The Daily Dialogue: Economists on Occupy; Live Tweeting WWII, Planting Trees/Wangari Maathaii

Check out the Occupy movements views of economics by watching this short video.

Occupy Economics from Softbox on Vimeo.

Follow Daily Live Tweets of World War 2

Follow the web’s hottest trend: live tweeting World War II day by day, covering all the battles of World War II with links to primary sources. This important, massive project of war will continue for the next 6 years.

Plant a tree in memory of Wangari Maathai

Click here to see the story, “The Hummingbird,” told by Nobel Winner, Wangari Maathai

When Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, her goal was to plant 1 billion trees. October 28th, 2011 marks the Green Belt Movement’s launch of the ‘I am the Hummingbird Campaign’ – a tree planting campaign seeking to honour the memory of Wangari Maathai by realizing her goal of seeing 1 billion trees planted around the world.

Take action to remember Wangari and her extraordinary work for the environment and women’s rights by planting a tree in her memory.  Visit the Green Belt Movement website to share your tree planting on their interactive map. You can also watch her ‘Be a Hummingbird’ video, which inspired the campaign.

The  Real Twins: The Romney Dialectic in 2 min.

http://youtu.be/Y7kog1CjzcY

 

The Union Leader Endorses Gingrich

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/joe-scarborough-blasts-new-hampshire-union

 

Child Soldiers, Child Wives: Wounded for Life

Leymah Gbowee, Executive Director, Women's Peace and Security Network Africa

About the author

Leymah Gbowee is a women’s rights and peace activist from Liberia, and the founder of Women in Peacebuilding Program/ West African Network for Peacebuilding. She was recently feature in an interview with Alison Stewart on the PBS program, Need to Know. (WIPNET/WANEP [10]).

During the early years of my work as a peace activist, I worked for the Lutheran Church Trauma Healing program in Liberia with the war wounded ex-child soldiers of Charles Taylor’s [11] army. My job was to design counselling sessions for the boys and link them with institutions that could provide some assistance for the many physical needs they had. This was a perfect place for someone who had so many negative perceptions and stereotypes about these young people.

During the years of engagement with these little boys, it became very clear how patriarchy as a system first influenced first their decision to join the rebellion. John (not his real name) told me he had joined the rebellion because his older brother joined, and that every time he came back from the war front, the community hailed him as a “real man”, and he also at 12 wanted to prove that he was a real man. When we met at 19, he had lost an eye and had many physiological scars that would render him unfit to achieve his full life’s potentials.

Joseph’s story is also similar; “the boys who joined the rebellion came back and were really respected and were seen often in the company of the elders and community leaders. When we came around we were told we were little boys and could not sit in the company of men. I wanted to prove that I too could sit in the company of elders, so I joined to rebellion”. Joseph lost a leg during the war, and now lives in Monrovia as a shoemaker.

The fact that a lot of these little boys’ future was altered because they needed to prove their maleness is something for us to think about. The second side to these narratives is that as they proved their maleness by joining the rebellion, they also had to prove their maleness by taking in a wife or two and bringing her to a state of total submission. Many of the wives of these young men were forcibly taken, raped and beaten into submission.

As part of my work as a case worker, I had the opportunity of working with the wives of these young child soldiers, their interaction and conversations predominantly bordered around the use of violence and abusive language as a means of communicating. About 80% of the girls in these homes told stories of being forced into the relationship and excepting their fate, because it at least offered them protection from numerous unwanted sexual partners. These girls also exhibited a kind of violent nature that was even more frightening than the behaviour the young soldiers displayed. A young lady (Martha) said she learned to be violent as a means of coping with the life of violence that she had been exposed to.

Many of these young men and women, may never get to live a life without violence, because even as the physical violence has ended for them, they continue to live with  emotional and psychological violence.  Joseph, told me “every time someone pass by and insults me my trauma is re-ignited and all I want to do is abuse drugs and forget the state I find myself in”.

Similarly the girls in these homes continue to be victimised by these “husbands” of theirs. Many of the girls now have kids and leaving these men is not an option for them as many of them say “who will take me with all these children? ” or, ” it will be difficult to take the children away from their fathers as they are really close to their fathers”.

The sad state of life for these girls is that their entire life is caught up in a spiral of one individual trying to prove their “maleness”. The cases described here are not limited to Liberia. This is the every day story of girls and women in conflict situations. Sexual violence has become a norm and unfortunately, young boys and men trying to prove their maleness has become the status quo in conflict situations.

The question that many ask is how is it that the world has descended into such a sad state, where the bodies of women are being used as a battlefront and a war strategy. The global statistics of women and girls who have been sexually exploited is not only appalling but heart wrenching.

Major General Patrick Camert once said, “It was more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in conflict context”.

Recent narratives from female survivors of war are all about rape and rape and more rape.

In Liberia, women of some ethnic groups have told stories of how knives and guns were inserted into their private parts because the soldiers said their own private parts were too good to enter theirs.  Recent stories from Cote D’Ivoire, describe how girls and women were placed in special rooms and forced to service soldiers sexually as they came from the war front. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and many more African countries that have gone through conflict or are going through conflict tell similar stories of the horrors of being a woman.

I can’t help but ask, why is it like this? Why do we have such a situation?  Why have women become so vulnerable to the men and boys that they co-exist with in communities and in nations?

I honestly can not answer these questions, but I would like to take a step back and reflect on the words of Elizabeth Rein and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in the book Women War and Peace [12] that “the abuse women suffer during conflict is a reflection of the interaction between men and women, boys and girls, during peace time”.

Is this statement true at all? My verdict is yes. In most of our communities we objectify women as bearers of babies, and our global media has descended to using the sensual objectification of women’s bodies as the only means of promoting products. Girls are being socialized both directly and indirectly to believe that a super model physique is the way to obtaining fame and fortune.

During the early days of the Liberian civil war, one of the child soldiers, I worked with, told me he didn’t rape anyone; he had sex with them and then added, “Isn’t that what women were made for”. This statement has often drawn angry reaction from women every time I mention it, but the question to ask is why did he think that way, would it be different if the statement  came from an unarmed boy? Well, on March 8, 2011, as we women celebrated International Women’s Day, my 13 year old daughter went to school to tell her friends about the day and what it meant… A young boy in her class (13 years old) asked her, “what are women good for but making babies and caring for the home?”.

Put a gun in this child’s hand, and the story is the same one as that of my child soldier friend. So what must we do to change these interactions in peacetime so that women and girls are safer during conflict? I think as activists we need to strategize on how to effectively engage with men and boys, and make them to understand the impetus for the work that we do.

As difficult as it may sound, I think women tackling difficult issues specifically in Africa is not a strange phenomenon. In 2003, Liberian women organized a mass action campaign to pressure the warring parties to bring an end to the civil war. Many commentators have hailed the women’s actions [13] as one of the contributing factors that ended the war in Liberia.  I think if women across the globe join forces on the issue of sexual violence, there will be some change. It is time women globally start making the connection between sexual violence and the unequal treatment of women in economic, social, and political context, and devise strategies for tackling these inequalities in a holistic manner. It is time to make men and boys see what they stand to lose when women are ill treated – and what they stand to gain when women are treated well.

Opening up the space for sustain dialogue with young men and boys is vital if we are to break this trend.

On May 23rd, 120 women leaders from around the world will join the Nobel Women’s Initiative to discuss and try to find some answers to the issue of security and ending sexual violence in conflict. I believe that the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the women gathered together will produce some practical recommendations on ways of dealing with this modern day pandemic.

(This article is published by Leymah Gbowee, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it with attribution for non-commercial purposes following the CC guidelines. /wr)

Who Do They Think They Are? War Rapists as People

(This article is thankfully reprinted under the creative commons license of the democracynow web site, which is hosting articles for the Nobel Women’s Intiative Conference, Women Forging a New Security: Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict, May 23 -26, in Montebello, Canada.. You may participate and follow the conference on social media, including twitter. /wr)

About the author

Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist researcher and writer, and visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London. Her most recent book is From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (Zed, 2007)

War is social. It may be about wounding and killing, but these actions are performed in the context of relationships between identifiable people – people who have a sense of self, and a notion of the identity of the ones they attack or by whom they are attacked. Likewise, although it goes against the grain to think of rape and sexual torture as relational, it makes sense to ask who the rapist thinks he is, and who he thinks his victim is. I was prompted to this thought by reading the words of a young Vietnamese woman as later reported by the US soldier who, with his colleagues, was about to rape, mutilate and murder her. Speaking English, she surprised them (he later wrote) by asking, “Why are you doing this to me?”  You and me. She asked him in effect to identify himself, and to indicate the identity he ascribed to her. I wanted to try to answer her question, since he did not.It is sometimes suggested in the case of rapes in peace time that some are committed by men who are clinically insane, who cannot be held responsible for their actions and about whom it makes no sense to ask sociological questions. Be that as it may, the perpetrators in that US squad during the Vietnam war of 1955-75 were enlisted soldiers, operating effectively in a military system. This suggests a certain level of social and psychic competence. Besides, as war rape characteristically is, this was a collective act. We must assume therefore that it was performed by knowing individuals, who had a verifiable subjective sense of self, enabling and indeed requiring conscious processes of identification and dis-identification with others.A useful way of understanding identification is to distinguish between a person’s sense of self, and the ‘identity’ projected onto her or him by other people or institutions. Identity is complex, made up of several positionings in terms of power. We may assume the soldier ‘identified’ the woman as ethnically inferior. He was born under the Stars and Stripes, she is a slant-eyed oriental. In class terms, she is economically inferior, worth less than him, ‘worthless’. He also identifies her as a woman, to whose body, as a male in a patriarchal gender order, he feels entitled. This gender subordination is amplified by the fact that civilian status is usually perceived as feminizing by those whose sense-of-self is of being armed, of belonging to a military apparatus.

We know that processes of identification are unavoidable. They are what makes us human beings in relation to differentiated others in a complex human society. But there are a variety of modes in which we can constitute ourselves in relation to others. At one extreme we can define the self by constituting an ‘other’ who is totally alien and inimical, who may even have to be annihilated if one’s self is to survive. At the other extreme, the self may be constituted in relation to another conceived as an individual or group whose existence validates one’s own, even complements it. Usually we conceive of ourselves and others in forms somewhere between these two possibilities.

To attempt an answer to the young woman’s question (how I wish I knew her name), I decided to look at instances of armed conflict in which the men of a military force abstain from sexual violence against enemy women.  I uncovered research, first, on male soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force. The researcher, Tal Nitsan [10] observed that Israeli Jewish soldiers seldom perpetrate rape on Palestinian women, although the Occupation presents ample opportunity. Why, the researcher wondered, this infrequency, when the occurrence of rape of Israeli Jewish women by Israeli Jewish men is no less than that of intra-ethnic rape in other countries? And, given a record of other kinds of brutal treatment by IDF soldiers of Palestinians, why not rape? The answer, it emerged from interviews with IDF soldiers, is to be found in a religious ethic in Judaism that constitutes Palestinian women as profoundly impure – so dirty that such physical intimacy would befoul the Jewish rapist. The IDF soldier’s sense of self and other was constituted in terms of such extreme alienation that evasion had priority over subjection. Ironically, rape was averted.

The other case of abstention from rape I examined was in the case of the Vietcong forces during the Vietnam war. While not only the US but also their South Vietnamese allies, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) frequently raped Vietnamese women, those of the Vietcong very seldom did so. When rape did occur, the perpetrator was publicly shamed by his unit, brought to trial and sentenced to execution. The moral injunction in this case derived not from religion but politics. The Vietcong forces were tightly controlled by the Communist political wing of the National Liberation Front, whose cadres were involved right down to the three-man battle units in the field. While the political command did not hesitate to order brutal executions of the leaders of the ARVN-controlled villages through which the NLF troops passed, it sought to constitute soldierly identity as one involving ‘respect for the people’. Though the armed conflict was deadly, Vietcong soldiers were taught to view the population among which they fought not as the enemy but rather as the masses of a future Communist Vietnamese society. The belief was inculcated that it was wrong to steal even ‘a needle and thread’ from a villager. To rape his wife or sister was unthinkable.

So rape is averted in these two cases, it appears, by extreme forms of identity constitution. In the case of the Vietcong, the Vietnamese woman is constituted as ‘like’, ‘close’ to the self, ‘worthy of respect’. In the case of the IDF, the Palestinian woman is put beyond the pale, remote from the self, cast out from the social. Surprisingly, this process too results in an infrequency of rape, because the woman is so despised as to be sexually untouchable.

The key factor at work in both cases, it seems to me, is a further process of identification, that of the male soldiers with each other. It is well understood, not only by academics researching militaries, but by those who train and command soldiers, that male bonding is an important social mechanism in building a strong and effective fighting force. The men must identify each other as equals, gain their sense of self from the respect their comrades accord them, and in turn achieve viability in dangerous situations from being able to identify with and trust the soldiers of their unit. This, I would suggest, is the factor that inhibits rape in both cases.  The US soldier rapist with whom this story opened would be likely to gain approval and regard from his fellows by participating in the gang rape of that young Vietnamese woman. He would lose the respect he so badly needs by failing to do so. In the case of both the Israeli soldier and the Vietcong fighter, if he rapes an enemy woman he will be condemned and cast out by his comrades. It is in these details, I think, that war shows itself to be social.  There may be hints in these insights as to how the incidence of sexual violence in war might be reduced.  And perhaps if we learn how men can be led away from raping enemy women, we may be on the way to learning, too, how they may be led to reconsider the identification of certain men as enemies.

To read openDemocracy 50.50′s coverage of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference, May 23-25, Women Forging a New Security:Ending Sexual Violence in War click here [7]

You can read the author’s article ‘Why Are You Doing This to Me? Identity, Power and Sexual Violence in War’ published in Jónasdóttir, Anna G., Valerie Bryson and Kathleen B.Jones (eds) (2011) Sexuality, Gender and Power: Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives

Master Works: Dorothea Lange and the Mississippi Photographs

4th of July, 1937. Hillhouse, Mississippi. (Click all pictures to enlarge.)
Two photographs taken in Mississippi in 1937 by one of America’s photography masters lay in the Library of Congress archives for half a century. Today, I am proud to present these two photographs. I am excited about the remarkable story these two pictures tell.

 Dorothea Lange, a woman trained as a portrait photographer in New York and who apprenticed with prominent society photographers, was the photographer for these two environmental portraits. Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in 1895, as a child she changed her name to her mother’s maiden name after her father left and her parents were divorced. Two of her five photos of a Mississippi woman are overlooked master works.

A Sharecropper’s Family that moved to Mississippi, 1937

Dorothea Lange took the long road to Mississippi. She traveled west to San Francisco in 1918, and opened a successful portrait studio, married a painter and gave birth to two boys. In 1935, she divorced. She married a economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and as the Great Depression drew near, she begin to make photographic images that documented the impact of the economy on daily lives of her subjects. Her photographs of human character find people on the edge of survival, working in poverty, standing in meal lines, alone, with their family,or in groups. Their faces are a deep study of the impact of these conditions.

A Sharecropper from Issaquena County, MS

In 1936, Dorothea Lange was hired by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration’s Office of War Information to travel across the South documenting a rural America. When she got to Mississippi, she photographed the sharecroppers and agriculture of the Delta. Her eye connected the relationships of work to living through the simple mechanism of image and composition. She raised these two photographic techniques to an art which at its best, is still surpassed.

Negro Children, Mississippi Delta, 1936

 As a photographer, she waited on each story to appear in the faces before her lens. For Dorothea Lange, sharing was a natural action, and she valued what was within. She was not interested in matching her images to variations of external social ideals. She waited untilher subjects’faces got past the apparent doom, relaxed from the usual cliches ,and finally opened a window to her and her camera that offered an inner glimpse into the expressions and emotions held dear in their inner heart. Working with spare back drops of natural settings, a porch or a field, her photos are careful documents of the hardships and hopes that lived and collided within her subjects. Her images somehow acquire and preservean inner strength and vulnerability. Her photos are a window to the inner grace of her subjects, presenting the dignity of their real selves as they face the camera for all to see.

 I think two of her best examples of image and composition are of a Mississippi women who was a field hand, working as a sharecropper in the Delta, that Lange photographed in 1937. This unnamed women has five images in the Library of Congress archives of Lange’s photographs. I was absolutely astounded when I found them. Together they tell a story heard but rarely seen. Photos of Negro sharecroppers , often idyllic and stereotyped, many times expressed the values of outside views of the people and their work.Lange soughtout the inner character of the persons photographed. But Lange also took herself out of the way. She knew how to look for the dignity and real vulnerability within everyone; she knew each person was a hero with a 1,000 faces, and she went beyond preconceptions to capture that moment in which the person emerged unique. She reveled in what she had not seen before. She abandoned formula or familiarity, sparked by the emerging difference that offered a look unseen before. She knew when she had this elusive quality: her photos are one with this transcendent moment.

Traveling Highway 1, 1938

 The Mississippi woman she photographs offers two extraordinary instances of Lange’s gifts.First is a picture of the woman sitting alone on her porch in a wooden ladder back chair. The woman, a farm worker and sharecropper, chops cotton; she uses a long handled hoe to weed and turn the soil in cotton fields. She is skille in “hoe culture.” She was born, by her own words, two years before the surrender, (the end of the Civil War in 1865). Photograph in 1937, she is likely 84 years old. Like other people Lange photographed, she is unnamed and no located is noted.

The wooden slated or cane-backed ladder chair in which she sits was the most common piece of furniture on rural porches. In the South, and in many rural locales, porches served as outdoor living rooms. From the porch, the sun cast its colors of pink and rose, leaves fell, dust rolled into the wind, wind played across the skin, and the changing light and its display of textures and signaled the swift, silent passage of time.

Master Work: A Portrait of an 84 year old Mississippi Woman

Lange’s photograph elevates the chair. Its straight back rail is at an offset angle to the vertical boards rising like timbers, towering above the sitting 84 year old woman. The chair is a throne more than a place of rest. It is a fixture exalted by its function. Its special role is to be a gathering place. Sitting here, the elder womanoffers silent, contemplative thanks for the immeasurable gifts of life given by an immeasurable God whose hand and will wrote the sky and colors and trees and fields seen by her living eye, restored her peace after troubles and calmed her fears, and gave her the health and strength she feels within. Look carefully at her face: her eyes are looking within; this wonder is almost too much to contemplate. Her hand supports the weight of this glorious knowledge, this lived experience.

 Each day the woman sits in this chairknowing that God calls to her. Her face is etched with a light filled with bright love. She is seeing something that belongs only to her. Dust, hard work, and weariness can not diminish this place she has entered. In fact, the journey to this place is a praise song deep in the soul. This elder woman has worked and earned a living turning the ground with a long handled hoe. Her real earning shows in the promise of her face, her hand touching her cheek to affirm that this presence that stirs within her is as real as the ground she works. Yet Lange’s composition makes this photo work: she photographs the woman from the side, allowing the viewer to look in. She subtly uses wood, the chair and the long, vertical house boards (rising out of view of the photo) to call to mind the altar chair in a church. Her composition frames and presents this woman’s story.The second shot is deceptive and its features easy to miss. It looks like the stereotypes often associated with this era, but close inspection offers a profound difference. This women, by her own words, born two years before the surrender, in 1863; in 1937, sheis 84 years old!

 At 84, she poses as a life-long, proud farm worker, a skilled laborer, knowing both how to tend a crop from planting to harvest, but also knowing, from long experience, how to preserve her body from the wear of sun and hand labor. Back and neck muscles and worn-out arthritic bones have often put others out to pasture, but she proudly is going on. Smiling, looking straight into the camera, her face expresses her easy confidence, a fierce pride, a lifelong way-making. This second portrait is taken at work rest.

Master Work: Portrait at Work Rest of an 84 unnamed Mississippi Woman,
A Sharecropper skilled in “hoe culture,” “born two years before the surrender.”

 The details of her longsuccess are in the details of her stance. Her thin frame is at an angle to the hoe. The angle offsets the pulling action of chopping by torquing the pull. As she chops the ground and pulls the hoe to turn the soil, her body twists from her lower back, hips, and thighs. In fact, by the portrait, her action works exactly like a modern rotary tiller, whose curves blades lift and spin the soilin exactly the same way she does with with the pose of her body!Her head is elevated, raised from the neck. Keeping her neck up and her head raised staves off the painful onslaught of arthritic that field workers who bent their necks and dropped their heads suffer from.

 But the signature adaption she has made is easy to miss. Look carefully at her right hand. Her palm is turned out. Her thumb is below her fingers. Pulling out prevents the muscles and tendons from becoming sore and uses the shoulder and back to pull the load as her lower back swings around, using her legs and thighs to complete the action.

 This portrait is a brilliant photograph. It is an anthropological study of advanced farm worker’s techniques. (I can find no other photograph of workers before or after the civil war photographed in a similar pose, showing similar techniques.)

 I am glad to share both photographs with you. Enjoy this remarkable story, connecting the American experience, told by two woman, one whose life touched the 1861 war, experienced freedom as an infant, and hoed the cotton fields of the rural Mississippi Delta; the other, a polio survior, a society photographerwho livedin large cities; both collaborating on a July day in 1937, before and behind a camera set up in the Delta to make these lasting images.

Sharecropper’s Home, 10 Miles from Jackson, 1937

All photographs by Dorothea Lange from the Library of Congress (available with no known restrictions).

Click here to see the Denver Post’s photo blogs amazing color photographs of America during the Great Depression.  Many of these are from the same time period as above.

The Natural Mystic, Extended

Click to hear Bob Marley sing about the mystery of the natural mystic.

Aunt Liza; Pueblo, CO, 1893. Former slave of the Hamilton family; cook at Ft. Francisco.



In Tahrir Square: Packed. Peaceful. Joyful. Proud. Women in full cover. Teenage girls in fashionable jeans. Families everywhere. Terry Moran, ABC News 

Ahh, data, statistical measures, and country names are the means of comparison when it comes to change, but there are also intangibles.

One very important mystic is that those who seek change do so in common and tap something unspoken and hidden. Change isn’t created from poverty statistics or job prospects (if it were so, the South would still be in revolt rather than fighting to cut the health care that will pay for their tarred lungs, clogged arteries, and overweight souls). Nor is change tied to the experience of poverty or scourges. Change’s most important measure is an uncountable quality that the US intelligent forces spent much of the week acknowledging they couldn’t identify.

As the eminence Frank Rich writes in his NYT column, it will take “months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.” When something big happens, we miss the small,  and the fault lies within ourselves: We miss the new beginning.

Coptic priests stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslim imams on a platform, calling for togetherness.

The natural mystic of change is sparked by a collective voice. It occurs when an individual voice realizes it can only achieve its purpose if it is spoken in concert with other voices; in what one dreamscribe and NYT commenter Amelia calls “an epiphany of collective action.” These voices when raised bring the world to attention and invite the mighty to test their mettle. Heads buried in the data don’t hear the signs or see the challenge beyond. They can’t identify the moment when the sky catches fire. When the blood burns. When the collective passions unite. As Dreamscribe Amelia says, “though miles divide us, dreams unite us; the blood dripping in your fight / falls through my hands. .”

In Tahrir Square: An old couple shuffle along through the crush, hand in hand, smiling the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen.

Change requires one other propellant–courage. To bring about change, the collective voices must stand for something and be supported by something. They must willing to confront the hardships and trials that attempt to silence their voices. They must enter that special zone of living where each breath is hammered with peril and the breath which is life brings and breathes the specter of death.

In the myths and realities of change around the globe, from the mythic appeals to India’s Shiva to the songs of civil rights (“ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round”) the courage of change must have the steadfast character of peace. (Think Mandela, Gandhi, Lincoln; others.) Dire predictions of political abysses, of chaos, of unsettled unrest ignore the basics and beg the question: change is always steadfast when based on peace which flourishes as progress.

Finally, change requires conditions that activate its substance. Corruption, injustice, violence really set the stage for change more than poverty, and never fear. These dark forces are the spark but never the source. The source, as poet Robert Hayden said, is “the immortal human wish, the timeless will.”

Yet limitation is an important part of peace. As the world watches change along the banks of the Nile, the I Ching recalls the image: “Waters difficult to keep within the Lake’s banks: The Superior Person examines the nature of virtue and makes himself a standard that can be followed. Self-discipline brings success; but restraints too binding bring self-defeat.”

So that brings us to the big question: after Egypt, will America change? Lots of comments I’ve read lately draw parallels and offer analogies and suggest we are on the cusp, ripe and ready. The key differences are the founding fathers had a greater vision than stopping conspiracies of caliphs or fighting against imaginary death panels while real people are dying through the indifference of those who fight imaginary struggles. The founding fathers had a clear vision lined up and stood together in courage and spoke with one voice. They faced peril but knew nothing of fear. The slaves followed in their foot steps, showing that courage was universal and change could alter any human condition. From Haiti’s maroons to China’s long march, under many banners, some alien, others detested, change marks and reveals elements within. It can be sparked from conditions outside, but it must flow from an inner source.

The founding fathers and old slaves would have laughed at those joining the present fight here at home. After their fight, they would have chortled at the idea that their cherished ideals of defense protected the right to sell guns to killers. They knew courage and fear couldn’t occupy the same place and the two didn’t operate in the same plane. Or achieve the same ends. They knew: fear, you fix it. Or maybe you didn’t. But courage leaves fear behind for a change that is transcendent and soars. It fixes you.

It’s not sparked by data. And it’s never on the radio or television, daily, dosed at the same time.

An enormous crowd of ordinary Egyptians. And they sing, and chant, and pray, and the children wave flags and the men openly weep.

The Word is a Paradigm

Photo from the Library of Congress

Studying a language without learning the nusances of culture and historic ideas and connotations of the language can result in just as much misunderstanding as the mispronunciation of a word. While schools focus on verbs and enunciation as authenticity, the real danger is losing sight of the China’s broad world view. China’s traditional vision of reality as a paradigm with complex, interactive, contradictory, transforming passive and active forces, each of which can have prime influence is equally as important to understanding China but not yet as “cool” as rambling off a few sentences in Mandrin.

The same holds true for the study of Spanish. More than a working langauage, it is a gateway to a world of ideas and experiences that are a part of a human treasury many Americans no longer hold dear.

It is a great irony that the study of languages has a danger implicit at its base: the purpose of making the world more American, the desire to make ourselves understood without an investment in understanding the legacy and grand traditions of others who spoke and created the language being learned. Frantz Fanon once said to speak a language means “above all to assume a culture, to carry the weight of a civilization” . . to be afforded “a remarkable power.” Being able to ask directions and order corporate cuisine may be practical, but it doesn’t produce the talented tenth so persuasively advocated for by WEB DuBois, who studied in Germany and England, a trained community that can apply the skills and ideas that are the legacy of the global community to problems in order to generate new approaches and solutions.

To be honest, I don’t speak Chinese, but I still use the I Ching, whose forecasting method I learned decades ago in college, to generate models and review procedural steps and warnings for issues of social justice. In the choice between learning the language or learning the great ideas of the dynasties that drove its political and social actions, I have always much preferred cultural literacy. I think the ultimate goal for those who want to exceed the utilitarian use of language is to learn to think in the language – in the way the best native speakers do. Then a part of world peace will be the lack of the “ontological resistance” that Fanon spoke of. I know as a SC tour guide working in a region where the only African language was created in America, my clients enjoy the forms and meaning within the language as much as its usual phrasing and articulations. The words, once thought to be assigned to those unlettered and untrained, do hold and reveal a civilization transforming and surviving by wrapping and preserving its humanity in ideas shared and maintained through speech. That language’s function was very different from the status assigned by outsiders. To guard against this contradiction, learning languages should lead to fluency in global thinking.

Oppression is a Many Splendored Thing

Protesting Congress Denial of Women's Rights. Photo, Library of Congress.

Denial is a part of every system of oppression. Republicans deny their oppression of working class families and the poor by pretending to be “for” family values and “free” enterprise, while shifting the balance of power and profit to those who exploit the public good for private and personal gain.

But what we are seeing with President Obama is a new class of denial. It’s a denial that denies it is denying. It calls for him to do things many–not all–but many don’t want him to do. Perhaps instructive is a story from my high school years, where as a member of the group of first African-Americans to integrate my hometown high school, I was encouraged to take full advantage of opportunities and activities. Except for the state BETA Club convention, when everyone wondered who would be my roomates, and the regional band clinic, another overnight trip, where we were suppose to stay with families (I was told I could decline the trip if I wanted to, although I had made first chair), and the Christmas parades where the good citizens of neighboring towns through cigarettes at the boots of our one African-American majorette. The point here is not to shock, open old wounds, or cite old history, it’s to point out that America never seems to know anyone who has done those things. We offer opportunity and equal expectations, but deny the invisible expectation of limits silently imposed by race–and then deny race is a factor.

With the President, remember the New Yorker magazine cover with his head wrapped and his wife in a 70s-styled afro with platforms with a fist bump, the American flag burning in the fireplace – the modern militant radical equivalent of the watermelon eating stereotype that supposedly was only a “parody”? Remember the discussions during the primaries as to whether the President had street cred (was he “black” enough)? So consumed were many with panning race and denying the panning, that no one saw what is obvious: it’s worse–his politics are neither racial or socialist (and socialist is simply another code word for race that can be denied by those who use it).

Now many who deny their denial have discovered they can have it both ways and are playing both sides. I feel like I’m watching an old Sidney Poitier movie, in which he is suffering silently under the yoke, as impotent as Gershwin’s Porgy, as tragic as Ellison’s Invisible Man’s battle royal–sympathetic, a source of fury–but safe.

This is meant to be a larger reading of Obama within the cultural dynamic of race outside of its usual confines of bias and prejudice. It is not a reading of his personality or politics, but of the subtle ways America invents to deny its denial that it (we) see race, and often hold out expectations which we don’t expect to be met. Newt’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” was an unveiled, unvarnished clear academic reference to the Mao Mao, yet not one pundit, broadcast or print, labeled it or nailed it. I found it insidious and bankrupt. It labeled the President in a way that really labeled the broader image of African-Americans–no longer welfare cheats but now deadly killers of western civilization’s right to its manifest destiny. It shut a door for me that no one among the Republicans or Tea Party folk renounced the remark. To support those who hold or who let such views go by would be like fighting for the Confederacy. (Which incidently some African-Americans did not based on principles or beliefs; they were promised freedom and pensions, creating a win-win in their political hedge.)

How can the country leave unnoticed the Kenyan anti-colonial reference while wanting him to “man up”? Actually the country is doubling down on its denial; from the Duchess who found him uppity to the pan cake boxes that bootstrapped him to recyled imagery, no one seems to be able to find anyone who thinks race is an issue, when it fact, it’s all over the place, but outside of the narrow confines of bias or prejudice by which we have been conditioned to think about it. Cultural attitudes are difficult to identity and can not be counted in surveys or polls, or one by one. They linger and reproduce as a interior legacy–and a big part of that legacy is that the complexities of the culture of race are denied.

To borrow and paraphrase an image from my favorite Ismael Reed poem, “Jacket Notes,” the President is like a man going over Nigara Falls in a barrel. Many of the gawkers hope he falls on his face. Some don’t think much of his act. The barrel makers don’t think he can cut it. “But what really hurts is / he is bigger than the / barrel.”

The New York State of Education

An Ansel Adams photograph of biology students at the Manazar Relocation Center, CA, 1943.

Education–the public education of 1.1 million school students who are predominately black, latino, and international, with a few native whites–across five boroughs of New York should bring sobering reflection and detailed thinking.

Instead, disappointedly, I find short cuts, straw arguments, logical fallacies in the comparisons of experience, and blame shifting as the principal reasons the Mayor cites for his choice of New York City’s School Chancellor.

To wit: Ms. Cathie Black, by all accounts, is a good manager. As a good manager, she should know her limits and capacities, evaluate her expertise, and decide if she is a good fit for the job requirements of New York City’s school chancellor.

Yes, the head of schools has to deal with the all mighty union, but acceptability to the union does not, prima facie, imply lousy results for the system–nor does union opposition automatically imply a greater badge of success. Standing up to the unions is a straw argument keyed on by the public and only one aspect of the job. Mrs. Black must ask herself: do I have the experience and nuanced skills required for negotiating with union officials? Can I master the myraid of details about benefits, discipline, duties in the labor agreement? This is vastly different from her experience in publishing, where employees work at will, there is little long term and capital planning, and it’s mainly important to know the sense of the popular pulse.

Washington, DC Elementary School Reading Corner, 1943.

The direct impact of the job is on the one million students who are the next generation of workers and leaders in the city. I suggest the main criteria of focus should be Ms. Black’s likelihood of improving the reasoning and knowledge skills of the city’s students, not her toughness, endorsement, or absence of one by one union.

Education is one of the most complex and important enterprises within a community. Its leaders usually have an advanced degree (Mrs. Black only has a Bachelor of Arts degree), an administrative certificate, internships, extensive in-service training, national participation in conferences citing the pros and cons of best practices, the ability to identify cutting edge trends, the ability to translate pedagogy into budget numbers, experience with student learning styles and cultural practices, and knowledge of the psychological development of children. Add in a discipline system that has to pass federal scrutiny, strategies to involve parents, along with broad medical issues and a variety of special needs, and the human relations skills of managing and motivating large groups and creating accountability. Modern education is a complex, serious, legal-bound, theory-based, parent-influenced, politically-driven enterprise. Is even the most successful business leader equipped for this task?

Ansel Adams Photograph of a Dress-making Class, CA. 1943.

To those who say “give her a chance,” I think its a fair and honest question to ask: why? Given the criteria of the expected role of the schools chief, what are Mrs. Black’s strengths and weaknesses? Can she identify the best curriculum trends? Will she know if someone is blowing educational smoke? What are her experiences with testing? How well does she work in arenas where she has limited knowledge and experience? How do her skills in business translate to leadership in personnel and curriculum, both critical areas? Can or will she be manipulated by experts and consultants? With whom is likely to clash? And most importantly, what is her educational vision for the nation’s largest urban system?

People who come through the ranks of education do so because they burn with passion and are driven to keep going through the hard times, They are determined to make things better, and to avoid repeating the mistakes in their institutional memory. As they climb, their exposure to educational practices gives them ideas of what works, what can be tinkered and adjusted, what needs to be abandoned.
I have a sister-in-law who is a high ranking curriculum official in an large Ohio city. Her day is impacted by everything from gang fights to resistance to longer class periods to changing state standards and data collectiing and federal reporting, and she works 14 hour days, putting in appearances at school events and meetings most evenings.

New York City's Benjamin Franklin High School, 1943.

Mrs. Black comes in with none of that experience. A simple comparison might suffice to reflect on her potential competence: given her corporate success and track record of achievement in business, would readers be willing to let her run the fire department? Or be placed in charge of the police? Coach the Jets? Does education have a specialized core of knowledge and skills that improves administrative performance? Should she be appointed as the person to led the education of New York City’s children?

“See the Lambs, All A-Crying”

Picking Cotton in California, 1938.

Those who practice the politics of suffering strike blows intended to wound every good effort to increase economic demand. Without increased demand, there will be no jobs growth. But the Chicken Littles who proclaim the sky is falling look only in one direction for shelter: tax cuts. Theirs is a one note world view.

The administration needs an immediate, massive public education effort, undertaken by leading economists, and yes, the effort can be bi-partisan, to examine the views of economic policy, and of those who mislead policy discussions by irrelevant examples, imginary threats, fallacies in logic, distortions of history, and old fashioned appeals to fear. It is amazing that most news programs now only have single guest experts whose job is to “interpret” the policy proposals for a $14 trillion dollar economy in sound bites less than 120 seconds long. Policy makers chase political numbers; analysis has become market driven.

The omission of facts, charts, graphs, and other visual aids in a visual medium is clearly intended to be deceptive and spread half-truths that have a full measure of fear and suffering. Economics is a dismal science not because its principles are muddled or unworkable; instead its sound body of developed knowledge and applications is clouded by those who alter and deliberately mis-read facts and exchange them for a currency of apprehension and distress, while sending links and posts to each other to congratulate themselves on the success of their efforts. But their success continues to be the country’s downfall. Jobs will not come except from demand; and evil can not beget good.

Corporate Operating Profits vs Private Employment

In the still of the political eclipse, both Wall Street shares and corporate profits are up. Personal money spent in California races exceeded the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. But the country is dominated by the politics of suffering. Like sleath figures, the corporations walk past the struggles of workers and families to cloak their patriotism in lobbyist fees, secret contributions, and frozen hiring while being awash in cash.

The very, very sad news is as the gap among the people widens, the consolidation of power narrows. The election already shows, that after the voting, not much will change. The tea party candidates, if elected, will be co-opted. Corporations who becry the yoke of government will continue to yoke the government by shifting expenses and costs for everything from training to health care to public platforms. Neither side seems to have any interest in governing; mastering its principles, and if you do, you are shunted aside. Power and money attract synophants. Those who seek office have already proven they can ignore truth, facts, and progress to serve their own interests and ambitions. It’s a simple step to serve and pander for interests of wealth and power even greater than their own.

Migrants: California Mother and Children, 1938.

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“Be Lifted Up, O Ancient Doors”

     In a $14 trillion economy, still the world’s largest, just a few days after Ford announced record profits of $1.69 billion for the quarter, and even after Bank of America posted $3.1 billion in profits in Q2 2010, one would think the idea of scary conversations about Republicans returning to power would be null. Especially in light of the crisis we averted. Yet the Republicans have managed to make the recovery scary.

Fear has more impact than the hard core numbers, so large they are insulated from their own good news. Fear brings it home. Fear lives next door, not across town. Fear feels more smug than common sense, or hope or freedom. To paraphrase W. H. Auden, fear “surrounds us like a baffling crime.”

And fear is closing the eyes of voters at precisely the time when their eyes need to be opened. It should be said that fear serves a political purpose. As do discussions of witches, anchor babies, headless bodies, and Newt’s Kenyan anti-colonialism (code for the Mau Mau who beheaded British whites). In 1868, Harper’s Weekly wrote, “How easily wicked and treasonable organizations may gain the control over the peaceable and the industrious members of society has always been signally apparent at the South.”

So do the crimes and ethic scars that are celebrated as being “just like you.” It’s all a sleight of mind! It’s framed as compassion spoken as a warning without acts of safety.

It ignores the questions: how did we become a nation divided? How we can be rich and poor?

The Economy

 

The drummed and hammered complaints that inspired fear have been a stimulus debt that provided a tax cut and clearly plugged the vortex into which the US economy went into free fall, and job growth.

But look at the economy and corporate outsourcing, cash hoarding, and profit expansion have deliberately inhibited job growth. This truth is hidden by the Republican spin. Profits are increasingly seven times faster than company revenues. Much of that very generous profit comes from down sizing and outsourcing, by zeroing out the employment revenue stream. The pay check is a target; it is snatched back for profit. As a poet e. e. cummings wrote: “strong men are in the streets digging for bread.”

The Powers That Be, 1868. Harper’s Weekly

The Republican positions simply mask the slash, smash, and burn techniques by which they plan to legislate another ill-fated take over of the economy, with more cash shipped to the private sector by no bid contracts, and more profits from lower wages and non-existent jobs.

Not one single idea offered by the Party or its candidates has the substance of growth or jobs. Their plans for austerity will not bring prosperity. They make only vague references to the power of the private sector. That power smashed the economy, fired workers, and now records record profits. (And strong men are digging bread.)

Jobs? Jobs are created by demand; to hire, there must be work to do. A tax cut doesn’t make work. It’s a private stimulus. It doesn’t have to be spent. It doesn’t automatically increase demand.

That power so extolled by Republicans is now driven by greed. It stole the principle of the common good and hung it in effigy. Shouting in the crumbling streets, uttering blame and inciting fear, the Party that anchors itself to the constitution has surreptitiously stolen the meaning of democracy in order to serve and enrich the select.

The Democrats

 

Push and pull once made for good politics and lively campaigns. And achievement used to count. Take Strom Thurmond; despite his horrific rhetoric on civil rights, his defense of segregation, (full disclosure: I’m African-American), I voted for him. When I was unemployed but actively seeking work, a phone call to his office and a 70 minute walk (saving bus fare), and I was a GS-10 in less than 72 hours. And after he invoked cloture on Jesse Helms’ filibuster of the King Holiday Bill, and delivered sewer, paved and lighted streets, and safety grants to SC’s small predominantly black towns, I voted by the deed rather than the word.

Now, the first African-American President and his party face the opposite problem. They have been matchless in acting for progress, but can’t get the message out. They have delivered, but have weak defenses and little attack. Quick: what is Chris Coon’s position on social security?The President

Now there are “kinder, gentler” attacks that cite mostly personality and psychology with a little parody and cute word play to render the administration ineffective. In dry training speak, whenever any system is out of kilter, it is usual to single out and blame an individual for the failures and shortcomings of the whole.

Bad weather? Hang the ship’s captain. Bad economy? Blame the President. Reduce complex dynamics to a single, identifiable cause.



But start with Obama and work backward. There were “many” who sought to de-legimitize him with unprecedented withering attacks. He was shouted at, tsk-tsked, signed, caricatured, ballyhooed, cartooned, cursed, labeled, slimed, belittled, disrespected.

He took the wrong vacations at the wrong time, he waited too long to visit the Gulf, he hesitated too long before taking the lead on healthcare, he overlooked too long the shape of the economy. Yet the Gulf (take a deep sigh here and say a prayer) is doing well, healthcare is slowly rolling out, and the macro-economy, at $14 trillion and counting, is doing relatively well. In fact, Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years. And it was Republican incumbents who lost their conservative seats to those who felt they were not conservative enough. Was Barack Obama supposed to campaign for them?

But as people pile on, at the top of the pile are jobs lost and not regained. Yes, like a stake, jobs stand above the buzz “of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire, and airy tongues that syllable men’s names.” (Milton.)

“You didn’t fix the jobs crisis, dude.” You were supposed to turn the ship of state around in 24 months. Audacity meet mendacity; all blame and little help; all “socialist” and no capitalists to the aid; he was all calm when confronting fury: and now judged as weak, absorbed, even mediocre; a contradiction which has become an antithesis. But remember again this fact: Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years.

Change hurts, whether it institutes new programs or people. It disturbs the status quo. It shifts power. Charismatic, reflective, Obama symbolizes the last broken barrier of America’s racial past. He challenged an ideal that many Americans cherished and he has suffered their contempt. He broke that barrier at the worst possible time; he became president at the arc of elite corporate political power; he spent billions on their bail-out while they acted in distain. But there is no going back.

 Even after next week, Obama’s got two more years. And things can’t really get much worse. If they do, despite the mantras that lay doom at his door, there will be plenty of real blame to go around.

 
New Jersey election, 1867. Harper’s Weekly.

–Walter Rhett
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Mississippi Children on the 4th of July 1937. Dorothea Lange Master Photograph. Library of Congress.

Could it be that the new source of wealth and prosperity is sourced in the permanent loss of jobs? (Republicans want to dismantle the safety net, shifting even more wealth to corporations.) The complaint, that Democrats have overspent, stimulated fear, and not messaged well, has partial truth. But it does not equal the massive truth of the Republican distortions and wackiness. DeMint, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the others are no Strom Thurmond. Thurmond didn’t neglect the message to his base or service to his constituents, and did both aggressively, delivering the goods by word and deed, even when they were at odds, and while getting his fair share, never uttered blame.