Joe Lockard

Social Fear and the Terrorism Survival Guide

The post-September 11 economy of the United States is a fear-infested and sober landscape. National security and security-related corporations, together with firms operating in support of the occupation of Iraq, have provided a major visible source of economic growth. Corporate sectors without any discernable claim on security products nonetheless work to integrate a national security consciousness into their corporate images. Grim, determined, and upbeat patriotism is being used to sell any product that needs selling.

“Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song”: John Brown and Public Poetry

During the weeks between the raid on Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859, and the execution of John Brown on December 2 of that year, popular and antislavery newspapers in the Northern states published an extraordinary effusion of poetry, first praising Brown’s acts and then memorializing his death in heroic tropes. This outpouring of poetry continued for months after the execution; it forms a unique literary response, one that functioned to translate rapid political shifts into familiar cultural rhetoric. However, John Brown poetry did more: it constituted a metaphorical revolution that prepared the American nation for coming bloodiness. Individual metaphors—enchained slaves, sacrificial altars, prophetic voices, and a suffering and corrupt Southern landscape calling for liberation—had all appeared previously. With the “meteoric” appearance of John Brown,1 that same metaphoric economy in antislavery poetry coalesced around his radicalized figure.