It’s Bastille Day, one and all, the celebration of the French Revolution, which was, of course, a pivotal time in world history. Not only did it lead to a diminishing of aristocracy and a rise in democracy and nationalism that would reverberate throughout time and space, but it caused a splash that rippled onto foreign, unexplored shores in strange, unpredictable waves. Also, it led to really long lines at Louis the Sixteenth’s castle in Versailles, which is a great place to visit; if I hadn’t gone there, I would not have known all kinds of things, like that Marie Antoinette dyed her sheep to match her clothes or that Louis’ hemorrhoids incited to a brief craze in which it was all the rage in the court to have a hemorrhoidectomy with these big, specially developed pincers – whether one suffered from rhoids or not, or that people at the royal couple’s balls weren’t allowed to leave the room where the king sat on a throne until he did, which meant that people weren’t allowed to relieve themselves, which meant they eventually peed on the floor. Louis’ throne was outfitted with a hole and and a chamber pot. Ah, history!) Golden pot to piss inPol Pot, smiling murderer and leader of the Khmer Rouge, who waged a “revolution” that resulted in the deaths of 25 per cent of the Cambodian population.

Anyway, about the ripples and the shores, the French Revolution led to Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel’s ruminations on the bloody revolt and it’s aftermath, and from these big, purple thought clouds, ideas rained, including the huge puddle that is known as the Hegelian Dialectic. It is very deep and, for me at least, kind of murky, but what I get out of it mostly is that things in time start with ideas that contain their own opposite; a thesis and antithesis.This means that change is inevitable, as no one movement, or theory, or way of being, or whatever, can exist without an equal and contradictory movement that is inherently brought into existence with its conception. Here’s a picture: Anyhoo, you probably already know this stuff and understand it better than I do. It’s pretty famous. Philosophers eat it up. Michel Foucault has contended that contemporary philosophers may be “doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel”. (I got that from Wikipedia.If you click on Foucault, it will take you right back to Wikpedia, which is maybe where you really ought to be right now, learning questionable factoids for yourself instead of trusting me to decipher some random person’s concept of the truth through my own skewed filter! It’s strange how things become fact, and how history is remembered, right? How do we ever know whose version of the truth is accurate, especially if there is always more than one truth? He gets to set it down as fact, and what is taught as history? Churchill said “History is written by the victors” -except nobody can actually prove whether or not he really said it.)

I bring this up because I saw this documentary on Grace Lee Boggs called American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, which you can watch here, until July 30, 2014: http://www.pbs.org/pov/americanrevolutionary/) The documentary was made by a woman named Grace Lee, who originally set out to make a film about Chinese -American stereotypes, using her own very common name as a jumping off point. It was during this endeavor that she met Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is this awesome Upper middle class Chinese American lady who was studying philosophy at Barnard in 1935 when she learned about Hegel and his ideas.They blew her mind and changed her life. After getting her Ph.D from Bryn Mawr, she couldn’t get a job, on account of prejudice and sexism and the like. She moved to Detroit, because Hegelian thought leads to socialism, and socialism is all about the worker, and in the 1950’s, when Grace was coming up, the place to find workers was the Motor City. She got involved with worker’s rights, and from there, with civil rights and the Black Power movement. She’s amazing. You should watch the documentary. She said that there has to be more to revolution than just rebellion, which is anger funneled into action, and that revolution is not just about the revolt, but also the evolution of new ideas and ways of life.

Lots of ripples hitting up against some strange shores, there.

So, I saw the documentary, and I was thinking about George Wallace’s racist speechwriter, Asa Carter, who wrote the famous “segregation now, segregation forever” speech.

Asa later “evolved” into Forrest Carter, who wrote the “autobiographical” The Education of Little Tree, a book Oprah recommended. The Education of Little Tree is about this five year old orphan who goes to live with his Native American grandpa in Appalachia and learns the way of the Cherokee, and was a New York Times best-seller. It’s all lovely, full of that “never-take-more-than-you-need” ethos and “a respect-for-all-things-great-and-small” attitude. Still and all, it was written by a Klansman. Did he have a revolution of spirit? Was he able to evolve? Does it matter? Can we ever really evolve, or are we destined to just keep revolting in a dialectical spiral for eternity? As John Lennon and Yoko Ono once said:

Let me tell you now
Everybody’s talking about, revolution
Evolution, masturbation, flagellation
Regulation, integrations, meditations
United Nations, congratulations

All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance

So, what’s my point, you ask? Every once in awhile, something happens that changes the world forever, but forever is really pretty relative, and virtually impossible to comprehend from whatever specific place you sit in time.Everything means something, even if that something is destined to change or be forgotten. And also, maybe nothing ever really changes.

You probably already knew that, too. Sadly, that’s about as deep as I get. I never claimed to be Hegel, or even Foucault, you know. Stop judging me!

Here is a Bastille Day poem written by a true revolutionary, Heberto Padilla, who has an important story that changed the way important (and unimportant) people thought, and that is unknown or widely forgotten today.