OK, the innermost desires of the current occupant of the White House
are never secret too long. He has an innate inability to contain
himself in any manner whatsoever. Kind of like little boys in their
‘terrible teens’.
I recently heard someone use the word “Fascism”
and it reminded me that just like the word ‘racist’, it does have a
specific meaning, tho it has been prefixed to many modifiers in its
historically short, modern history.
(To be a racist, by the by,
is to also have the position and societal power to enact and enforce
your beliefs. Otherwise you are, simply, ‘prejudiced’. I dislike
pineapple on pizza is a prejudice, for example. If I wrote that I do not
like folks of the Caucasian persuasion that would be a prejudice, as
well: as a person of color I have no societal power over them. All I
could do is on a personal level, like not hiring them, not publishing
their photography, etc. As such, my actions would be prejudicial ones,
not racist ones.)
So, to fascism.
The great novelist and thinker in semiotics, Umberto Eco, was born into fascist Italy. To help clarify people’s thinking on just what the word means, he published an essay in 1995 for The New York Review of Books titled “Ur-Fascism“. While I am not certain his list is the last word, he offers 14 typical features that, like a tiny speck of atmospheric ice crystal that permits the formation of hail, allows fascism to coalesce into a state we can identify.
*****
Openculture.com
(via a refinment from someone named “Kottke” and then blogger Paul
Bausch) published these as the following comprehensible list:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of
every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The
Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult
elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the
Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this
sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of
action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be
taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form
of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical
spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In
modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way
to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal
of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the
intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to
social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical
fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering
from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and
frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The
obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest
way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy
is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus,
the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9.
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no
struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology,
heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the
cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both
disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard
sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective
populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which
the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented
and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Thoughts on watching the body of Civil Rights and Justice Warrior,
Representative John Lewis, being ferried in a horse-drawn wagon across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
*******
“And before I’d be a slave I’ll be
buried to my grave”
‘Oh Freedom’, an African American freedom song associated with the U.S. Civil Rights movement but actually written after the U.S. Civil War (12 April 1860 – 9 April 1865). A version was first recorded by Earl R. Nance (with Clarence Dooley, Tenor Vocal & Guitar; Madie Nance, Soprano Vocal; Helen Nance, Alto Vocal & Mandolin) August 26, 1931 in Richmond, Indiana. (video, above)
Most of us are more familiar with the Odetta (1957), Harry Belafonte (1960)
or Joan Baez (1963 March on Washington) versions but the original recording
takes me to an earlier place in our country’s history.
*****
“get out there and get in the way, get
in good trouble, necessary trouble, and be yourself.”
– John Lewis, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 1, 2020 (a
motivator to the end!)
John Lewis also spoke similar words to young people at the Children’s
Defense Fund Freedom Schools National Training in June 2014. Marion Wright
Edelman, founder of the Fund wrote, “As he spoke to today’s young Freedom
Schools leaders John Lewis told them that when he was their age getting into
“necessary trouble” shaped his life’s mission. As he explained, he grew up poor
in rural Troy, Alabama, where his father, a former tenant farmer, had saved
enough money to buy his own land. He worked on the farm alongside the rest of
his family but was always desperate to get an education. A teacher encouraged
him over and over to read all he could. Although he wasn’t allowed in his
segregated county library like so many of our generation, he did his best: “I
tried to read everything, the few books we had at home, the magazines. We were
too poor to have a subscription to the local newspaper, but my grandfather had
one, and when he would finish reading his newspaper each day, I would get that
newspaper and read it.” He also listened to the radio to learn more about the
news outside his small community, and eventually started hearing about new
events that would change his life: “In 1955, 15 years old in the 10th grade, I
heard of Rosa Parks. I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard his voice on an
old radio, and it seemed like he was saying, “John Lewis, you, too, can do
something . . . You can make a contribution.”
John Lewis decided then that was exactly what he would do. He started with
the library: “So in 1956, 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and
cousins, we went down to the public library in the little town of Troy,
Alabama, trying to get a library card, trying to check out some books, and we
were told by the librarian that the library is for Whites only and not for
coloreds.” A year later, as a high school senior he decided to apply to Troy State
College (now Troy University), a White college close to his home—but his
application was ignored and unanswered. John Lewis was stopped temporarily—but
he was not finished.
He told the very rapt audience that getting into necessary trouble in order
to stand up for what is right is required of us all: “If we fail to do it,
history will not be kind to us.” And he reminded us that this is true even when
there is a terrible cost, as with the murders of the three Freedom Summer
volunteers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: “Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and
James Chaney. I knew these three young men. On the night of June 21st, 1964,
almost 50 years ago, these three young men were detained, taken to jail, taken
out, turned over to the Klan, where they were beaten and shot and killed. They
didn’t die in the Middle East or Eastern Europe or Vietnam or in Central or
South America. They died right here in our own country, and they must be looked
upon as the founding fathers of the new America, a new way of doing things, a
new way of life.””
*****
Looking across the aisle, I also found this interesting scene on the morning TV show The View (transcript from The Decider):
“[Meghan] McCain offered her own reflection on Lewis’ legacy with a personal
story about meeting him at her father’s office when she was 14. “It was
important to [her father] that I heard this man’s story and knew who he was,”
said the co-host. “I can remember when I was 14 not really ever seeing my dad
deferential or in awe of anyone, and that was one of the first times.”
McCain added that while Lewis and her father “ended up having a political
disagreement” when Sen. McCain ran for president — “I have no interest in
rehashing it right now,” she said — but they were able to squash it. “When my
dad passed, John Lewis put out one of the more beautiful statements of anyone,”
she recalled.”
James Madison (1751-1836) at the College of New Jersey (Class of 1771) in Princeton. Portrait by James Sharples (British, 1752-1811)
The Executive Branch current morphing of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into what some other countries call their Interior Ministry has been, in a way, a no-brainer. Of the 80-odd federal law enforcement agencies in the United States, Customs and Border Protection Agents may be the most ‘physical’ with apprehended suspects as they conduct operations along a largely deserted southern border without the prying eyes of the greater public. They routinely hold people who they suspect are entering the country illegally without offering up specific charges. (Separate and incarcerate children apart from their parents? OK, no problem! They have also arrested U.S. citizens who leave gallon jugs of water in the desert for immigrants because such actions are seen as aiding those attempting to enter the U.S. without papers.)
In many countries
Interior Ministries are anything but people-friendly: these departments are not
populated by employees guiding their populace on ranger-led interpretive nature
hikes through spectacular natural scenery. They are heads-of-state directed agencies
who operate as a secret police, whose employees are feared by their own people
and rightly so. The tactics employed by such ministries include warrantless
search and seizures, arrests without stated cause, indeterminate detention,
torture and other popular acts of authoritarian governments. They are internal
police forces answering to the whims of the supreme leader, not the directives
of local officials. Portland was simply a warm-up exercise incorporating agents from Customs and Border Protection, the
Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.
Chicago is slated to be next as what we in the past called Gestapo Tactics is
rolled out across the country’s big cities using whatever federal manpower is
available. The Trump administration has learned another valuable lesson from
Russia’s playbook by customizing its own anonymous armed officers, our version
of the “Little Green Men” who invaded and occupied eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the
Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books; 2017) spoke with Michelle Goldberg
for her New York Times July 21st column, “This is a classic way that
violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or
whether it’s the Russian Empire. The people who are getting used to committing
violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in
the interior.” “
Typical of right-winger’s flip-flops, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was rabid in 1995 with a flip warning of the seizure of American’s guns under Congress’s ‘Assault Weapons Ban’: “In Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” Now, however, the NRA endorses Trump for a second term (July 16 announcement) and, with a thudding flop, lauds his actions in Portland for “stand[ing] tall for the constitutional freedoms in which our members believe.” Where o’ where are my conservative friends who used to uphold the rights of individuals at all costs against Big Government? Perhaps they are all busy praising the powers of plutocracy and the all-controlling Spy State: all citizens are equal but some are more equal than others.
In an article in today’s The
Atlantic magazine David A. Graham writes, “Chad Wolf, the [acting head
of] DHS amid the crackdown, is also accountable only to the president: Trump,
who loves circumventing the Constitution’s requirement of Senate confirmation
for some positions, has often chosen to leave acting heads in charge of
agencies so that they are more pliable and dependent on him.”
As if anonymous federal police throwing people into unmarked rental cars is not enough, Trump has bought in John Yoo, seeking advice from the lawyer who wrote Bush 43’s 2002 legal justification for Guantanamo ‘enhanced interrogations’, the so-called ‘torture memos’. Yoo has publicly confirmed he’s helping the Trump administration find ways to skirt Congress and impose his (Trump’s) own policies without congressional approval, even if such policies violate laws – that is, the democratic principles of citizen protection upon which this country was founded.
Yoo’s thinking on this was detailed in an article in the magazine National Review (June 22) arguing the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provides a back door to implement policies by the Chief Executive without regard to legality: the ruling “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors.” In Yoo’s recent interview with the British newspaper The Guardian he says, “And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.” And with regard to Portland’s unidentified, masked agents: “It has to be really reasonably related to protecting federal buildings … If it’s just graffiti, that’s not enough. It really depends on what the facts are.”
But… facts, of
course, never get in the way of life in Trump-ville.
I am again and again struck by our country’s
Founders who were so often uncannily prescient in setting up roadblocks for
undesirable outcomes and on-ramps for desirable ones. They could not possibly
plan for every exigency but certainly covered a lot of ground in their attempt.
For all its social faults the Age of Enlightenment bred people – men and women
– of brilliance and forethought to whom expertise, science and knowledge were
things of beauty to combat ignorance, popular befuddlement and the rule of the
rabble.
I end here with a small quote from the transcript of the James Madison
Debates of the Constitutional Convention, delivered by the man himself, on
Friday, June 29, 1787. As was usual, the written record contains abbreviations
commonly used in such recorded work in the 18th century (the italics are mine).
“In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of war, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. It is perhaps questionable, whether the best concerted system of absolute power in Europe cd. maintain itself, in a situation, where no alarms of external danger cd. tame the people to the domestic yoke.” Further, “He [Madison] entreated the gentlemen representing the small States to renounce a principle [the rank of the States as political societies, for example] wch. was confessedly unjust, which cd. never be admitted, & if admitted must infuse mortality into a Constitution which we wished to last forever.”
There are myriad qualities that make us human but few, other than the wide bailiwick of ‘culture’, have tentacles that reach – or should reach, as far into our psyches as the pursuit of justice.
All the qualities are evolutionarily useful, of course, and some are shared with other species: tool use for example. Plus we have the category of emotions – but we have no lock on exclusivity there, either; witness your dog jumping for joy when you return to your home (even after being gone for only 10 minutes!) or elephants grieving their dead. Then there is the neurological brain and unfathomed mind terrain of morality, ethics, mutuality, competition and the like.
I, and millions of others on this hunk of rock speeding through the universe, think the historical Buddha was onto something when he hit upon desire as a main cause of human misery. And, again, when he taught that wisdom and compassion were two primary keys to the alleviation of much that passes for our distress in this world. Notice that I used the past-tense ‘taught’ (teach) and not ‘preach’, a signal difference between Eastern and Western approaches to the divine. Preaching is an activity wherein someone with a supposed special insight and connection to the spiritual expounds to a (mostly) passive audience. Other than the “call-and-response” in traditional black churches there is precious little two-way communication going on.
Teaching in the active sense is a whole other endeavor altogether. It is what Doris Lessing (“Introduction” to the Grove Press edition of Ecclesiastes) identifies as the “experiential Path” vs. the “passive” one. When we hear and learn of concepts like “Justice” in our schools and places of worship we internalize, if we do at all, an intellectual concept. When we grow up in an environment with parents and a community that teaches us about “Justice” we internalize it in our hearts. It is closely linked to compassion for the Other. To see a black citizen beaten or killed on an anonymous video stream causes every right-thinking person unease. To walk out of the house knowing that this treatment might be your own lot brings on another level of apprehension altogether.
In many ways ordinary, middle-class white people in our society are privileged not so much by what has happened in their lives as by what has not happened.
The last time I drove cross-country from Ohio, then to Chicago for a Leica meeting and then home to New Mexico I was stopped not once, but twice by states highway patrol. In Illinois the trooper was right behind me as we drove 70+ mph along the Interstate. I decided to move back to the right lanes after passing a car and in a few seconds saw the flashing lights go on in the patrol car. I dutifully pulled over and awaited the standard visit from the cop at my Mercedes Sprinter van window.
When he finally came up I asked what was the problem. He said that in Illinois there is a law that a driver cannot change lanes on an Interstate within 275 feet of signaling a lane change. I asked him to repeat the statement as I was trying to internalize his comment (which was not as succinct as my version of it.) Then I did a quick calculation and said that at the speeds we were driving, 275 feet go by in less than three seconds. I added that I did not have a stop-watch but was pretty certain the legal time had transpired and I had, after all, signaled my intentions. He said, yes, I had signaled but he was pretty certain I had moved into the right lane too early. When I let out an exasperated breath (I was trying to get to my meeting hotel before nightfall) he added that he was not going to give me a ticket, only a ‘Warning’, and that I should leave my van and get into his patrol car. I responded with, “Really!” He said, “Yes, you need to comply, sir.” As I opened the door and stepped out he suddenly said, “Are you armed?” I looked at him with incredulity and said, “Are you serious? No, of course not!”m
As I approached his car I reached for the back door handle but he said, “No, get in the front passenger seat.”
“Okay, cool, I can look at all the toys!”
I did not get much done by way of inspection because there was a police major in the back seat who grilled me on fly-fishing in New Mexico when he saw the Catch & Release sticker in my rear window. I got the idea he was trying to ferret out whether I knew anything about the great art of casting with a fly or had stolen an expensive vehicle.
After several days in Chicago I headed back to the Interstate toward New Mexico. That evening late, just west of St. Louis, a car kept tail-gating me closely for miles. Rather than hit the brakes, which I would have done in my youth, I simply slowed down. Who wants to get the driver behind alarmed and pissed-off enough that he/she pulls up and sends a bullet thru the driver side window?
As I slowed those flashing lights came on! He kept me waiting for a long time before coming up to the window. Tired and (again) exasperated as I was trying to reach my usual hotel, I asked what took so damn long. He said he saw I had an old arrest record at the White House but could not find that it had ever been settled. It took him a long time to find it had been adjudicated (‘don’t return to DC and cause trouble for at least 6 months.’)
Then, I got the only laugh I have ever received from a state cop during the many times I have been stopped: “Officer, first things first. I am very proud of that arrest. It is a sterling moment of civil disobedience from my youth. I made national TV and got a televised comment from my state senator, John Glenn! Second, why did you stop me in the first place?”
“I could not read your license plate or see a sticker to see
if it is current.“
“My date sticker is right there for all to see.”
“Yes, I see it now, but in Missouri it is illegal to drive
with a license plate that is hard for an officer to read. Now, I’m not going to
give you a ticket, but….”
Another ‘Warning’ ticket in my pocket after a stop that
lasted ninety minutes.
Many of you will laugh at these stories, and I can, too,
now. But, the significance of them is that any ‘untoward’ action or displayed
anger on my part could have ended badly for me. Driving while brown can be a
risky practice in many places in the United States. What proved to be
remarkable was that the very next week the NAACP issued a notice that read, “if
you are black you should avoid driving through Missouri if at all possible.”
This is an incredible piece of advice in 21st century America.
These examples of state police action would be simply idiosyncratic stories if not for the fact that they are repeated across this nation every day. I am lucky in that I am sure the officers’ calculus of behavior was influenced by my educated flat, mid-Western speech, my demeanor and my expensive set of wheels (both officers were impressed by my great Mercedes vehicle), i.e. ‘he can probably afford an expensive lawyer’.
To sum, dear Reader, do not assume that your peaceful and secure daily existence is the norm for everyone in this country. Do not assume that those who are executed with impunity by state actors had it coming. Do not assume that after we have conquered Covid-19 everyone will return to a life of beauty and personal empowerment. Do not assume we must all color within the lines as dictated by the mandates of the 1%. Yes, applaud those officers who “take a knee” in solidarity with the people they have sworn to serve and protect but remember that real change is not a cosmetic application of soothing words and easy actions. True justice requires vigilance and perseverance – the hard work of all people of good will.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” – Justice Thurgood Marshall
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” – John Stuart Mill, 1867
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ― Frederick Douglass
I just learned that Denis Goldberg, one of the last two survivors of South Africa’s infamous Rivonia Trial (1963-1964), died on April 29th of cancer with Covid-19 complications.
Denis Goldberg, a civil engineer and an anti-apartheid
activist, spent 22 years in prison. He was arrested during a meeting of
activists and commanders of the MK (uMkhonto
we Sizwe) the armed wing of the ANC (African Nation Congress) on a farm in
Rivonia. The defendants in the sabotage and treason trial were Nelson Mandela
(already in prison under a “citing workers to strike” charge), Walter Sisulu, Lionel
Bernstein, Denis Goldberg, Arthur Goldreich, Bob Hepple, Abdulhay Jassat, Ahmed
Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Moosa Moolla, Elias
Motsoaledi and Harold Wolpe. (Goldreich and Wolpe escaped from prison, after
beatings and torture, before beginning their sentence; Hepple fled the country
when charges were withdrawn; and Lionel Bernstein was acquitted, rearrested and
placed under house arrest before escaping from the country.) The rest beat a de facto death sentence thru what was
probably a private treaty with the judge. Goldberg received release in 1985 largely
through the work of his daughter and members of her kibbutz and the U.S. and Israeli
governments (for many years both close allies of apartheid South Africa.)
Many Americans think the fight for democracy in South Africa
was a monolithic black vs. white struggle. This arrest list shows how wrong
this view is: those arrested were English, Indian Muslim, Jewish, Xhosa, Pedi
and Coloured.
The Rivonia Trial (Rivonia is a suburb of Johannesburg)
contained what is considered a founding moment in the attempts to create a
democracy in South Africa – 31 years before it became a reality. The ‘moment’
was , in fact, a three hour defense opening statement by Nelson Mandela, his
famous “I Am Prepared To Die” speech. Here is the closing paragraph:
“During
my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I
have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black
domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in
which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my Lord,
if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
As the only remaining white found
guilty, Denis Goldberg was taken to Pretoria Central Prison to serve 22 years.
The others served in various prisons with most doing extended time on Robben
Island off the coast. Mandela served almost 28 years (18 of which were at
Robben), Walter Sisulu served 26 years (most at Robben), Ahmed Kathrada
served 26 years (18 at Robben) with the balance at Pollsmoor Maximum Security
Prison (along with Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi and Walter
Sisulu.) Many, perhaps all, of those convicted worked on interesting college
degrees while incarcerated. Some may remember that it was Ahmed Kathrada who
showed President Obama and the First Family around Robben Island in 2013.
In 2017 the three remaining survivors
of the Rivonia trial – Denis Goldberg, Andrew Mlangeni and Kathrada, along with
the three surviving defense attorneys, Joel Joffe, George Bizos and Denis Kuny
– appeared in a documentary film entitled “Life
is Wonderful”, directed by Sir Nicholas Stadlen. These were the words
Goldberg’s mother, Annie, is said to have uttered when she learned that he and
his comrades had been spared the death sentence. (Annie must have been quite a
mom: in 1960 she was arrested with him for supporting strikers after the
Sharpeville massacre and they both spent four months in jail.)
“Mary Ann Vecchio [a 14-year old runaway, as the world later learned] gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student, Jeffrey Miller, lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio. On publication, the image was retouched to remove the fence post above Vecchio’s head.” The protest was against President Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Reacting to mass demonstrations on May 1st, Nixon he had called anti-war protestors ‘bums’.
Four students were killed and 9 wounded by the 67 shots fired by the Ohio National Guard that day. Two of the four killed were bystanders and none of the four was closer to the Guard than about a football field in distance. The Guard had been dispatched to Kent State by Governor James Rhodes, at the request of the town of Kent’s mayor, after an arson attack burned down the ROTC building on May 2.
Four million students (college and high school) went out on strike after the news of the shootings became public.
In New Mexico, where I now live, eleven people were bayonetted at the University of New Mexico by the New Mexico National Guard in a confrontation with student protesters on May 8th. The demonstrations in Washington, DC were so combative that Nixon was removed to Camp David for his safety and the 82nd Airborne was lodged in the basement of the Executive Office Building next to the White House. At Jackson State University, a historically black college, in Jackson, Mississippi, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police during a demonstration on May 14 – an event that did not receive the same attention as the shootings at Kent State.
I was in high school in Ohio and vividly remember those times – especially when my Draft Number turned out to be 99. For many years thereafter I never ate at Wendy’s because Ohio Governor Big Jim Rhodes (“part P.T. Barnum, part Elmer Gantry, part Norman Vincent Peale” – Dayton Daily News) was one of Wendy’s investors. There are memorial events at Kent State on May 4th every year and I have managed to make it to one (the 30th, I believe.)
There are still unanswered questions about the timing and personnel involved in the Kent State massacre. A prominent one involves the university- and FBI-informant Terrence Brooks Norman (no relation!), a student who appeared to be the only non-Guardsman individual who was armed at the demonstration.
The great Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020) has gone beyond to the Irish pre-Christian Otherworld of Mag Mell (the Plain of Delight) or, perhaps, Tír-na-hÓige (land of the [ever-] youthful) where worthies engage in poetry, music, entertainment, and the feast of Goibniu that grants immortality to those taking part.
If Americans know Eavan Boland it is
most likely for her poem Quarantine
from her 2001 book Code, reproduced, below, courtesy of Carcanet Press, All Rights
Reserved.
Boland lived in New York from 1956 to 1960 when her diplomat father had a posting. Though the poem Quarantine is about Irish history, she often wrote poetry reflecting the lives of those who live in Dublin’s contemporary suburbia.
Boland said she wrote this poem after reading an anecdote in an early 20th century memoir of the famine, Mo Scéal Féin by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire. It has been estimated that more than a million Irish died from starvation and disease in the period 1845 to 1852 and a million others emigrated, a period we know as the Irish Potato Famine. Although almost documentary in nature, I prefer to read Quarantine as a love poem and admire the use of repetition (‘worst’, ‘last heat’, ‘last gift’), the phrase ‘freezing stars’ and a reference to the horrible British administration of the country during the famine where tenant farmers actually grew enough wheat to feed people but had to ship it off for English tables (‘Of the toxins of a whole history’.) The next to last stanza brings to my mind the phrase, ‘Never Again!’ but, of course, we humans are slow to learn and even slower to react.
Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with
his
wife.
He was walking—they were both walking —
north.
She was sick with famine fever and
could not
keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and
north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars
they
arrived.
In the morning they were both found
dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole
history.
But her feet were held against his
breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
In my spare time, while sequestered to keep Covid-19 at bay, I am having a great time re-reading books and articles I have previously read, looking for those jewels of language and expression that make me smile, nod in agreement, cry and ponder. Sometimes we read a piece that is a wonder of wonders that will stick to our brains until we bid the world adieu.
Here, a poem by Shailja Patel, a Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, and political activist. She is most known for her book “Migritude” based on her one-woman show of the same name funded by the Ford Foundation. CNN characterizes Patel as an artist “who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.” – Wikipedia
When I lived in Tanzania, East Africa I was often mistaken for a Wahindi (Indian). I spoke rudimentary Kiswahili so I would sometimes correct folks. Other times I just went with the flow and brushed it off. Idi Amin expelled Indians, many of whom owned small businesses, in 1972. Tanzania was a little better but prejudice came to the fore after independence leading many Indians to migrate out. (One guy most people know was from Zanzibar, Farrokh Bulsara, better known as Freddie Mercury!)
Here, a long, but great Patel poem, “Migritude”, (a word she created from the African diaspora movement of the 1920s known as Negritude, joined with ‘migration’ and ‘attitude’.) I know exactly what she means and sometimes think of this poem (especially the section about her father speaking 5 languages) when I am working on my disappearing languages project!
Migritude by S. Patel
“The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati turn their trusting faces to the sun say to me care for us nurture us in my dreams I shudder and I run. I am six in a playground of white children Darkie, sing us an Indian song! Eight in a roomful of elders all mock my broken Gujarati English girl! Twelve, I tunnel into books forge an armor of English words. Eighteen, shaved head combat boots – shamed by masis in white saris neon judgments singe my western head. Mother tongue. Matrubhasha tongue of the mother I murder in myself. Through the years I watch Gujarati swell the swaggering egos of men mirror them over and over at twice their natural size. Through the years I watch Gujarati dissolve bones and teeth of women, break them on anvils of duty and service, burn them to skeletal ash. Words that don’t exist in Gujarati : Self-expression. Individual. Lesbian. English rises in my throat rapier flashed at yuppie boys who claim their people “civilized” mine. Thunderbolt hurled at cab drivers yelling Dirty black bastard! Force-field against teenage hoods hissing F****ing Paki bitch! Their tongue – or mine? Have I become the enemy? Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality. Words that don’t exist in English: Najjar Garba Arati. If we cannot name it does it exist? When we lose language does culture die? What happens to a tongue of milk-heavy cows, earthen pots jingling anklets, temple bells, when its children grow up in Silicon Valley to become programmers? Then there’s American: Kin’uh get some service? Dontcha have ice? Not: May I have please? Ben, mane madhath karso? Tafadhali nipe rafiki Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait Puedo tener….. Hello, I said can I get some service?! Like, where’s the line for Ay-mericans in this goddamn airport? Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a’ July! Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot! The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati bright as butter succulent cherries sounds I can paint on the air with my breath dance through like a Sufi mystic words I can weep and howl and devour words I can kiss and taste and dream this tongue I take back.”
Terry Holding His Son Jacob
Red Beach, WWII U.S. Marines Landing Area
Guadalcanal Island, Solomon Islands
With his wife and nine children he lives ‘rough’ on Red Beach, the site of the first landfall of the U.S. Marines in the Solomon Islands. The family has only recently returned to this shore-front they say they own. He and his wife are Gilbert Islanders, Micronesians, in this country of Melanesians. Despite their uncertain future, the family and little community maintain the site. The original historic marker has been stolen and moved 500 meters west to draw tourists and our dollars there. (The two Solomon Island brothers who they say drove them away to keep the land for themselves have recently been jailed which has allowed the return of Terry and his family.)
The Gilbert Islands are a group of 32 atolls and reef islands and one raised coral island dispersed over 1.3 million square miles, halfway between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea. It is the nation now known as Kiribati (their pronunciation of the word ‘Gilbert’ — though accented, Terry’s English is a good as mine). The name was coined in 1820 by a German admiral, in the employ of Russian Tsar Aleksandr I, after the British captain who ‘discovered’ the islands in 1788. This mix of European interests in the Pacific is a common circumstance involving changing identities and loyalties for the last couple centuries.
The main north-south line of islands in Kiribati is still called The Gilberts and stretches 780 km/485 miles. It is amazing to me that with a small population and such close proximity (in sea-faring Pacific islander terms) the northern islands were ruled by a chief and the southern islands were run by collectives of elder men. The origin myth of the Gilbertese has the ancestors coming from the West and being whitish-skinned and red-haired. It is intriguing to speculate that the Asian branch of the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, might have been sea-faring!
Most Westerners know almost nothing about Kiribati so here are three points of general interest that stand out to me:
– three of the islands were Great Britain’s last attempt at colonization (1938-1963)
– the islands were attacked by the Japanese in December 1941 on the same day as Pearl Harbor. In August of 1942 U.S. Marines landed an attack and 19 were captured as prisoners and summarily executed by the Japanese. In 1999 their bodies were finally returned home by an honor guard.
– three of the islands are U.S. territories, including Palmyra Atoll, the only incorporated U.S. Territory.
(There are a total of 14 Insular Areas around the world that fall under U.S. jurisdiction. Can you name them!)
Japanese Type 88 75mm Anti-Aircraft Gun (with its base just beyond)
Richard “Dick” Claxton Gregory
(12 October 1932, St. Louis, Missouri – 19 August 2017, Washington, D.C.)
Dick Gregory Lecturing at Wright State University, April 1973
Photo: Wilbur Norman
Dick Gregory, U.S. Army veteran, urbane comedian-turned-social activist and writer, actor, businessman and provocateur par excellence, died yesterday at the age of 84. I first met him in April 1973 when he spoke at Wright State University. I would then run into him at various events around the East Coast. I think the last time I saw him must have been in 1987 when he was arrested protesting apartheid in front of the South African Embassy in Washington, DC.
He could keep up a biting and satirical running commentary better than anyone I have ever met, no doubt from practice as a stand-up comedian in his early career. That career was given a big boost by his appearance on The Jack Paar Tonight Show in 1961.
After turning down invitations to perform on the show he was called by Paar to find out why. (Billy Eckstine had told Gregory no black performer was ever asked to sit on the couch after their act.) Gregory told Paar that the reason he was not willing to perform on The Tonight Show was “because a Negro has never been able to finish the act and walk to the couch.” The show’s producers changed this policy, making Gregory the first African American to take the couch and talk with Paar after a stage appearance!
“It was his beauty that beat me.” – George Foreman
In a world where many noted personalities are famous simply for being… well… famous, Mohammed Ali was a giant, a man who not only had a skill and performed colossal feats with that skill (40 Sports Illustrated covers as of next week attest to this) but who stood for something, as well. Ali became a symbol of hope and aspiration for anyone trying to make something of a life begun in humble or deprived origins, for those forced by circumstance into a life of servitude and despair. How appropriate that he was recognized by both the United Nations and Amnesty International as a world ambassador for peace and justice.
I met Mohahammed Ali once. I had, of course, seen him many times on television, flashing that infectious smile and spouting his sing-song braggadocio. What do you say to the man who was once the world’s highest paid athlete and most recognized face and name on earth (as an American, everywhere I went in Africa in the late 1970s people who could not speak much English would raise their arms and shout “Mohammed Ali!”)? I managed to mumble something about it being a supreme pleasure to finally meet “The Greatest”.
What I was not prepared for was his handshake. Ali took both my hands in his and I still remember, and often mention, that my hands (I’m 6 foot, 1 inch tall) were engulfed in what seemed to me to be two catcher’s mitts enclosing my hand. I immediately thought of what it would be like to be hit by such huge fists and said so. He laughed and slowly threw one of his famous mock punches.*
“If you are still the same person at 50 as you were at 20 then you have wasted 30 years of your life.” – Mohammed Ali
When you are “The Greatest”, so you shall ever remain.
* In Philadelphia I belonged to the same club as Joe Frazier and his hands were similarly sized. Plus, Frazier was not that tall but his shoulders extended far beyond my own when we would stand face to face. He was built like a moving , giant cinder block.
The Senators, listed below, complained Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ veterans benefits bill was too expensive. And they were upset that Majority Leader Harry Reid prevented a vote on a GOP amendment cutting the bill and adding sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program.
No doubt these same, mostly old, rich, white men will be wanting to send U.S. ground forces (a slick, cosmetic way of saying our young gals & guys) back to Iraq as soon as yesterday to try and save the unsavable: the corrupt, intransigent regime of Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki, the country’s Prime Minister. Oh… and yes, he is also acting Interior Minister, acting Defense Minister, acting National Security Minister and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party.
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
– from Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 24 November 1808 – 29 September 1890 and usually translated into English as, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Senators Who Voted Against Veteran’s Benefits This Past February
Apologies for the puns but they are springing up everywhere. NY Daily News in their current headline (they must have been hoarding it) reads: Fat Chance Now, Chris. Assuming Gov. Christie of New Jersey is telling the truth about not knowing his staff and a NY/NJ Port Authority appointee (and a best friend) purposefully closed lanes of eastward traffic on the George Washington Bridge, it’s going to be a bad time for the rising star of the GOP. The fact that it was traffic into New York City on, of all days, 9-11, will speak volumes to residents of the Big Apple.
If you at seated at the top, the culture surrounding you takes its cue from you. If that culture shows itself to be mean-spirited, petty and vindictive … well… you get the idea. Further, if it is shown that the woman who died, because the emergency services could not get through, might have survived, it begins to sound like the kind of (justified) litigation that could drag on until the next presidential primaries.
I suppose many far-right Republicans are silently cheering more than the Dems as Gov. Christie is not exactly a darling of the most conservative wing. People love it when meteors plunk down as meteorites.
In the event you haven’t the slightest clue as to what this blog is about: the allegation is that senior staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie closed three of four east-bound lanes of the country’s most heavily used bridge — for four days in September 2013 — as retaliation for Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, not endorsing Republican Christie in the governor’s re-election race – a contest where he was ahead in the polls by about 25%. The George Washington Bridge crosses the Hudson River connecting Fort Lee, NJ (and points west and south) to the northern section of New York City (and points east and north.) ALL traffic hugging the east coast of the United States crosses that single toll bridge. Delays during the four-day lane closures were as long as 4 hours.
Two damning emails have been unearthed by digging Democrats. One is: Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee (from Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs.) “Got it,” was the reply from David Wildstein, the Port Authority’s highest-ranking political appointee. Another, from Wildstein, regarding school buses stuck in bridge traffic: they are the children of Buono voters (Barbara Buono was Christie’s Democratic opponent for governor.)
Aside from the $60,000 reported as the cost for conducting the lane closures, there must be hundred’s of thousands of more dollars involved. How much overtime had to be paid out to freight drivers heading to New England? How many delayed shipments delayed yet other shipments? How much gasoline & diesel was consumed by stuck traffic? (320,00 cars per day, both ways on both decks. There are 4 lanes each way on the upper deck and another 6 lanes on the lower deck. I assume, from the photographs, the closures were on the upper deck, but have not been able to find out if this is correct.)
There is always a chain of consequences in such ill-advised stupidity. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t give a damn.
Other headline suggestions around the country were:
Bridge Set Me Up / Bridge To Nowhere / Payback’s a Bridge / Bridge Troll / A Bridge Too Far
We lost one of the planets most entertaining writers yesterday. Simon Hoggart (26 May 1946 − 5 January 2014), Parliamentary sketch writer for The Guardian Newspaper and wine columnist for The Spectator. He might well have become a tennis star but for serious injuries that led him to consider journalism. Tennis’ loss was the written word’s gain (and broadcasting’s, on both sides of the Pond, as well.) Always writing, he published about twenty books, the last two after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2010.
Hoggart’s insights and witticisms are legion. Herewith, a few:
Watching John Major run the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands make balloon animals.
I’m just back from a week in France. Naturally I took a case of non-French wine over on the ferry so as to have something decent to drink. The French are terrifically complacent about their wine, believing that the worst they produce is better than the best from anywhere else. They are wrong, and there are few sights more depressing than the parade of tired, ill-kept, dreary bottles on the shelves of French supermarkets. The humblest British high street off- licence has wines from a dozen countries, and frequently twice that; in France it is hard to find wine from outside the region, never mind abroad. It may cost i1 or so per bottle less, but that is no compensation for Chablis like acidulated chalk dust, or clarets which have finesse and backbone but no discernible taste. I know many older drinkers like only French wines, but this is force of habit; just as men over 50 tend to prefer stockings to tights, it’s a matter of how you started. — 19 April 1996, Diary.
I loved his testimony (before Parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee) in 2009 about the bleaching effects of politicians’ jargon when they seek to white-wash political acts. He began the hearings by re-stating one of Churchill’s war-time phrases as if it were re-written by a modern government wonk, turning “We will fight on the beaches” into “an ongoing programme of hostile engagement in littoral sectors.”
Gotta love it! He and his writing will be much missed.
The 50th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech has arrived (and the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) and commentators are tripping over themselves lauding the accomplishments springing from the speech, confusing ‘black faces in high places’ with economic progress of the poorest elements of society.
Conflating improvements in segregation/integration with progress in class mobility is not a mistake Rev. Dr. King would have made and neither should we.
This speech, incidentally, is consistently rated by scholars of American history as the country’s most significant 20th century political speech. Once he got talking King deviated from the original prepared speech. Many of his most eloquent passages were extemporaneous injections from prior speeches as comparison of the filmed speech to his original, printed version reveals. This is especially true toward what was supposed to be the end of the speech when the singer Mahalia Jackson blurted out, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.” After a few sentences and Mahalia’s repeated exhortation King moved his prepared lines aside. His training as a black minister came to the fore and the rest, as they say, is history. But, as all history, it is one where black and white Americans see and hear different ideas in the same narrative with identical words.
FBI assistant director William Sullivan, after the speech, noted “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”
I rode my motorcycle from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. to the 25th anniversary celebrations of the March. En route I joined a column of black bikers without knowing who they were, it was just company and a cushion of motor safety on the massively trafficked interstate. When we neared New York Avenue the column got off and, as I was going to the anniversary event, so did I. We all filed into the Mall area and parked. My companions were a biker club from Staten Island, NY. The president had been to the original March in 1963 and was returning with his club members for the 25th. Very nice.
City of London Tracked Mobiles/Cells Via Wi-Fi Trash Bins
How can the public stay ahead of Big Brother when there are so many ways to keep tabs on citizenry? In what has to rank as one of the most creative methods, the City of London has been able to track Wi-Fi enabled devices that pass within proximity of 12 of the 100 “bomb-proof” recycle bins installed just before the 2012 Olympics. One might have guessed these bins were capable of more sophisticated uses as they sport internet-enabled displays. The 12 sleuth bins were “developed by… “Presence Aware” which markets the technology as providing ‘a cookie for the real world.’” Once again commerce and the security state intersect.
Quartz first broke this story and here, four hours ago, recounted its supposed withdrawal, complete with maps.
“Listening is hard because the more you listen the more unsettling the world becomes”
4 Episodes
15 minutes each
First broadcast: Tuesday 09 July 2013
Tim Harford (the Financial Times‘ ‘Undercover Economist’ and presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less) has a new live-recorded, mini-series in Pop-Up Ideas, 15 minute programs exploring how prominent thinkers use “key ideas in anthropology and the social sciences to tell fascinating stories about how we – and the world – work.”
Program 1:New Yorker ‘Staff Writer’ Malcolm Gladwell describes how the U.S. war in Vietnam might have gone differently had the military listened to one of its own researchers, Konrad Kellen (family birth name Katzenellenbogen.) Kellen’s job was to debrief captured Vietcong guerrillas and describe their mind-set vis-à-vis the war. (Kellen’s life story is fabulous and fascinating.)
In one such debriefing he asked the captured senior officer if the officer believed the North Vietnamese could win the war. “No,” was the reply. Minutes later he asked if the Americans, then, would win the war? “No.”
This was interpreted by top U.S. Army brass as the answers of a demoralized enemy. Kellen, however, believed the answers were the responses of someone who did not think in terms of winning or losing at all — an entirely different view and one much more threatening to any eventual U.S. and South Vietnamese victory.
Listen to Gladwell’s interview here starting about minute time stamp 2:20.
The other programs (from the BBC Radio 4 website):
Program 2: One of the world’s most influential counter-insurgency experts, David Killcullen, whose ideas were described by the Washington Post as ‘revolutionizing military thinking throughout the West’, talks about how future instability will emanate from rapidly-growing coastal megacities.
Program 3: The financial journalist Gillian Tett describes how her background in anthropology led her to predict the financial crisis in 2008.
Program 4: Tim Harford explores the concept of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ – a term coined by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin in a hugely influential 1968 essay.
First Formal Public Remarks by the Pakistani Girl Shot by the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai gave a speech to the United Nations Youth Assembly yesterday morning. I would like to think of it as her western ‘coming out’ talk — hoping we will hear more from her in the future. (Although she is not a neophyte when it comes to presenting her views: she had a blog hosted by BBC Urdu when she was 11 years old, hand-writing her entries that were then transcribed and uploaded by a reporter.)
You may remember that she is the little Pakistani Pashtun girl shot (along with her friends) in the head and neck October 9, 2012 by the Taliban for saying that girls should have the right to go to school. As she stabilized, in critical condition, she was airlifted to England for rehab.
She is now 16 years old!
You can skip to time stamp 3:45 to get by the Introductions and Thank You comments.
A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees at Guantánamo. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure. — The Guardian Newspaper
What are the alternatives for keeping the prisoners (100 hunger-strikers with 40 being force fed) alive? I do not know.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler has ruled that the court cannot make a ruling on whether the detainees can be force-fed by the military, adding “The President of the United States, as Commander-in-Chief, has authority – and power – to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”
If you would like to read reporter Ben Ferguson’s eye-witness account of the making of the video, click here.
NOTE: This video is not for the faint of heart (nor, as you will see, was the procedure for Mos Def, a Muslim, born Dante Smith in Brooklyn, N.Y.)
