"The Bombing of Osage Avenue"

Produced in 1986 for WHYY, The Bombing of Osage Avenue examines the 1985 MOVE bombing and its aftermath through interviews with neighborhood residents, footage of the siege and the investigation that followed, and the poetic narration of Toni Cade Bambara.  In a report from Death Row aired on Democracy Now, Mumua Abu-Jamal observes that on May 13, 1985. “the city, armed and assisted by the U.S. government dropped a bomb on a home and called it law.”  The MOVE bombing was a “massacre,” an example of a “city wag[ing] war on its citizens,” and proof of the corruption of the system.  The Bombing of Osage Avenue reinforces Abu-Jamal’s assessment and situates the 1985 MOVE bombing along a historical continuum of white aggression (a history fires and bombings, a history of burning) toward black and black-friendly communities and institutions in the United States generally and Philadelphia specifically.  Images show the destruction of an aerial assault on a black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the infamous race riot there in 1921.  The image echoes that of the burned blocks surrounding the MOVE home in West Philadelphia.  Further, footage of the police helicopter dropping a bag of military-grade explosives on the roof of the MOVE house recalls the state-sanctioned assault on Tulsa (each a result of a kind of elite panic of the city’s white citizens).  The film also touches (briefly) on the history of MOVE in Philadelphia, especially the 1978 confrontation with police that capped the previous decade of antagonism between the two groups.  Though this film focuses more on the 1985 bombing, the images from the 1978 siege also illustrate the militarization of city space by government forces against “undesirable” members of its citizenry that pose a real or imagined threat against the institutional status quo (in this case the Frank Rizzo administration/ machine). 

We see images representative of the carceral city; barricades, helicopters, assault rifles, (a majority white) police officers in formation mobilized against a black community.  The military mobilization of 500 officers with heavy artillery pointed at the Osage Avenue house.  It shows a city “neighborhood [as] a free fire zone” where police officers pin members of MOVE inside their burning home.  The MOVE house is both fortress and prison, a bunker shielding its residents from the city outside and, ultimately, a fiery tomb.  It stands aggressively against the city and its neighborhood, its speakers blaring during the day and night before burning to the ground.  Visually, the rubble of the neighborhood echoes that of the bombed out cities of Europe during the Second World War.

The Bombing of Osage Avenue deals with the neighborhood of Cobbs Creek as much as it does with MOVE, and it illustrates well the vibrant and thriving (mostly) black community that existed in Cobbs Creek prior to the 1985 bombing.  The neighborhood was one of working-class blacks and home owners (according to the film the largest population, per capita, home ownership in the city) who had supplanted previous generations of white residents in the post-war period.  The horrific bombing of the MOVE house (and the effective murder of those inside) was, perhaps, the most visible and immediate disaster.  The destruction and erosion of the vibrant Cobbs Creek neighborhood is another part of the disaster legacy of the bombing. 

Though The Bombing of Osage Avenue touches on the history and mission of the MOVE organization and the more recent history of racism in the city, it focus chiefly on the antagonistic relationship between MOVE and the city and the between MOVE and its neighbors in the first part of the nineteen eighties during the administration of the city's first African-American mayor W. Wilson Goode.  An earlier film, MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia (which is available in its entirety here), provides a more in-depth look at the 1978 confrontation between the organization (then located in Powelton Village) and the Philadelphia city government under controversial mayor Frank Rizzo, illustrating the antagonistic relationship between the city and its African-American residents.  This event seems to have laid the groundwork for the response 1985 bombing.  It seems clear that city leaders perceived and treated its black communities as a disaster spaces, which resulted in policies and actions that actually made them so.   

The residents of both Powelton Village and, later, Cobb’s Creek obviously felt otherwise and interviews with residents suggest the kind of vibrant community suggested (but ultimately overlooked) by Jane Jacobs in her influential 1961 book The Life and Death of Great American Cities.  In terms of Cobb's Creek, it would be interesting to see how practices of redlining and blockbusting may have facilitated or limited the creation and development of the black community.  City funded efforts to make the community whole in the wake of the 1985 bombing have failed, and one gets the sense that the damage done cannot be undone by rebuilding of (shoddy) homes because there was much more to this (and any)  neighborhood than just physical structures.  Further, the failed efforts to make the neighborhood whole in the wake of the MOVE bombing suggest the ways in which planners fail to take into account the notion of lived space.  It is an example of a city betraying the trust of its citizens, first in a state sponsored act of terrorism against African American community, and again in its efforts to restore the neighborhood in the wake of the 1985 MOVE bombing.  

The Mütter Museum

Located at the edge of Center City Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum is one of the city’s most peculiar institutions.  Part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Museum is home to a collection of more than 25,000 objects and artifacts relating to the study and practice of medicine.  Packed tightly in the vitrines that line the walls are an odd, and often unsettling, collection of specimens.  

The Mütter is a science museum with the disposition of a sideshow.   Here, the visitor comes face to face with faces and pieces of faces, skulls and brains both whole and cross-sectioned, and diseased tissue and swollen organs of all shapes and sizes (including an ovarian cyst the size of a watermelon).  There are displays devoted to the “Natural History of Crime” and Teratology (the study of malformed fetuses).  There is the skeleton of an “American Giant” (at 9’2” the tallest skeleton on display in North America), the plaster death cast of Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and a selection of books bound in human skin.  It’s enough to make even the sturdiest of visitors a bit squeamish.  

Most of the Mütter’s specimens are from the nineteenth century and early-twentieth century and reflect the strange impulses and interests that mark the evolution of science and medicine.  The museum’s permanent collection is housed on two floors and situated in the center of the building.  The open floor plan allows the visitor to see what is above and below. The layout recalling surgical auditoriums of old, the crowded display cases the back room of a medical laboratory or library.  The collection is presented using an open storage model.  The cabinets are filled – nearly overflowing – with artifacts.  Objects are arranged according to subject in heavy glass cases.  Informational text identifies the objects and situates them in terms of medical history.  There is little separating the visitor from the specimens, a distinct lack of artifice. 

    

Two additional exhibit halls are located adjacent to the permanent collection and host a revolving series of exhibits that draw on the museum’s extensive holdings.  Currently on display is a Civil War centered exhibit that uses Lincoln’s assassination and the aftermath, as the starting point for an examination of the medical practices of the period.  The assassination of Grover Cleveland is also discussed.  In the next room – “Rarely Seen: Hidden Collections from the Mütter Museum” – an exhibit highlighting some of the museum’s many medical objects.  Here, visitors can view “strange medical devices” including an iron lung and a device that uses x-rays to fit shoes (dosing everyone involved with high levels of radiation).   

A large cabinet with many drawers sits beneath the staircase in the lower gallery.  In it, the Dr. Chevalier Jackson collection which contains some 2,000 foreign objects removed from the throats of his patients.  There are pinbacks (one touting “Perfect Attendance” and another promoting traffic safety – “B-A 2-Way Looker”) and metal jacks, a reed from a toy saxophone and half a radiator key, safety pins and carpet tacks, and on and on.  It is an astounding (and meticulously documented) collection, which serves as both a testament to Dr. Jackson’s dexterity and as a catalog of early twentieth century (mass-produced) material culture. 

There is humanity in the Mütter’s specimens that is absent at other science museums.  The exhibits tell the human story of science and medicine.  Further, it is a place that stokes visitor’s sense of wonder and curiosity.  In this way it recalls the Wagner Free Institute of Science.  Further, it serves as an extension of Charles Wilson Peale’s impulse toward “rational amusement” – the combination of education and entertainment characteristic of his American Museum.  It also reflects the collection and display practices of the sixteenth century Wunderkammern.   Stephen Greenblatt describes the cabinets of wonder as places where the “expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed.  It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of experience.”  Greenbaltt’s description provides a sense of the Mütter experience.  It is a place that combines the natural and the man-made, the fantastic and strange, and instills awe, wonder, and often doubt in the visitor.  

For more information, check out the College of Physicians and the Mütter Museum on Facebook.com.

Steven Lubar @ Temple University "Record, Preserve, Document, Shape: Talking About the Public Humanities"

Temple University Libraries recently hosted a talk with Dr. Steven Lubar as part of their Beyond the Page series.  The conversation, facilitated by Temple’s own Dr. Seth Bruggeman, centered on the idea of public humanities, the challenges facing contemporary museums, and the role of technology vis-a-vis museums and public humanities.   

As Bruggeman observed, Steven Lubar has had an “incredible influence on how Americans understand the past” and the ability to make accessible to a broad audience complex problems and ideas.  He spent 22 years at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History, developing some of their most significant exhibits including Engines of Change (1986), The Information Age (1990), and America on the Move (2003).  He has written several books and many essays dealing with American history and material culture, including History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (1993).  In his current role as Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, Lubar is helping shape the next generation of historians and museum personnel.   

Bruggeman described Lubar’s influence on him as a young student – through an essay in which Lubar put for the idea that “technology is politics by other means” – which sparked his interest in material culture studies.  He went on to add that Lubar “has remained on the forefront of writing about technology and how it shapes what historians do and how we can use it to reach broader and broader public.”  In his discussion Lubar focused a great deal on the ways in which technology can be employed in the field of public humanities.  

The conversation began with the question:  What does “public” mean and why do we care about it?  Lubar described the notion of “public” disciplines as those that initiate and rely on conversation, that invite audience participation, and which break down traditional notions (and sites) of expertise.  He described the field of public humanities as “public history plus” – a broader, more inclusive program of study that incorporating elements/concerns of an array of disciplines that serve the public, including history, anthropology, archeology, folklore studies.  It is part-public history, part-museum studies, and part-some other things which in combination reflect the evolving needs and concerns of twenty-first century museums.  Lubar observed that the museum and the way that people think about history are constantly changing and that students need to be prepared for the challenges ahead.  The public humanities field provides the flexibility necessary to meet these challenges, accommodating a diversity of fields, technologies, and interests. 

Referencing a recent New York Times article on digital technology and the humanities, which suggested that the “next big idea in language, history and the arts [is] data,” Lubar discussed the role of technology in the field of public humanities.  He described “digital” as a “tool” suggesting that it is “another way of doing your work” which fosters new ways of thinking.  Further, the use of technology is not something that should be avoided because it is mechanical or difficult, but used as another tool for understanding and outreach.  That the field of public humanities accepts and uses new media and digital technology seems to be one of its greatest strengths, creating a generation of individuals comfortable with using technology as a tool.   

Lubar described a community history project by Brown students which employed flicker to display photographs and solicited responses from community residents to build its archive on the Fox Point neighborhood.  Here, technology (along with more traditional oral history techniques) was used to create a collaborative exhibit which explored the evolution of a neighborhood in relation to the University.  Further, the “Faces of Fox Point” exhibit was developed as a workshop for local middle-school students, introducing them to oral history and photography “as documentary sources” and allowed them to add their own work to the exhibit.  In the “Faces of Fox Point” we see how technology can be used to democratize curatorial input and expertise, engage its audience through participation, and invite conversation between scholars, students, and the community.  It also suggests It reflects the best aspects of the public humanities and also suggests a broadening of the idea of what museums are and what they can do.

Norwich Calling

Students in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, U.K. were asked, “What does America mean to me?”  Their responses provide a glimpse of perceptions of the United States abroad and also pushed me to examine my perceptions of my country.       

Reading an outsider’s perspective of one’s country is always difficult.  It is especially so when your country is the U.S.  One is keenly aware of the negative, often bemused, international perception of the U.S.  I would argue that we’ve done much to earn this reputation.  However, regardless of one’s personal feelings the initial response to these perceptions is often defensive.  Moving beyond knee-jerk reaction, I found that I agreed with my peers on many points.  Their responses were often critical of the U.S. and many of them note the disparity between American ideals and image and the political, economic, and social realities of the nation.  I especially agree with the oft-repeated notion that America is difficult to define.  From a vantage point within the United States, I can say that I have difficulty pinning down the essence of America.

What follows is a summary of the key themes that emerged from the nineteen group responses crafted by the students of UEA.  Though I have quoted directly from several of these responses, I have attempted to synthesize the contributions of many individuals into a unified voice.  I invite UEA students to contact me via the comments section if they feel I have misinterpreted or misrepresented their assertions, and also to comment generally on my response to their responses.  Further, I invite UEA students to provide additional information regarding the characteristics of their class.  I am curious to know more about the demographics of their group (age, sex, gender, etc.) and how they feel this might shape their perceptions of the United States.  

Several themes emerged in the student responses to the question, “What does America mean to me?”  Several students described the U.S. as difficult to define, marking it as an almost imaginary place constructed through media and consumer products.  Some pointed to the power and the fallacy of the American Dream.  America was described as a “land of contradictions,” a “concept rather than a country” and “constantly reinventing itself.”  Here a self-created American myth – which includes notions of equality, liberty, justice, rugged individualism, meritocracy, self-creation, and economic prosperity – informs and overwhelms reality.

They described the U.S. as a superpower whose global reach is political, economic, and cultural.  It dominates the global stage, while relying on, and often exploiting, other nations to further its goals.  As one group observed, “America absorbs other cultures before regurgitating and manipulating them to conform” to its own goals.  The U.S. regards itself as an ideal society and forces others to adapt while “protect[ing] its own interests and [obscuring] its own fragilities.” 

Many cited the contradictions between American ideals and the social, economic, and political reality of life in the United States.  Issues of race in America, specifically the oppression of African-Americans, was cited as a chief example of American hypocrisy and the failures of the American experiment.  Also noted was a selective forgetfulness of the more troubling aspects of the nation’s past.  The country’s physical size and geographic and cultural diversity was cited as both strength and a weakness, and Americans of were perceived as unified by a shared national identity.  Patriotism and individualism were identified as traits essential to American identity, and success and wealth marked as important goals. Many students noted the power of American symbols, institutions, and iconography to evoke the American Dream and mythos and unite the nation’s diverse population.  Examples include the American flag, the “Star-Spangled Banner,” Superman (the ur-immigrant), cowboys and the American west, the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline, Hollywood, and Barack Obama. 

Many pointed to the power of the media in shaping perceptions of America and some of the ideas discussed by the UEA students were shaped by media representations of the country.  The U.S. was characterized as a producer and exporter of culture and these cultural products – literature, film and television, music, and corporate brands – were characterized as transmitters of imagery and values of the U.S. and important tools in decoding American identity.  American film and television programs were described as “inescapable” and, along with corporate entities like Starbucks and McDonalds, are synonymous with America, presenting an image of America based on capitalism, consumption, and materialism. Disney films are cited as symbolic of the American world view and further illustrate the power of American cultural products to transmit ideology.  Further, these products were perceived as often overshadowing those of individual nations and act as a homogenizing influence. (I would suggest that many feel that “Americanization” is a threat to the diversity of the United States.)  What emerges here is a sense of cultural colonialism on the part of the U.S. 

One group “found it difficult to comprehend how America has such a limited knowledge of the ‘outside world’ whilst also having such a detailed knowledge of their own country.”  I would agree with the assumption that Americans have a narrow perception of the outside world.  To say this is to admit that I, as an American, have a limited understanding of the world beyond our borders.  My response to the question, “What does the U.K. mean to me?” would be woefully lacking (and would be derived from a combination of sources that included, in no particular order; Elvis Costello, Ricky Gervais, The Up series, Ealing comedies and Hammer horror films, and Bob Hoskins).  Perhaps this is because of our relatively short history, or our size and our relative geographic isolation.  Or maybe it is because of some ingrained, and misguided, notion of American exceptionalism.  It is not sufficient enough explanation to observe that it is very likely that many Americans lack a detailed knowledge of their own country beyond their immediate region.  We derive our perceptions about our country from many of the same sources that the UEA students describe.  We, too, are sold and believe the American myth.           

I agree with many of the perceptions and criticisms outlined in the responses of the UEA students.  Our principles are often at odds with our actions.  We do practice a kind of cultural colonialism (not to mention economic and ideological colonialism).  We are susceptible to our own mythology.  As a nation we are by turns myopic, self-absorbed, and apathetic.  On the global stage we are alternate between isolationism and imperialism.  I agree that our diversity is our greatest strength.  And that American patriotism is a unifying force, but it can also be destructive when it becomes nativistic or jingoistic in tone.  I agree to some extent that American democracy has become distorted in the twenty-first century and that, depending on the day and who you ask, American’s generally believe they live in some kind of democracy.  I agree that the U.S. is a nation of great contradictions and, despite our wealth, one of great disparity.  That said I am optimistic that the U.S. can act as a force of good in the world, that we have the capacity to recognize our errors and change for the better, and that our political system at its best is responsive enough to facilitate these changes.  It is also a place of great opportunity, but I also recognize that as a middle-class white male I have greater advantages, more opportunity, and can afford to be optimistic

That said, I cannot explain Sarah Palin beyond acknowledging her popularity as a testament to the diversity of opinion in America and the power of the media to shape perception and create celebrity.  And it is my great regret to report that Thurston Moore, with Sonic Youth or without, is not as revered as he should be.