Seeing ourselves as others see us

The blogger Soj who writes at Flogging the Simian has recently returned to the States from several years living at a modest level of comfort in Romania. Her blog is an interesting window on the world, steeped in her U.S. origins, but also consciously explaining how this country looks to the rest of the world.

In a new post she describes the culture shock she encountered in the freezing aisles of U.S. supermarkets on her return. But then she gets down to the hard stuff, to popular U.S. consciousness of the Iraq war.

...this has perhaps become the first war in the history of civilization which has not had any major impact on the country fighting it. I'd say right off hand that the incident of 9/11 has had FAR MORE impact on the life and culture of Americans than the 3 year war in Iraq. It's simply incredibly mindboggling to think that America really is so tremendously wealthy that it can fight a war and barely feel it. What other country could do that? ...

So here I am, in the land of those so rich and powerful they can fight a war on the side, something unthinkable in the history of civilization. And what does that do to the American psyche? What impact does it have on people to know their land is so f--king powerful that it can fight a war and barely feel it?...

It's always been hard for me to understand the fervor of those who want even more war. I'm talking about the neocons and PNACers and those who push for wars with Syria and Iran and whomever else. But I'm starting to see where it comes from. 100 years ago a war the cost of Iraq might not have touched the aristocracy too badly but the peasants would've been eating crusts of bread to pay for it and there's only so much blood you can squeeze out of a turnip. But in America? By god, there's at least two or three more big wars and maybe up to 10 "police actions" that could be started and you still wouldn't even have to ration food....

I also think that explains the apathy so many people have for these wars. I understand the zealotry of those profiting from them, but why the apathy? It's because there's apathy for pretty much anything that doesn't affect you. Do you really give a crap if children in Malawi starve every year? You probably barely even heard of Malawi and unless you see some commercial at 2am, it doesn't even enter your consciousness. And neither does the Iraq war.

We're so rich we don't care; we think we don't have to.

Night Draws Near:Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

Anthony Shadid's reporting from Iraq for the Washington Post first grabbed my attention in early June, 2003. This was at the beginning of the U.S. occupation under proconsul Paul Bremer. Shadid, an Arabic speaking, Oklahoma-born, Lebanese-American, had lived through the invasion and the subsequent looting in Bagdhad, sharing fears and hardships with many Iraqis.

Upon the arrival of his Post colleagues, Shadid and Thomas Ricks were able to conduct a telling experiment. Ricks accompanied a group of U.S. soldiers on patrol; Shadid followed the squad, gathering the impressions of Iraqis about their interactions. Where a G.I. saw the Iraqis as "ninety five percent friendly," Shadid heard the occupation was "despicable....They're walking over my heart." The U.S. soldiers were particularly proud of their assistance to the Rami Institute for Autistic and Slow Learners, enjoying leaving their guns in the school yard while they played with the children. They had no idea, as Shadid reported, that the young Iraqi men clustered outside suspected that the soldiers might be having sex with the women teachers: "Only God knows ... I haven't seen it with my own eyes. But I've heard about things."

Night Draws Near collects Shadid's reporting on the gulf between invaders and Iraqis that has played out in repeated episodes of bloody devastation and human desolation. He arrived in Iraq while Saddam Hussein was still in power and wraps up the book with his observation of the January, 2005 election of purple thumbs. In between he made friends and, with the help of his Iraqi "fixer," conducted searingly honest interviews with many who came to hate and fear the occupation. Because he so obviously likes and cares about many Iraqis, he tries to find a hopeful note to end on, but the overall impression he conveys is of bewilderment striving to hold off despair.

As a U.S. activist who has followed the course of the invasion and occupation quite closely, I was struck by how Shadid, reporting from Iraq, reports a quite different understanding of the phases of this sorry story. At the beginning, the picture from my U.S. point of view was in sync with that of the Iraqis -- shock and awe bombing, then invasion, the toppling of the Saddam statue (which I always thought of as a vignette made for TV) followed by terrible looting and insecurity.

But soon our pictures diverge. In Iraq, the summer of 2003 seems to have been about the Shiites exuberantly claiming power commensurate with their numbers and the rise of the young cleric Muqtada Sadr. From the U.S., the picture was dominated by the failure to turn up any WMDs and by the surprising durability of a Sunni-led insurgency that blew up the U.N. humanitarian mission. We could only dimly understand that for Iraqis the U.S. presence was rapidly hardening into a humiliating occupation, on a par with that suffered by the Palestinians.

As Shadid reports it, the next phase as seen by Iraqis began with coordinated bombings that killed scores in Bagdhad on the first day of Ramadan, October 27, 2003.

[T]he conversations would never be the same again, and the perception of the American military in Iraq was taking yet another turn; the all powerful army imbued with technological prowess has become, first a callous overseer in a looted capital, then an insensitive occupier in a Muslim land, and now, in the wake of the Ramadan bombings, it was a provocative presence whose visibility only deepened the strife....Dread was everywhere.

In the U.S., I don't particularly remember this turning point, though I know many of us thought the Administration was lying to us daily when claiming "progress."

In December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, the U.S. Administration worked to spin the event, especially on its deluded homefront, as evidence of further "progress." According to Shadid,

Saddam soon became a sideshow in Iraq. The stakes were higher: Who has the right to rule and from where does that right arise?

A radicalized Islam was filling the power vacuum left by Saddam's overthrow. In Sunni areas, racial clerics celebrated martyrdom in the fight against the U.S. invaders. Among Shiites, traditionalists followed Ayatollah Sistani who urged deliberate steps toward restoring Iraqi governance under Shiite leadership; younger and poorer Shiites were drawn to young Sadr who called on them to expel the occupiers.


Shadid reports from Najaf near the Imam Ali shrine, one of Shi'a Islam's most venerated sites.

Shadid dates the next phase in Iraq as beginning with suicide bombings on March 2, 2004 in the Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala. More than most anywhere in Iraq, the shrine cities had prospered from the overthrow of Hussein, filling with pilgrims finally able to worship at the shrines. When they too were bathed in blood as Baghdad and the Sunni triangle had long been, in the eyes of Iraqis the occupation had irretrievably proved that it would not or could not rule. It was over, even if Paul Bremer in the Green Zone and George W. in Washington hadn't noticed yet. Uprisings by Sadr's Mahdi Army in the south and the capital and by militant Sunnis in Fallujah followed.

For U.S. observers of the occupation, the spring 2004 uprisings were not exactly a shock, but their scope and the short term successes certainly were impressive. From our great distance, it took a long time for people to believe that Iraq was not under U.S. control, but that spring this impossible truth began to seem real. John Kerry had already emerged as the Democratic nominee for President; his popular base was rapidly realizing that the U.S. adventure in Iraq was a failure, just as Kerry let himself to be trapped into trying to explain how he'd do occupation better than Bush. The Iraqis were residents of a grimmer reality, spiraling into an inter-communal power struggle; the occupiers thought they were steering the ship but actually were simply trying to navigate impossible rapids while lumbering about with lethal weaponry.

Shadid's story ends in 2004 (with a short epilogue about the 2005 election.) As just about anyone reading this knows, Iraq has simply become bloodier and more chaotic since. For a current accounts of life in Iraq's capital, try Treasure of Baghdad; if you are like me, you'll weep.

***
There was one more insight from Night Draws Near that I wanted to mention. Shadid writes:

Time and time again I am struck by how seldom I hear the work hurriya, "freedom," in conversations about politics in the Arab world....Much more common among Arabs is the word adil, "justice," a concept that frames attitudes from Israel to Iraq. For those who feel they are always on the losing end, the idea of justice may assume supreme importance.

On the one hand, this observation can seem to emphasize the distance between our U.S. culture and the Arab world. But a very little reflection reminds me that the passion for justice is also one of the pillars of our culture, from the Psalmists of the Hebrew Scripture crying out to God for the weak through Martin Luther King Jr. preaching that tradition to a white supremacist society in the last century. The recent immigrant marches were rooted in the same tradition. We in the U.S. who want to curb the empire should be able to recognize the cry for justice arising from the Arab world. Pope John Paul II famously said there can be "no peace without justice." There also can be no meaningful freedom where injustice reigns.

Friday Cat Blogging

It's MY laundry.

Cast a vote for our future

You can help pick the winners of a contest that will give California students scholarship money for college. Before 11am PDT, May 21, visit the contest page of the Campaign for College Opportunity. There you can read finalist essays by middle and high school kids and view the posters and TV ads they've created on the theme "Save a Spot for Me in College." Take a look and cast your vote for the overall winners.

Do this and you'll be participating in an innovative grassroots lobbying effort. The Campaign for College Opportunity seeks to impress on state legislators the need to support community college education for all students who graduate from high school. The state master plan has called for such support for many years; the state's higher education system has been much of the engine of California's prosperity. But state government has been hamstrung by the refusal of Republicans to agree to any new tax measures, and consequently, community colleges have begun to crack under demand that exceeds the supply of places. They have raised fees, limited the availability of classes, and cannot provide the counselors who might help get students through the bureaucratic maze.

So the Campaign wanted to collect California students' own thoughts and dreams about college to share them with legislators. What better way than a contest with real money prizes?

Last month I wrote about serving as a reader in the first phase of the contest. It was a fascinating experience. Hundreds of us helped winnow down 8000 entries.

Now the Campaign seeks our online votes which will be used alongside those of a panel of judges who include:

• Farai Chideya, author and correspondent for National Public Radio

• Don Hahn, Interim Head of Feature Animation at the Walt Disney Company

• Joe Kapp, former NFL star

• Josefa Salinas, radio personality for Hot 92 Jamz in Los Angeles

• Peter Schrag, columnist for the Sacramento Bee

• Mike Sklut, host of "High School Sports Focus" on Action 36 in the Bay Area

Reading these student essays, what came through so poignantly is that these young people, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, want to be what they think of as "good people" -- productive workers, supports to their parents, participants in their community. Read their own words at the contest page and help give them a leg up toward their dreams.

Our impossible beliefs had better be novel

AT ST. PETER’S SQUARE: A tourist bus covered with an advertisement for “The Da Vinci Code” movie is parked at the Vatican, where a debate is raging over the blockbuster novel. (Alberto Pizzoli AFP/Getty Images) Via LA Times

"We're not a secular society, we're a credulous one," according to Frederick Forsyth, author of best-selling thrillers including The Day of the Jackal, when discussing Dan Brown's book on BBC radio.

It seems to me that Forsyth has more accurately described the atmospherics around the novel and the new movie than any number of fulminating preachers who denounce it.

The entirely skeptical Adam Gopnik also did quite a job on this phenomenon in a New Yorker review:

A cultural anthropologist, a hundred years from now, will doubtless find, in the unprecedented success of “The Da Vinci Code” during the time of a supposed religious revival, some clear sign that, in the Elvis mode, what a lot of Americans mean by spirituality is simply an immense openness to occult superstitions of all kinds.

We live in a culture at once hungry for belief and very unsatisfied by what's on offer.

Most of the discussion of the film simply exemplifies our lack of practice at thinking about our culture's conventional faith stories. Tracy Wilkinson, in a generally thoughtful effort to discuss the film's impact on the Roman Catholic hierarchy, claims that Dan Brown's premise that "Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child [is] an idea that challenges the divinity of Christ...." Huh? The guy was a Jewish peasant carpenter. That he should have been married and fathered a child seems completely plausible; it might not have seemed worth mentioning to his contemporaries. The "orthodox," wildly implausible idea that Jesus was both God and man is both less and more believable than the suggestion he had a family life.

We, the citizens of this vastly rich, unthinkably powerful, early 21st century empire, don't much like the stories of our own lives. Living in a shallow commercial culture surrounded by lies, we want new and better stories. The ancient content of Christian faith -- that God mysteriously became a human being, died, and appeared alive again -- is both unbelievable and too familiar to be interesting. We want this year's story, a shining new one. Curiously, our standards of proof are no higher for the new one than for the old one: neither seems plausible in the light of contemporary notions of material reality -- but novelty automatically improves on antiquity for many people. So here comes The Da Vinci Code. None of this is any reason to forego a good yarn. And none of it has much to do with the lived experience of looking for God in the Christian story.

Nice little bonus from the immigration panic

Well Bush gave his immigration speech and I didn't listen to it, because the man makes me ill on direct exposure. Don't miss CNN's broadcast of his rehearsal at Crooks and Liars though, if you can get the page to load.

However I did notice this smidgen in the NY Times transcript:

"A key part of [the temporary worker] system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law ..."

So what follows from this? Some musings:

So you want a job? Show me your card.

You are brown and you don't have one -- we'll have to deport you.

Oh, you say you are a citizen? Well, then everyone better have a card.

See, those brown people, they made you all get identity cards.

Well, yes, those ID cards fit well in the latest NSA, 24/7, all-seeing seamless surveillance culture.. You want us to protect you from brown people and terrorists, don't you? Don't you?

Hey, buddy, you know we'll take care of you....

At Medicare Part D deadline, seniors say "Replace the program!"

To show the large volume of petitions they had collected, protesters spread the individual sheets out on large red banners.

Speakers denounced Medicare Part D (the partial prescription drug benefit) outside the San Francisco Federal Building this afternoon, bringing petitions with 20,000 signatures to give to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Today was the last day for current Medicare recipients to sign up without penalty; those failing to do so will be charged a late enrollment assessment for life! Once the sign up deadline is past, eligible people who didn't manage to figure it out will not be able to enroll until January 2007 and will pay what some are calling Bush's "prescription drug tax," a seven percent penalty.


Demonstrators listened patiently.

Many seniors have found the new "drug benefit," provided by a confusing array of private insurance companies, fails to cover their particular needs or, even worse, isn't honored by their pharmacies.

According to speakers at today's rally, the Republican-backed new law is designed to raise profits of insurance companies, not to ensure the well-being of older people who need drugs. It is full of bureaucratic hurdles, inflexible rules and coverage gaps that almost seemed intended to trip up "beneficiaries."

Pelosi knows when she has to get on the bus with her constituents. Her aides passed out a statement:

While the benefit works for pharmaceutical companies and big business HMOs, it isn't doing enough to make prescription drugs more affordable for our seniors. That's why Democrats are working to improve the flawed Republican prescription drug program -- and we want to do it today.

Bobby Bogan (left above), an organizer for Seniors Organizing Seniors, would go a lot farther than our Congresscritter. He announced: "if we have to, we'll sit in, walk in, roll our wheel chairs in and get this unfair law replaced."


Don Beckler (left) of Health Care for All called the Medicare Part D program nothing but "snake oil from insurance companies" and called for universal, single-payer health care. Don Beetle (right) testified to what it is like living with a Medicare eligible roommate with HIV disease whose drugs simply aren't comprehensively, reliably covered under this program.

The small demonstration was also organized by the California Alliance of Retired Americans, Gray Panthers, and Senior Action Network.

According to the New York Times, chaotic federal implementation of the plan has forced many states to step in to pay charges their senior citizens cannot put out while waiting for the Feds to get organized.

In January, California, like many other states, set up an emergency program to help low-income people having difficulties filling prescriptions under the new Medicare law. Stan Rosenstein, the Medicaid director in California, said last week, "We are spending a half-million dollars a day on our program because a number of people are still having problems."

The California program is set to expire on Tuesday. The Legislature is working with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to extend it, with some changes, through Jan. 31.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there are 43 million people on Medicare. Republicans expect 6 million to miss the deadline; Democrats think that figure will be more like 9 million.

Protesters don't really care what either set thinks: they want their government to do its job and ensure that older people get the benefits their wealthy country should be able to provide them.

Big Brother and all that

Michael Cline photo

So the National Security Agency is collecting all our phone records -- and has been for years. This is, of course, yet another instance of a casual, probably illegal, violation of our expectation of personal privacy by our current rulers. The Bushies are authoritarian megalomaniacs bent on undermining any constraints of law. Our Constitutional framework may not survive the present lot.

But that is not what I want to look at. What I want to focus on is that the technical means now exist to know just about everything about all of us. If we use any of the everyday conveniences of modern life, we leave trails -- on the phones, on the internet, from the transponders that pay bridge tolls, with our credit card and debit card purchases, even at the supermarket with our "club" cards. Our lives are totally open books; most of this data is for sale to corporations that want to sell us things. And with enough computing power, certainly available to governments and probably to the largest corporations, there is very little about our lived lives that can't be known based on the electronic trails we create.

As I've explored before,what's new is simply the amount of personal information that can reasonably be collected and digested. Our past expectations of privacy, of anonymity, depended on the inability of anyone to know so much about us. Now we give away vast amounts of data to interested parties everyday.

Most of us know this, intuitively. William Gibson, the dystopian author best known for the novel Neuromancer, had some interesting observations on some reactions to news of the NSA spying:

I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.

I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response. ...

In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We've gotten somewhere we've never been before.

Via Boing Boing

Exactly. The problem of privacy, of any meaningful freedom for individuals, in an environment of technical transparency is entirely a problem of political creativity. As attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained to the LA Times:

"There is simply no legal process for this kind of wholesale invasion of privacy. What they claim to be doing with the data is irrelevant because the fact is they could do whatever they choose without any oversight."

Our Bill of Rights and our system of laws assumed that Big Brother's reach would have practical limits. That is no longer true.

Today we are challenged to develop new restraints on governments to meet the new conditions. The enormity of the task is only slightly reduced by appreciating that overthrowing of the divine right of kings probably seemed only marginally less daunting in the mid-1700s. We might pull it off; the species has before, at some times and in some places. The cost of constraining monarchs has never been small; the project is not likely to be quick or easy this time either.

Watching the Prez to nail his pelt to the wall

Apparently Bush intends to "secure the border" using the National Guard. That's expected to be part of his Monday speech. Huh?

• What National Guard? Didn't they use up that pool of cannon fodder in Iraq?

• Don't they know who joins the Guard: enterprising young people seeking a way up. Wonder how many are Latino?

• Apparently Bush wants to make himself into Pete Wilson. This move may serve him in this year's elections, but the Republicans can forget the Latino vote, especially after some National Guardsman shoots some unfortunate U.S. citizen who happens to be brown.

The nice thing about this is that we can expect that one of the places Bush will hurt the GOP most is Texas.

Friday Cat Blogging

It's my book.

Now a cheer for ONE juror

So one lone juror kept the United States from the ignominy of executing a lunatic, convicted on the basis of torture evidence under a crackpot theory of responsibility. The foreperson (unidentified but evidently female) of the Moussaoui jury reports she was frustrated that despite 11-1, 10-2 and 10-2 ballots, no one would argue against the death penalty, yet someone kept voting it down.

But no one could figure out who was casting the dissenting vote, the foreman said, because that person didn't identify himself during any discussion -- and each of the votes were done using anonymous ballots.

The jury had to reach unanimity in order to smoke the guy.

Yet another instance when sanity seems to hang by a thread.

Go to jail; graduate from high school

A Palestinian girl holds a sign that reads in Arabic "salaries" during a demonstration by school teachers calling for payment of their salaries in the West Bank city of Nablus May 10, 2006. REUTERS/ABED OMAR QUSINI.

This story is a jaw dropper. Young Palestinian men are trying to get themselves arrested at Israeli checkpoints in order to be sent to prison where they can more easily study for exams than in the starving occupied West Bank, according to Reuters.

Israeli army officials say at least 80 young men have either turned up at checkpoints and asked to be arrested or else carried knives and other weapons to ensure they are detained. ...

Hijazi Abdul-Rahman, 18, who lives in a village near Jenin, in the northern West Bank, went to a nearby checkpoint with his friend Malik a month ago in an attempt to be arrested. Abdul-Rahman carried a small knife and Malik, who would not give his family name, openly carried a badly wired bomb.

They were detained by Israeli security forces and sent to a holding cell but released 25 days later after it emerged under interrogation that they were not a serious security threat. For Abdul-Rahman it was a grave disappointment.

"I lost my chance," he said, speaking at his home in a village north of Jenin. "I wanted to do my high school exams in prison because it is easier there than at school here." ...

"It's better to spend even your whole life in prison than to be stuck here," he said. "Here we can't even have a sandwich."

This story smells like somebody's disinformation campaign, but I have no way to know if it is true. If it is true, it speaks to a horrendous level of despair in occupied Palestine. Not surprising, given the US and European cut off of aid to Palestine in reaction to the election of the Hamas government. As of yesterday, apparently some assistance will resume, now that Israel's allies have shown who is boss.

Remembering homeless mothers

We may think that Mothers Day comes along on Sunday, but it is celebrated on May 10 in much of South America, Mexico, India, Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. So here in San Francisco, homeless advocates and students from Graduate Theological Union held a procession and speak out for homeless mothers, especially victims of wars, in the War Memorial Veterans Building Garden in Civic Center. The event was dominated by huge plaster puppet "saints" made by students in a class taught by Sally Hindman of the Center for Arts, Religion and Education. The activist San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and senior artists from West Oakland's St. Mary's Center helped organize the small demonstration and prayer service.

The event was a small but very San Francisco-like mixed bag in the noonday sun.


Spanish speaking mothers looked on.


A brother from the Coalition offered prayer and Fr. Louis Vitale spoke out for justice.

Homeless mothers certainly need any attention they can get. It is surprisingly difficult to find a quantitative description of homelessness among mothers or, actually, anybody. According to the U.S. Census Bureau FAQ

Question: Does the U.S. Census Bureau have information on the population experiencing homelessness?
Answer: The U.S. Census Bureau does not produce counts of the population experiencing homelessness.

If you dig very deeply into their data, in 2000, you find a category of persons living in "Other noninstitutionalized group quarters" who may be homeless; of these 1.3 million people, about 46 percent are female. Who knows how many are homeless? Who knows how many are mothers? Who knows how many the census missed?

Our social scientists also don't seem to know much about homeless mothers. Or, more likely, government institutions that fund social science research won't fund efforts to find out who is on the street in the era of "welfare reform." One of the better studies was completed in 1996, before cutbacks to the aid programs that held these families together. The Worcester Family Research Project (available as a .pdf) provides a glimpse of who homeless mothers are. They are likely to be:

• Extremely impoverished. In 1996, "homeless mothers reported a mean annual income of $7910 a year, 67% of the federal poverty level for a family of three. About half lived on less than $7000 a year."

• Subject to residential instability. "Homeless families moved nearly four times in the two years prior to becoming homeless... Eighty-nine percent of the homeless moved in with family or friends in the two years prior to becoming homeless."

• Socially isolated. Homeless "mothers ...had few relationships they could count on for financial and emotional support."

• Victims of severe physical and/or sexual abuse and assault. "A staggering 92% of the homeless ... experienced severe physical and/or sexual assaults at some point in their lives. More than 40% ... were sexually molested as children."

• Sickly. "Nearly one-third of homeless ...women reported a current chronic health condition, with high rates of asthma, anemia, and ulcers. This is especially disturbing since the average age of the mothers was 27 years."

The organizations that brought people to Civic Center need the support of those of us lucky enough to have a place to live this Mothers Day.

Digital stories, digital distortions

Camera phones change how we interact with the world, Steven Barrie-Anthony writes in the LA Times.

It's difficult to imagine Robert Frost, say, stopping in the woods on a snowy evening, giving his harness bells a shake with one hand while holding a camera phone with the other, and still taking in enough of the experience to conjure it later in verse. Another poet could write from Frost's photo record, although whose woods those were he might not know...

This is something I've thought about a lot, though I don't have a camera phone -- and can't imagine having one unless they improve a lot because I am too much of a snob about image quality.

For years I didn't choose to use a camera, except rarely. I wanted to be sure that I lived my experiences fully rather than turning them into pictures.

I've always known how to capture photos that would enable me to tell a story. When we worked in South Africa for anti-apartheid newspapers, knowing that we'd have to try to explain back home, I snapped images with a slide show in mind. I came away with a usable story.

My first digital camera changed my relation to the world. Because I did not have to develop a lot of bad pictures in order to find a few good ones, photography became my art form, a delight in its own right. A better camera has made me a photographing fanatic.

At this time, I'm not interested in video -- I don't know how to tell stories in that medium. I'm not sure I want to. Maybe soon that reluctance will seem dated -- a little like Frost creating a poem out of a remembered experience.

This blog seems on its way to becoming as much a venue for my picture stories as for my thoughts. I'm fine with that.

After May Day: the movement spurs anxieties

My previous post on the current immigrant insurgency, on the new civil rights movement, was written from a perspective formed by being in the streets and enjoying the wonderful energy of proud people rising up for dignity and justice. It is through such experiences that I have learned what I little know about the possibility of the beloved human community.

But of course, most people weren't there in the streets and might not want to be there. What might the immigrant uprising mean to them?

Periodic panicsFirst some history, to put present anxieties in context. The story of U.S. immigration "policy" is one of enthusiastic starts, punctuated by fits of fear. Those already here have repeatedly become afraid that newcomers would swamp their culture and threaten their livelihoods. In the west, in the late 19th century, the fear was labeled "the yellow peril"; Chinese immigrants were excluded by act of Congress in 1882. But white immigrants, from southern and eastern Europe just kept on coming -- by 1910, the foreign born were fully 14.8 percent of the population (they were only 10.4 percent in 2000.) In 1924, seeking to stem the tide, immigration law set quotas for the allowable number of immigrants by country, favoring whites and northern Europeans.

With the beginning of the Cold War, the McCarran Walter Act of 1952 added anti-communist provisions to the geographical exclusions; no godless revolutionaries were to be allowed. In 1965 the U.S. partially abolished the national origin quotas that had aimed to keep the country white and also began to facilitate family reunification (the opportunity for immigrants to bring close family members to join them.) This legal change particularly enabled Asian immigration. By 1986, the country had attracted 3 million undocumented migrants mostly from south of the border. A new law called for sanctions on employers who hired them but also offered amnesty to those already here.

The employer sanctions were not enforced; employers kept on hiring and migrants kept on coming. And so today, some U.S. citizens, some of those of us already here, including a minority of violent racists, demand a wall to close off the Mexican border and criminalization of undocumented persons already here. These provisions are embodied in Congressman Sensenbrenner's HR4437. This current panic sparked the current immigrant movement.

Race and racism haunt the new landMeanwhile, not surprisingly, many African Americans wonder whether the result of this immigrant movement will be to further erase their contributions to this country. Some African Americans are directly in competition with the newcomers for low wage jobs and don't like that. But even more important to African American unease is fear that this latest wave of newcomers will simply adopt the unjust racial system of their new country. Andre Banks spelled this out in an article for the Applied Research Center:

There is little question that the current immigration debate, though coded and contrived otherwise, is entirely about race. Yet, the framing made popular by immigrants and their advocates is so hostile to Black people and our American experience that it seems impossible for us [African Americans] to stake a claim with this movement....

The narrative of the immigrant as the symbol of hard work that leads to opportunity can mean nothing but alienation for Black people precisely because we know this myth is false. Without our labor -- not immigrant labor, but slave labor -- in the fields and on the march there would be no market brimming with wealth and economic opportunity, nor a tradition of civil and political rights readily available for appropriation and exploitation....

New immigrants of color, unlike their European predecessors, should recognize that in passively accepting anti-Black racism in exchange for integration into U.S. culture and economy, they might issue a warrant for the future seizure of their own tenuous rights.

Mexicans, Salvadorans and Dominicans are not Irish, Italian and German. Racism, in its subtle sweep, touches every community of color. While it is true that Black people often end up at the bottom, other people of color, despite the comfort of an idealized immigrant narration, are nowhere near the top.

Many African Americans simply cannot identify with the immigrant narrative being promoted by the new movement. They didn't come here to better themselves and succeed through hard work. Their ancestors were dragged here in chains against their will and the fruit of their hard labor has been appropriated by generations of whites.

Banks reminds his readers that despite still being burdened by the U.S. racial hierarchy, majorities of African Americans have historically supported the justice struggles of other groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson writes to encourage such support. He stresses historical kinship, urging solidarity among potential allies.

Immigrants of previous generations, including African Americans, should see the new undocumented workers as allies, not threats. They share with African Americans a history of repression, of being subjected to back-breaking, soul-deadening work -- or to no work at all.

They also share a common heritage. Less than 10 percent of enslaved Africans ended up in the United States. The vast majority were shipped to Latin America and the West Indies. People of color are brothers and sisters under and of the skin, whether we are called undocumented "Latino" immigrants or "African Americans."

Four Northern Californian civil rights veterans, María Blanco, Eva Paterson, Hector Preciado and Van Jones, have attempted to name explicitly the source of much unease between communities of color:

As for the new civil rights movement, perhaps much of the discomfort created by this phrase is due to the fact that there is still much unfinished business in the "old" civil rights movement. The immigrant rights movement has to be sensitive to that reality.... Latino immigrants who today march for dignity know that they are part of the great tradition of the freedom marches, launched and led by African Americans. ...

The naysayers will always be there. So will those who want to divide us. What we have before us is an opportunity to reinvigorate our mutual work with the energy captured by the spirited expression that rang out across the nation on May 1 -- sí se puede!

The land was never emptyBefore the whites and the African Americans, native peoples lived in this place. Now there are folks who, if not exterminated, really have been erased! Meteor Blades has offered some perspectives on the current moment incorporating a perspective from those earlier residents:

• ...Let's dump the word immigration. It's acquired a formalistic, rule-driven tinge that obscures what's really going on, which is, simply, migration, the latest in many waves of migrations, this one being a continuous tsunami since Columbus said, Hi there, we come in peace.

• ...Previous migration policies have substituted ideology, ethnocentrism, religious bias and a twisted economic self-interest for reason, justice and fairness, victimizing human beings who often were already victims.

• ...Globalization that allows the free movement of goods, services, capital and finances around the planet while forcing labor to stay on its side of the fence and ignoring the ecological consequences of reckless economic "development" is a recipe for disaster. Outsourcing and migration can't be unentangled. Bioregions pay no attention to political borders....

Ideally -- I know, what a scary word -- migration policies ought to focus on directing North America toward becoming an ecologically sound model of sustainable economics in which the borders will, decade by decade, lose their importance, and "globalization" will not mean exploitive homogenization nor be a synonym for corruption and greed.

Now there's an outsider perspective on it all. Si se puede! Because we must.

After May Day: A new civil rights movement?

After nearly a week, I may be ready share some semi-coherent thoughts about the exhilarating immigrant marches last Monday. I do believe we are seeing something that does not fit neatly into our existing political categories. Because it is new, and because it is not mine, I am a little hesitant to attempt analysis -- but here goes...

A surprise developmentThe size, broad scope, and determination shown in the marches clearly took this country by surprise. Where'd all these people come from? Of course, they've been with us for a long time (the average undocumented worker has been the country five years.) But we simply don't look at them. I'm reminded of visiting family in Palm Desert, California. They live in a gated-community, an oasis of manicured green, surrounded by cactus, rock, and brown desert. All day, silent shapes tend and water the luxuriant plantings, unacknowledged by the golf cart driving residents. Bet those workers took a day off on Monday to assert themselves as human beings. We, the comfortable white middle class and certainly the opinion-forming media, are more like my oblivious retired relatives than we usually care to know.

And there are vast numbers of these people. Estimates say 12 million U.S. residents are now undocumented. Fully thirty-three percent of U.S. population growth in 2004 came from immigration according to the National Geographic quiz some of us have been playing with. When such a large group suddenly makes itself visible, it is hard not to take notice.


Real life, not protest theaterThe marches felt different from most of our experience in other ways. The folks in them have already demonstrated their grit by simply getting here. It is not easy to leave home and come here to work at menial jobs. We are sucking the adventurous and the enterprising out of the Latin countries to the south, as well as less obviously from much of the rest of the world.

Furthermore undocumented immigrants are truly poor people; when they risk even the little that they have in order to assert their dignity and humanity, their protest carries a moral weight quite different from the set piece acts of "civil disobedience" that have characterized much middle class agitation for the last 30 years. For an undocumented worker, the possible consequences of political protest are literally incalculable; fortunately there have not been many reports of retaliation against participants in the May Day marches.


Undocumented immigrants are workers Well, duh... But think about it for a minute: how often in most of our lifetimes have people who thought of themselves as workers led a protest movement? We've seen movements organized around race, around gender, around aspirations for peace -- but seldom by and for workers. Sure, there was lots of ethnic, Latino, Mexicano, pride in the marches, but as well and often more so, these folks see themselves as proud workers. In fact, to a considerable extent, they are the U.S. "working class" as that term once was commonly if imprecisely understood: they are the people whose work gets them dirty, whose work subjects them to daily physical effort.

Their self-understanding as workers was clear in how the day's events were planned. They called the protests for May Day, celebrated as International Workers Day in most of the world. They urged from the beginning they would walk out for the day and boycott as well; professional immigrant advocates wanted to tone down the protests. However people who see themselves as workers understand that what the society values them for is their labor and so it is by withdrawing their labor that they assert their dignity.

The hand painted signs at the rallies over and over again expressed outrage that Sensenbrenner, Tancredo, the Republican House of Representatives, or anyone would call them "criminals." They know, proudly, that their labor creates much of the country's wealth. "Si se puede; yes, we can!"

Undocumented immigrants appeal to idealsFor most of us, this is a time of political cynicism. The politicians are rotten and our system is failing. Immigrants know political cynicism; many of them come from countries that can make even less claim to practicing justice and equity than George W. Bush's United States. But nonetheless, their movement aims to speak to this country's ideals. Many signs and speeches demand that the United States demonstrate its best characteristics, not its worst. They insist over and over: "You are a nation of immigrants; don't you remember your ancestors came here poor and hungry?" "How can you treat us as less than human?" "Don't you understand we are really just people, like you?" They wave the U.S. flag hopefully.


A bumpy road aheadIf the emergence of the immigrants is indeed the new civil rights movement, like the last one it is not going to make gains without struggle. It is easy to see some obstacles ahead. I'll list a few:

• Lofty goals: as David Bacon and Nativo Lopez point out in an important article on the marches, "people are ready and willing to fight for the whole enchilada." Winning it all, amnesty for all the undocumented, may be more than can be achieved in the short term. Can the movement find strategies and tactics to carry through an ongoing political process marked by repeated fights?

• Divisions by country of origin: in some places, immigrants from different countries worked together well on May Day; Chicago seems to have been a successful example of cooperation. But in others, especially where there are huge Spanish speaking, mostly Mexican-origin, populations, Latino nationalism could overwhelm immigrant unity.

• Divisions by immigration status: many of the "reform" schemes now in Congress would create a multiplicity of legal statuses based on time in the country, ability to document work, ability to pay fines, etc. If some version of these passes, will the group on the legalization track abandon the remaining, and still arriving, undocumented population? Experience says no, because in real life the new arrivals will have family ties to the "legals," but divisive pressures will grow.

• Leaders: anyone who saw these marches has to believe that the leadership exists in the immigrant communities to accomplish huge tasks. They've done it. But that functioning leadership is not, mostly, in the professional immigrant advocacy organizations, especially those in DC and especially those in the Democratic Party. Before the immigrants took to the streets, most of those in "respectable leadership" were open to various "reform" compromises coming out of Congress that would create a "guest worker" status that amounts to slave labor and "legalization" for only a minority of the undocumented. The leaders from the streets need to get into the mix with the professionals, if not completely displace them.

• Pulling up the ladder behind them: When does an immigrant stop being an immigrant? Historically, people have come to the United States, suffered as part of an exploited underclass of workers, gradually gained economic stability, won education and assimilation for their children, and then looked down on the next set of immigrants. Or, more succinctly, the objective for most immigrants has been to leave an immigrant identity behind and become "regular Americans." Can a civil rights movement be based in a population whose individual members are always striving to escape the group? Globalization and the disparities in wealth between north and south suggest that the incoming flow is not likely to decrease regardless of what kind of wall the U.S. builds on its borders. But can a movement be sustained with a changing cast of core participants? I guess we'll see.

Damu Smith, 1952-2006

Damu Smith, the founder of Black Voices for Peace and executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network, died May 5 of colon cancer in Washington, DC. He was 54.

Smith's website tells the story of his activist life. Radicalized while still a high school student by observing the Black liberation struggle in Cairo, Illinois, he assumed the name "Damu" ("blood" in Swahili) and moved to Washington where he worked in the anti-apartheid movement, against legal injustices in the U.S., and for peace and a freeze on nuclear weapons.

When Smith was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2005, he became determined to encourage others to get frequent colon cancer tests. "I'm going to be the poster child for twice-a-year screenings." African Americans experience an earlier onset of the disease and higher incidence and mortality rates than whites.

I only met Smith once, at a conference in 2000 where I took the picture above.

But like Smith, in the early 1970s, I saw the segregated Pyramid Courts housing project in Cairo -- marveled at the bullet holes that dotted walls and roofs there and in St. Columba's Catholic Church where the Black United Front held its meetings. When I reported from Cairo in April 1973, I wrote "there is not much of a pie to win a piece of in Cairo, and those who own what there is struggle fiercely to keep from giving it up." Three Blacks had been killed in the simmering local struggle for equality; 25 Black businesses, 43 homes and 25 cars had been torched. Cairo's story destroys any comfortable illusion that Black civil rights were won without blood and anguish.

The town, located where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet, has apparently never recovered from those dreadful times. According to a contemporary website created by Joe Angert, a St. Louis Community College professor:

Cairo, Illinois is the strangest city on the river. It feels like you are visiting a motion picture set from the 1950s and all the actors, save a few strays, have cleared the streets to hide from some impending doom. ...

It really feels abandoned. The population is roughly 3000, which on face value seems like a healthy number, but the city was built to sustain a population five times larger. The buildings are still there, large stone banks, churches, and government buildings; grand in design, but with their promise unfulfilled. They look sad standing there abandoned....

Rather than hire blacks the white store owners one after another just closed shop and left. Cairo is the city that died from racism.

Damu Smith lived a life creatively devoted stopping the dying and increasing freedom for all peoples. Such lives are to be celebrated and emulated if we dare.

You can bet on it!

Tomorrow the Episcopal Church in the San Francisco Bay Area (officially the Diocese of California) will elect a new bishop. Delegates from the various parish churches and the members of the clergy, separately, will vote, probably repeatedly, until one of the seven candidates gets a majority from both sets of electors. The election is the end of a yearlong process that climaxed with the candidates being grilled by about 2000 members of the denomination in six open meetings in one week. To become bishop of this diocese, you have to survive ordeal by popular interrogation. All the candidates seem to have held up pretty well.

Outside the diocese, there is intense interest in whether we'll select one of the three candidates who are open, partnered gay priests. In the worldwide Anglican Church and in pockets in the U.S., such a choice would be a scandal. But I have to say that in the small, mostly gay, Episcopal parish where I am a member, the sexual orientation of the candidates is barely an issue. Oh sure, we wouldn't mind at all if our church further affirmed our equality by selecting a gay bishop. But mostly we just want a good bishop, someone who can lead a fractious, diverse, and inclusive community. The focus on sexual orientation feels voyeuristic, a little prurient.

Election junkies can follow tomorrow's balloting live at the Diocesan website.

UPDATE: MAY 6, 2006: Paddypower.com will have to pay out some on this one. The Right Rev. Mark Andrus has been elected Bishop of California on the third ballot.

Where in the world are we?

Have fun. Make yourself miserable. Take the geography quiz that the National Geographic just gave to 510 U.S. young adults between 18 and 24.

I got 2 wrong, one because I thought too much about my answer, one because I have no idea where CSI is filmed. Maybe you'll do better.

Start here.

One cheer and a boo for juries

Zacarias Moussaoui & Hamid Hayat (KCRA illustration)

Today the Zacarias Moussaoui jury decided not to kill him. The verdict seems pretty remarkable, given that they had already found, on the basis of torture-derived "evidence" further tainted by prosecutorial misconduct, that this nutcase and aspiring martyr had some responsibility for 9/11. Having accepted the bizarre notion that a jailed incompetent could have averted the attacks, it seemed impossible that they would simply jail him for life. After all, these people had been subjected to the Flight 93 cockpit tape recording and the testimony of bereaved New Yorkers.

I feared the jury would decide that offing Moussaoui would give "closure" to the relatives, as if grief could be assuaged by revenge. But apparently not. Good for that jury for rising to an impossible task. Jury service sometimes evokes extraordinary capacities for serious thought and responsible discernment in the most ordinary citizens.

Unhappily, another jury in Sacramento, California seems not to have risen to such discernment. According to the LA Times, they convicted 23-year-old Hamid Hayat of Lodi of providing material support to terrorists, on the basis of Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Tice-Raskin's closing argument:

"Hamid Hayat had a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind."

That was the clincher for the jury, which last week found him guilty of one count of providing material support to terrorists and three counts of lying to federal agents. He now faces up to 39 years in prison.

The proof of Hayat's views were a teenage scrapbook, a slip of paper inscribed with a warrior's prayer in Arabic, books about jihadi martyrs, and Hayat's own boastful comments secretly recorded by a man he thought was his best friend but who turned out to be a paid FBI informant....

In interviews, several jurors said Hayat's confession and evidence of what jury foreman Joe Cote, a 64-year-old retired salesman from Folsom, Calif., called "un-Americanism" convinced them that he posed a danger.

Hayat "confessed" under FBI interrogation, after much prompting, saying that he had been to a terrorist camp in Pakistan. This "evidence" might seem more convincing if his father had not also "confessed" under interrogation that his son had attended a terrorist camp -- at a completely different location where "the training, including firearms practice, took place in an enormous, deep basement where trainees masked like 'Ninja turtles' practiced pole-vaults and executions with scimitars." Unfortunately for Hamid Hayat, his jury never heard this version as his father was tried separately under a completely different theory about the location of the putative camp. The father's jury was unable to agree on a verdict.

Okay -- I wasn't there at this trial, I didn't hear it all -- but this case sure sounds like a prosecution for the thought crime of stupidly fantasizing about being an Islamic warrior. Dumb, yes -- but criminal? Not in my book. The evidence that this guy did anything but harbor silly ideas seems awfully thin. One of the Hamid Hayat case jurors now is claiming she was bullied into agreeing to the guilty verdict. Lawyers will argue over whether her remorse has any legal implications.

The nanny took the day off

If you were there in one of the huge immigrant marches on Monday (and if you weren't you missed a joyous day), you might have observed that there were many, many children among the throngs. A moment's reflection makes one reason obvious.




Nannies don't have babysitters when they march. And proud Latinas and Latinos brought the whole family.


So much to see!






Some children clearly found it all a little overwhelming.




Others were simply pooped.

But I wonder, in fifteen years will they remember they marched for justice with their families? Will they work to make this a more child friendly culture? Perhaps.
Some images taken April 10, most from May 1, 2006; all San Francisco, CA.

A Famous Victory:Boys and their toys

Three years ago, Commander Codpiece declared "Mission Accomplished."

A 19th century English children's poet described an elderly farmer's attempt to explain the antics of such men to his grandchildren:

She saw her brother Peterkin
Roll something large and round,
Which he beside the rivulet
In playing there had found:
He came to ask what he had found
That was so large and smooth and round.

Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
Who stood expectant by;
And then the old man shook his head,
And with a natural sigh—
"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory.

"I find them in the garden,
For there's many here about;
And often when I go to plough
The ploughshare turns them out.
For many thousand men," said he,
"Were slain in that great victory."

"Now tell us what 'twas all about,"
Young Peterkin he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."
...
"With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then
And newborn baby died:
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

"They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won,
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.
...
"And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win."
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Oddly, this quaint rhyme was part of every student's education at the acme of the British Empire. What is our equivalent?

May Day immigrant march, San Francisco

The San Francisco Chronicle calls the crowds of marchers on San Francisco's Market Street this morning "thousands." For decades I've walked in peace marches and gay pride parades on that street and I can testify, this was as closely packed, as enthusiastic, and possibly as large of some of the largest marches I've ever seen there.

Thoughts later -- for now just pictures.


Marchers poured into downtown San Francisco all morning.


Soon the crowd was packed together.





There was great pride and excitement.