March 16 is of no particular significance to me. However, that is indeed the date today, and I am in need of a blog post. And so a little scan of the day in history, and I find there are things to remember and to celebrate, as there always are.
A few moments to remember, then, dealing with various interests of mine: books, radical left politics and heavy metal.
1) First publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in 1850.
In 17th century Massachusetts, in a small Puritan-dominated town near Boston, Hester Prynne is pregnant out of wedlock. Dragged before the religious and legal authorities she refuses to give up the name of the father, taking upon herself instead a life of condemnation and isolation, forever marked with the great letter A of the adulteress. A romance, an historical drama, a critique of the hellfire and damnation religion that was so central to the founding of America, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous work is a love story rooted in personal and social tensions of sin and repentence, shame and redemption, law and morality.
Born in Salem, and counting judges of that town’s infamous witch-trials as his ancestors, Hawthorne’s book is a personal reckoning with his own family history and the legacy he has inherited as well as an attempt to grapple with the broader cultural inheritance of the United States. Just the novel presents the character of Pearl – Hester Prynne’s young and troubled daughter – as in many respects the human embodiment of the scarlet letter, she is likewise Hawthorne himself and America as a nation – born of and fully immersed in the legacy of Puritanism and the accusation of witchcraft, she is passion and freedom and the hard work of redemption.
We read this aloud, a chapter each night before bed. Highly recommended, if you can do the same. We also watched the movie, with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. Whatever else you do, don’t make that mistake.
I’ve already put up a post on the Required Readings site today, but in honour of the day I did the above. which can be found at its proper home here.
2) Kidnapping and later assassination of of Italian politician Aldo Moro in 1978, by the Red Brigades.
An underground armed resistance movement of the radical left, the Red Brigades went on quite a tear in the 1970s and 1980s for bank robberies, kidnappings, and attacks on symbols of capitalism. After a split in the mid-1980s and mass arrests later in the decade, the Brigades were done. But they have remained hugely important, not least for their historical connection to what are often called the autonomist Marxists and Antonio Negri, in particular.
Negri was arrested and accused of being the strategist behind Moro’s kidnapping and faced charges related to numerous crimes, including some some 17 murders. Though charges related to the specific actions of the Brigades were dropped, he was charged for his role as their inspiration, charged with being their intellectual and political face. Awaiting trial, Negri fled to France where he lived in exile and taught university for 14 years, becoming one of the most significant radical thinkers of the late twentieth century. When he finally returned to Italy to serve his sentence, Negri was as much a superstar of the radical left as a pariah of the state, and today – following the incredible success of his and Michael Hardt’s Empire – is recognized as already a major figure in communist history as well as the communist present, a synthesizer of anarchism, post-structuralism and Marxism, and a profound inspiration for not only the Red Brigades of the 70s but also the anti-globalization movement of the mid 1990s and contemporary anti-capitalist networks.
3) Twisted Sister becomes the first band ever to sell out the Paladium in New York without ever releasing an album. This was back in 1979, way before the ridiculous videos we all loved, and back when they were actually a pretty damned good heavy metal band. In honour, two videos today that are not the ones you’ve seen but are the real reason that TS is worth remembering.
Oh, and by the way. Remember the whole PMRC thing in the 1980s? Twisted Sister was pretty awesome there, too, as frontman Dee Snider testified before Congress and became one of the most well-recognized faces of that particular anti-censorship struggle. Yeah – politics are everywhere.
