The Organ Grinder’s Monkey: a short essay on the so-called politics of respectability
Respectability is no way to live a life. Respectability is not even living. The so-called politics of respectability is neither respectable nor political. Animals and machines cannot be political. Respectability is a minstrel show. Organ grinder's monkey is not a self-respecting political position.
"Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
A: Because it was dead."
–David Wojnarowicz
A human being is a human being is a human being. To present oneself as if one were a human being, however, is to give up the ghost. Why? Because only an animal or a machine can act as if it were human. A human being is a human being. The "as if" is a fatal concession, an always-fatal fall. The thing that remains as spirit-fled flesh is just an animal or a machine. It is the organ grinder's monkey, the politician of respectability.
The tune to which the organ grinder's monkey dances is never its own: "For they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"
The organ grinder's monkey dances to its master's tune. It may be rewarded with shiny coins or a place on the Dean's List or tasty peanuts or a Ph.D. or yummy bananas or a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. None of these things matter because the monkey is dead. The monkey fell out of the tree. Tree of Life? Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Willow? Redbud? It does not matter. The monkey fell, the monkey has fallen, the monkey is falling, it never ends; it is always already over at the beginning: The monkey fell because it was dead.
Verisimilitude: the appearance of being real or true. The organ grinder's monkey makes respectability noises, "I am black, but O! my soul is white," and "Am I not a man and a brother?"
Verisimilitude is the key, the beat, the blood, and the harmony: "I am black, but O! my soul is white," "I am black, but O! my soul is white," "I am black, but O! my soul is white," over and over, like crimson and clover, "Am I not a man and a brother?" "Am I not a man and a brother?" "Am I not a man and a brother?" like an alarm clock, but the monkey is not sleeping, it is dead.
To argue for one's humanity is to concede the argument before it begins. To make one's life into such an argument is to end one's life altogether. In fact, the individual pawn's apparent self-sacrifice is really just a genocidal attack on its own group.
One summer, perhaps I was eight or nine, my mother and I spent weeks at the library at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. We were in the library from morning to evening, and, for reasons having to do with her research, we were half a continent away from home and the rest of the family. That, at any rate, is my how I remember it. I recall one day very clearly. It was the day a band of feral children came to the library. They were loud, wild, stupid, and probably poor. They did not love libraries. They did not know about libraries.
We love libraries. I have always loved libraries. As a child, the library appeared before my eyes as an endless and impossibly beautiful forest. My parents were both university professors. My grandparents, all four, were schoolteachers. A great-grandfather was also a teacher. My aunts and uncles and cousins have degrees too numerous to count. After the ground zero of slavery, libraries became our home. We also love athletics, so libraries and track meets were, for us, home.
Back to the "fluttered folk and wild,” the feral children who entered the library. I wanted nothing to do with them. "Half-devil and half-child," they were about my age. They spent about an hour, maybe two, running and shouting and pushing and shoving each other around. They did not love the library; they seemed to love jumping around and making noise. They were, to my amazement and horror, utterly uninterested in books, save as objects to toss around. As it happens, they were black. Trapped in slavery.
At some point, I walked past an elevator in the library and an old woman, white, called to me, holding the door, "Young man," or some such adult-to-child 1970s form of address, "I think that you are about to miss your bus. Your group just left the library." I said, "I am NOT with them." What had I to do with the wildlings? "I am not with THEM." My white interlocutor responded, "You can say that again!" I denied the wildlings a third time, only in my mind ("I am not with them").
We were both disgusted. But I do not think that we were disgusted by the same thing. I told my mother about the conversation. She told me to "never feel happy" about that kind of conversation. My mother and I were already in agreement.
"Why take children to a library without first teaching them how to use and appreciate a library?" I recall thinking. "White racism" is what I recall concluding, even before I spoke with my mother. “What a clever way to get them to exclude themselves.”
Reading at a desk for hours is an acquired skill, a physical skill. It is not unlike athletics. You have to be coached. Your imagination has to be coaxed. This is done routinely for the children of the bourgeoisie.
What white racists might have seen or thought about the wild black children, or me, really does not matter at all, and it did not matter to me. One would have to be a monkey to actually have feelings about what racists' think. In fact, that may be how it starts. It starts when one begins to care, as a matter of the heart, as a matter of inner feelings, what racists think: "Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead." No one should make his or her life a performance piece for or against white racism. That is not respectable, it is not political, it is not even living.
The feral black kids were performing for white racists. They were on display, as in a zoo. In fact, taking them to the library –untrained as they were in its uses, uninformed as they were of its wonders– was a sadistic way of getting them to cooperate in their own alienation. If I had been happy to be seen as not with them, then that happiness would have put me on display in the same zoo: Look, the mutation that proves the general rule.
The wild children, who happened to be black, had been cast out of the garden. But we all had been cast out. "Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead." No counter-performance of mine was going to successfully "bid the sickness cease." And why would I give up one second of my own life to perform for racists?
Coins and peanuts and bananas, like Ph.D.s and high office, are not victories. The powers and principalities that were and remain happy to hear black children howl in the library were and remain happy to have the rest of us not exist, or exist only to prove the general rule, like the organ grinder's monkey. The politics of respectability cannot win. The proponents of respectability do not want to win; they do not want us to win. They only want to be wanted, like the organ grinder’s monkey.
In Madison, Wisconsin, in 2013, over four decades after my afternoon of respectability, the police made over 1,000 arrests of black children between the ages of 10 and 17. There are only 3,247 black children between the ages of 10 and 17 in Madison, Wisconsin. The human zoo has expanded beyond the school and the library. The plantation is nearly complete.
Better must come.
There is nothing wrong with anyone. No one is better. No one is worse. No one is in a position to judge. There is nothing to judge. The monkey fell out of the tree. The monkey fell because it was dead. The dead have nothing to offer. It is different with the living.
p.s.
something else from 1970:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KYiACKRgc
—Anthony Paul Farley, Albany School of Law