When Acorn came under attack by the Right, I underestimated the depth and seriousness of the assault. The videos produced by young, right-wing zealots conveyed the impression (to some audiences) that ACORN was an edgy organization with a fraudulent social agenda whose employees stood ready to assist underworld-types how best to game the system. In truth, ACORN was edgy and hard-charging and and populist.
At the time the videos surfaced, I thought ACORN might get in a mild bit of trouble, but that it would matter little. ACORN, as I thought of it, was an over-the-hill organization with a stale agenda. I may have been right in some respects--that ACORN was tired (and undernourished)--but it turned out that the organization was indeed in deep trouble. And I entirely ignored the possibility that if a group working at the grassroots for affordable housing and a living wage, and against predatory lending, was erased, neither justice nor a movement that believed in justice would be well-served.
Now ACORN is gone. It took less than a year from the time the organization came under fire until it went under. And now, Planned Parenthood is under a similar attack.
When it happened to ACORN, the right did not know it could destroy a center/left organization. It took awhile for most right-wing organizations to recognize the opportunity that was presenting itself. That's not the case this time. The Right knows what is possible. The Right is mobilized. The Right has learned lessons about how to pursue and amplify the attack. The Right knew another attack was coming.
Of course, Planned Parenthood isn't ACORN. Planned Parenthood is a bigger organization with a better foundation, a larger constituency, more resources and more access to resources. All to the good, because Planned Parenthood may be facing a fight for survival here. And if there's still a Left out there, it better show up for this fight.
Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Most Dangerous Man in America
How do we go from individual acts of courage to a mass movement for peace and justice?
In 1971, when the first of the Johnson administration's major escalations of the war in Vietnam was already a decade old, the New York Times began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers, a Rand Corporation study of the history of U.S. military and political involvement in Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg, a high-ranking strategist at Rand, working under a contract with the Pentagon, copied and leaked the top secret report to the Times, the Washington Post, 17 other newspapers and several members of Congress.
The story of Ellsberg's evolution from elite war strategist to anti-war activist is told in The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a documentary that premiered Friday night in D.C. and several other cities. Former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who moderated a question and answer session after the showing, was also featured in the film for his role in inserting the whole of the Pentagon Papers into the official records of a Senate sub-committee he chaired. The Q and A, featuring Ellsberg, himself, and filmmaker Rick Goldsmith, highlighted a few key issues connected to the absence of a contemporary anti-war movement and apparent obstacles to movement-building; but passing through a sustained challenge to one's courage and integrity, as Ellsberg did on his journey to leaking the documents (and Gravel did, as well, in reading portions during a formal session of his sub-committee) does not automatically qualify one to speculate about how to build a movement.
Perhaps, it is uncharitable of me to carp about Ellsberg and Gravel, who deserve virtually any applause they get for their individual acts of moral courage and for their lifetime commitment to peace and justice, as well. But I have a churlish streak, so I will plunge ahead with the point that both Ellsberg and Gravel (and "The Most Dangerous Man...) seem essentially unaware that they were standing on the shoulders of a movement when they shared the secret papers with an apparently astounded public. Yes, the movie does acknowledge a certain measure of movement activity, of clashes between demonstrators and police, and of leadership from a select few politicians, but the nod is only cursory; the film goes so far as to claim that with his actions Ellsberg set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.
This strikes me as very bad and unhelpful history. By 1969, the year when Ellsberg made the decision to begin copying the Pentagon Papers, the anti-war movement had already made the war a political hot potato. By that time, the first of thousands of campus teach-ins against the war (at the University of Michigan) was already five years past. Also earlier, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City ("A Time to Break Silence") first linked the civil rights struggle to the war in Vietnam.
From that point forward King moved beyond his brief as a leader of the civil rights movement to become a leader of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. A year later, in a tragic moment that injected a fresh moral energy to both movements, but also added to a growing cultural and social division in the country, King was assassinated.
It was also the movement (and therefore a collective expression of a myriad of moments of individual courage) that forced President Johnson to give up the presidency at the end of his first full term in 1968. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding thirteen. Ten days after Kent State, the police in Jackson, Miss. fired on a crowd of students at Jackson State University. Two students were killed, another 15 were wounded. Though the series of demonstrations at Jackson State began as a civil rights protest incited by an incident in which a white motorist injured a black pedestrian, there was also a strong anti-war message infused in the demonstrations organized by students at the historically black university.
All of this and much more was part of the zeitgeist that inspired, shaped and affirmed Ellsberg and Gravel and others in their individual acts of conscience. And all this matters because in this history lie the lessons we must learn if a movement for peace and economic and environmental justice is to develop early in the 21st Century. The first person to speak during the Q&A following the film on Friday night was an older guy who spoke about his own despair over the absence of a viable popular movement in the U.S. Neither Ellsberg nor Gravel could speak to the question of how a movement develops though they both asserted that there is always hope; hope that is kindled in individual acts of resistance. This is reasonable and true, but we cannot mistake the moment in time when an otherwise collaborationist media publishes something like the Pentagon Papers as a pivotal moment in the development of a movement.
That moment comes when a mature movement has already forced people in positions of influence who have remained studiously neutral or have been complicit, as Ellsberg himself was, to confront their own consciences. In such a moment, some, like the editors at the New York Times and Washington Post, may finally make the decision to do the right thing and publish the truth, or a reasonable facsimile. The crowd at the premiere seemed to believe that the publication of the Pentagon Papers was an act of journalistic courage, but the comments of the Washington editor of the Times suggest something else. Once we had the documents in our possession, he said, we had to publish. If we had not, and the public had ever found out what we knew, it would have ruined the newspaper.
It is worth noting here, in the autumn of the newspaper publishing business, that journalists need not rue the fate of our great newspapers who have failed to relentlessly investigate and publish the truth about our war frauds in Iraq and Afghanistan. The end of the major urban dailies is at hand, in any case. By and large, the public has lost interest in their fate. So it should also be obvious that no strategy for building a movement can depend, in any part, on newspaper or, even, television news coverage. Audiences are too fragmented and have too many media choices for any message from any source to fall on millions at once with the same impact.
The good news here is not that I have any better idea how to build a movement than do Dan Ellsberg or Mike Gravel. The good news is that elements of that movement already exist. They exist in affinity groups and collectives focused on individual issues. Elements of the next movement exist in neighborhood collaborations aimed at improving local schools or reclaiming abandoned housing. Elements exist even here, in Washington, where some electeds, like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich keep fighting the good fight. There are also organizations fighting for economic and environmental justice on a global scale. Though labor unions are only a pale shadow of what they once were, some unions continue to organize low-wage workers and strategize ways to connect to a larger movement.
None of this is enough. What is missing here is a critical mass of young people who have not yet fully compromised with prevailing attitudes or who are not yet resigned to a comfortable cynicism. I do not know how to persuade people 30 or 40 years younger than me that their future, that the future of the world they will grow into is at risk; that to be 50- or 60-something in 2040 will be a lot more unpleasant than being that age now. I cannot even say persuasively how I know this to be true (though I will keep working on my argument that it is so). Nor can I say what exactly is required of me now. But I will say that I won't stop thinking or writing about these questions until I have better answers. And when I get to that happy point, I'll keep working on the same questions, anyway, because nothing less is required of each of us.
In 1971, when the first of the Johnson administration's major escalations of the war in Vietnam was already a decade old, the New York Times began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers, a Rand Corporation study of the history of U.S. military and political involvement in Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg, a high-ranking strategist at Rand, working under a contract with the Pentagon, copied and leaked the top secret report to the Times, the Washington Post, 17 other newspapers and several members of Congress.
The story of Ellsberg's evolution from elite war strategist to anti-war activist is told in The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a documentary that premiered Friday night in D.C. and several other cities. Former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who moderated a question and answer session after the showing, was also featured in the film for his role in inserting the whole of the Pentagon Papers into the official records of a Senate sub-committee he chaired. The Q and A, featuring Ellsberg, himself, and filmmaker Rick Goldsmith, highlighted a few key issues connected to the absence of a contemporary anti-war movement and apparent obstacles to movement-building; but passing through a sustained challenge to one's courage and integrity, as Ellsberg did on his journey to leaking the documents (and Gravel did, as well, in reading portions during a formal session of his sub-committee) does not automatically qualify one to speculate about how to build a movement.
Perhaps, it is uncharitable of me to carp about Ellsberg and Gravel, who deserve virtually any applause they get for their individual acts of moral courage and for their lifetime commitment to peace and justice, as well. But I have a churlish streak, so I will plunge ahead with the point that both Ellsberg and Gravel (and "The Most Dangerous Man...) seem essentially unaware that they were standing on the shoulders of a movement when they shared the secret papers with an apparently astounded public. Yes, the movie does acknowledge a certain measure of movement activity, of clashes between demonstrators and police, and of leadership from a select few politicians, but the nod is only cursory; the film goes so far as to claim that with his actions Ellsberg set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.
This strikes me as very bad and unhelpful history. By 1969, the year when Ellsberg made the decision to begin copying the Pentagon Papers, the anti-war movement had already made the war a political hot potato. By that time, the first of thousands of campus teach-ins against the war (at the University of Michigan) was already five years past. Also earlier, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City ("A Time to Break Silence") first linked the civil rights struggle to the war in Vietnam.
Soon, if not already, King said, our troops "must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated must surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor."
From that point forward King moved beyond his brief as a leader of the civil rights movement to become a leader of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. A year later, in a tragic moment that injected a fresh moral energy to both movements, but also added to a growing cultural and social division in the country, King was assassinated.
It was also the movement (and therefore a collective expression of a myriad of moments of individual courage) that forced President Johnson to give up the presidency at the end of his first full term in 1968. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding thirteen. Ten days after Kent State, the police in Jackson, Miss. fired on a crowd of students at Jackson State University. Two students were killed, another 15 were wounded. Though the series of demonstrations at Jackson State began as a civil rights protest incited by an incident in which a white motorist injured a black pedestrian, there was also a strong anti-war message infused in the demonstrations organized by students at the historically black university.
All of this and much more was part of the zeitgeist that inspired, shaped and affirmed Ellsberg and Gravel and others in their individual acts of conscience. And all this matters because in this history lie the lessons we must learn if a movement for peace and economic and environmental justice is to develop early in the 21st Century. The first person to speak during the Q&A following the film on Friday night was an older guy who spoke about his own despair over the absence of a viable popular movement in the U.S. Neither Ellsberg nor Gravel could speak to the question of how a movement develops though they both asserted that there is always hope; hope that is kindled in individual acts of resistance. This is reasonable and true, but we cannot mistake the moment in time when an otherwise collaborationist media publishes something like the Pentagon Papers as a pivotal moment in the development of a movement.
That moment comes when a mature movement has already forced people in positions of influence who have remained studiously neutral or have been complicit, as Ellsberg himself was, to confront their own consciences. In such a moment, some, like the editors at the New York Times and Washington Post, may finally make the decision to do the right thing and publish the truth, or a reasonable facsimile. The crowd at the premiere seemed to believe that the publication of the Pentagon Papers was an act of journalistic courage, but the comments of the Washington editor of the Times suggest something else. Once we had the documents in our possession, he said, we had to publish. If we had not, and the public had ever found out what we knew, it would have ruined the newspaper.
It is worth noting here, in the autumn of the newspaper publishing business, that journalists need not rue the fate of our great newspapers who have failed to relentlessly investigate and publish the truth about our war frauds in Iraq and Afghanistan. The end of the major urban dailies is at hand, in any case. By and large, the public has lost interest in their fate. So it should also be obvious that no strategy for building a movement can depend, in any part, on newspaper or, even, television news coverage. Audiences are too fragmented and have too many media choices for any message from any source to fall on millions at once with the same impact.
The good news here is not that I have any better idea how to build a movement than do Dan Ellsberg or Mike Gravel. The good news is that elements of that movement already exist. They exist in affinity groups and collectives focused on individual issues. Elements of the next movement exist in neighborhood collaborations aimed at improving local schools or reclaiming abandoned housing. Elements exist even here, in Washington, where some electeds, like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich keep fighting the good fight. There are also organizations fighting for economic and environmental justice on a global scale. Though labor unions are only a pale shadow of what they once were, some unions continue to organize low-wage workers and strategize ways to connect to a larger movement.
None of this is enough. What is missing here is a critical mass of young people who have not yet fully compromised with prevailing attitudes or who are not yet resigned to a comfortable cynicism. I do not know how to persuade people 30 or 40 years younger than me that their future, that the future of the world they will grow into is at risk; that to be 50- or 60-something in 2040 will be a lot more unpleasant than being that age now. I cannot even say persuasively how I know this to be true (though I will keep working on my argument that it is so). Nor can I say what exactly is required of me now. But I will say that I won't stop thinking or writing about these questions until I have better answers. And when I get to that happy point, I'll keep working on the same questions, anyway, because nothing less is required of each of us.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Crime, Punishment and Race
What I Learned at AFSC, Part I
From 1984, or thereabouts, to the end of the decade, I worked for the estimable American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Michigan. My associates there, Marc Mauer, Richard Cleaver and Penny Ryder, among others, were wonderful colleagues and good at their jobs. Fiercely committed to peace and justice, they brought passion and expertise to their program areas, in Richard's case, the Middle East and, later, gay liberation, in Marc's and Penny's, the criminal justice system.
Marc moved on shortly after I started working at AFSC. After a few years at The Sentencing Project, he became that group's executive director. Recently, his organization released a new study, No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America. The report confirms what previous Sentencing Project studies (and AFSC's work in Michigan and elsewhere) have always shown:
The American system of criminal justice relentlessly and overwhelmingly discriminates, victimizing people of color and the poor, and does so regardless of the severity of the crime and the frequency with which they commit crimes. "The dramatic growth in life sentences is not primarily a result of higher crime rates, but of policy changes that have imposed harsher punishments and restricted parole consideration," the report says.
The Sentencing Project has also extensively studied the way discriminatory sentencing in drug cases, harsh treatment of juveniles, and inadequate drug treatment, education and training programs in prisons have contributed to recidivism, to racial disparities in imprisonment and to the country's overall rate of imprisonment. These factors and others have made the US easily the world's leader in imprisoning its own people. The US rate is five times that of England and Wales, almost six times that of Canada and more than nine times that of Germany (see more imprisonment data at this site, maintained by King's College, London).
Though I continue to follow their work, I am not in regular contact with Marc or Penny, but what I first learned from them underlies the conclusions I've reached about the criminal justice system since:
Our criminal justice system clearly doesn't work. It doesn't makes us appreciably safer. It doesn't rehabilitate. It wrongfully investigates, detains, arrests, tries, convicts and punishes as a matter of routine. It destroys families and devastates communities. It is one of the principle ways in which our society restrains, disempowers and disposes of people and groups regarded as irrelevant to societal goals.
These outcomes can be statistically validated. They are predictable and we pay extraordinary amounts to obtain them (In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, author Joel Dyer calculated the combined cost in 1999 of "law enforcement, corrections and courts at the federal, state and local level" would reach about half the total of the US military budget--and rise at a faster rate thereafter). Yet we continue to pay for them. They must therefore be the results we seek.
Philosopher Jeffrey Reiman has written quite extensively about concluding that the results we predictably get must be the results we want. Reiman is the author of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, a book now in its 8th edition and one that I have bought repeatedly as new editions come out. In an introduction to the book that has survived through several editions, Reiman argues that the criminal justice
(You can find out more about Reiman's ideas here.
Of course, the racism and discriminatory treatment that shape the growth and management of the criminal justice system don't originate with the system, though its operations and results reinforce racism. The operation of the CJ system simply reflects what we as a society believe and what we care about most. The racism that plagues criminal justice originates with us. So far, we have not shown a great deal of concern about the talent the system wastes, the lives it throws away. We don't even notice.
That, by the way, is what Henry Louis Gates was reacting to when he could not calm himself during a confrontation with police at his Cambridge home. Gates is a scholar and writer of considerable achievement. And an African American. What, he must have been asking himself, does a black man have to do to be treated with the respect he has earned? On the other hand, Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, the arresting officer in the incident, is reported to be an instructor about race issues for the department. Assuming that he has earned that responsibility and thought deeply himself about how a white officer should handle himself in such incidents, it seems likely that he still had difficulty managing his own feelings about a confrontation that went south.
There they are: Gates, aghast, subject to what may have been routine police procedure in a country in which "routine" frequently means danger to blacks. Crowley, astonished, accused of being a symbol and believing that his sympathetic understanding of the racial subtext ought to compel obedience. Is it any wonder that we desperately need the national conversation about race that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have so recently and frequently called for?
But even at AFSC conversations about race were complicated and emotional. The bedrock Quaker belief that there is that of god in every human being had deep appeal to the non-Quaker and, sometimes, secular staff. AFSC had also made massive efforts to hire people of color into meaningful programmatic and leadership roles. But the organization and the liberal Quaker community whose beliefs guided the work were predominantly white. Efforts to adapt Affirmative Action principles in hiring and to program choices and strategy did not always blend easily with the founding goals of the organization (created to provide a way for nonviolent Quaker youth to perform alternative service during World War I) or with the concerns of its mostly Quaker contributors. Regardless, I never saw so many different people commit so much time to discussing the ways in which attitudes about race consciously and unconsciously affected organizational culture and resource management.
For much of the time I was at AFSC I was also a member of the Ann Arbor City Council. My concerns in both roles overlapped considerably. At one point, I was able to get the organization to fund summer staff to work with black youth on Ann Arbor's south side. The city itself picked up the funding in some form a year later, but neither AFSC or the city were willing to spend enough to establish a successful program.
For that I hold myself principally responsible. I was unable, as a council member, to persuade my council colleagues and, as the director of AFSC's Michigan office, to persuade regional officials, that organizing and direct service work with minority youth ought to be a higher priority. We all knew getting good work done with black kids in poor neighborhoods would take more money and more commitment than we had managed to that point, but we were also unwilling, as a group, to believe that if we didn't act, or if we focused our energy and resources elsewhere, we would be ignoring the literal waste of individual lives. Race and our underlying attitudes about race (i.e., racism), had a role in that. I couldn't persuade others to do more because, at least in part, I couldn't see what was at stake.
Of course, the purpose, conduct, effectiveness and implications of the work were a matter of dispute at the time. And, because these conversations are so difficult, they remain contested. In fact, an earlier post of mine, memorializing Stella Taylor, an African American woman I knew at the time, provoked a heated response from a person who saw the work from a different perspective (you can see the post and comment here). It seems to me that a conversation about race that doesn't bring us to the conclusion that it is getting the little things right--like supporting daycare and pre-K everywhere, fixing every public school, funding summer employment programs in even the smallest towns--is a conversation that hasn't gone far enough.
From 1984, or thereabouts, to the end of the decade, I worked for the estimable American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Michigan. My associates there, Marc Mauer, Richard Cleaver and Penny Ryder, among others, were wonderful colleagues and good at their jobs. Fiercely committed to peace and justice, they brought passion and expertise to their program areas, in Richard's case, the Middle East and, later, gay liberation, in Marc's and Penny's, the criminal justice system.
Marc moved on shortly after I started working at AFSC. After a few years at The Sentencing Project, he became that group's executive director. Recently, his organization released a new study, No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America. The report confirms what previous Sentencing Project studies (and AFSC's work in Michigan and elsewhere) have always shown:
The American system of criminal justice relentlessly and overwhelmingly discriminates, victimizing people of color and the poor, and does so regardless of the severity of the crime and the frequency with which they commit crimes. "The dramatic growth in life sentences is not primarily a result of higher crime rates, but of policy changes that have imposed harsher punishments and restricted parole consideration," the report says.
The Sentencing Project has also extensively studied the way discriminatory sentencing in drug cases, harsh treatment of juveniles, and inadequate drug treatment, education and training programs in prisons have contributed to recidivism, to racial disparities in imprisonment and to the country's overall rate of imprisonment. These factors and others have made the US easily the world's leader in imprisoning its own people. The US rate is five times that of England and Wales, almost six times that of Canada and more than nine times that of Germany (see more imprisonment data at this site, maintained by King's College, London).
Though I continue to follow their work, I am not in regular contact with Marc or Penny, but what I first learned from them underlies the conclusions I've reached about the criminal justice system since:
Our criminal justice system clearly doesn't work. It doesn't makes us appreciably safer. It doesn't rehabilitate. It wrongfully investigates, detains, arrests, tries, convicts and punishes as a matter of routine. It destroys families and devastates communities. It is one of the principle ways in which our society restrains, disempowers and disposes of people and groups regarded as irrelevant to societal goals.
These outcomes can be statistically validated. They are predictable and we pay extraordinary amounts to obtain them (In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, author Joel Dyer calculated the combined cost in 1999 of "law enforcement, corrections and courts at the federal, state and local level" would reach about half the total of the US military budget--and rise at a faster rate thereafter). Yet we continue to pay for them. They must therefore be the results we seek.
Philosopher Jeffrey Reiman has written quite extensively about concluding that the results we predictably get must be the results we want. Reiman is the author of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, a book now in its 8th edition and one that I have bought repeatedly as new editions come out. In an introduction to the book that has survived through several editions, Reiman argues that the criminal justice
"system survives the way it does because it maintains a particular image of crime: the image that it is a threat from the poor. Of course, for this image to be believable there must be a reality to back it up. The system must actually fight crime--or at least some crime--but only enough to keep it from getting out of hand and to keep the struggle against crime vividly and dramatically in the public's view, never enough to substantially reduce or eliminate crime.
"I call this outrageous way of looking at criminal justice policy the Pyrrhic defeat theory."
(You can find out more about Reiman's ideas here.
Of course, the racism and discriminatory treatment that shape the growth and management of the criminal justice system don't originate with the system, though its operations and results reinforce racism. The operation of the CJ system simply reflects what we as a society believe and what we care about most. The racism that plagues criminal justice originates with us. So far, we have not shown a great deal of concern about the talent the system wastes, the lives it throws away. We don't even notice.
That, by the way, is what Henry Louis Gates was reacting to when he could not calm himself during a confrontation with police at his Cambridge home. Gates is a scholar and writer of considerable achievement. And an African American. What, he must have been asking himself, does a black man have to do to be treated with the respect he has earned? On the other hand, Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, the arresting officer in the incident, is reported to be an instructor about race issues for the department. Assuming that he has earned that responsibility and thought deeply himself about how a white officer should handle himself in such incidents, it seems likely that he still had difficulty managing his own feelings about a confrontation that went south.
There they are: Gates, aghast, subject to what may have been routine police procedure in a country in which "routine" frequently means danger to blacks. Crowley, astonished, accused of being a symbol and believing that his sympathetic understanding of the racial subtext ought to compel obedience. Is it any wonder that we desperately need the national conversation about race that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have so recently and frequently called for?
But even at AFSC conversations about race were complicated and emotional. The bedrock Quaker belief that there is that of god in every human being had deep appeal to the non-Quaker and, sometimes, secular staff. AFSC had also made massive efforts to hire people of color into meaningful programmatic and leadership roles. But the organization and the liberal Quaker community whose beliefs guided the work were predominantly white. Efforts to adapt Affirmative Action principles in hiring and to program choices and strategy did not always blend easily with the founding goals of the organization (created to provide a way for nonviolent Quaker youth to perform alternative service during World War I) or with the concerns of its mostly Quaker contributors. Regardless, I never saw so many different people commit so much time to discussing the ways in which attitudes about race consciously and unconsciously affected organizational culture and resource management.
For much of the time I was at AFSC I was also a member of the Ann Arbor City Council. My concerns in both roles overlapped considerably. At one point, I was able to get the organization to fund summer staff to work with black youth on Ann Arbor's south side. The city itself picked up the funding in some form a year later, but neither AFSC or the city were willing to spend enough to establish a successful program.
For that I hold myself principally responsible. I was unable, as a council member, to persuade my council colleagues and, as the director of AFSC's Michigan office, to persuade regional officials, that organizing and direct service work with minority youth ought to be a higher priority. We all knew getting good work done with black kids in poor neighborhoods would take more money and more commitment than we had managed to that point, but we were also unwilling, as a group, to believe that if we didn't act, or if we focused our energy and resources elsewhere, we would be ignoring the literal waste of individual lives. Race and our underlying attitudes about race (i.e., racism), had a role in that. I couldn't persuade others to do more because, at least in part, I couldn't see what was at stake.
Of course, the purpose, conduct, effectiveness and implications of the work were a matter of dispute at the time. And, because these conversations are so difficult, they remain contested. In fact, an earlier post of mine, memorializing Stella Taylor, an African American woman I knew at the time, provoked a heated response from a person who saw the work from a different perspective (you can see the post and comment here). It seems to me that a conversation about race that doesn't bring us to the conclusion that it is getting the little things right--like supporting daycare and pre-K everywhere, fixing every public school, funding summer employment programs in even the smallest towns--is a conversation that hasn't gone far enough.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Gays in the Military
Same Old Arguments
I don't usually see a letter in the Washington Post that addresses in effective detail most of what I was trying to say in a letter that I'd sent. But this one in today's Post is a more than adequate answer to the question: Why didn't they publish my letter?
In fact, the letter written by Andre Sauvageot covers most of the ground my letter covered and is actually more succinct. Sauvageot's letter wasn't self-referential, either. Mine was.
But it's fine with me if the Post doesn't run my letters. Writing about good and bad generals and good and bad military personnel policy is a bizarre thing for me to be doing, anyway. First of all, I'm not a fan of militaries or military service. Obviously, there is a rationale for a defensive army and their is such a thing as heroic service. But I got over wanting to die for my country at the age of eighteen, or so, and have refined my anti-war and anti-militarist perspective ever since.
In a world in which there is so much real need and in which possessing weapons almost inevitably leads to using weapons in acts of war, aggression and injustice, I'm inclined to believe that moving in a measured way toward a policy of national vulnerability is both patriotic and a way to find a good portion of the funds necessary to build a just world in the 21st Century.
I don't usually see a letter in the Washington Post that addresses in effective detail most of what I was trying to say in a letter that I'd sent. But this one in today's Post is a more than adequate answer to the question: Why didn't they publish my letter?
In fact, the letter written by Andre Sauvageot covers most of the ground my letter covered and is actually more succinct. Sauvageot's letter wasn't self-referential, either. Mine was.
But it's fine with me if the Post doesn't run my letters. Writing about good and bad generals and good and bad military personnel policy is a bizarre thing for me to be doing, anyway. First of all, I'm not a fan of militaries or military service. Obviously, there is a rationale for a defensive army and their is such a thing as heroic service. But I got over wanting to die for my country at the age of eighteen, or so, and have refined my anti-war and anti-militarist perspective ever since.
In a world in which there is so much real need and in which possessing weapons almost inevitably leads to using weapons in acts of war, aggression and injustice, I'm inclined to believe that moving in a measured way toward a policy of national vulnerability is both patriotic and a way to find a good portion of the funds necessary to build a just world in the 21st Century.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Marge Piercy and Zionism
Corrupting Power
Rereading Marge Piercy's He, She and It about a year ago, I was moved to writing her a mash note. Piercy’s work has always engaged me, but for the last few years, focusing on her poetry, I have neglected revisiting her novels.
Piercy is sometimes lyrical, but more often her poetry is a rare combination of grit, mystery and authenticity. This seems a result of integrity more than anything else, a loyalty to feeling, a passion for justice and a dislaying of both profoundity and desire. Piercy writes as I wish to write.
I am near certain that I will never be quite so reliably present, frank and loving as Piercy seems to me. But sometimes, while reading her, it feels almost sufficient to me that I can recognize those qualities in someone else.
In Piercy’s best stuff—in the poem “Joy Road and Livernois,” in her most feminist poetry, in which she celebrates fertility and menopause, self-knowledge and passionate commitment, in her Jewishness, which seems more than ethnicity, but other than pure faith, and in her novels, I find language that moves me as beauty sometimes moves me. But I am not seduced by it, I am awakened. This isn’t an experience of perfumes and curves and grace and artful drapery; this from Piercy is the reliable uplift I experience in the presence of my closest friends and of my real life partner. It is warmth and it is steel.
The paragraph in He, She and It that moved me to stop reading and start writing the original draft of this post is on page 113 of my Fawcett Crest paperback edition.
“From that moment on, Joseph loves Chava, but he is ashamed of his love. He is a golem of clay. How could any woman embrace him? He could not give her children. If he should touch her, he is terrified he would bruise her flesh that is as light as a petal to him. He would crush her as he crushed the narcissus he tried to pick on the bank of the Vlatava. He knows that the Maharal, whom he always longs to please, whom he cannot help but consider his father, would never forgive him. He cannot bear to imagine the anger of the Maharal if he should ever touch Chava. But Chava is the sun of his day, his rose of light. Whenever she is called out for a birth, he walks with her and he waits outside, all night if necessary, until the dawn renders the ghetto as safe as it ever is,”
This is not even my favorite paragraph on the page, let alone in the book. But it is the point where I finally felt I had to stop reading Piercy for a moment and write to or about her.
Though there are no politicians in her books, or none that come to mind, Piercy is always political. Her best characters, her leading women, mostly, are deeply political and heroic without any desire to be that way. Their values are earthy, global, relational and, sometimes against their individual will, profoundly empathic.
In one short passage, Piercy lays out a most succinct argument about the limitations of what we really know compared to what we think we know. On page 77, the aging Malkah speaks to her granddaughter Shira.
“The great whales—we had just about killed off the last of them before we began to translate their epic and lyric poetry. Were they people? Were the apes who learned to communicate in sign language intelligent beings? Was Hermes [their long-dead, but unforgotten cat] a real presence?” Is it too much of a stretch to note that this passage proposes that creating and understanding poetry is always a matter of someone’s, if not everyone’s, survival?
Piercy’s character Yod, a cyborg, possesses a dignity and integrity that makes him the clear equal of human beings; he makes the same essential claim on our respect and sympathy. His emergence into consciousness is at least as traumatic for him as the birth moment is for babies. Yod tells Shira that he was flooded in a single moment with more data than he could possibly absorb and process. It was the trauma of that moment, he speculates, that doomed earlier attempts to create a functioning cyborg, fatally overwhelming and overloading their nascent circuits.
It is Yod’s fate to struggle with the same basic challenges with which humans also struggle. He is ignored, exploited and lonely, and fated to wrestle with his own version of the human condition. Yod must teach himself or learn from others how to overcome his isolation, how to negotiate the conditions of his existence, how and who to love, how to judge when his moment of personal sacrifice arrives.
For me, reading Piercy is a great intellectual adventure, as exciting to me as Talmudic study is purported to be. Yod has an analogue in Piercy’s story, the “un-man,” the golem Joseph, created in early 17th Century Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew (the Maharal). One of the rabbi’s kabbalah students is a scientist, David Gans, who is also a colleague (as much as a Jew of the time could be) of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
Gans, Kepler and Brahe discuss Giordano Bruno, who had recently been burned at the stake by Roman Catholic inquisitors trying to force Bruno to recant his theories asserting that truth is relative to the position of the observer. “It’s a hazardous business imposing truth,” says Gans. “The Maharal says we can never arrive at truth if we fear discussion. We must attack falsehood, but only after we have given it leave to speak.”
The passage reminds me of Henry, an old friend of mine (from whom I am now estranged) who is locked in bitter struggle with the rabbi and congregation of a temple in Ann Arbor, Mich. Henry believes that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the existence of Israel as a Jewish theocratic state, is the major cause of conflict in the Middle East; the prime cause, even, of the devastating American attack on Iraq. It is a point that he has tried to make by presenting his personal account of the conditions of life for Palestinians living under occupation. But the rabbi of the temple whom he first approached, seeking only an opportunity to make a presentation, denied him. Henry’s response was to organize a silent vigil at the synagogue on Saturday mornings.
Nothing Henry wishes to say or do falls outside traditional Jewish notions of valid discussion. But it is clear that the rabbi who denied him does not share the values of the Maharal. Perhaps Henry’s claims are false, but “we must attack falsehood” after we have permitted its expression, not before.
Though she never mentions Palestine or Palestinians in He, She and It, Piercy’s book is full of implicit observations about the injustice that accompanied the creation and are part of the maintenance of the state of Israel in its current form.
“The Maharal abhors violence…he says no nation has a right to dominate or rule another. Each people has their own road, their own destiny to fulfill. The world is imperfect and requires repair so long as any people is under the rule of another (page 315).”
This belief of the Maharal reflects a traditional Jewish understanding of the obligation called tikkun olam, the obligation to heal the world. Less than one hundred pages later, Malkah, a 21st century computer whiz, reflects on the same subject.
“…my part was to read the poem by Mara Schleimann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption, a great repair, tikkun olam, gone amiss.”
It is a striking thing to imagine that the unjust use of Jewish power, which historically has been something Jews have wielded only against others within their own community, has become an ethnic and nationalist power used to expropriate and oppress non-Jews. But that is precisely Piercy’s message here.
Zionism in the 19th Century was just another minority political tendency in European Jewish communities, which seemed to sow and cultivate political theories with a frequency inversely proportionate to Jewish powerlessness in the larger universe. But in the 21st Century Zionism has become a false god, an idolatrous nationalist celebration that dooms the history, plagues the present and crushes the hopes of Palestinians, the people whose circumstances and fate Jews, above all others, should be lamenting.
:
Rereading Marge Piercy's He, She and It about a year ago, I was moved to writing her a mash note. Piercy’s work has always engaged me, but for the last few years, focusing on her poetry, I have neglected revisiting her novels.
Piercy is sometimes lyrical, but more often her poetry is a rare combination of grit, mystery and authenticity. This seems a result of integrity more than anything else, a loyalty to feeling, a passion for justice and a dislaying of both profoundity and desire. Piercy writes as I wish to write.
I am near certain that I will never be quite so reliably present, frank and loving as Piercy seems to me. But sometimes, while reading her, it feels almost sufficient to me that I can recognize those qualities in someone else.
In Piercy’s best stuff—in the poem “Joy Road and Livernois,” in her most feminist poetry, in which she celebrates fertility and menopause, self-knowledge and passionate commitment, in her Jewishness, which seems more than ethnicity, but other than pure faith, and in her novels, I find language that moves me as beauty sometimes moves me. But I am not seduced by it, I am awakened. This isn’t an experience of perfumes and curves and grace and artful drapery; this from Piercy is the reliable uplift I experience in the presence of my closest friends and of my real life partner. It is warmth and it is steel.
The paragraph in He, She and It that moved me to stop reading and start writing the original draft of this post is on page 113 of my Fawcett Crest paperback edition.
“From that moment on, Joseph loves Chava, but he is ashamed of his love. He is a golem of clay. How could any woman embrace him? He could not give her children. If he should touch her, he is terrified he would bruise her flesh that is as light as a petal to him. He would crush her as he crushed the narcissus he tried to pick on the bank of the Vlatava. He knows that the Maharal, whom he always longs to please, whom he cannot help but consider his father, would never forgive him. He cannot bear to imagine the anger of the Maharal if he should ever touch Chava. But Chava is the sun of his day, his rose of light. Whenever she is called out for a birth, he walks with her and he waits outside, all night if necessary, until the dawn renders the ghetto as safe as it ever is,”
This is not even my favorite paragraph on the page, let alone in the book. But it is the point where I finally felt I had to stop reading Piercy for a moment and write to or about her.
Though there are no politicians in her books, or none that come to mind, Piercy is always political. Her best characters, her leading women, mostly, are deeply political and heroic without any desire to be that way. Their values are earthy, global, relational and, sometimes against their individual will, profoundly empathic.
In one short passage, Piercy lays out a most succinct argument about the limitations of what we really know compared to what we think we know. On page 77, the aging Malkah speaks to her granddaughter Shira.
“The great whales—we had just about killed off the last of them before we began to translate their epic and lyric poetry. Were they people? Were the apes who learned to communicate in sign language intelligent beings? Was Hermes [their long-dead, but unforgotten cat] a real presence?” Is it too much of a stretch to note that this passage proposes that creating and understanding poetry is always a matter of someone’s, if not everyone’s, survival?
Piercy’s character Yod, a cyborg, possesses a dignity and integrity that makes him the clear equal of human beings; he makes the same essential claim on our respect and sympathy. His emergence into consciousness is at least as traumatic for him as the birth moment is for babies. Yod tells Shira that he was flooded in a single moment with more data than he could possibly absorb and process. It was the trauma of that moment, he speculates, that doomed earlier attempts to create a functioning cyborg, fatally overwhelming and overloading their nascent circuits.
It is Yod’s fate to struggle with the same basic challenges with which humans also struggle. He is ignored, exploited and lonely, and fated to wrestle with his own version of the human condition. Yod must teach himself or learn from others how to overcome his isolation, how to negotiate the conditions of his existence, how and who to love, how to judge when his moment of personal sacrifice arrives.
For me, reading Piercy is a great intellectual adventure, as exciting to me as Talmudic study is purported to be. Yod has an analogue in Piercy’s story, the “un-man,” the golem Joseph, created in early 17th Century Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew (the Maharal). One of the rabbi’s kabbalah students is a scientist, David Gans, who is also a colleague (as much as a Jew of the time could be) of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
Gans, Kepler and Brahe discuss Giordano Bruno, who had recently been burned at the stake by Roman Catholic inquisitors trying to force Bruno to recant his theories asserting that truth is relative to the position of the observer. “It’s a hazardous business imposing truth,” says Gans. “The Maharal says we can never arrive at truth if we fear discussion. We must attack falsehood, but only after we have given it leave to speak.”
The passage reminds me of Henry, an old friend of mine (from whom I am now estranged) who is locked in bitter struggle with the rabbi and congregation of a temple in Ann Arbor, Mich. Henry believes that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the existence of Israel as a Jewish theocratic state, is the major cause of conflict in the Middle East; the prime cause, even, of the devastating American attack on Iraq. It is a point that he has tried to make by presenting his personal account of the conditions of life for Palestinians living under occupation. But the rabbi of the temple whom he first approached, seeking only an opportunity to make a presentation, denied him. Henry’s response was to organize a silent vigil at the synagogue on Saturday mornings.
Nothing Henry wishes to say or do falls outside traditional Jewish notions of valid discussion. But it is clear that the rabbi who denied him does not share the values of the Maharal. Perhaps Henry’s claims are false, but “we must attack falsehood” after we have permitted its expression, not before.
Though she never mentions Palestine or Palestinians in He, She and It, Piercy’s book is full of implicit observations about the injustice that accompanied the creation and are part of the maintenance of the state of Israel in its current form.
“The Maharal abhors violence…he says no nation has a right to dominate or rule another. Each people has their own road, their own destiny to fulfill. The world is imperfect and requires repair so long as any people is under the rule of another (page 315).”
This belief of the Maharal reflects a traditional Jewish understanding of the obligation called tikkun olam, the obligation to heal the world. Less than one hundred pages later, Malkah, a 21st century computer whiz, reflects on the same subject.
“…my part was to read the poem by Mara Schleimann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption, a great repair, tikkun olam, gone amiss.”
It is a striking thing to imagine that the unjust use of Jewish power, which historically has been something Jews have wielded only against others within their own community, has become an ethnic and nationalist power used to expropriate and oppress non-Jews. But that is precisely Piercy’s message here.
Zionism in the 19th Century was just another minority political tendency in European Jewish communities, which seemed to sow and cultivate political theories with a frequency inversely proportionate to Jewish powerlessness in the larger universe. But in the 21st Century Zionism has become a false god, an idolatrous nationalist celebration that dooms the history, plagues the present and crushes the hopes of Palestinians, the people whose circumstances and fate Jews, above all others, should be lamenting.
:
Friday, May 22, 2009
Wild Once and Captured (revised)
An earlier version of this poem can be found here.
A further revision can be found here.
Wild Once and Captured
On Hearing Annie Lennox
Wild Once and Captured
On Hearing Annie Lennox
A prairie full of flowers,
a whisper full of rhythms,
a mirror full of faces,
a mountain draped with heroes,
every one a rarity
designed in regnant places.
Here music summons silence,
here longing is allure
and touching is an art
and dancing is a language
and searching leads us one by one
to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit,
rich and ripe
with promise, peace and legend.
There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once and captured
and has broken out again.
A further revision can be found here.
Wild Once and Captured
On Hearing Annie Lennox
Wild Once and Captured
On Hearing Annie Lennox
A prairie full of flowers,
a whisper full of rhythms,
a mirror full of faces,
a mountain draped with heroes,
every one a rarity
designed in regnant places.
Here music summons silence,
here longing is allure
and touching is an art
and dancing is a language
and searching leads us one by one
to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit,
rich and ripe
with promise, peace and legend.
There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once and captured
and has broken out again.
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