Destiny's Dance: Willa Cather's MY ANTONIA as American History and Revelation

 

Photo:  Jorn Olsen

-- By Tom Phillips  
 Originally published in The Willa Cather Review, Vol. 66, number 2.  Summer 2025

        Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is often read as a lyrical meditation on America’s frontier past. However, Cather defended herself stoutly against charges of escapism, or “supine Romanticism.”  She believed in Art as Revelation.  Alongside her paean to the prairie is a sharp critique of middle-American society and a vision of the conflicts that would roil this country to this day, over issues of ancestry, color, gender, language, and class.

The story of the Shimerdas illustrates the paradox of immigration–America’s xenophobic openness, a “nation of immigrants” that fears and shuns foreigners. This is the context of Ántonia’s father’s suicide, and her own hard-won independence. In the end she builds a little Bohemia, a burgeoning family farm at a distance from town. Speaking her native language with her children, she is worn down but not defeated by her struggles with the English-speaking establishment of Black Hawk, Nebraska. Meanwhile, Jim Burden’s retreat to the East--to Harvard Law and moneyed Manhattan–conveys the chasm between coastal elites and the agricultural heartland.  The legacy of slavery also makes a central appearance in the plot. And the whole is shadowed by an indigenous civilization all but erased by America’s “manifest destiny.”

At the same time, the long, loopy romance between Jim and Ántonia--unconsummated but never abandoned–suggests the potential for reconciliation. And Cather’s constant evocation of the landscape places all her characters on common ground. As Lena Lingard says, “it ain’t my prairie.” The beauty and mystery of the land belongs to all; sun and wind diffuse the strains of a pluralist culture where change is rapid and trust often fleeting.                                       

Air Boxing in Brooklyn

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Photo: Lisabel Leon 

No one who has seen a championship boxing match, and watched the fighters fall into each others' arms at the final bell, can doubt the emotional power and depth of boxing.  No sport offers a better metaphor for life, in all its glory and humiliation.  

Shadowboxing is something else.  It's punching the air, the only target being an image of yourself.  In boxing, it's an essential training exercise.  As a metaphor for life, it runs the risk of self-obsession.  That seems to be case with "Shadowboxing in Blue," an all-female production of music, dance, theater, boxing, and psychology, that will disappoint fans of all five disciplines. 

Calling 9/11 Again

---By Tom Phillips 

I wrote this in 2021, re-read it today, and didn't change a single word.  

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Photo by Jesse Mills

Out for a late-night walk this week, I saw what’s become a familiar sight in September — a beacon shining up from the former site of the World Trade Center. This lonely blue beam seemed a symbol of the narrow view Americans have taken on the events of twenty years ago.

I knew people who were killed in the World Trade Center that day, and others who barely escaped. The thousands of civilians who died were victims of an atrocious war crime. Even so, I agree with those who say it’s time to re-examine what happened and why.

The 9/11 assault on America was not an isolated act of “terrorism.” It was a shot heard round the world, as momentous as Lexington and Concord — -the opening battle in a clash of civilizations. It’s a war that was long in coming, still going on, and which we are inexorably losing.

The George W. Bush administration was warned of the 9/11 attacks by US intelligence which it chose to ignore. But the public had been warned much earlier— in a 1993 essay by a Harvard historian. In the journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote that the next world war would be a “clash of civilizations” — a counter-raid by conservative Muslim and Confucian societies against America’s world empire.

Huntington’s essay was hastily dismissed by other historians. In a follow-up issue of Foreign Affairs, middle-east maven Fouad Ajami insisted that world wars could only be fought by state powers. Ajami later became a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, which was in line with his theory but detached from reality. The reality is that the United States is the leader not of a free world, but a failed world, and its enemies are those who don’t want to live in it.

Our nation was founded on a unique phrase — the “pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s declaration was based on English philosopher John Locke, who argued for the rights of “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson preferred a final phrase so vague that it could inspire both a runaway slave and the bounty-hunter chasing him through the woods.

Thus we have pursued happiness for nearly 250 years, and wound up more miserable than we began. As F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby — “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Happiness has taken the form of outsize property holdings, low taxes, racial privilege, gouging the environment, exploitation of labor, disregard for the poor, and a glut of consumer products, from salty snacks to SUVs, designed to addict their users — -all wrapped in an avalanche of plastic waste. We’ve had our ups and downs, but starting on 9/11, the world delivered its verdict on the American empire.

Thumbs down.

-- Copyright 2021, 2025 by Tom Phillips 

Dancing the Future: AI at the Battery

 --By Tom Phillips 

Battery Dance in Frontiers: Photo by Steven Pisano

“Why do they all look so mean and weird?” whispered my companion as we watched six black-clad dancers writhe and scuttle, spin and splay on a stage by the Hudson River. “Maybe they’re zombies?” I guessed.

No, it’s worse, I later thought. These are not the undead, because they were never alive. These are our new companions, beings who are not and have never been.  In a twist, "Frontiers" shows us human beings dancing like AI creations.  

The Theatre of Life: Jill Johnston

 

Jill Johnston, c. 1970    

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, 

and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

Columbia 2025: The Students' Turn to Roar

-- By Tom Phillips 

B'way and 114th  

Students held the upper hand yesterday in the first big protest of the school year at Columbia.   Acting president Claire Shipman was forced to call the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestinian occupation of Butler Library, and at least two people were carried out on stretchers among 75 arrested.  Hundreds of students then staged angry protests at both ends of 114th Street, cursing the officers who pushed them off the blocked streets and onto the sidewalk.  Students on Amsterdam then made an end run down to 111th Street, turned right,  and marched up the middle of Broadway with exhausted police bringing up the rear.  

The scene was in sharp contrast to last year's bust at Hamilton Hall, carried out by an army of cops who blocked off the entire campus, clambered into Hamilton as if it were a medieval fortress under siege, and then occupied the university for the rest of the academic year.   

This year, things are different.  

• Shipman makes no sense when she claims that non-Columbia people were among the occupiers of Butler Library: there's no way anyone gets onto the locked-down campus without a Columbia ID.  The chief security guard at 116th Street last night described Shipman's claim as "false information."  
• The students clearly hold the moral high ground, alongside Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as they contend with illegal detentions by an increasingly unpopular Trump regime.  
• Columbia's crackdown on faculty and student speech looks cowardly in the light of Harvard's stand against government intrusion,   
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza justify the protests, and expose the Republican campaign against campus antisemitism as exactly what  Claire Shipman originally called it: "Capitol Hill nonsense."  

Shipman is out of options. With students on their high horse, another police occupation would be a bloodbath.  It's too late to join Harvard's resistance.   All she has left are lies --- the protesters aren't Columbians, the problem is antisemitism, ICE is nice, etc.  As a former TV journalist who believes none of this nonsense, elected to make the medieval trustees look modern, Shipman's best course is to resign before they axe her.  And then? 

Listen up, Columbia, here is an idea that could save you: 

Let the University Senate choose the next President.  Let it be a president with academic stature,  committed to academic freedom.  Give the University back to its rightful stewards: faculty, staff, and students.  Roar, Lions, Roar.  

 

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips 

 

The Dance a Coup Couldn't Cancel

US Patriots at the Pyramids 

The White House’s first wave of assaults on government-funded programs left many defunct or disabled. But at least one group managed to carry out its plans, without federal funds and in defiance of an order to stop. These intrepid and inspired artists are the performers of Time Lapse Dance, led by New York choreographer Jody Sperling (center, above).

With a grant from the US Embassy in Cairo, the company spent three years planning a tour--- to perform for children and young people at Egypt’s Hakawy International Arts Festival. On Sunday, January 26th, the day before they were to depart, Sperling woke up to a message from the State Department: her grant was terminated and she must stop the program immediately.  It was a short phone call, she says. She was in shock.  The costumes were all packed, the plane tickets purchased.  She began a frantic round of fund-raising, and re-negotiating contracts with her Egyptian hosts.  “They can’t stop us from going,” she said.  Long story short: the cancelled tour went on.