In consideration of this week's dismaying display of partisan politics at their worst, we present Charles Mingus' protest song Fables of Faubus for this week's Dreaming of the Masters post.
Fables of Faubus was one of Mingus's most explicitly political works, written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. The song features call-and-response vocals between Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond, and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone. The razor-sharp satire portrays Faubus as a mock villain no one takes seriously.
This week America saw the appalling spectacle of a Supreme Court nominee admit to Congress, in what Doreen St. Félix called in The New Yorker a “grotesque display of patriarchal resentment,” that he was a binge drinker in high school and college, living a privileged life of frat-boy excess and debauchery, and then feign shocked dismay that people believe the previous, totally credible testimony of a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by him during one of those drinking binges. Whether or not the charges are true, or whether his actions of some 35 years ago are still relevant, the uncontrolled anger, the sense of privilege, and the bitter partisan comments by the nominee should alone preclude him from being seated to the bench.
It was either Faubus, or this:
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