the blog at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com for transcripts of every single episode. And if you like the podcast, give it a good review on iTunes. That helps. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980-1994 by Wayne Bodle

A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York by Patricia U. Bonomi

Colonial New York: A History by Michael Kamen

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

How the most disliked — and elected — profession is disappearing from politics by Ana Swanson

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