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A Conversation with Stanley Crouch

Think Tank Transcript Stanley Crouch

ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN,recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN,helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology,improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundationand the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. On this edition ofThink Tank, a lively conversation with one of American's leadingessayists, Stanley Crouch.

MR. CROUCH: If you put Louis Farrakhan -- if you put a beardon Louis Farrakhan, right, and a mustache and put him in a suitwithout a bow tie. And you put him and David Duke on a plane and youflew them to West Africa, the Africans would say, ah, two Americans. If you sent them to wherever in Europe David Duke's family comesfrom, they would say upon seeing Farrakhan and this guy get off theplane -- no matter whether they were in an argument or not, theywould say, ah, two Americans.

Now, what makes us American transcends all of that.

MR. WATTENBERG: A conversation with Stanley Crouch, next onThink Tank.

The New Yorker Magazine wrote recently: 'After 30 years asactor, poet, playwright, jazz drummer, professor and essayist, Crouchis a rare figure in a narrowly specialized intellectual world. He'san independent thinker, unconstrained by affiliation with any camp,creed or organization.'

Crouch was for years jazz critic and staff writer for theVillage Voice and is currently artistic consultant to Jazz at LincolnCenter. He is also a columnist for the New York Daily News, acontributing editor for the New Republic Magazine, and author ofseveral books on music and culture, including Notes of a HangingJudge. His latest book is the All-American Skin Game or the Decoy ofRace.

Thank you for joining us, Stanley Crouch. You write in theAll-American Skin Game that the U.S. Constitution is like the blues. What do you mean by that?

MR. CROUCH: Well, I mean that the -- that the Constitutionessentially has what I call a tragic base. That is that it's not somuch based on the idea that human beings are innately good. But,it's based on the suspicion that human beings may do very bad thingsand that they are capable of abusing power and that they have to bescrutinized very closely. So that's the tragic base of it.

And then it seems to me that the -- that it's connected toblues and to jazz, by virtue of the fact that through amendments andnew policy you are able to improvise responses to what happens in thesociety. So that we have, for instance --

MR. WATTENBERG: Sort of a jam session going, right?

MR. CROUCH: Right. So, for instance, if you have bad policy,like slavery is legal, women can't vote, then you have an instrumentthat allows you to redeem yourself to make up for past mistakes thesame way that a jazz band the next time it plays a song may be ableto make up for the mistakes that it made in the first time that itinterpreted it. So that's kind of what I mean. And I think that the-- that the American vision is a vision which I call tragic optimism. That is, the idea that human beings are frail, in fact, and can doterrible things. That's the tragic part. But, that they can also doextraordinary things, that's the optimistic part.

MR. WATTENBERG: You use music as a metaphor in places I havenever quite seen it used before as in -- I mean, it's a politicalmusical vision that you talk about. Is that about right?

MR. CROUCH: Yes, I think -- well, I think it's because I'vebeen so influenced by listening to jazz, by the interpretations ofjazz made by people like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. And inthat, I've come to see it as a truly American art form that has --that contains in the very way it's made much of the sensibility ofthe country itself.

MR. WATTENBERG: Does -- I guess we can stipulate that Americamakes music. But, does music make America? Is that a two-way flow?

MR. CROUCH: Well, I think so. I mean, I'm sure that you canremember back into your

childhood, as we all can --

MR. WATTENBERG: Last century.

MR. CROUCH: Well, certain tunes that you associate with theway you began to look at the world at certain times, you know.

MR. WATTENBERG: Right.

MR. CROUCH: Certain things that -- I mean, you learned acertain dance to go with a certain rhythm. And then if you -- thatif you're chasing some girl, you know, and she actually likes the wayyou dance, that that's a beginning. So you kind of say, okay, thismusic helped me get a little bit closer to something I was interestedin or that you -- you know, that music is -- we associate music withso many different things that happen to us.

Not just our romantic lives, but tunes that seemed to say to usat a certain time, from another place, exactly how we feel. Andperhaps when we are listening to that we feel as though our tale isbeing told to the world and those sorts of things. So I think thatit is a double thing.

MR. WATTENBERG: In the whole constellation of music it isblues and jazz that interest you most?

MR. CROUCH: Yes, truly. Yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: If you had to give our viewers sort of apocket history of jazz in America, how's that, in the next 30 secondsor whatever. I mean, where -- who do you start with? Where does itgo to?

MR. CROUCH: Well, okay, what I would do is, I would say, okay,Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Bassey, Charlie Parker andDizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, WyattColeman --

MR. WATTENBERG: And Wynton Marsalis?

MR. CROUCH: Yes, I think that Wynton Marsalis is the mostimportant jazz musician around right now. He's attempting to do withjazz the same thing that James Joyce did with a novel in Ulysses orthat Herman Melville did with it in Moby Dick. That is that anystyle can work. You use a style to express a certain thing. So, forinstance, Moby Dick is written in a number of different styles,because when Melville would get to a point where he wanted to expresssomething a specific way, he might use a different style to tell thatpart of the story. He's got sections that are written like plays. Things go from -- they're told in first person then they go intothird person.

So anything that he wanted to do, he used to tell this story. James Joyce does the same thing in Ulysses. And Marsalis does thesame thing in the way he writes his music. He might use a NewOrleans parade kind of thing for one section. He might use somethingthat would be considered very way out in another section. He mightuse a straight swinging blues in a particular place. He might use asinger. He might play something and have a dance beat to it. And soall of those things may go together in -- in one piece of music. AndI think it's --

MR. WATTENBERG: Is he most important as a composer or as amusician?

MR. CROUCH: Well, he's a -- see, his importance isextraordinary because he also represents a rebellion against thesloth, the vulgarity and the simple-mindedness of pop music. That isthat, you know -- see, what he represents and the younger musicianswho are coming behind him, is a turning away from, you know, thosedumb shoes and stupid hairdos and imbecilic taste in clothes that yousee popularized on MTV and BET and VH-1. So --

MR. WATTENBERG: That would be what, rock and roll, rap?

MR. CROUCH: Yes, all of that. Yes. Right.

MR. WATTENBERG: So you are not a fan of that?

MR. CROUCH: No. I mean, I'm not opposed to it.

MR. WATTENBERG: Isn't it true that the music of young peopleat any given point is scorned by their elders. I mean, when I wasgrowing up, as I recall it, I remember I used to listen to my sisterlistening to records and she was big into jazz. But, the oldergeneration thought jazz was sort of dirty music in a way. And isn'tthat really true, era-after-era, that people think that the new musicis rotten music?

MR. CROUCH: Well, you know, that -- that is an argument thathas -- that has been made, because so many movements in the 20thCentury have had -- have created controversy when they came intobeing, you know, the work of Picasso or Stravinsky, et cetera, etcetera. I mean, even with that movie in 1903 or something, The Kiss,and it's just a few little -- a couple of little pecks, but everybodywas, oh my God.

All right, the problem is this, if you say those things aboutgangster rap you are right. It is vile. I mean, it glamorizesthugishness, misogyny, mindless violence, constantly getting drunk,smoking reefers, acting in an anarchic fashion.

MR. WATTENBERG: Stanley, you have written that American meantblood and class were not balls and chains. You've also said thatevery American knows exactly what you mean when you say, they said itcouldn't be done and we did it. Is that a central theme of whatyou're writing about?

MR. CROUCH: Of course. I mean, the -- I mean, on the onehand, we have -- we have -- one side of our history is what I call --I say somewhere in All-American Skin Game it's a running battle withthe worst manifestations of capitalism. That is, everything frominsider trading, slavery, selling of rotten meat, et cetera, etcetera, et cetera.

Now, those -- what it seems to me that our country attempts todo is bring about what I call civilization under capitalism. Thatis, a way to bring together the profit motive, morality and ethics. That that's the grand ideal. And I mean, from the Pure Food and DrugAct on and on and on, that's an ongoing battle. It's just like themaking of locks. Right. If you and I were in the lock business,every time we invent a new lock, people who break locks are startingto figure out how to break that lock.

MR. WATTENBERG: Right.

MR. CROUCH: You know, that's why -- that's why banks don'thave the same lock that they had, say, 40 years ago, because theminute that lock came into existence there were bank robbers whostarted thinking.

MR. WATTENBERG: Sometimes the people who make the pure foodand drug laws go so far that they start destroying healthy aspects ofcapitalism. I mean, the whole over- regulation argument.

MR. CROUCH: Yes, but see, that's -- but, see, that's why oursocial contract is so extraordinary. It's all -- it's sofundamentally based in the fact that people can screw it up, whateverthe it is. You know, you can go too far one way or the other. Sowhat we are seeing now is that -- you see, our history is this, youand I come up with a law that we think will protect some part of theenvironment better than the policy we presently have. Once abureaucracy gets involved and people begin to get paychecks to do acertain thing, they can to too far with that. Right.

Then one day they come back and they say, well, Wattenberg andCrouch, you all said that when you -- when we -- when proposition18,403 came out of here that it was going to change this and it'sactually made it the worse thing. You say, well -- well, what wewould say then is, well, you know, we're presently working on a newpolicy to amend the problems that we did not foresee in the otherone. And I think that that's the thing that we have to always keep inmind.

That's what I mean about the tragic optimism. The possibilitythat it can go wrong is innately understood. And our amendments, ourrewriting, our rejection of previous policy, all of that is aboutbeing able to try to -- try to get closer and closer to the realitythat we actually observe in the world.

MR. WATTENBERG: You've been criticized as being sort of aneo-conservative hitman. That's one quote, which I always thoughtit's what I was. And that you've beat up particularly toughly ongays and feminists and the black activists. And is that because ofyour distaste for this separatism kind of thing

and the victimization? Is that --

MR. CROUCH: Well, for one thing, these purported separatistsusually have jobs many of which are tenured jobs, in which they arepaid to tell people that they can't be successful. Right? So I findit very ironic that some kid who is a homosexual, a woman, someminority, right, goes to a college where somebody is getting nearlysix figures a year, lifetime job guaranteed, as long as they don't doanything extremely crazy, right, and that person is going to tellthese kids that you can't be a success. I work nine months a year. I have a three month vacation every year, you know. But, you can'tmake it. Right? So don't pay any attention to me. Right? You arethe one who can't make it.

MR. WATTENBERG: Are some of the notable black figures todayviewing themselves principally as black and you are saying, there'snothing wrong with being black, but there is this great Americanculture that's open to us, and that's the game I want to play in?

MR. CROUCH: You're absolutely right. But, you see, theproblem we have here, it seems to me, is that, the first thing, as Icite somewhere in there, when Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, came toAmerica, he observed and he said -- he observed that white peoplewalked, talked and laughed like negroes from what he could tell, youknow. And Africans often accuse black people, black Americans, ofbeing black-skinned white people. That is, we have influenced eachother so much, okay, that the idea of racial division is a bigproblem.

For instance, if you -- when you first come to New York from aplace like I came from in Los Angeles, right, everybody you talk toon the telephone you think is Jewish because you don't know the NewYork accent, you haven't been able to make the distinctions of thenegro American version of it, the Puerto Rican version of it, theJewish version of it, the Irish version of it, the Italian version ofit. Now, all of those versions are inside that accent, but when youfirst pick up the telephone when you come to New York, New York --all of those racial divisions, racial and religious divisions,disappear because your ear isn't attuned to that.

MR. WATTENBERG: There is this thing going on that -- that manyblacks are anti-semitic, that is an accusation, and the accusationagainst you has been, I guess, that you are semitophile, that you areoverly friendly to Jews. That you have a particular identity withJews. Does that make sense?

MR. CROUCH: Well, I thought -- the thing, well, you see --

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, some of your critics make that point.

MR. CROUCH: Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, you know. I mean, see, I'mthe kind of person you can say almost -- I can be attacked fromalmost any side depending upon how irrational you are. I mean, ofcourse -- (Laughter.) Of course, I wouldn't think anybody rationalwould attack me.

MR. WATTENBERG: I'm getting ready for my attack. (Laughter.) This has all been just a put-on.

MR. CROUCH: But, well, see, the thing with me is that I'vealways -- see, I was born in 1945. When I was coming up, I remembervery distinctly when Eichmann was captured, and there was all of thisstuff that came out on the television about World War II and thedeath camps, and all this stuff. And my mother was very adamantabout the fact that when we looked at that, that was happening in thedeath camps and stuff, that we -- that that put in perspective whatwas happening in terms of racism in the United States.

Further, she worked for a -- she was a domestic, a maid, sheworked for a number of Jews who would invite me and her to dinner atthe house, and they -- she would get them to loan me books, and Iwould go there and they would be talking about -- you know, Iremember having lunch with these people who were German Jews, andthey said, well, what do you think about Nixon and Kennedy, you know.And so, this was 1960, I was 14. I didn't turn 15 until December the14th, and I was like, gee whiz, this is what the white folks talkabout. I didn't -- you know, I mean, because I wasn't accustomed tothese kinds of -- you know, I was -- nobody ever asked me as a 14-year-old what I thought about the presidential race.

Now, that was just the beginning. Not that my mother wasn'talways -- she was a big Kennedy person and all of that. I don't meanthat. I just meant that there was a certain kind of a -- of anintellectual engagement that I encountered in the Jewish world that Iwas very -- that I was then enthralled by and am still veryfascinated by. And -- but I think, you know, in the United States,though, it's very easy to be attracted to a number of different kindsof things outside of what some people might think is justcircumscribed ethnic groups. In other words, as an American, I don'tparticularly feel uncomfortable among any American group. I mean, ifI'm among American Southerners, or Italian-Americans, or Jews, orAsians, or something, I'm never somebody going looking around saying,well, where my people is? I don't -- you know, that doesn't reallybother me, you know.

In fact, when I was a boy, my mother was so obsessed with usmeeting other groups of people that she sent us all to thiselementary school that was a mixed school that had Asians, Irish kidsin it, Spanish kids in it, because there was an all-black elementaryschool very near us, and she said, look, you know, the world is madeup of all kinds of people and you might as well start meeting themnow. So she sent me and my brother and my sister to that school. Somy first six years of -- first six years of school, I was able tofind out very quickly that no ethnic group or no ethnic, religious orracial group is superior to any other, because I ran into idiots inevery ethnic group. There are a few smart ones in every one.

MR. WATTENBERG: Right. Is the melting pot still the rightmetaphor for America?

MR. CROUCH: Oh, I think so. Except that, you see, I thinkwhat we misunderstand now is, okay, you see -- like there's ahilarious show on Showtime called Sherman Oaks, what it's about isit's this Jewish family that lives in the valley outside LA, right,in the suburbs. One of their sons has decided that he's black, andhe has a black friend. And so the black friend is the -- to see theconversation between the white kid and the black kid is hilariousbecause the white kid is going: You, look here, bro, what we've gotto be doing out here is two black men --

(Video clip.)

MR. CROUCH: And so it's a real send up of that andimmigration, and all kinds, you know, and upper middle class angst,and a bunch of things, but in the white kid, right, what we see is,is how quickly any cultural language can be appropriated anyplace inthe United States. You've got people who pick up all kinds ofdifferent things one from the other, and I don't think there'sanything wrong with that. I think that -- in other words, I don'tthink there's any way that somebody should be able to tell somebodythat if you're going to be a Jewish American, you have to start hereand stop here. If you're going to be a black American, you have tostart here and stop here. If you're going to be a real, you know,modern day woman who's pro-feminist, you have to start here and stophere. I think that's all dumb, plus I don't think it works. I thinkpeople will -- will gravitate towards the things that make them feelmost human within the terms of their time.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is intermarriage the final stage ofassimilation?

MR. CROUCH: Well, I think -- well, see, to me, when it comesdown to romance, I think that should just be the province of the twopeople. I mean, it's so difficult for Americans to stay married thatI don't think right now -- I don't think anybody should worry aboutintermarriage. I mean, it just doesn't guarantee anything. Further,as I've often said now, if you put Louis Farrakhan -- if you put abeard on Louis Farrakhan, right, and a mustache and put him in a suitwithout a bow tie. And you put him and David Duke on a plane and youflew them to West Africa, the Africans would say, ah, two Americans.If you sent them to wherever in Europe David Duke's family comesfrom, they would say upon seeing Farrakhan and this guy get off theplane -- no matter whether they were in an argument or not, theywould say, ah, two Americans.

Now, what makes us American transcends all of that, andeverybody else on the face of the earth recognizes it almostimmediately -- almost immediately as soon as they see it, you know. And that's the thing I think that's most important, and that's thething I think that's going to win out.

MR. WATTENBERG: But I mean, you are saying, quite properly, Ithink, that who marries who should be up to the individuals, fine.

MR. CROUCH: Right.

MR. WATTENBERG: But is this going to have a powerful -- asthis progresses and if it progresses, particularly black-white, whereit hadn't happened before, is this going to change American society?

MR. CROUCH: I think so, yeah. I think American society isgoing to be drastically changed by intermarriage. I mean, in that Ithink race will become so diffused, and it will become sodiversified, if you will, because of all of these different kinds ofcombinations, that I don't think the two or three different divisionsthat we now are using will really work, say, 100 years from now.

MR. WATTENBERG: It's going to be hard to tell?

MR. CROUCH: Right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Stanley Crouch. And thankyou.

Please send your questions and comments about Think Tank to NewRiver Media, 1150 17th Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036. We may also be reached on the World Wide Web at www.pbs.org. We mayalso be reached via e- mail at thinktv@pbs.org. For Think Tank, I'mBen Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, inassociation with New River Media, which are solely responsible forits content.

Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of thePresidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancerpatients through cellular and molecular biology, improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundationand the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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