Sisters Under the Skin: "The Great Gatsby" as Jazz and Racial History

 -- By Tom Phillips                        

This is an edited version of my essay published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol 19, 2021, pp. 189-202.

Amid the cacophony of Jay Gatsby’s garden party in chapter three of The Great Gatsby, a bass drum booms and the orchestra conductor announces a request from the host, for “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.”  The title is all we learn of the piece.  It disappears, “tossed off” into the evening, a passing joke. However, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intricately patterned novel, as in jazz, things take on meaning even as they disappear.

Breaking Up America: Liberty and Death

 -- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Zaq Landsberg, Reclining Liberty

Give me liberty or give me death! thundered Patrick Henry at the dawn of the American revolution. 

Today, Liberty and Death are partners in a mass murder-suicide pact.  Police with assault weapons blow away mentally ill people with assault weapons, but only after allowing them to slaughter school children, church members, hospital patients and other helpless citizens.     

"Enough!" peeped President Biden, embarrassed into speaking after two weeks of daily massacres.  But the carnage here is dwarfed by the war in Ukraine, the  foreign-policy equivalent of a school shooting.  The Biden administration is pouring 40 Billion dollars worth of deadly American weapons into a fraternal conflict on the other side of the world -- on the pretense of defending democratic ideals we no longer practice at home. 

Maybe we have reached our inflection point at last.  A nation that tolerates child sacrifice to protect its arms industry must perish from the earth -- as must a nation that exports death and ruin and writes off a million civilian casualties as “collateral damage.”  

The USA is a failed state and a danger to humanity.  What is to be done?