Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! I had a good time in Cincinnati, as documented in our Lagniappe, but it is good to be back on the titular street. I have many irons in the fire- new videos, working on my Birthday Lecture, other publications, etc. This week, we have a review of a history book, a discography of a legendary singer-songwriter, and of course, Cincinnati observations.
Note for Citizens: we are using OpaVote to vote for my reading! Please look for an OpaVote ballot in whatever email you use for this newsletter. If you’d prefer to go back to voting in comments, let me know. If you’re not a Citizen, consider becoming one!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS
Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields
DISCOGRAPHIES
Townes Van Zandt!
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: Cincinnati!
REVIEWS
Paul Thomas Chamberlin, “The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace” (2018) - The “new global history” makes its way from the archive-heavy “groundbreaking” texts that get a scholar through the door, to the more approachable, secondary-source-using works that help a professor get tenure (and if they’re lucky and have a good contract, textbook buys). Chamberlin did the former with his book “The Global Offensive,” about the PLO’s international campaigns, and is now doing this latter with a broad-scope look at the Cold War in Asia. It makes sense the Cold War is such a locus for global history, given that it took place around the world, and the archives are mostly intact, and in a variety of languages for all these scholars to show off their chops. It’s been a good time for Cold War scholars.
Chamberlin takes aim, though in a curiously unaggressive way, at two shibboleths of recent twentieth-century historiography. One is right there in the subtitle: “the long peace,” the idea that the Cold War constituted a peculiar time where conventional wars between great powers ceased, in marked contrast to the first half of the century. This was most strongly promulgated by the dean of Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, though Gaddis, in this as in other instances, was always more of an affirmer of consensus establishment ideas than he was an innovator. It’s easy to see the Cold War as peaceful from Yale. It’s a lot harder from pretty much anywhere in the parts of the world that Chamberlin writes about and refers to as “bloodlands,” making another nod at another Yale historian with substantial crossover appeal, Tim Snyder (Chamberlin went from a job at the University of Kentucky to one at Columbia over the course of researching this book, for those playing the home game). Snyder’s “Bloodlands” was an interesting and frustrating book, understanding the regions between a Germany and Russia through a lens inflected both by an understanding of the central importance of mass violence and a certain liberal totalitarianism-school dingbattery that only got worse once Snyder got Resistance-brain after the Trump election.
Chamberlin reassures us he’s not having a go at Gaddis and I don’t recall him mentioning Snyder by name but there’s enough of interest here to retain us without academic backbiting. The central idea should be obvious to anybody: maybe we avoided the big nuclear blowout everyone was afraid of, but a lot of countries suffered terribly due to the Cold War. Particularly given the coincidence of the Cold War occurring during the collapse of the European empires, the conflicts that would have accompanied decolonization in any event became supercharged and freighted with meaning as the Cold War superpowers forced each conflict into the framework of bilateral — or at best, US vs USSR vs China trilateral — conflict. The Cold War’s gravitational pull — and especially the sheer determination on the part of the American side to assimilate seemingly every political event between 1947 and maybe 1980, if not well after, into an us vs them framework, and the money and force they’d throw into the project — drew in wars that had little to do with decolonization as well, particularly in the Middle East.
While some of this dynamic played out in Africa and Latin America, Chamberlin chooses to focus his efforts on Asia. This makes sense, as many of the worst conflicts occurred there, and enough of them happened that you get a solid arc of conflicts from the end of WWII right up to the nineties. Most of the book is made up of respectable capsule histories of Cold War conflicts running in an arc from Korea all the way to Lebanon. Chamberlin artfully balances concision and completeness, overarching theses and the details of the individual conflicts. It wouldn’t make a half-bad textbook with which to teach the Cold War.
The historical narratives Chamberlin threads through these conflicts include atrocious conduct towards civilians as well as the eventual downfall of both revolutionary Third World communism and of secular nationalism in much of the arc of conflict he describes. Most of the wars in Cold War Asia were civil wars, and one thing that has become increasingly clear in history is that civil wars are a special kind of hell (you have to wonder how much the fact that the US Civil War was understood as “chivalrous,” alongside the way the English kind of throw their civil war down the memory hole, contributed to the delay of that realization in anglophone history). These invariably become wars against suspect populations. In Korea, massacring suspect civilians was de rigueur when either side, the American-backed South or the communist North, seized an area, or retreated from it. Massacre was also common on the invariable “both sides” in Vietnam, to the point where many were surprised that after the communist revolutionaries final victory, their revenge kill count was “only” in the five or six figures. On and on.
“Both sides” doesn’t really cover it, though, because one side was typically a good deal stronger than the other, and that was the side that was backed by the United States. The Soviets and Chinese did not distinguish themselves with their regard for human life during interventions in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam. But it’s clear, from this book and from the Cold War scholarship in general, that both material and ideological factors rendered American-backed parties in these wars both deadlier and more willing to use that deadliness indiscriminately. You want to see disregard for human life, have a gander at the conversations between Nixon and Kissinger about what their friend, the Pakistani military under Yahya Khan, was doing in Bangladesh in 1971, or the approving CIA memos of the mob slayings of hundreds of thousands of purported communists in Indonesia in 1965. You didn’t need to be a sociopath like Kissinger, though- just accepting of the Cold War establishment party line and not thinking too much, like most Americans involved in destroying Korea and Vietnam, in large part from tens of thousands of feet in the air or from an office somewhere, killing between one and three million in both places, mostly civilians. Even the (arguably) grisliest set of episodes in the book, the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, took place with tacit American (and Chinese) approval, to “counter” in some backwards way, the (Russian-backed) North Vietnamese.
The international left won some pretty substantial victories in Asia during this period, mainly in creating and maintaining a communist regime in China and the victory over American imperialism in Vietnam. But it took a beating in doing so. Brutalized societies do not for utopias make. In many respects, our caricatures of Communist regimes as brutal and deprived gain their truth from the fact that all of them — not just the ones in the Asian bloodlands, either — went from long-oppressed, typically impoverished autocracies to war-torn messes to just left to their own devices. There’s limits to how much failure and oppression that excuses, but the point is that deprivation and violence, often enough inflicted by overweening foreigners (who think they’re doing you a favor in the bargain!), tend to elevate harsh, hasty decisions and those who are comfortable implementing them. The rest is history.
It’s questionable how much that factored in to the ways in which the third wave of Asian Cold War conflicts in the Middle East (after a first wave in Northeast Asia and a second in Southeast Asia) turned away from communism and towards ethnic conflict and religion, especially militant Islamism. It certainly didn’t help, in terms of confusing local socialist forces (do we favor China or Russia, etc?) or inculcating paranoia and divisiveness in, say, the Afghan left. Egypt and Arab nationalism is somewhat outside of the scope, or anyway the framing Chamberlin gave it, and while he doesn’t underplay the American hand in encouraging Islamist forces, he doesn’t quite nail how destroyed the Middle East left was by direct suppression, not just discouragement at how communism seemed hard and treacherous.
This brings me to one of the odder things about the book- what he counts and what he doesn’t as part of his “bloodlands.” Snyder was odd about this too, including relatively quiet Estonia but not bloodied Yugoslavia, but he had a thesis, double-occupation, Nazi-Soviet totalitarian interplay, to advance. I don’t really see what Chamberlin’s thesis would lose by including the Hukbalahap rebellion in the Philippines in the late forties and early fifties, or the “Malay Emergency” that ran from 1948 to 1962. I guess every pedant will find a gored ox in any book of this kind, and the book doesn’t suffer too much from their exclusion. It probably doesn’t help that neither war is that well sourced or widely written about, as I have reason to know. In fact, the main people who write about them are self-dealing counterinsurgents crowing about them as success for their model of war. Beyond them it’s tricky to find stuff. The British aren’t eager to talk about Malaya because of their usual impulse to hide their dirt; Americans aren’t eager to talk about the Philippines because it’s a confusing by-blow that doesn’t demand anything of them (not unlike Liberia in that respect). For instance, I can’t find a good casualty count for the Huk War. Details are a little better with the Emergency but not much. It could be they simply weren’t bloody enough for Chamberlin’s definitions? But among other things, they encouraged the western side in the Cold War to take a hard line in Asia…
Anyway, this is a pretty admirable work of history. It’s interesting to see the “bloodland” thing taken out of the context of totalitarianism arguments, most of which implicitly back Anglo-American power, if not all of its uses (often, totalitarianism-minders want that power to be used more aggressively, like North Korea hawks). It’s conceivable that this book is an instance in a kind of positional warfare on the part of soft-left (here meaning actual leftists who are cautious about revolution, not liberals) academics to use widely accepted notions — like that it’s bad to kill millions of people — to criticize the Cold War state and its inheritors, most of the states currently extant and the neoliberal capitalism that dominates most of them. That’s cool- I can’t help but imagine the slashing attack an Eric Hobsbawm or a Walter Rodney would make of the same material, but sometimes expanding the trench lines works too. ****’
DISCOGRAPHIES
Townes Van Zandt! Country singer-songwriter Steve Earle once said of his friend Townes Van Zandt, “Townes is the best songwriter in the world, and I’d stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” When informed of this, Townes responded “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards, and if Steve thinks he’s going to get near Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sorely mistaken.” Steve Earle -- by most accounts, a real mensch -- named his son Justin Townes Earle after his great friend. Justin Townes was a talented alt-country musician in his own right, and died last year. Steve Earle has been through a lot.
In any event, I think I agree with Steve Earle on this one. For one thing, I was never a worshipper at the Church of Bob. He’s got some very good songs, no doubt, but A. he has some stinkers B. his good material is often overrated and C. he always came off to me as profoundly insincere. As far as I’m concerned, the big competition for Townes in my personal pantheon of singer-songwriters is Van Morrison. Split the difference- Townes never wrote anything as transcendent as “Astral Weeks,” but he also never wrote anything as bad as the heaps of banality Van produced for decades after his good years. Townes died in 1997; Van is still with us, buying off paternity suits, writing covid-denier songs (with Eric Clapton!), and being generally unpleasant.
Contrasting Townes to Van and Bob Dylan might lead a reader to think I’m going to paint a picture of a simple, honest, good-hearted tragic troubadour, who’s only not a Dylan or Van Morrison level household name due to bad luck and societal ignorance. Not quite- Townes Van Zandt was more interesting than that. He was born to money- there’s a county named after his family in Texas. He was always a troublemaker with a depressive streak, and they tried insulin shock “therapy” on him which didn’t help any. He dropped out of school and started playing guitar in Austin clubs and bars. He was good- bluesy and country, fine rich voice, talented guitar picker, handsome, funny, wry. His early records from the late sixties reflect some of the “Nashville Sound” then dominant, with a lot of string sections, vocal backup, and weird instrumentation, but that was never his scene- rerecordings of some of those songs, like “Tecumseh Valley,” in a simpler, starker production are a lot better. He wasn’t quite “outlaw country,” like the reaction to the Nashville Sound you got with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc., either. He was doing his own thing. He became the songwriter’s songwriter, the country singer’s country singer.
His songs run an emotional gamut- humor, awe, love, love lost, love lost because he lost it on purpose but is still sad about it, clinical depression, acceptance of one’s limitations, fun stuff to play at honky tonks. Cynically, one of the reasons snooty blue-staters like me can get behind Townes as much as we can is because he never did kitsch. He sang beautifully, plaintively, about his love for parts of the country, in songs like “My Proud Mountains,” but he never did the performative “I’m a country boy, yuk yuk, :white identity politics!:” that even smart, good country musicians so often do. Insofar as his songs paint a picture of the songwriter, we see Townes as a wanderer, someone who loves women and good times, but haunted by his inability to see anything through, be it a career or a relationship, the classic American bard’s mentality. In a lot of songs, he’s not above blaming his lover for expecting more from him- Townes was no saint and didn’t pretend to be. A lot of people know sadness, but depression is something else, and Townes sang of it in many different registers: the sheer bleakness of facing that wall in “Nothing,” the exhausted but hopeful feeling of recovery in “You Are Not Needed Now.” He also indulged in the occasional dip into genre! With the high-fantasy-inflected “Silver Ships of Andilar” and “Rake,” a vampire story in country song form. I guess you could say his most famous song, “Pancho and Lefty” (Willie Nelson covered it and made it a hit), is something of a wistful crime story, about a good bandit and the guitar-picker who betrays his best friend. And then there’s the songs about just being Townes, a dude who had some good times, some bad times, and took life as it came with a sense of wry humor and genuine wonder, like “No Deal” and “To Live Is To Fly.”
Woo! A lot of songs. A lot of great songs. In terms of an album-by-album comparison, it’s hard to say. The first few albums, like “For the Sake of the Song” and “Our Mother The Mountain,” are somewhat over-produced, but have some great songs. I think production values and Townes’s songwriting hit their highest stride in his middle albums, especially “Delta Momma Blues,” but they’re all good. His later albums get sadder and sadder as Townes sank further into alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, and poverty, but not worse, necessarily. By the time of his last album, “No Deeper Blue” in 1994, his lead song ended with a refrain “Too late to wish I was stronger.” His wife saw the hand-written lyrics of that song, and called Townes at the studio to tell him how happy she was that he had written something so beautiful. “Song, hell, that was a suicide note,” Townes responded. By then, his voice wasn’t the same, after decades of abuse, but there’s no denying the power of those last songs. His heart gave out, eventually. He was fifty-two. We still have his music. That’s something.
Next on discographies: a band that started when two of its members escaped from the same cult?
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: Cincinnati!
Cincinnati was cool! Very transparent development/gentrification strategy based on getting suburbanites to drink beer by the downtown stadia and in the hipster “Over the Rhine” district. I did both! People were friendly. Here are some pics:
This is the view from the garden of a friendly “OTR” watering hole. Cincinnati has a lot of old buildings like this- is there a term for them? The old buildings don’t look like this in Boston. In OTR, they hold bars, restaurants, shops, and the young people who staff them. In other neighborhoods, they’re boarded up and abandoned much of the time.
The Cincinnati zoo was pretty great! Here is a young giraffe.
Here is a snoozy baby rhino and his mom.
And here’s the pic everyone wants to see! I waited in a short line to see Fiona, queen of the city, and she did not disappoint. Here she is snoozing against the glass while her mom, Bibi, takes a nap on her butt. It was magical!
This was the birthplace of Mamie Smith, the first recorded blues artist. There’s no plaque. There should be a plaque, at least.
A child at a nearby brewhaus was driven positively mad by gravel. They were coocoo-bananas for those little rocks.
Cincinnati chili was pretty good! Basically bolognese sauce made by people who think aromatics are “kinda gay.”
Vintage paperback haul from Ohio Book Store
And look who greeted me at the door when I returned!