Of Crossbones, Good Lit and Life on the Bow: Drake Raft and the Crew of the Jolly Roger
Glancing up at the clock on the wall above my computer, I take note of the time. It's 2:00 am but I'm wide-awake, cruising the internet aboard the Jolly Roger, "flagship of Grungeservative Renaissance" - a cyber-frigate that hoisted its skull & crossbones flag in March of 1995 and has since been cruising the seas surrounding the cultural bastions of the liberal academic/media complex, looking for a good skirmish. Its mission - to plunder, attack, reason, beckon, mock, lampoon, and otherwise fire well-stocked cannonades over the startled sensibilities of an entire generation of web-surfing landlubbers whose minds are aswirl in the opaqueness of a powerful nemesis, post-modern relativism. Originating in America's gilded Universities, this living, insidious, relativistic fog has slowly seeped across the cultural landscape to where it now influences a significant segment of the general American consciousness. What makes the voyage of the Jolly Roger fascinating is that it is piloted by a band of Princeton graduates and former grunge rockers, a real-life Dead Poet's Society with a dash of Robert Louis Stevenson and old-fashioned American values thrown in the mix.
Like real pirates, there is the whiff of intrigue about them and speculation rises as to whether the group is comprised of three individuals, two or even one. For our purposes, we shall consider them a trio, as they present themselves on their site: Captain Drake "Red Avenger" Raft, Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham and Elliot "Ahab" McGucken. Read their Convocation Speech or the crystalline prose of Drake Raft's eloquent essay on The Two Nantuckets and it becomes apparent that these men believe a few things strongly and have the means to state them with force and artistry. To them, the Founding Fathers are hardly Dead White Males but luminescent forces; men whose reading and thinking, writing and discoursing left a high watermark that we would do well to note. Forget the current stable of manufactured, Next Great Authors. They'll take Herman Melville any day.
To borrow Melville's metaphor, they are hunting a whale of their own, one whose malevolent coursing through their generation has left a black wake that plagues those who fall into its foamy roil, costing them their ability to discern the lasting from the cursory, the profound from Madison Avenue-trashy. Wake up and smell the ambiguity. Welcome to the age of Post-Modernism.
What is this malady that begs metaphorical expression? What is this black wake, this whale, this fog?
“In the culture generally, postmodernism is associated with a playful acceptance of surfaces and superficial style, self-conscious quotation and parody, and a celebration of the ironic, the transient, and the glitzy. It is usually seen as a reaction against a naive and earnest confidence in progress, and against confidence in objective or scientific truth . . .
In its post-structuralist aspects it includes a denial of any fixed meaning, or any correspondence between language and the world.”
One of the tenants of postmodernism is a rejection of what is called the "Grand Narrative" or "meta narrative" approach to human history and destiny - the belief in universal, absolute truths. Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism - most "isms" fall into the arena of the Grand Narrative. During certain epochs of Western history, men have arrived on the world stage with the insight, talent and serendipitous fortune to address the universal human need for a good explanation (as Will Rogers might have put it) for why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and where they might be going. At times, the Grand Narrative has appeared to a fair portion of the world as a kind of messianic message wrought from the wellsprings of ultimate truth, bringing order out of seeming chaos, tying together disparate events and explaining all of life in a rational, linear fashion.
By contrast, the postmodern mindset is one of "skepticism towards all meta narratives" (Jean-Francois Lyotard). Critics of the meta-narrative approach to knowledge have pointed out the relationship between knowledge and power, claiming that Western meta-narratives have tended to legitimize white male privilege at the expense of women, minorities and those at the margins of society. This is what gives postmodernists their moral sword. Although postmodern rejection of certain Western values is trendy, there is also a fair stream of moral justification coursing through its assumptions so that it seems only right to denounce the system that ran roughshod over the Indians, created and maintained slavery, forced Colonialism upon naive and powerless societies, taught the world to lust for gold, plunged nations into numerous wars in this century alone and is responsible for a host of other ills that currently plague the planet. Drake Raft and Crew represent a growing number of dissenters who are reacting against this one sided view of Western civilization that has itself become a Grand Narrative, one that is coming under scrutiny by those who would question its simplistic interpretation and denunciation of Western culture and values.
Had certain Princeton literary academics seen fit to acknowledge at least some of the greatness of the Western literary canon, the Jolly Roger might never have left port. It was the snobbish disd ain brought to bear upon the Western Canon (and Western culture, generally) and the juxtaposition of the Great Authors against the Madison Avenue-annointed Generation-X soup line hackers whose work was being extolled that gave the guys the impetus to break away from the mainland and begin to build their cyber-frigate from which to harass the ivy towered professors and "professional manuscript rejectors" of the literary/media complex. Countering postmodernism, offering an alternative to the "fog", constitutes a mission, akin to a charter tacked with a keg nail upon the mast of their frigate.
“Elliot “Ahab” McGucken, Drake “Red Avenger” Raft, and I, Becket “Bluebeard”
Knottingham, hailing from Ohio, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, showed up as freshmen at Princeton with little more than a profound love for literature, embroidered with a subtle Puritan lust for all things gothic and profound, like her enchanting smile and ineffable poise. The three sonneteers became inseparable friends after meeting on the J.V. tennis team and then writing songs and skits for and acting in the Princeton Triangle Club. General Washington’s words do well to capture the essence of the profound camaraderie felt between the chief literary officers of the Good Ship: My first wish would be, that my military family and the whole army should consider themselves as a band of brothers, willing and ready to die for one another.”
In the past three years their flagship site has evolved into one of the most fascinating and adventuresome ports-of-call on the web. Comprised of a collection of various domains clustered around the idea of a cyber-University, the website is a virtual Platonic Academy with a bracing charter: to reawaken and reenliven the concept that a good immersion in the Western Canon, the literary, philosophical and aesthetic heritage that built Greece, Rome, Europe and the entire Western Hemisphere and continues to influence much of the planet, is capable of restoring some semblance of rationality to the silliness and meaninglessness that pervades literature and the general national dialogue these days. According to a figure cited in one of their essays, The Founding of Classicals, Inc. (classicals.com) twenty thousand others have signed on and are sharing the adventure. The New York Times has written about it and one senses this is just the beginning. It has taken a quarter of a century, but the mission of the Jolly Roger (and others like it), piloted by the sons and daughters of excess, may be a long awaited antidote to the sad dramas and philosophical follies of the Baby-Boomer generation.
To understand where Drake Raft and Crew are sailing from, I believe we need to take a short walk back through time. I picture myself sitting around a campfire with the Jolly Roger mates. The frigate is anchored fifty yards offshore, rigging silhouetted under the moonlight, while we share lines from Moby Dick, expounding on the thought that inspiring, life-changing literature, like exemplary lives, seems to be in decline. One of the guys, maybe Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham, asks me how things got to be this way, why my generation let the Western Canon fall into a state of disrepair. Everyone is attentive. I pause, aware of several feelings, some contradictory, running through my mind: beware of over-generalizing; on the other hand, be specific. A wild dog, perhaps a coyote, bays somewhere in the distance. I begin my story.
It is early November 1963, and lines - old, trusted markings - are blurring. From civil rights to literature, from music to film, the black and white, standard conceptions that have been held for decades are continuing to crack around the edges, a trend born in the realities of a stalemated war (Korea) and the polarized rhetoric of the Cold War throughout the fifties when what would become known as the credibility gap had its beginnings.
While most of America works and dozes, reads the paper each morning, and maintains the status quo, there is a restlessness afoot. Structure and form are giving way to freedom of expression, confrontation, and spontaneity. The trend is growing but at present it courses the back roads of the dominant culture, breaking out sporadically in headlines and news screens, interrupting our evening leisure. It is a kind of mid-point. Six years have passed since the US Army was called upon to escort nine black students to classes in Little Rock. Six years remain in the decade. Nineteen sixty-nine, the year of Woodstock, will be, to many, the last hurrah. For many mainstream Americans, busy with the details of bills and kids, the major movements, even Civil Rights, are still on the periphery of their working lives. Dylan is redefining the concept of popular music but the charts are dominated by mainstream pop groups. The Beatles are two months away from the Ed Sullivan show. There are advisers in Viet Nam but, we're told, no actual fighting soldiers. It is the quiet before the gathering storm.
Two events, one sudden, the other gradual, will mark the end of a major act in our generational play. One poisons our native desire to believe in Camelot and the viability of pristine ideals; the other damages our ability to trust, first individual government leaders, then the establishment, then anyone over thirty, then much of anything. The events in Dallas, the tragedy of Viet Nam . . .
Along with the assassinations, the broken dreams, the great political betrayals, the credibility issues, we become enamored of central philosophical truth, one that seems to capture and express our disillusionment. Given formal expression by Descartes, it is the concept of a gap between the actual and the apparent, the objective and the subjective, the thing vs the thing in itself. Words implying value become soft in this context; they lose all capability of conveying anything hard and actual. To say a thing, whether a book or a painting or a person, is good is to float an opinion up into the philosophical ethers. In reaction, we retreat, some of us, to simple goods: the poor, the homeless and children, trees, endangered species, whales and dolphins, clean water and the environment, civil rights. Other entities - literature, art, ethics, well, who can really say what is good, what is bad? Francis Schaeffer, Christian apologist and founder of L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, once expressed the fundamental truth that nature eats up or tends to eventually dominate grace. For the purposes of our brief historical narrative the point has been expressed before and it is this: when we lose the ability to differentiate art from trash, trash rises to the level of art. This is the dilemma facing the NEA: they should know, intuitively, that across in a jar of urine is not art but defending that point-of-view takes work and may cost them a certain amount of respect amongst the beret and Euro-cigarette crowd mingling at the Starbucks of the world.
Back to our story . . .
This is the generation of professors and academics that greeted Drake Raft and Crew upon their arrival at Princeton as freshmen. What had evolved around them was a culture dominated by the sound byte and the stifling climate of political correctness, of long-winded academics, lawyers, and political fall-out spin doctors manipulating and trivializing the English language to the point of absurdity; of mind-seering images created by MTV-inspired media programming executives; of trashy literature and poetry marketed as though the latest incarnation of the Last Great Author had just arrived.
“It was almost ten years ago that we came down with a bad case of sea fever ourselves. We showed up on the Princeton campus hoping to acquaint ourselves with the greatest that had ever been thought and said, and too, we were looking forward to being united with others in the common context of the Western tradition, for cultures only truly come to life when they are shared. But upon arriving, we soon found out that there was no program of study centered about the Great Books. There existed programs of study which were centered about various vocations, a gender, and some selected cultures, but one could not major in Western Civilization. We were at the number one University in the greatest country, and yet we could not major in our own heritage, nor minor in it, nor even receive a certificate in Western Culture. No curriculum existed which would aspire to introduce us to the greatest that had ever been thought and said. No professor nor provost possessed the courage to step forth and say, “This is what you must know! This is where you must go! Come now, I’ll lead the way!” A Princeton legend has it that back in the seventies a provost did speak these very words and was shot the following sunrise. ”
The group evolved as a lark in the spring of 1991 and its inception is the stuff of campus legend:
“Like most lasting memories from one’s college years, it all began as a joke. It started out as a secret society at Princeton, The Princetonians After Dark, and it soon evolved into The Jolly Rogers about ten minutes before we convened for the first official meeting. We were seniors at Princeton with a week of exams yet left in the spring semester, and everyone who hadn’t been let into a secret society yet was feeling a bit nervous. There is a tide in the affairs of men, as the saying goes, and as Becket had stumbled upon a tree house a week earlier while taking a shortcut through the Institute for Advanced Study woods, the time was ripe. After we’d composed and delivered the invitations on a portentous, thundering, late May night, it began to dawn upon us that we’d done it all just a bit too well. We realized that all forty people were going to show up the next night, at five after midnight, at the ramshackle tree house half a mile out in the Institute woods. We’d christened the tree house the Pirate’s Nest on the maps we’d included in the invitations, just to make sure that all the inductees would have no doubts as to our authenticity.
So we rounded up a few more people and props, and we secured officers and created a history which dated the secret society back to 1772, and allowed us to include James Madison as one of the founding fathers, for he had attended Princeton sometime around then. That would be the same James Madison who said, “Without educated citizens, popular government is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Then came the moment where we had to formulate some sort of a mission statement, so we decided to devote The Jolly Rogers to the Great Books, as all credible secret societies must be associated with banned substances and daring deeds performed in the dark of night. All romance is a rich blend of the profound and the forbidden, and in the excommunicated rhyming, metered poetry penned by dead white males we found both. Thomas Jefferson had once said, “I cannot live without books,” so we made that the secret motto on the invitations, to be revealed only at meetings or in times of extreme crisis.”
After graduation, the guys moved down to Chapel Hill, NC for grad work and formed a grunge band. Music, it turned out, was not capable of communicating the full weight their passions. As fortune would have it, though, a new technology was emerging that would give them the means to take their vision global. The website was conceived and launched in 1995. Now they could bypass the entire publishing/distribution chain and bring the classics, the Great Books, directly to the people.
“Music couldn’t capture the Apollonian concepts that we had been born to express, such as Fidelity, Prudence, Commitment, Character, Virtue, Loyalty, and Reverence, and we found ourselves far more at home upon this profound new medium rooted within the printed word, the World Wide Web. And besides, grunge wasn’t ours— it was pretty much the corporate pagan’s, and it wasn’t too much fun working for them, having to follow all their stringent marketing manager rules and conforming to their aging, nihilistic mindset, so we quit.”
As with all idealistic endeavors, the voyage of the Jolly Roger will likely have its share of storm and stress. Everyday concerns will press upon the crew. Wives, children perhaps, money issues - the stuff of life will undoubtedly swell up and slap against the sides of their vessel (Captain Drake, we learn, is engaged to a Ms. Bootsy Starbuck McCluskey - read her original email and ghost story at (http://jollyroger.com/beaconway/bootsy.html). Critics will rise to denounce the Jolly Roger as an attempt to reintroduce and reinvigorate the dead white male literary corpus with all its provincialism and cultural-centric ideology. They will be cited for leaving out the great body of minority writing and for extolling the virtues of a select group of men while overlooking their foibles, including prejudice and philandering.
“From time to time we have been accused of arrogance upon our sites for doing nothing more than being outspoken about the Convictions and Ideals we hold dear. This is one of the more pronounced ironies of this inverted postmodern age, that those who humble themselves before God and the Greats should be considered arrogant. For we are the most humble men aboard the Good Ship. We have humbled ourselves before the profound rugged individuals who labored countless collective hours to pen the definitive Laws which today protect the entrepreneurial soul’s Natural Rights in America.”
Then, too, there are business ventures in the making that will take time and funds to keep afloat. Their newest endeavor, Classicals Cafe, is located outside Triangle Park and caters to souls looking for lively conversation, good literature, and coffee. The good news is that most of the classics are public domain and Drake & Crew won't need a lawyer to draw up royalty agreements should they turn to publish a classic now and then. One of the nice facts about literary economics in the postmodern era is that, while the latest, mindless best-seller might put you out $25, nineteenth-century classics, hardbound, are selling for $7.95 in special editions (I picked up Moby Dick and Walden recently at Barnes & Noble for $16).
I had the experience several years ago of visiting Washington, DC for the first time. For my wife and I, the week we spent there became a memorable highlight. To understand something of the spirit that moves the Jolly Roger, it would be good to stand before the monuments in the Capital mall; to walk the gravestones of Arlington; to read the inscriptions on the marble and visit the great edifices and let the words of the honored settle in. Let their best deeds speak to you, as we did, and you may find that to walk the streets of the Capitol and the surrounding historical region, to visit the farms and homes, the meeting houses, and the places where the Founding Fathers penned their finest words, is to sense the elevation, the mountain top, of human endeavor.
Perhaps it's time to set our cynicism aside and keep company with those who, when the moment called, strode onto the historical stage fully awake, with the power of a refined set of faculties and the benefits of a broad classical education at their disposal. And, wonder of wonders! there is the sense that we, too, are capable of great things if we set our course aright.
The times are right for the Jolly Roger and its mission. We've spent too long with our sails down, bobbing in the doldrums, looking to blame someone, something, for our lack of progress. What happened was this - we stopped the quest, we dropped our anchor and it cost us the ability to commit ourselves to our best ideals, too much of anything, really. Commitment is central to a pirate's life. You don't leave the safety of the city and harbor and cast your fate upon the mercies of the sea without commitment. Commitment is what separates visionaries from mere thought peddlers, those who carry around a bag of trendy popular notions and political correctness, pass it off as learning, and take solace in the comforts of their tenured position.
So, let's hoist a tankard and toast. Here's to sea spray and more Pirates!
I wish Drake Raft and Crew favorable winds as they sail on. They are out on the bow of a memorable, even remarkable, adventure. May they have the clear-eyed focus to stay the course. In the midst of the marriage of conglomerate business and literature, of the quick buck and the marketing spin, they remind us that it's time to resurrect a few simple ideas: words, like actions, have meaning and consequences; that reading literature from eras where this simple truth was intuitively known and practiced is a good antidote to the foggy cynicism swirling about us.
“So there you have it. That’s how it all came to be. The WWW is the medium upon which the rising generation is free to define its soul, and as it lends itself to the printed word, it is the perfect place for a contemporary literary renaissance, where the permanent profound can meld with the living romance of the Gothic Carolina nights. And after having said all that, I cannot deny the simultaneous simplicity of literature. I guess what it all comes down to is that we wouldn’t want to live in the “Southern Part of Heaven” without setting some of youth’s most sublime, yet fleeting, sentiments down in ink, as best we can, before they’re gone for good. God bless ye and God bless America.”