T A B L E+T A L K Is self-publishing worth the trouble? Discuss the pros and cons in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) Gore Vidal By Chris Haines (01/14/98) Russell Banks By Cynthia Joyce (01/05/98) Haruki Murakami By Laura Miller (12/16/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S Always in Pursuit By Stanley Crouch Punditry about politics and culture, from the New York Daily News columnist and New Republic contributing editor (02/25/98)		STANLEY CROUCH | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Where does a filmmaker like Spike Lee fit into that analysis? Well, his new movie, "Four Little Girls," about the black girls who were blown up Sept. 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., was a very good film. Spike Lee started out as an ideologue, but his last movie suggests he's developing. He has great cinematic technique. Once his understanding of the human heart parallels his filmmaking ability, who's to say what he'll do? The guy's only 40. Let's all remember that the early novels of William Faulkner had depictions of black people that were essentially racist. But by 1940, Faulkner was writing in a way no one would have expected from a guy who began where he began. He came a long distance. If he did that, who's to say Spike Lee can't do it? Do you think that Louis Farrakhan has that capacity for growth? No. Louis Farrakhan is an ideologue. I think he's insane. He's a nut. He talks about flying in space ships and all that numerology nonsense. I don't see how we can put him in a serious discussion. He's not really important. The people who are really important are all the black mayors, all the black people in Bill Clinton's administration, all the black congressmen, all the people in this growing body of black entrepreneurs. These are the important people in the country's racial dialogue. The problem is that the dialogue has been overtaken oftentimes by these con-men and con-women, who have turned alienation into a commodity. They teach kids that they're alienated from everyone else. Black kids come on campus, and they get them into the black student union and get them a separate black table. Then, in the worst of black studies, they teach them that they're forever outside America, that they're only victims. Women and various other groups are taught similar things. So the fact that this country has been moved forward and its principles deepened by these different groups gets lost in the shuffle. Why do you admire Johnnie Cochran and Ron Brown so much? You know, some imbecile who reviewed my book said I admired Johnnie Cochran and Ron Brown because they were black men who made it in a white world. But I don't know where that white world is. Carl Jung said that white Americans walk like Negroes, talk like Negroes and laugh like Negroes. Now Carl Jung was from Switzerland, where they make the real white people. He also pointed out that the dominant images in the dreams of his white American patients were those of Negroes and Indians. That's something we ought to think about. We can also look at the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, where he talks about these American woodsmen who wore their hair long, Indian-style, dressed in Indian-style buckskins and were, at least in part, culturally Indian and unashamed of it. They had learned from the Indians. Now this sort of thing has happened in America over and over. All those foods that white people in the South love to eat -- fried chicken and black-eyed peas -- were invented by the slaves. As Albert Murray says, that makes them incontestably mulatto. But today, people are afraid to say that you, a white person, and I, a black person, have more in common than not. They prefer to say that if you're from one ethnic or religious group and I'm from another, then that makes a big wall between us. Now people are trying to impose the idea that your category is more important than who you are. One of the pieces in the book was written after the Oklahoma City bombing. I wrote that piece to remind people that the deaths of the four little girls who were blown up in Birmingham in 1963 foreshadowed what we saw in Oklahoma City. This is something that we're not supposed to forget. I saw a woman from the Feminist Majority speaking about the recent bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham. She made no connection to the fact that 35 years ago, there had been another bombing. That's what I'm talking about -- this balkanized, narcissistic thinking about one's own group. I was amazed. She couldn't see that it was happening all over again. You've been criticized for defending the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. What's your defense? Everybody thinks it was some kind of expression of racial solidarity. But consider this: Let's just imagine that Woody Allen had been accused of murdering Mia Farrow, and a major piece of evidence had been found by a black detective. And let's say this black detective goes on the witness stand and he's asked if he ever referred to Jews as "kikes." He says no, never. Then a tape is discovered in which we find out the detective is a member of some racist black group that considers Jews not just kikes but monsters. The case would have been lost. The fact that jurors almost always acquit when the prosecution's star witness is found to be lying on the witness stand was not made clear to Americans by the media. The same media that talks about the corruption of the system -- Watergate, Iran-contra, the CIA, Monica Lewinsky -- set that fact aside. It's one of the great sins of our period. Why do you dislike rap and rock 'n' roll so much? Are you suggesting there are ethics in music? I don't particularly dislike rock 'n' roll, and I don't particularly dislike rap. I dislike gangsta rap. I dislike the side of rap that encourages violence over trivia, theft, drive-by shootings, misogyny, the side of rap that gives young women the impression that in order to rebel, they should become sluts. That's what I don't like. These things have had a very destructive influence on our society. What is it about jazz then that speaks to you so profoundly? Well, for one thing, people have to know how to play their instruments. Also, it's a democratic musical form. It's based upon the interplay between the individual and the ensemble, which is what our social contract is about. It's about the individual in the community. Jazz also has an unsentimental vision of life. We would be better off if we didn't always sentimentalize everything and everyone. We sentimentalize the great figures of our past, and then we find out that they were human beings who did both things that were exceptional and other things that perhaps weren't savory at all. Then people want to reject the whole deal. That's the adolescent morality that you find in rock 'n' roll. We have to be able to see both the good and the bad. That's what being grown-up is all about. We have to strive toward what I call an unsentimental patriotism, one that faces 200 years of slavery, the decimation of the Indians, the second-class citizenship of women, child exploitation and terrible labor conditions, but one that also recognizes that we came through with the unions, that women and minorities moved themselves into the center of the dialogue and therefore took the country closer to being the thing that it was originally conceived as. And jazz is the musical expression of all that? It's one of them. SALON | Feb. 25, 1998 Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington correspondent.