GRADES

I will be in my office finishing grades from 9.30-3.30 pm tomorrow. Please stop by during those times if you'd like to discuss your grade before I turn it in. Thank you for everyone who has brought by papers and exams. It was a great class.

Reading for Thursday

Please read pages 1-44 in Fires in the Mirror for Thursday. 


For next Wednesday, finish the text.

Little Scarlet

  

Luis: Walter Mosley’s “Little Scarlet” refers to some

of the ideas we’ve discussed in class such as the scapegoat, and the role of emotions which are relevant to contemporary issues.  The protagonist of the story who goes by the name of Ezikiel Rawlins, otherwise known as Easy, experiences the emotional buildup of several feelings throughout the events which unfold. A devastating riot, the pursuit of a serial killer, doubt about his lovers faithfulness in the past, lust for a nubile youth by the name of Juanda, and the transformation of society with Easy in the front lines creating and experiencing those changes with his collaboration with the police.  Throughout the story, Easy manages to repress the intense feelings of anger, and passion by focusing on the case and not on his own internal struggles.  Consequently, the suppression of his anger attributes to its buildup, and the most subtle gesture is all that is needed to spark the emotional time-bomb.  While driving Jaunda to her home, Easy informs her of about Harold the primary suspect, and warns her to be careful and not to disclose the events that they’ve just discuss.  Easy tells her that Harold has been killing African-American women for years, and she asks ‘“Why didn’t somebody stop him?’”  Easy crudely responds ‘“Because nobody cares about black women bein’ killed… Nobody cares about you girl.  A man could cut your throat and throw you in the river and if a cop see you floatin’ by he wouldn’t even drag you in because he might get his shoes wet”’ (Mosley 209).  He also states, “I experienced a vicious satisfaction hurting Juanda like that.  It was wrong but I was angry” (209).  The overwhelming sensation of this “vicious satisfaction” from emotionally hurting someone provides the understanding for the outlet that is needed to project raw emotions such as anger to mitigate one’s own consumption by it.  One of the reasons why anger intensifies if not filtered through some medium is because the mind and body associates this emotion as unhealthy to some degree and like toxic waste, it must be expelled to allow for other sentiments to take its place.  Easy is aware that his response to Juanda was harsh as he states “it was wrong” but then justifies it with that fact that he was “angry.”  So Easy’s superego and moral consciousness are clearly active but overridden by the less rational component of the mind which coordinates emotional response.  It’s also interesting to note that the victim of Easy’s emotional discharge is a black woman which alludes to the idea of African-American women being an emotional repository  for men of black and white ethnicity.     

Katerina: Within Mosley’s book,( the page I can’t remember at the moment and might edit this post just to enter it in), it was mentioned that the women were placed up on meat hooks, preserved in that cold locker like room. It was almost as though they were trophies being presented in such a manner. Really makes me think, in a high moral thought process mind you, on what sort of sick, perverted person would do such a thing? Could if no one knew the whole story and just say an image of that one scene, there could be multiple reasons as to why. Be it that’s how they presented women in a morgue. Or maybe they’re just fake dolls.

Jose: In the story we come across a poem that Harold has writen on a wall with red lipstick. The poem reads "Dirty girls get mud in their eye, They eat maggots and die, Break brains bad things bad things, They all die down in my pantry" (Mosley 152). Harold is described as a homeless bum living in the streets but with the evidence of his writen poem we know that Harold is able to read, write and display complex thoughts in writen form. This now demonstrates that Harold is an intelegent man not just a common bum with no education. In 1965 many   African Americans did not read due to the economic class structure so to find a homelessman with an education could have been very rare. The fact that Nola was strangled to death then shot in the head after she was dead displays a sense that this murder was personal and emotional. Harold did not just commit a random murdur and Nola was not a random victim, she was chosen and what ever she did in her life affected Harold and she payed for it with her life. 

Estivel: We have discussed a lot of themes in Little Scarlet’s book and Easy Rawlings investigation about Nola’s death, but one of the topics I was most interested was Harold’s guilt. The poem found by Rawlings (Page 152). It said….

“Dirty girls get much in their eye

They eat maggots and die

Break brains bad things bad things

They all die down in my pantry”

It was evident that Harold killed Nola. Each of these words represent Nola’s shot in the eye, “eat maggots” (white man) and the deathly strangulation (break brains). The police targeted a white man as responsible for Nola’s death, but ironically, during such race riot, during such period of violence between two races, the main responsible was a homeless black man, a poor African man from the streets who knows how to write a poem and kills people (especially black women) without suspicion. Harold seems to have an interesting background throughout his life because he’s not illiterate. In some way, Harold punishes black women for being around with whites. Black and whites were segregated, riots and violence were in people’s blood, and Harold was attacking the enemy (whites) by killing black women who becomes the lover of the people who discriminate them. But “revenge” is the word that describes the actions against his own community. As we discussed in class, I believe it’s very true that sexual attraction, touches and the union of two lovers from different races and skin color had the power for revolution.

Ashley: I didn't get to write last week due to issues with my computer monitor so now I will write twice as much despite the fact that I won't get that credit. Last week in class we started discussing Little Scarlet, a detective novel by Walter Mosley,in which the protagonist Easy Rawlins is assigned to solve the murder of an African American female. The story takes place in the 1960s when the Watts riots occurred. We also were able to watch Heat Wave, a 1990 film that is also inspired by the Watts riots. The first thing I wanted to discuss was an excerpt from Little Scarlet on page 218. This scene is crucial because Easy isn't engaged in conversation with another character but explaining to the reader how manipulative the ghettos of Los Angeles were (much like the idea of Hollywood being a manipulative society in The Day of the Locust). This idea of a hopeful place to live out the American dream is also brought up in the film Heat Wave. Easy brings up this idea of a "new class of poverty" because of how aesthetically deceitful the slums were. He mentions that the African Americans have cars,houses,lawns and electricity: factors that weren't prevalent in poverty 100 years prior. This wasn't the poverty that Irish imminigrants faced in five points that was visually blatant in Jacob Riis' photography, this was/is a silent and systemic form of poverty. This was a way for the oppressors to brainwash the indifferent masses who were already becoming dumbed down by the media (another Day of the Locust correlation?)into believing that African Americans were getting along fine. This of course is still happening today on the same scale as it were back in the sixties. This is where I take what I got from the novels and film and bring it to a personal level. I am from Williamsburg,probably the second most expensive city to live in, which is now facing a massive amount of gentrification. I have experienced tons of situations with intolerant people in my own neighborhood as well as hearing about it from friends of mine. As a frequent visitor to my boyfriend's apartment in Williamsburg Houses (projects), I constantly have to face unecessary police cars parked in front of the children's playground that is located at the center of the buildings. This could be solely because of the socially demonized residents of the projects but it is also because of the four to five condominiums in a one block radius(I can't say I've only dealt with xenophobic behavior but It doesn't change my emotion toward the outcome of this change) .Many people and business owners have had to face evictions and local schools have had to be annexed or closed. There has been no help for our community and there is an awkward divide here. Things like this and the Occupy movement (which a friend from the projects was actively involved with) has made me see a great correlation between my neighborhood and Occupy and to what we have been studying in class. Things like this only come around in cycles and I do believe that we have been seeing on screen might come to life.

 I'm going to leave a music video this time named Hiipower by conscious Hip-Hop artist Kendrick Lamar. This video is chock full of footage from the civil rights movement and even has clips of riots and such. To me there is a correlation between the class work and the message/content of the song.

l your guns and play me, let's set it off

cause a riot, throw a molotov

somebody told me those pirates had got lost

case we been off them slave shipsot our own pyramids, 

write our own hieroglyphs

 Every day we fight the system

just to make our way, we been down for too long
But that's alright, we was built to be strong
cause it's our life
Every day we fight the system

Extra Credit: Event

CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue 

Fri Feb 10, 2012, 4:00 pm  |  English Lounge (Room 4406)

[8]What Do Keywords Do?
    Links:
      8. http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/What-Do-Keywords-Do

Lecture: Bruce Burgett, Glenn Hendler

  The _Oxford English Dictionary_ defines "keywords" as words that are of
  "great importance or significance." In the digital universe, keywords
  organize vast quantities of complex information. These words are nodal
  points in many of today's most dynamic and vexed discussions of political
  and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. Drawing on their
  experience editing _Keywords for American Cultural Studies_, _Bruce Burgett
  _(Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington) and _Glenn
  Hendler_ (English and American Studies, Fordham University) will discuss the
  critical and creative potential of keywords to catalyze interdisciplinary
  conversation. This a public program connected to “[9]Revolutionizing
  American Studies.” For further information on this and other Seminars in the
  Humanities, see http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars.
    Links:
      9. http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/revolutionizing-american-studies

  _Co-sponsored by the Revolutionizing American Studies Seminar and the PhD
  Program in English_

Model Close-Reading: Assignment One

NOTICE: the presence of a topic sentence (with room for improvement, given the content of the paragraph); the citation and explanation of key phrases and words from the text (with half-correct MLA citation: a good effort); and gestures at connections and critical thinking to conclude. This is an above-average paragraph.

We might wish for an explanation of the "their" in the opening sentence, and analysis at the conclusion that goes further than class discussion. 

It was the wanting to defend their community that justified their actions. In fact, many embraced the executions of African-Americans and celebrated them in a parade like fashion. This was the case for Henry Smith, who was executed in a similar style. “Arriving here at 10 o’clock the train was met by a surging mass of humanity 10,000 strong. The negro was placed upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history.” (Wells, p. 90) The text mentions the word “monster” which many affiliate with evil. White southerners would use this word to describe African-Americans for their advantage. It allowed them to disguise their actions in terms of their own victimization. Therefore, many white southerners did not believe what they were doing was wrong. “Curiosity seekers have carried away already all that was left of the memorable event, even a piece of charcoal.” (Wells, p. 91) The crowd gives off a sporting event feel by illustrating the crowds’ willingness to cling on to artifacts for memorabilia; similar to a fan at a baseball game who hopes to catch a ball. I feel this literature piece is more detailed and illustrates a lynching on a grander scale in comparison to a silent film.

Model Opening Paragraph: Assignment One

NOTICE: opening scene, transition to texts under discussion, specific thesis statement.

Perhaps Jube never had the guarantee of living out his life to its entirety and even less one with out the possibility of being mistreated by his fellow man.  Still, the fate that he was dealt with was depicted by Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s short story The Lynching of Jube Benson was lawless, humiliating and brute. Begging for his life and questioning his own likelihood in the murder for which he was accused, had spared him no mercy.  He was quickly taken by a crazed mob led by a local doctor and friend no less, hung before a crowd moments before his brother Ben and a friend brought the actual culprit to the anxious and grotesquely motivated crowd. The written accounts of the unjust murder of Jube Benson were extensively more graphic than that of any visually violent scene. The film Within Our Gates portrays an equally vile crime, a sexual assault attempt. The visual advantage of this medium may be limited only by the scenes provided in the film. A written chronicle of either of these crimes in my opinion has the greater advantage at arousing an emotional response from perceiver as they are hindered not by the imagination of a film director.  Written literature of violence can be extensively more vivid by illustrating the emotion with unique detailed accuracy.

Blog Assignment FIVE: Mosley's Little Scarlet

Please select one of the themes we've been discussing in class and explore it in a close-reading of a passage from the text. Your blog should go further than class discussion, and focus on explaining what scenes, images, words, and actions mean. Strike to make connections between the passage and larger issues we've discussed in class.

Please note that all the powerpoints are now available on the course's blackboard site.

1943 Harlem and 1965 Watts

In class Monday we discussed Ann Petry's In Darkness and Confusion, and in class Thursday we discussed the opening chapters of Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet.

The discussion of the Petry short story was spread through four groups; each group focused on a different theme from the text: education, the riot, the protagonist William's relationship to his son, Sam, and the impact of World War II on the events in the text. As we observed from our power point during class, the contradictions of the war and pervasive discrimination through defense industries had provided some of the background context for the riot. We also closely examined the connections between high wartime food prices, resentments against police brutality, and poor living conditions in Harlem. Students can check their notes against the notes on the board accompanying this post. They should note, too, that we covered some of the big themes that have been raised thus far in the course.

In Thursday's class we learned more about Watts and theories of "hostile belief systems" and the role they play in riots. We looked at those ideas from Terry Ann Knopf's Rumor Race and Riot, and then initiated a discussion of Mosley's Little Scarlet. Perhaps most notably, we framed our discussion using the opening scene, post-riot, when Easy Rawlins speaks to a disgruntled customer at a burned out shoe store. The customer had been desiring "justice" in a larger sense, not just the price of his lost shoes. As he Easy moved into his investigation of Nola Payne (and the central theme of black women comes into focus), his ability to move between different neighborhoods and spaces becomes important. He also must 'control' his behavior in order to keep his focus on the job. We moved this language of nerves and pulses into a more general discussion about the way trauma and emotion become biologized in the body - the 'self' is not 'one' with the body.

Students should note, too, that we discussed the second assignment on Thursday. Some of the vital issues students might consider for their writing are noted in the board notes here.

Board notes from 1/23: Petry's In Darkness and Confusion

 

Economy and Riots

George Soros - an advisor to Obama, and one of the richest men in the world, predicts urban riots. Check the link HERE.

Videos: World War II Context for 1943 Harlem Riots

Video: from The War: Segregation, Its Impact   

http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5381.htm

Video: from The War: African-American Troop Training    

http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5373.htm

Depression and Race Riots

Last week we hovered in the first few decades of the 20th century, and examined race riots and the Great Depression. To do this we looked through the lens of two novels: Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and David Bryant Thorne's Hanover, Or the Persecution of the Lowly. In both novels, we see an intersection between collective violence, collective resentment, and collective aggression against bodies that are simultaneously symbolic and objective targets of that violence.

When we watched the final scene of John Schlesinger's 1975 vision of The Day of the Locust, for example, we clearly see the way the enraged crowd gathered for a Hollywood film premiere quickly turns on the very symbols and bodies of its affection. Once the destruction begins, the symbols of wealth, status, and power immediately become targets for resentment, frustration, and rage. This occurs even as the crowd turns on itself, particularly in form of older men devouring young children. The crowd eats its young - just as Hollywood exploits crowds through it's "dream dump" of historical and romantic fantasies. American life was so many groups and classes feeding off one another; The Day of the Locust, I argued somewhat playfully, is the first zombie text.

Later in the week, we returned to earlier moments of the 20th century in order to revisit another form of racial violence that emerged out of white supremacy and American nationalism (besides lynching): the race riot. Like lynching, race riots involved some narrative of sexual violation between white and black communities. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those sexual violation narratives were produced, circulated,  and sustained by the authority of newspapers. In the case of Hanover, we find that the entire riot of Wilmington, North Carolina was planned by local Democrats in order to return to power. They used the newspaper as an agent instigation and accusation, but the execution involved to overthrow black and Republican government took months to organize and involved several different kinds of figures in the white community. We conversed about how elite members of the white community were able to mobilize lower-class whites as a militant "Red Shirt" organization through narratives of sexual violation, but also through promises of material gain.

As in later race riots in Atlanta and Tulsa, the Wilmington riot coalesced white civic passions around the threat of black masculinity, but we cannot explain the riot without understanding how certain members of the crowd stood to gain from its activities. In order to understand the anatomy of the crowd, then, we have to locate how it's formed and how it acts according to a certain logic. It's not a simple "destruction," as Le Bon might put it, but a focused violence that reconfigures local political and economic order for the gain of particular members of the community. Everyone stands something to gain, but each gains something different: the Democrat leaders re-assume power and re-assign black jobs to favored white persons; opportunistic or organized members of the white community can take over black homes and businesses, and thus appropriate wealth and status; and exploited members of the white community can assign blame and punish others for their condition in life, without having to blame themselves or, somewhat impossibly, members of the white elite. Taken together, these actions are more economically and politically strategic than abjectly destructive. The economist David Harvey calls these moments of organized mass theft "accumulation by dispossession."

Link to Zizek

Daniel brought in this link to Zizek talking about memory and trash. We didn't have time to talk about it in class. Here's the link (thanks Daniel):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU

Dunbar's Jube Benson and Griffith's Birth of a Nation

In class Thursday we went over two of Paul Lawrence Dunbar's short stories: "The Scapegoat" and "The Lynching of Jube Benson," both from his collection The Heart of Happy Hollow, published in 1904. After the break, we watched some of the key clips from D.W. Griffith's blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Before we began looking at the stories, we read over the preface from Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd, first published in France in 1896 and translated into English the following year. We discussed how Le Bon considered the crowd a threatening collection of urban masses, who were bent on organizing themselves into unions and demanding suffrage. He contrasted these self-determining rights of the crowd with his stance that crowds were built for destruction, could not reason, and appeared when "civilizations" were in their collapse.

In Dunbar's story "Scapegoat," the class made a number of interesting observations. The main character, Robinson Asbury, had a special relationship to his black community because he remained in the neighborhood of 'the people' even as his success as a barber and then as a lawyer could have allowed him to taken off to better streets. He decides to enter politics, and a clique of the town's old guard prevents him by nominating a stooge candidate, a local school principal, to compete against him. He cannot raise as many people in an annual parade, however, which portends he won't be able to raise votes. After Asbury wins the election, the group backing the principal (Morton) cries "fraud," and the old guard are only too happy to see the election battle go to trial. Here, the class made much of the fact that Dunbar explains the cries of "fraud" as protests by those that had ulterior emotional motives. We played this into a conversation that shuffled around the ways emotion and belief are tied together, and how people with emotional investments can refuse to believe in reality if it doesn't fit their emotional paradigm. For many, Asbury was a symbol and a model for them. He embodied their hopes. For others he was the opposite.


Asbury can't defend the corruption of the vote, apparently, but during the trial exposes the rest of the political machinery as just as guilty as he. He goes to jail for a year and comes out stronger; from that point forward, his status among the people as a martyr allows him to influence local town politics from behind the scenes.

Class Notes on Lynching: "A Red Record" and "Within Our Gates"

Monday's class covered assigned excerpts from Ida B. Well's A Red Record and Oscar Micheaux's film Within Our Gates.

A Red Record

The class summarized from Well's Red Record that the three main excuses given by white southerners for lynching were "Negro Domination" (political power), suppression of race riots, and rape. The class noted that each of these reasons was based on fear of black persons, and even of black men in particular. We also noted that it was important that white southerners constantly framed their actions in terms of their own victimization. It was their "defense" of their community that justified their actions. They didn't see themselves as bad guys.

We had to reckon this reasoning with the actual sport-appeal of lynchings themselves, in which the class agreed the white southerners took an obvious pleasure. This pleasure was sadistic: it was a pleasure that came from the spectacle of suffering. As we read over selected passages from A Red Record about the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, in 1893, the class argued that the parade and gathered thousands was an event that demonstrated that tolerance for certain kinds of violence is learned social behavior. The enjoyment felt by the south might be awful to us, but it was a product of the era. We didn't let the matter rest there, however; we did note that the lynchers inability to "see" the extremity of their violence came from an "ideological" blindness. The violence that occurs without question is violence that has been fully integrated into a worldview. We debated briefly what forms of violence that occurs today that might appear heinous to the future, such as the death penalty.

Within Our Gates

In Oscar Micheaux's film Within Our Gates (1920), we watched the school teacher Sylvia Landry head north to Boston from the south to secure funding for southern black schools. In the north, we witness Sylvia head to the home of rich Bostonian woman and ask for money; the woman debates the matter with her southern friend, who argues against Negro education. While there, she meets one Dr. Vivian, a black intellectual, and they fall in love.

In one interesting scene, a gambler named Larry Prichard (brother of Sylvia's friend Alma) has a shoot-out with his mate Red. He's chased by the detective Phillip Gentry.

 We learn that in the past Sylvia's family was lynched by a southern mob bent on punishing her father for an accused murder of a leading white plantation owner, Phillip Gridlestone. In reality, Gridlestone was shot by an angry white worker. When Gridlestone's son comes to rape and probably murder Sylvia during the lynching, he finds a scar on her chest that reveals her as his long lost sister - Sylvia is "white." She returns to Boston to be with Dr. Vivian.

We focused on the lynching scene in particular. The black character Efrem is lynched first, before the mob can find the Landry family. The family is then lynched upon their discovery, although their youngest son escapes and flees on a horse.

Please check my plot notes against the summary HERE. 

Blog Assignment Two

For their second blog, students should reflect on some of Zizek's terms for violence, and then meditate on the photographs of lynching we observed in class. Are the lynchings examples of subjective or objective violence? What was the purpose of the violent lynchings? Why were they so popular? What was their connection to "punishment"? What do they say about racial identity in the US in the 19th century? Students may frame their thoughts and reactions however they wish, as they long as they write with these questions and terms in mind. Students are especially encouraged to create new arguments and vocabulary for themselves.

Theories of Violence: terms from Zizek

subjective violence: violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent

symbolic violence: violence embodied in language and its forms

systemic violence: the violence and routine consequences of the smooth functioning of economic and political systems


"Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is invisible since is sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent" (Zizek 2).

"There is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the over-powering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking" (Zizek 4).

"Reality": is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable "abstract," spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality" (Zizek 13)

Objective violence is always accompanied by a "subjective" excess: "the irregular, arbitrary exercise of whims. An exemplary case of this interdependence is provided by Etienne Balibar, who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence: the "ultra-objective" or systemic violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism, which involve the "automatic" creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the unemployed, and the "ultra-subjective" violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious, in short racist, "fundamentalisms" (Zizek 14).

The Civil War Draft Riots

Our class on Thursday began to discuss the different factors that motivate mass social violence by examining the 1863 Civil War Draft Riots. We learned about the riots from the PBS "New York" (2004) DVD "Order and Disorder," and we also looked at a few scenes from Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York (2003). Besides observing that New York in the 1850s and into the Civil War was generally a violent place, we also noted that many of the issues that make the United States a place called "America" also arose in the film - namely, the US is a place where the fiction of the American Dream rises and falls against a tide of immigrant and "native" expectations and feelings.

In the Draft Riots, for example, the overwhelming participation of the Irish working class wasn't coincidental. Even though new Irish immigrants had taken jobs from African-Americans in the preceding decades, as the PBS documentary points out, they were afraid that free African Americans - and newly freed slaves in particular -- were going to take their jobs. Democrat politicians like Mayor Fernando Wood helped activate those fears through excited warnings about the dangers of free black Americans.

The class was quick to point out, however, that Irish fears about their economic security and about work competition also took place in the context of virulent white supremacist culture. The Irish wanted to be white, and not just because of the advantages it conferred. Status as white individuals - as white men, in particular -- would mean that the Irish could gain an easier path to economic and political "rights" (indeed, one point that the PBS film makes clear is that the Irish were taken much more seriously as a political class after the riots).

The Draft Riots also allowed the class to reach back into the founding documents of American national identity: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. We spent some time unpacking just what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" meant, and how that final idea, happiness, may have had something to do with the aforementioned American Dream. We also noted that the Declaration of Independence moves from an assertion of natural rights from God in the first paragraph to an assertion of rights as "people" in the second paragraph. In short, power moves from a higher power than a King to a power justified by the desires of a collective group. This change transforms once more in Article One, Section Two of the Constitution, which introduces the idea of "free persons" as another category of citizenship for American nationality. As Anibal pointed out, two documents that he thought were positive, celebratory texts also contain the ideas that sustained different forms of civil violence in the US. The Constitution, with its 3/5 clause for counting slaves, embedded the idea of racial inequality into US legal identity. The groundwork for the Civil War thus appears there -- just as the immigrant-oriented American Dream appears in the Declaration of Independence, even though the document also appears to invent a general theory of rebellion against all forms of power. 

Declaration photo from archives.gov