Frederick Douglass

The very human feeling of compulsion towards something that you fancy is lovely when you are not in its thrall. I remember when we had a rat (or two) in the Marsden Ave apartment and used peanut butter as a lure for our traps. It worked like a charm and the reward was the disgusting removal of a feral corpse. If aliens want to trap me they'd just have to put a jar of almond butter mixed with honey and basically all fear would go out the window and my fate would be experimentation out of the world. 

Books, when they are a compulsion, is a quaint idea. We can imagine easily the compulsion of food and drink, sex, and computer games but books can captivate. Audiobooks, too, it seems. If I could say that I dread the weeks when I don't need to commute to Hamilton it might surprise. Why? Because I have an excuse to listen to my books. Recently it has been the Asia Saga from James Clavell some of whose books go into 50 hours which no normal busy person could finish in four weeks without a strict regiment. Right now it is a biography about Frederick Douglass whose 40 hours I still need to work hard to complete.

I didn't know anything about Douglass until a few years ago when President Trump described him as "an example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more" which betrayed the Don as it made it obvious he though being someone who can speak with full confidence and bluster about someone or something that he knows nothing about Frederick Douglass. The grammarian will notice that Don was using the present perfect tense with a person who died in 1895. Don may have thought one day that he'd have to give Frederick the Medal of Freedom. But Frederick Douglass did do an amazing job. I am not half-way though and I'm already convinced of that.

He was a slave for 20 years until he escaped but emerged not only as a charismatic speaker but one with clear principles, the power of literacy much beyond those who had spent their youth in education and the wisdom for the ages. In this modern age we know the population-scale effects of deprivation and discrimination on a group while also observing those few sparkling lights of the extraordinary who stay strong and not be cut down as they distinguish themselves where most others would fall. His spectacular emergence was an antidote to that of age racism - a slave who was or became a gentleman and a scholar. Or should have been the antidote but for the dogmatism of white superiority, or that the real politick realised that emancipation of the slaves would devastate southern states regardless of moral questions. Any realistic person could say that slavery as an institution and racial notions are not of an objective rational mind. But what we can say about the blinkered prejudiced minds of the past, it is also pleasant to hear the lives of the anti-abolitionists of the times. Some people really were passionate in their support and desire to subvert slavery system, hiding slaves, supporting their escape to British colonies. While the politics of any moment in the past is hard to grasp in the competing persons and policies, that time in America, the emergence of the Republican Party and their very first elected US president, Abraham Lincoln, was part of the tumult of the times. 

So here is to compulsions of learning of lives. I will blog about the Asia Saga once I can listen to the final 50 hour novel and complete the full view.