Last night, some guests who have been staying with us for a few days were watching that cinematic classic Predator on television when I wandered through the living room.
One of them pointed out to me that its cast includes the present governor of California, the former governor of Minnesota, and some guy who was almost governor of Kentucky.
All I can say is, wow, how about that exaggerated Hollywood masculinity and the voting public?
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Anarcha Project
My main project involves writing history and producing audio outputs based on interviews with long-time Canadian activists, and I'm always excited to hear about other projects doing similar kinds of things. An email from a friend made me aware of the Anarcha Project. In their own words:
The person behind this project is currently on a tour of the Southeast of the United States doing a last batch of interviews. Not sure if she is still open to new participants, but I'd bet it would be worth a try if you were in the areas she is visiting and were interested. Look here for the call for participation and itinerary for this trip.
A cool, cool project. I can't wait to see the book that comes out of it!
(Thanks to brown rab girl fish for the email telling me about this project.)
The Anarcha Project is a people's history project consisting of interviews with anarchist and anti-authoritarian people (primarily women and transgender folks) in the continental US from 2003 to 2005. 159 interviews have been completed with people in the continguous 48 states (except the Southeast) as of January 2005. The goal of this project is to record radical history and publish these stories in order to dessiminate unrepresented voices and words. The final product will consist of a book, this website with some audio archives available for free to the public and a historical video collection.
The book will consist of approximately 20 of the interviews I've completed. The interviews will be edited down and reviewed by the person interviewed. There will be quotes from different interviewees regarding topics of interest, like work, sex, activism, etc. I would like the book to be published by a publisher, so it is widely available to the public, but failing that, I am prepared to self-publish. I am looking for an anarchist woman/trans person to design a cover for it, so suggest someone or an idea.
The person behind this project is currently on a tour of the Southeast of the United States doing a last batch of interviews. Not sure if she is still open to new participants, but I'd bet it would be worth a try if you were in the areas she is visiting and were interested. Look here for the call for participation and itinerary for this trip.
A cool, cool project. I can't wait to see the book that comes out of it!
(Thanks to brown rab girl fish for the email telling me about this project.)
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Some Reading
- A news article about the shootings in the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota on an online Native publication. It includes the information that "Contribution to provide assistance to victim's families can be sent to Red Lake Nation Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 574, Red Lake, MN 56671."
- I don't go over to Dissident Voice all that often, but when I do I always hope that I'll come across an article by Joe Bageant. He's a socialist from a white working-class background in the heart of the South of the United States, and he writes with a gritty and distinctive voice. I don't always agree with his politics 100%, but his latest is bang on. Here are some excerpts:
[My friend] Dickie's class, the business and owning class, is congenitally incapable of getting the fact that the masses are part of political history too. These owning class people are not mean, or at least not intentionally so, nor are they stupid. They merely live their lives based upon the way they have experienced their lives -- as a class that owns the country and rents it back to the rest of us. And they see us as exactly that, a faceless swarm to be exploited and managed profitably. His class’ town bankers owned my daddy’s ass, and I don’t even want to think of the ways Dicko probably owns mine indirectly through local financial institutions.
OK. So the truly rich may not get it. But the most dangerous weasels of all, the ones at the next level down from Dicko -- those little ankle biters trying to get a bigger piece of the action -- they get it all too well. Or at least to the extent they understand that the masses need to be roughed up from time to time. Kept in their place. Now I’m not talking about the barber or three-chair beauty shop or the deli owner up the street. I am talking about the realtors, lawyers and middlemen willing to cooperate in whatever it takes to destroy land use and zoning codes, bust unions and keep wages low, rents high, the liberals down and the “cullids” out. This group of second tier conservative professionals and semi-pros are dead set on being real players someday. On their way up the ladder they will screw you blind and make you beg for your change.
Beyond all this, it never ceases to amaze me how flat out damned ignorant these successful, well-heeled neocons at the local level can be. One business leader in my town, I’ll call him Jim Dawkins, returned from a trip to Europe and, knowing that I am a double-bottomed cast iron leftie, brought me a copy of a socialist newspaper. He gave it to me as a joke, and said “Man! Can you believe they actually allow this stuff to be published over there? We got laws against such crap in this country.” I reminded him that we have no such laws and that the socialist party is probably the largest political party on the planet. “Aw bullshit!” he said. “Then what the hell do you think is the largest party?” He answers, “The Republican Party. We’re the only country with real parties.” Now this is a guy who has an MBA, holds local office and has influence in public affairs around here. What in friggin heaven passes for education in this country? What kind of bubble are these American business people living in? Whatever the case, characters like Dicko and Jimmy Dawkins stand on the necks of millions of working poor.
One recent winter day, after the long dark commute back from the D.C. metro area, I stepped into my living room, where for a split-second I saw my daddy sitting on the couch by the flicker of the television eating ice cream straight from the carton, just like he did when I was a kid. Even a spilt second with an apparition is a long time, an eternity which defies our very notion of time. After the electric waves of shock quit going through my body, I sat down on the couch and reminded myself why I am a socialist: If I can do my bit, however small that may be, to prevent good men like my dad from working their guts out to line a lesser man’s pocket, or restore dignity to labor in even the smallest way, then I will do it. And if I can use the only damned gift I ever had -- the one he never understood -- in testimony, then I will do that too. - The focus of this article is on the questionable goal of rebuilding the Democrats, but the lesson that it preaches is that "we" need to get out there and knock on doors and talk to people -- sub in a somewhat different understanding of "we" and some different goals, and it has an important point to make.
- Found here: Oliver Cromwell, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and an afterthought on George W. Bush.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Gould Quote
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
(Via this post at The Killing Train)
Friday, March 25, 2005
M19 in LA
First off, I feel bad about the relative lack, over the last week, of posts consisting of original writing as opposed to just pointers to other things. My work is in a very writing-intensive stage at the moment, so mostly if I have had the energy and time and mindset to spend doing original nonfiction writing on topics related to social change, I have been feeling the urge to put it there. But I'm just printing out draft #2 of the chapter I'm working on this month, so I think I'll take a break and do some writing here.
I want to reflect a little bit on my experiences of the March 19 peace march in Los Angeles, one of a great many such events that occurred around the world to commemorate the second anniversary of the invasion and recolonization of Iraq. For pictures and text, including some interesting critiques, go to LA Indymedia and scroll down a bit in their central "features" column.
In general, I can think of three general classes of reasons for engaging in a particular political action.
There is nothing inherently wrong with action that falls mostly or exclusively into category (3). In fact, most activities even by people who place a lot of emphasis on direct action are, in fact, largely in that category. One difficulty in thinking and making decisions about this kind of action is that human consciousness is a notoriously slippery beast and it can be a pretty tricky thing to predict what kind of effect you will have or try and evaluate what kind of effect you have had. I think a useful tool in trying to figure this out, at least for those of us inclined to look to the progressive sections of the Western academy for insight, is various research and writing on pedagogy, including the academic areas encompassed by the term "critical pedagogy." I'm far from an expert about these things, but I think it's an interesting place to start. The purpose of most of the pedagogy of political actions should be, I think, to facilitate people in their journeys of political consciousness and action in ways that lead towards justice and liberation and empowerment of individuals and communities. Ideally, such pedagogy is reciprocal, mutually supportive, and egalitarian rather than unidirectional, hierarhcical, and authoritarian.
A mass action can be one of the types of direct action described in (1) and (2) above -- the mass presence of people could be engaged in protecting or disrupting a particular institution, for example. But most mass actions I have been a part of, including last Saturday's peace march and rally in Los Angeles, are purely symbollic and therefore seek to influence the course of human events solely through mechanism (3).
As I've expressed before on this site, I often have mixed feelings about symbollic mass actions. I have sometimes experienced them as affirming and empowering and energizing. At other times I have found them empty and ritualistic and unoriginal and pointless. Some of that is idiosyncratic to me, and has to do with my mood on any given day, but certainly not all. By thinking of such actions in terms of pedagogy, it has been possible for me to articulate a little bit more clearly, at least for myself, my attitudes towards them.
The M19 march in LA was much like many other marches I have been to. There was a preamble that consisted of people milling about until the time came to go into the street, a rally, then a march, then another rally. The milling about involved much exchanging and selling of radical (and, in one rare case, progressive Islamic) propaganda. Both rallies involved lengthy lists of speakers and a little bit of music.
Quirky notes: The sound system at the pre-march rally was woefully inadequate. It rained. The hotdog vendors had no veggie dogs so I had to settle for a pre-packaged pastry. I liked that it was in Hollywood because that is the area where we first lived in LA and I miss it; except for going to a movie up there a few weeks after we moved I haven't been back since last August. There is something mesmerizing about Hollywood because it is the cultural focus of such huge amounts of money but the whole place is just so trashy. But at least there are street-level business and people (a few) actually walk places.
But back to pedagogy -- it seems to me that in this event, as in the many others like it which I have been to, there were two main ways in which the opportunity for teaching/learning were explicitly seized.
One was the distribution of literature during the preamble to the march. In some ways, I think this is harmless or even useful. Where else do most people who are not themselves active in radical politics have an opportunity to acquire material produced from radical left perspectives, and even engage in conversation with people who advocate those positions? Of course the quality of the newspapers varies a lot. Some I find interesting and useful, though some are so laden with jargon and so dogmatic that I would imagine they alienate far more people than they educate even before the readers actually reach the content. And while conversational engagement with party members can be interesting -- I have certainly found it so in the past -- from my observation what happens at such events isn't real person-to-person engagement. Last Saturday I saw more than one exchange between a youthful party member who appeared to be pretty privileged and a fellow demonstrator who appeared to be coming from more oppressed spaces, in which the party member was doing far more telling and a lot less listening than I would think would be useful if one was trying to build a meaningfully revolutionary organization. And I realize this is my own baggage, but I do find something mildly embarassing about the desperation of the Marxist sectlets in hawking their papers, because it gives the impression that they are it, as in the only conceivable alternative to the liberal Democrats or the Greens, and that is a depressing thought. At the same time, I don't want to support the tendency that most people would have to dismiss these groups out of hand, because many participate in useful organizing and have valid and interesting analyses on the questions of the day.
The other site for explicit attempts at teaching/learning was the speeches at the rallies. It seems to me that the best use for such speeches would be to reaffirm the central points of unity for the rally, stir up some energy and enthusiasm, and perhaps briefly present some information or a perspective or two that the participants in the march might find challenging or novel. The mode of teaching/learning is still very authoritarian, in that there is one source of wisdom (the podium) and many passive recipients, but using that model in the way I described above would both make the event enjoyable and perhaps provide fodder for discussions amongst marchers, where the real teaching/learning would actually take place. Instead, M19 in LA followed a protocol that seems quite widespread, with all of the sponsoring organizations getting a few minutes at the mike, resulting in most people at the pre-march rally getting bored, frustrated, and wet, and learning little, while most people dispersed at the end of the route long before the last speaker spoke. Which isn't to say there were not individual speakers that were informative and inspiring -- there definitely were -- but whatever boost they provide tends to be smothered in the monotony of the rest.
(An encouraging side note to this dynamic during the pre-march rally last Saturday came from some folk beside me who resisted the authoritarian and boring and soggy method of pedagogy that was being imposed. It was folks from the LA chapter of U.S. Labor Against the War, who seemed to be mostly SEIU members judging by their jackets and buttons, who kept chanting "Start the march now! Start the march now!" in the face of too many speakers, too much rain, and not enough volume.)
All of this probably comes across as being more negative than I really intend. After all, I went to the march knowing that it would probably be like this, and I'm sure I'll go to many more such marches. I'll enjoy some more than others, and I'll probably rant over beer after more than a few of them. But I'll still go. And I'll probably feel after most of them that it was well worth going. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The single most important learning from mass actions like this has nothing to do with the explicit attempts to convey information. It is, rather, the empowerment and affirmation and support and all-around psychological boost that comes from being in the midst of thousands of other people from a great variety of geographical, social, and political corners of the community who are all engaged in struggling towards the same (or at least functionally similar in the short term) goals. As I note regularly here, LA is a very separated and separating city, and being a stay-at-home parent is also relatively socially and politically isolating, so being in a crowd of union activists, Latino punks, liberal Christians, women wearing hijab, Bus Riders Union organizers, Anti-Racist Action militants, Progressive Democrats of America members, Palestinian nationalists, high school peaceniks, octogenarian Quakers, radical cheerleaders, women and men who had engaged in revolutionary struggle in their countries of origin before moving to LA, and all sorts of other people of conscience, was like being immersed in an ocean that washed away at least a few of the encrusted layers of alienation that form a protective but unhealthy callus on the outside of one's psyche in the course of daily life. And this kind of affirmation and empowerment is very much pedagogical -- there is no question that it helps important realities seep into consciousness in a way that just reading about them as dry facts cannot.
And the other factor that will keep me going back to marches like this is keeping in mind exactly what their purpose and function is. Sometimes, an embodied statement of dissent matters a lot. It can become an empty ritual, but sometimes it matters. Given the nature of the occasion and the number of other people in so many other sites across the globe doing the same thing, last Saturday was important. But it is also important to remember that the real work of social change occurs not at marches but between them. And that means that even if there are common features of such marches that make me roll my eyes, that doesn't need to be a cause for negativity overall because marches are just marches, and the rest of the diverse and inspiring ways of changing the world and combatting imperialism keep on going regardless.
I want to reflect a little bit on my experiences of the March 19 peace march in Los Angeles, one of a great many such events that occurred around the world to commemorate the second anniversary of the invasion and recolonization of Iraq. For pictures and text, including some interesting critiques, go to LA Indymedia and scroll down a bit in their central "features" column.
In general, I can think of three general classes of reasons for engaging in a particular political action.
- To build something useful and positive and liberatory. This would include Gandhi's "constructive program"; holding a women's dance to raise money for a local women's shelter; the breakfast programs of the Black Panthers; forming a worker cooperative.
- To directly confront or interfere with or otherwise disrupt an oppressive event or institution. This would include dock workers refusing to load ships with armaments that were going to be used in putting down an uprising by workers or peasants in some other part of the world; the material interference in the smooth functioning of the World Trade Organization summit by activists in Seattle in November 1999; the historic boycott of Nestle because of its behaviour in the developing world.
- To change the consciousness of someone, somewhere. This would apply to practically everything that is ever done in the name of social change, including on some level all of the examples cited above, but it would be more of a foreground concern in terms of speechifying, putting out leaflets and books and newspapers, and of course many kinds of demonstrations.
There is nothing inherently wrong with action that falls mostly or exclusively into category (3). In fact, most activities even by people who place a lot of emphasis on direct action are, in fact, largely in that category. One difficulty in thinking and making decisions about this kind of action is that human consciousness is a notoriously slippery beast and it can be a pretty tricky thing to predict what kind of effect you will have or try and evaluate what kind of effect you have had. I think a useful tool in trying to figure this out, at least for those of us inclined to look to the progressive sections of the Western academy for insight, is various research and writing on pedagogy, including the academic areas encompassed by the term "critical pedagogy." I'm far from an expert about these things, but I think it's an interesting place to start. The purpose of most of the pedagogy of political actions should be, I think, to facilitate people in their journeys of political consciousness and action in ways that lead towards justice and liberation and empowerment of individuals and communities. Ideally, such pedagogy is reciprocal, mutually supportive, and egalitarian rather than unidirectional, hierarhcical, and authoritarian.
A mass action can be one of the types of direct action described in (1) and (2) above -- the mass presence of people could be engaged in protecting or disrupting a particular institution, for example. But most mass actions I have been a part of, including last Saturday's peace march and rally in Los Angeles, are purely symbollic and therefore seek to influence the course of human events solely through mechanism (3).
As I've expressed before on this site, I often have mixed feelings about symbollic mass actions. I have sometimes experienced them as affirming and empowering and energizing. At other times I have found them empty and ritualistic and unoriginal and pointless. Some of that is idiosyncratic to me, and has to do with my mood on any given day, but certainly not all. By thinking of such actions in terms of pedagogy, it has been possible for me to articulate a little bit more clearly, at least for myself, my attitudes towards them.
The M19 march in LA was much like many other marches I have been to. There was a preamble that consisted of people milling about until the time came to go into the street, a rally, then a march, then another rally. The milling about involved much exchanging and selling of radical (and, in one rare case, progressive Islamic) propaganda. Both rallies involved lengthy lists of speakers and a little bit of music.
Quirky notes: The sound system at the pre-march rally was woefully inadequate. It rained. The hotdog vendors had no veggie dogs so I had to settle for a pre-packaged pastry. I liked that it was in Hollywood because that is the area where we first lived in LA and I miss it; except for going to a movie up there a few weeks after we moved I haven't been back since last August. There is something mesmerizing about Hollywood because it is the cultural focus of such huge amounts of money but the whole place is just so trashy. But at least there are street-level business and people (a few) actually walk places.
But back to pedagogy -- it seems to me that in this event, as in the many others like it which I have been to, there were two main ways in which the opportunity for teaching/learning were explicitly seized.
One was the distribution of literature during the preamble to the march. In some ways, I think this is harmless or even useful. Where else do most people who are not themselves active in radical politics have an opportunity to acquire material produced from radical left perspectives, and even engage in conversation with people who advocate those positions? Of course the quality of the newspapers varies a lot. Some I find interesting and useful, though some are so laden with jargon and so dogmatic that I would imagine they alienate far more people than they educate even before the readers actually reach the content. And while conversational engagement with party members can be interesting -- I have certainly found it so in the past -- from my observation what happens at such events isn't real person-to-person engagement. Last Saturday I saw more than one exchange between a youthful party member who appeared to be pretty privileged and a fellow demonstrator who appeared to be coming from more oppressed spaces, in which the party member was doing far more telling and a lot less listening than I would think would be useful if one was trying to build a meaningfully revolutionary organization. And I realize this is my own baggage, but I do find something mildly embarassing about the desperation of the Marxist sectlets in hawking their papers, because it gives the impression that they are it, as in the only conceivable alternative to the liberal Democrats or the Greens, and that is a depressing thought. At the same time, I don't want to support the tendency that most people would have to dismiss these groups out of hand, because many participate in useful organizing and have valid and interesting analyses on the questions of the day.
The other site for explicit attempts at teaching/learning was the speeches at the rallies. It seems to me that the best use for such speeches would be to reaffirm the central points of unity for the rally, stir up some energy and enthusiasm, and perhaps briefly present some information or a perspective or two that the participants in the march might find challenging or novel. The mode of teaching/learning is still very authoritarian, in that there is one source of wisdom (the podium) and many passive recipients, but using that model in the way I described above would both make the event enjoyable and perhaps provide fodder for discussions amongst marchers, where the real teaching/learning would actually take place. Instead, M19 in LA followed a protocol that seems quite widespread, with all of the sponsoring organizations getting a few minutes at the mike, resulting in most people at the pre-march rally getting bored, frustrated, and wet, and learning little, while most people dispersed at the end of the route long before the last speaker spoke. Which isn't to say there were not individual speakers that were informative and inspiring -- there definitely were -- but whatever boost they provide tends to be smothered in the monotony of the rest.
(An encouraging side note to this dynamic during the pre-march rally last Saturday came from some folk beside me who resisted the authoritarian and boring and soggy method of pedagogy that was being imposed. It was folks from the LA chapter of U.S. Labor Against the War, who seemed to be mostly SEIU members judging by their jackets and buttons, who kept chanting "Start the march now! Start the march now!" in the face of too many speakers, too much rain, and not enough volume.)
All of this probably comes across as being more negative than I really intend. After all, I went to the march knowing that it would probably be like this, and I'm sure I'll go to many more such marches. I'll enjoy some more than others, and I'll probably rant over beer after more than a few of them. But I'll still go. And I'll probably feel after most of them that it was well worth going. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The single most important learning from mass actions like this has nothing to do with the explicit attempts to convey information. It is, rather, the empowerment and affirmation and support and all-around psychological boost that comes from being in the midst of thousands of other people from a great variety of geographical, social, and political corners of the community who are all engaged in struggling towards the same (or at least functionally similar in the short term) goals. As I note regularly here, LA is a very separated and separating city, and being a stay-at-home parent is also relatively socially and politically isolating, so being in a crowd of union activists, Latino punks, liberal Christians, women wearing hijab, Bus Riders Union organizers, Anti-Racist Action militants, Progressive Democrats of America members, Palestinian nationalists, high school peaceniks, octogenarian Quakers, radical cheerleaders, women and men who had engaged in revolutionary struggle in their countries of origin before moving to LA, and all sorts of other people of conscience, was like being immersed in an ocean that washed away at least a few of the encrusted layers of alienation that form a protective but unhealthy callus on the outside of one's psyche in the course of daily life. And this kind of affirmation and empowerment is very much pedagogical -- there is no question that it helps important realities seep into consciousness in a way that just reading about them as dry facts cannot.
And the other factor that will keep me going back to marches like this is keeping in mind exactly what their purpose and function is. Sometimes, an embodied statement of dissent matters a lot. It can become an empty ritual, but sometimes it matters. Given the nature of the occasion and the number of other people in so many other sites across the globe doing the same thing, last Saturday was important. But it is also important to remember that the real work of social change occurs not at marches but between them. And that means that even if there are common features of such marches that make me roll my eyes, that doesn't need to be a cause for negativity overall because marches are just marches, and the rest of the diverse and inspiring ways of changing the world and combatting imperialism keep on going regardless.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
The Opposite of Sense
I don't usually do "I can't believe they did that!" posts, but I just can't help myself this time. Apparently a judge has just ruled in Ohio that the state's ban on gay marriage means that domestic violence charges cannot be filed against unmarried people in that state. As MediaGirl says
I can't believe they did that. Except, unfortunately, I can.
(Via this post on Feministing)
At least the battered unmarried women of Ohio can find solace in the fact that their suffering is for the noble cause of preventing gays from marrying. Here's to black eyes against gays. Here's to broken ribs to support heterosexuality. Here's to rape in the name of straight pride.
I can't believe they did that. Except, unfortunately, I can.
(Via this post on Feministing)
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
A Plug for Radio Free School
I don't get to listen as often as I'd like, but I still like to see what Radio Free School is about each week. I'm posting a plug for the show this week because it includes material that I was involved in producing, from a cd of interviews with political cartoonists that went with an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, called "Tooning In: Political Cartooning in Hamilton and Beyond."
Here's an excerpt from the show's weekly update email:
You can listen to the show in a variety of ways...it's too late to listen to it on the web stream of CFMU, but there are lots of other options:
Here's an excerpt from the show's weekly update email:
interview(s) - Gord Pullar, Madeleine Kay, Roy Carless*, Joe Ollman*, Jack Lefcourt* (* from "Tooning In: Political Cartooning in Hamilton and Beyond"), Evelyna Kay on Calvin and Hobbes.
"The Crazy Show" - by Madeleine and Bronwyn
music - "Bubblegum," Sonic Youth, EVOL
trip - mountsberg wildlife centre recounted by Madeleine and Bronwyn
editing - Beatrice Ekoko, Madeleine and Randy Kay
RADIO FREE SCHOOL an all volunteer show by, for and about
Un-schoolers/Home Learners. Check out our web site. Contact us at grassroots(at)hwcn.org or P.O. Box 19, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton ON, L8S 1C0.
You can listen to the show in a variety of ways...it's too late to listen to it on the web stream of CFMU, but there are lots of other options:
Every Wednesday at 12 noon to 12:30 pm (EST) on CFMU 93.3 FM - Listen live on the web at http://cfmu.mcmaster.ca;
also on:
Free Radio Santa Cruz 96.3 FM
KRBS-lp 107.1 FM in Oroville, California
Free Radio Asheville, 107.5 fm, North Carolina
Fredericton, New Brunswick on CHSR 97.9 FM
CFUR FM 88.7 UNBC/CNC Campus/Community Radio
CFRU 93.3 FM, Guelph Ontario, Canada.
Radio Lava Lamp from Osaka, Japan at
and searchable for download at Radio4All.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Writing Quote
To be a writer is to betray the facts. It's one of the more ruthless things about being a writer, finally, in that to cast an experience into words is in some way to lose the reality of the experience itself, to sacrifice the fact of it to whatever imaginative pattern one's wound requires.
-- Christian Wiman
Monday, March 21, 2005
StopRacialProfiling.CA
"Stopracialprofiling.CA is a Canadian website dedicated to a campaign to stop racial profiling in Canada. It brings together community groups, law makers, lawyers, activists, targets of racial profiling and all affected communities. We urge you to visit the various pages of this site and get involved."
Virginity Pledges Don't Work
This just in: ignorance and shame don't lead to better decision-making. According to conservative Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, "Virginity pledges don't reduce rates of STDs, study finds." This article reports on a study done by researchers at Yale and Columbia, universities in the United States. Youth who take virginity pledges, a fad being pushed in the abstinence-only version of sex miseducation favoured by the right, engage in sexual activity later, have fewer partners, and marry earlier, but they get STDs at the same rate as other youth, they are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex, and are more likely to engage in sex without using condoms. They are also less likely to seek treatment for STDs. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. (Via this post at Feministing)
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Some Reading
I've kind of been storing up some good stuff, so this might turn out to be rather a long list.
- An LA-based political electronic music project called Ultra-red. (Via Brown Rab Girl Fish)
- There has been discussion in the US mainstream media about the lack of women writing op-ed pieces in major newspapers, which parallels a recent spate of posts about the "lack" of women writing political blogs. Here's a summary look at those things by Katha Pollitt at The Nation. (Via Feministing)
- An online photographic exhibit of the African American Holocaust, lest we forget. (Via an email from a wonderful activist in Hamilton, my former city)
- An interview with Tariq Ali on the situation in Iraq. I would've liked a bit more opportunity for discussion of detail and nuance, but I suppose the interview format doesn't lend itself to that.
- A dose of radical political economy from John Bellamy Foster. (Via Rabble.CA)
- A really great post from activistgradgal about her own experiences as part of a grad student union, and linking that to her working-class family's history of experience with the labour movement. (Via Feminist Blogs)
- An exhibit about the history of Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia. (Via Marian's Blog)
- The site of Naomi Aldort, "a parenting counselor, internationally published writer, and public speaker." It includes a page with some articles by Aldort. I was particularly struck by the essay "Getting Out of the Way." Overall, I'm not sure yet how much I agree and how much I differ with what she says, but much of it seems to make sense. Words to reflect on: "Parental expectations may be the greatest obstacle to a child's development and a prime cause of difficulties." (Via my friends at Radio Free School)
- An article by long-time Black labour activist James Warren on Black Commentator. He writes:
The majority of humanity will free themselves or they will never be free. The prize is the ranks mobilized. Our most prized possession is the ordinary working class men and women waking up as if from a deep sleep, radicalizing and demanding a better life. There is no force on the face of the earth capable of stopping an oppressed people determined to be free if they have a leadership worthy of their fighting capacity. I think we are in the early stages of such an awaking today, not only amongst Blacks but working people as a whole.
- A good, nuanced post from Rahul Mahajan on the situation in Lebanon.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Leafletting With L
I have been attending my friendly neighbourhood peace and justice vigil since last August or September, but the vigil takes place in a location with almost no pedestrian traffic so it does not involve distributing leaflets or directly engaging the passing public in conversation. As I've noted before, the vast majority of the built form in greater Los Angeles does not lend itself to this sort of activity. And I miss it. Even if the activity which the leafletting is promoting is of marginal political utility, the leafletting itself is a powerful political tool and a chance to talk and listen to regular folk about the issues of the day, something many North American social movements don't do enough of.
This week marks the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion and recolonization of Iraq. It also marks the second anniversary of the vigil I've been attending. In order to commemorate these things, the vigil regulars are trying to get a larger crowd than usual for a bit of a celebration on the corner. As well, we are trying to kick off a petition drive to get our Governator to demand that the California National Guard units be withdrawn, as apparently the governors of Montana and Idaho have already done (not that the federal government is under any obligation to so much as open the envelope that the demands are sent in, but it's still symbolically useful). There's some talk of seeking a city council resolution. The details of where all of this might go are unclear to me at this time. But, anyway, the point is that this sparked some activity beyond the usual weekly vigil, in order to try and build things up a bit for tomorrow night: some leafletting.
While this was happy news for me, it meant having to wrestle with a couple of dilemmas. First of all, I'm not particularly comfortable doing this kind of thing solo. Most of the time it's fine, but in my experience in handing out leaflets in downtown Hamilton on a variety of issues over a number of years, once in a while you will run into someone who threatens violence or some other unsavoury consequence. I, or friends/allies doing what I would've been doing had I been there that day, have had hassles or threats of violence from cops, from angry vets, and from skinheads. Taking controversial stands, even in the politest possible way, is going to provoke intense reactions sooner or later, so it just seems to me to make sense to leaflet with a buddy. However, when I assumed that this would be the practice here and asked at the meeting last week when people wanted to leaflet, the uncomprehending, "Well, whenever you want to," kind of threw me. I followed up over email, and I still have the sense that this concern on my part is seen as a little peculiar.
In any event, the times at which others would be leafletting did not include evenings, when I would be able to go on my own, and that raised the other challenge I had to deal with. I ended up deciding just to plunge in and see how L might react to tagging along. I wasn't sure how long his patience would last, and I was pleasantly surprised. He spent 35 minutes sitting in his stroller watching the world go by as I chatted and passed out pieces of paper. It was quite encouraging, and indicated I might actually be able to do this regularly, if for shorter periods than I might have done previously.
Beyond L's amiability, I enjoyed the chance to get out there. I felt kind of rusty; I'd forgotten how you have to be able to package the information verbally in a variety of different ways, on the fly, depending on the level of interest expressed by the person with whom you are engaging. I had no particularly interesting conversations other than with the woman that I was out there with, but that was more than enough to make it fun. People on balance seemed to be supportive.
The only other thing of note was the location: in the parking lot of a grocery store, just outside their doors, with permission of the store. I've been kicked out of a grocery store parking lot or two in my time for handing out political material, so I thought it was pretty cool that we were actually allowed to be there.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether there is more leafletting to come, but I hope so. I am sure that I'm going to stick to my guns about not engaging in political action alone. I think part of the reason why that is not part of the way the local group does things is the way that people are so geographically separated from one another in LA -- you just don't find many skinheads at an upscale organic grocery store on the west side, and apparently middle-class white emotional repression (or something) is considered sufficient to keep any rage at the peaceniks bottled up while in such a public place. But it still feels like something I don't want to be doing.
This week marks the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion and recolonization of Iraq. It also marks the second anniversary of the vigil I've been attending. In order to commemorate these things, the vigil regulars are trying to get a larger crowd than usual for a bit of a celebration on the corner. As well, we are trying to kick off a petition drive to get our Governator to demand that the California National Guard units be withdrawn, as apparently the governors of Montana and Idaho have already done (not that the federal government is under any obligation to so much as open the envelope that the demands are sent in, but it's still symbolically useful). There's some talk of seeking a city council resolution. The details of where all of this might go are unclear to me at this time. But, anyway, the point is that this sparked some activity beyond the usual weekly vigil, in order to try and build things up a bit for tomorrow night: some leafletting.
While this was happy news for me, it meant having to wrestle with a couple of dilemmas. First of all, I'm not particularly comfortable doing this kind of thing solo. Most of the time it's fine, but in my experience in handing out leaflets in downtown Hamilton on a variety of issues over a number of years, once in a while you will run into someone who threatens violence or some other unsavoury consequence. I, or friends/allies doing what I would've been doing had I been there that day, have had hassles or threats of violence from cops, from angry vets, and from skinheads. Taking controversial stands, even in the politest possible way, is going to provoke intense reactions sooner or later, so it just seems to me to make sense to leaflet with a buddy. However, when I assumed that this would be the practice here and asked at the meeting last week when people wanted to leaflet, the uncomprehending, "Well, whenever you want to," kind of threw me. I followed up over email, and I still have the sense that this concern on my part is seen as a little peculiar.
In any event, the times at which others would be leafletting did not include evenings, when I would be able to go on my own, and that raised the other challenge I had to deal with. I ended up deciding just to plunge in and see how L might react to tagging along. I wasn't sure how long his patience would last, and I was pleasantly surprised. He spent 35 minutes sitting in his stroller watching the world go by as I chatted and passed out pieces of paper. It was quite encouraging, and indicated I might actually be able to do this regularly, if for shorter periods than I might have done previously.
Beyond L's amiability, I enjoyed the chance to get out there. I felt kind of rusty; I'd forgotten how you have to be able to package the information verbally in a variety of different ways, on the fly, depending on the level of interest expressed by the person with whom you are engaging. I had no particularly interesting conversations other than with the woman that I was out there with, but that was more than enough to make it fun. People on balance seemed to be supportive.
The only other thing of note was the location: in the parking lot of a grocery store, just outside their doors, with permission of the store. I've been kicked out of a grocery store parking lot or two in my time for handing out political material, so I thought it was pretty cool that we were actually allowed to be there.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether there is more leafletting to come, but I hope so. I am sure that I'm going to stick to my guns about not engaging in political action alone. I think part of the reason why that is not part of the way the local group does things is the way that people are so geographically separated from one another in LA -- you just don't find many skinheads at an upscale organic grocery store on the west side, and apparently middle-class white emotional repression (or something) is considered sufficient to keep any rage at the peaceniks bottled up while in such a public place. But it still feels like something I don't want to be doing.
Review: Prophecy and Protest
One of the down sides of trying to write the book I'm trying to write under my present circumstances is that I feel I should be reading far, far, far more material on the history of social movements in Canada than I will ever have time to read. The up side of that down side is that I get to read a lot of really cool material on the history of Canadian social movements.
Prophecy and Protest: Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: Gage Educational Publishing Limited, 1975) is a work I have just had the pleasure of finishing. It is a thirty year-old collection of essays and book excerpts on a variety of movements that impacted Canada, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century.
I had hoped I would have more time to reflect when writing this little review, because there were some important themes that were, if not entirely new to me, then rediscovered in clear enough form to really make me take notice. For example, I was very much struck by how the social gospel movement in the early 20th century is really the forebearer of populist movements of both right and left since that time in white, English-speaking Canada. At its peak that movement combined an assertive infusion of progressive, socially-minded, even leftist thought into Canadian Christian traditions, while not abandoning an emphasis on personal uprightness and righteousness. The most successful wings of the social gospel at the time were the temperance movement and the women's suffrage movement. Some of those who came out of this tradition were prominent in pacifist and socialist causes, but much of the social gospel movement was still very conservative. A few of the oldest white Canadian-born Christian participants in my project were politicized after the social gospel movement had ebbed but evidently by co-religionists who had been drawn in when it was at its peak. Through these descendents of the social gospel we got the middle-class side of the origins of the CCF and the NDP. Yet the emphasis on personal responsibility, sobriety, conservative values -- not to mention the racism often embedded in the rhetoric such things as the women's suffrage movement, and the championing of Christianity above all other faiths -- are very much predecessors of the false populist movement harnessed in the renewal of social conservatism in Canada since the 1980s.
Anyway. What else did I learn? I learned that the Ku Klux Klan was quite tightly tied to the Conservative Party, at least in Saskatchewan. I learned that in one legendary poll taken in 1944, never to be repeated, a socialist party was the most popular party nationally in Canada. I learned that in the early 20th century Toronto and possibly other cities had official religious institutions with names like "XYZ Socialist Church" and "ABC Labour Church." I relearned that when non-activist academics write about social movements, even when the ways they talk about them do make some sense intellectually, it can be unintentionally hilarious. I learned more about the social credit movement and still find its economic and political philosophy, at heart, incomprehensible. I learned a bit about the history of electoral and movement politics in Quebec in the first half of the century.
The award for most ridiculous statement of the book goes to the editors, who wrote: "While one could not claim that the current movement among Canada's native peoples has an historical tradition as strong as Quebec or English-Canadian nationalism, it nevertheless does have historical roots that have provided an important foundation for the present-day struggle." And if it isn't obvious to you why that is ridiculous then read it again, think about it, and if necessary go away and read some writings by Aboriginal activists.
[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Prophecy and Protest: Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: Gage Educational Publishing Limited, 1975) is a work I have just had the pleasure of finishing. It is a thirty year-old collection of essays and book excerpts on a variety of movements that impacted Canada, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century.
I had hoped I would have more time to reflect when writing this little review, because there were some important themes that were, if not entirely new to me, then rediscovered in clear enough form to really make me take notice. For example, I was very much struck by how the social gospel movement in the early 20th century is really the forebearer of populist movements of both right and left since that time in white, English-speaking Canada. At its peak that movement combined an assertive infusion of progressive, socially-minded, even leftist thought into Canadian Christian traditions, while not abandoning an emphasis on personal uprightness and righteousness. The most successful wings of the social gospel at the time were the temperance movement and the women's suffrage movement. Some of those who came out of this tradition were prominent in pacifist and socialist causes, but much of the social gospel movement was still very conservative. A few of the oldest white Canadian-born Christian participants in my project were politicized after the social gospel movement had ebbed but evidently by co-religionists who had been drawn in when it was at its peak. Through these descendents of the social gospel we got the middle-class side of the origins of the CCF and the NDP. Yet the emphasis on personal responsibility, sobriety, conservative values -- not to mention the racism often embedded in the rhetoric such things as the women's suffrage movement, and the championing of Christianity above all other faiths -- are very much predecessors of the false populist movement harnessed in the renewal of social conservatism in Canada since the 1980s.
Anyway. What else did I learn? I learned that the Ku Klux Klan was quite tightly tied to the Conservative Party, at least in Saskatchewan. I learned that in one legendary poll taken in 1944, never to be repeated, a socialist party was the most popular party nationally in Canada. I learned that in the early 20th century Toronto and possibly other cities had official religious institutions with names like "XYZ Socialist Church" and "ABC Labour Church." I relearned that when non-activist academics write about social movements, even when the ways they talk about them do make some sense intellectually, it can be unintentionally hilarious. I learned more about the social credit movement and still find its economic and political philosophy, at heart, incomprehensible. I learned a bit about the history of electoral and movement politics in Quebec in the first half of the century.
The award for most ridiculous statement of the book goes to the editors, who wrote: "While one could not claim that the current movement among Canada's native peoples has an historical tradition as strong as Quebec or English-Canadian nationalism, it nevertheless does have historical roots that have provided an important foundation for the present-day struggle." And if it isn't obvious to you why that is ridiculous then read it again, think about it, and if necessary go away and read some writings by Aboriginal activists.
[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Monday, March 14, 2005
Inviting Questions
I had an experience yesterday that made me think about the subversive impact of asking certain kinds of questions. I'm not talking about the vague bumper-sticker admonition to "Question Authority!" but rather a very specific and deliberate kind of asking for the opinions of others.
The experience involved a telephone conversation with one of the long-time Canadian activists who participated in my social movement history project (one who also now happens to be living and active in the United States). We know each other not just from that, however, but also because we both contributed to a particular social change project a few years ago and had the chance to meet a few times that way, so after our business related to my project was completed we chatted for awhile. This conversation included quite a bit of political talk, of course. Two of the topics that came up were the threat of the SEIU to secede from the AFL-CIO and the related debate over how to transform the union movement, and also some discussion of Philippino politics and the fairly public conflict between the Communist Party and some non-CP leftists. The person to whom I was talking was long active in the anti-dictatorship struggles in the Philippines before he came to North America as a refugee and is currently a staffer with SEIU, so on both of those counts he knows way more than I do.
The subversive thing, the thing which took me by surprise and disconcerted me, was the he asked my opinion on both of those issues. I'm usually fairly able to come up with things to say on most issues, including those which I know a lot about and those on which I am more of a novice, but I found myself more tongue-tied and stuttery than I am accustomed to when responding to both of these questions, and I wasn't quite sure why. And in reflecting on our past association, I realized I'd had similar experiences with this particular individual before.
After some thought I now realize that I had some trouble handling those quesitons, or at least handling them as smoothly as I would've liked, because it is so rare, even in progressive political and social movement spaces, for people with more experience/expertise/authority in a given area to ask people with less of each of those things for their opinion, especially in a way that demonstrates a genuine interest in the answer. I've had lots of conversations in the last ten years with activists with clearly greater experience/expertise/authority than me with respect to some issue or movement or controversy -- some in my former capacity as a journalist, some as a researcher, but most (including yesterday's call) just as a fellow activist because I want to learn from their experience and knowledge. In the majority, even if the conversation as a whole included communication in both directions, the segment relating to their particular experience/expertise/authority tended to involve them talking and me listening. Beyond that, this tendency to leave unchallenged the unidirectional flow of communication along the line from greater to lesser experience/expertise/authority (or perceived experience/expertise/authority) is also a boy thing -- there are women who do it too, but on the whole they are more likely to encourage bidirectional communication. And when the roles have been reversed, though I can call to mind occasions when I haven't fallen into that pattern, I probably have to admit that there are more (particularly when beer is being consumed) that I have.
The person with whom I was talking yesterday is a very skilled and experienced practitioner of popular education. I suspect his deliberate invitation for me to share my opinion in areas which he knows orders of magnitude more about is related to the philosophies and practices in that tradition. It is tied to the radical notion that people have a right to an opinion based on being people, not based on being experts. Experience and expertise still matter, of course, but we need to work to change our socialized (though often not terribly conscious) tendency (especially among men) to link them to who is presumed to have a right to say what they think and who is more easily allowed to take up conversational space in both formal meetings and informal conversations. How many people have we driven away from our movements by falling into this pattern and making them feel ignorant and excluded and unwelcome?
There are never magic answers, but judicious asking of, "What do you think?", genuinely meant, even when you have a clear advantage of experience and expertise, is one of many steps we need to take in order to create equitable relationships, which are the building block of equitable groups, which we need in order to struggle for just and liberatory societies.
The experience involved a telephone conversation with one of the long-time Canadian activists who participated in my social movement history project (one who also now happens to be living and active in the United States). We know each other not just from that, however, but also because we both contributed to a particular social change project a few years ago and had the chance to meet a few times that way, so after our business related to my project was completed we chatted for awhile. This conversation included quite a bit of political talk, of course. Two of the topics that came up were the threat of the SEIU to secede from the AFL-CIO and the related debate over how to transform the union movement, and also some discussion of Philippino politics and the fairly public conflict between the Communist Party and some non-CP leftists. The person to whom I was talking was long active in the anti-dictatorship struggles in the Philippines before he came to North America as a refugee and is currently a staffer with SEIU, so on both of those counts he knows way more than I do.
The subversive thing, the thing which took me by surprise and disconcerted me, was the he asked my opinion on both of those issues. I'm usually fairly able to come up with things to say on most issues, including those which I know a lot about and those on which I am more of a novice, but I found myself more tongue-tied and stuttery than I am accustomed to when responding to both of these questions, and I wasn't quite sure why. And in reflecting on our past association, I realized I'd had similar experiences with this particular individual before.
After some thought I now realize that I had some trouble handling those quesitons, or at least handling them as smoothly as I would've liked, because it is so rare, even in progressive political and social movement spaces, for people with more experience/expertise/authority in a given area to ask people with less of each of those things for their opinion, especially in a way that demonstrates a genuine interest in the answer. I've had lots of conversations in the last ten years with activists with clearly greater experience/expertise/authority than me with respect to some issue or movement or controversy -- some in my former capacity as a journalist, some as a researcher, but most (including yesterday's call) just as a fellow activist because I want to learn from their experience and knowledge. In the majority, even if the conversation as a whole included communication in both directions, the segment relating to their particular experience/expertise/authority tended to involve them talking and me listening. Beyond that, this tendency to leave unchallenged the unidirectional flow of communication along the line from greater to lesser experience/expertise/authority (or perceived experience/expertise/authority) is also a boy thing -- there are women who do it too, but on the whole they are more likely to encourage bidirectional communication. And when the roles have been reversed, though I can call to mind occasions when I haven't fallen into that pattern, I probably have to admit that there are more (particularly when beer is being consumed) that I have.
The person with whom I was talking yesterday is a very skilled and experienced practitioner of popular education. I suspect his deliberate invitation for me to share my opinion in areas which he knows orders of magnitude more about is related to the philosophies and practices in that tradition. It is tied to the radical notion that people have a right to an opinion based on being people, not based on being experts. Experience and expertise still matter, of course, but we need to work to change our socialized (though often not terribly conscious) tendency (especially among men) to link them to who is presumed to have a right to say what they think and who is more easily allowed to take up conversational space in both formal meetings and informal conversations. How many people have we driven away from our movements by falling into this pattern and making them feel ignorant and excluded and unwelcome?
There are never magic answers, but judicious asking of, "What do you think?", genuinely meant, even when you have a clear advantage of experience and expertise, is one of many steps we need to take in order to create equitable relationships, which are the building block of equitable groups, which we need in order to struggle for just and liberatory societies.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Dissing Dissent
The other day, via a post on Rox Populi, I came across this article from Dissent, a journal characterized as "centrist liberal-left" by Paul Street in his essay looking at the way some liberal-left sorts have gone out of their way to lie about the positions of more left leaning sorts since 9/11. I've only ever occasionally thumbed through Dissent, and normally wouldn't have had occasion to respond to things published therein, but I was already in an irritated state of mind when I read the article linked above and the article annoyed me further -- enough, in fact, for me to take the time to respond to it in detail.
The title of the article is "Why Don't They Listen to Us? Speaking to the Working Class" and her concluding paragraphs are:
On the surface, while the title sets off a few warning alarms in my mind, the conclusions seem reasonable enough. "We" need to build counter-institutions in the media realm, "we" need to be critical of "our" own ways of talking about issues, and "we" need to listen. All good.
But.
The article begins as follows:
In other words, it starts off defining the problem purely in terms of electoral politics and implicitly identifying the Democratic Party as "we." This does not treat social movements as independent entities, and it links both author and reader in an uncritical way to a party that may sometimes present candidates worth supporting on tactical and strategic grounds, but which has been complicit in empire abroad and in inequality at home in massive ways. Submerging onesself in such a "we" with out the slightest caveat, proviso, or objection -- well, it says something about where the article is coming from and where it is going.
The preamble continues:
Excuse me? Inflexibility and deception are presented as the main reasons to be angry at the right. Sure, those are bad things. But how about lots of death and human suffering and destruction of the natural world? Or does dwelling on those things make the Dems only incrementally better record at home and equally bad recrod abroad make bringing that up too rhetorically dangerous?
She continues:
Fair enough. That's a good question. She begins the answer by a nod towards the structural advantages of right-wing forces, but decides (and I agree this is a worthwhile thing to do) to focus on problems internal to "us".
As I've explored before on this site "we" is a problematic term in liberal/progresive/left/social movement politics, and to her credit she realizes this:
Okay. Good question.
Lousy answer.
She completely accepts, without critical engagement, that the heart of "we" is urban, middle-class liberals. In some ways, this makes sense as they disproportionately control the institutions which she is concerned with (which I assume to be the Democratic Party, the explicitly para-Democratic Party organizations, and the major issue-based organizations affiliated with or at least kind of associated with social movements in the U.S.). But there is no effort to question why this understanding of "we" is useful, and no effort in trying to figure out if maybe it is unfair and oppressive.
The failure to give a better answer to the question above is at the heart of the problems with this article. Maybe, just maybe, it is the fact that urban, middle-class liberals control all of these institutions that is the problem. Maybe, just maybe, urban, middle-class liberal complicity or active collaboration in the silencing of non-right-wing voices outside of this identity over decades has contributed to the way things are. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the author finds it so easy to put urban, middle-class liberals at the heart of hope for a humane, sane, and progressive future in this country is a symptom of what is wrong.
African American communities are consistently the most progressive polities in the country, and other working-class communities of colour (excepting a few clusters of right-wing Latino/a exile groups) are still significantly more so than white folks. Even if you accept voting Democrat as an indicator of progressiveness, and even if you just look at income as a proxy for class, the poorest folk in America in the last election were still more likely to vote Democratic than Republican for president.
Why on earth is it acceptable to construct the core of "we" as urban, middle-class liberals? (A category that it would also be fair to say, by the way, would be white-dominated, with token people of colour.) Why is it considered to be so natural and or inevitable and or appropriate for this group to have the institutional and, by extension, discourse-controlling dominance that they have in liberal and progressive contexts at the moment?
The article goes on to ask:
And the article goes through some examples.
First the standard immoral, elite liberal contextualization of Vietnam. It says that counter-cultural movements of the '60s and '70s were
The millions of dead in Southeast Asia don't merit a mention, apparently; the main governmental offenses are again "dissimulation" and "outright deception" rather than mass slaughter of civilians; and for some reason the fact that "we couldn't win" is somehow relevant to the characterization of Vietnam as a bad thing. The deaths of millions would've been better if the U.S. had won?
The article then attributes the fertile ground which the right has tilled to reaction to "disconcerting and somewhat alarming" changes to various cultural practices, and to the social place of women, queer people, and people of colour. I think there is some truth to this, and it is probably correct that we don't always do as good a job as we could at engaging with the angst thus generated, but the article leaves out other important factors, like the increased economic vulnerability because of changes in the economy since the 1970s, the erosion of the manufacturing base, and the rush towards neoliberal economics. That kind of insecurity has a tendency to make people lash out against feared "others" as well, but it isn't mentioned; perhaps that's because of the inability of liberals to offer sound alternatives, and the fact that they have often been complicit in such changes.
So the diagnosis of the internal-to-"us" portion of the problem is politically correct enforcement of liberalism within urban, middle-class environments. But the article is curiously one-sided in describing that phenomenon. Every single example that follows is about the failure of the gatekeepers in liberal and progressive institutions to lend an ear to or speak in defense of points of view she links with mainstream moderation rather than politically correct excess. There is not one word of recognition that truly listening to the experiences of people outside of the urban, middle-class liberal identity might lead to policy proposals and political agendas that are not more centrist but, rather, more radical. The article does not devote one word to problematizing why it is these gatekeepers that need to be doing the listening, i.e. why power is concentrated in their hands. Nor does it talk about what might be gained from admitting left voices engaged in struggles on the ground to these elite liberal circles.
For example:
This example is framed around the author's silencing, or attempted silencing, by other academics, without recognizing that this can happen because the realities of working-class communities of colour do not already shape in concrete, embodied ways the politics and practices of supposedly progressive academic spaces. And the only words funneled through the author into this progressive space that she worries about being silenced or dismissed are those that would tend to push liberalism towards the centre. But you would also, in such circumstances, encounter words and recommendations from interview participants that pushed in a much more radical and left direction than the liberal policy establishment would be interested in going. Can anyone doubt that a criticism of bilingual education by its participants, for example, could easily be used to construct a more radical agenda than the status quo around education, language, and whatever else was related?
Another example from later in the essay:
There are several things I could say about this, including what seems to be a dismissal of the racism embedded in the media construction and policy response to the urban crime issue in the '80s by the sly device of acknowledging it and moving on rather than suggesting how white fears of crime and people of colour experiences of police harassment could both be accommodated in a progressive policy approach.
But more importantly: the article posits two possible poles for responding to this issue. There is the liberal pole, which she says didn't take white working-class fears seriously enough, and the conservative pole, which took advantage of the hype and hysteria and racism to go beyond what might be a sensible, measured response. But it precisely that sensible, measured response somewhere between the two poles that she seems to be calling for. No mention is made of a response with a powerful leftist component: heavy state intervention in the economy to create jobs for working-class people of all racial groups, sharp redistribution of wealth downward, and generously funded training programs and support programs for people with addictions. (There might be some need for changes in policing along with that, because those solutions are more medium to long term.)
If you rule leftist answers out a priori, as right-wing demonizing has taught liberals in the U.S. to do for decades (even where they weren't so inclined already), then you have a hard time presenting alternatives to working-class people that don't come across as liberal preaching or conservative fatalism.
I have several more examples marked out in pen, but I'm getting tired and this post is excessively long so I'll restrict myself to one.
"Illegitimacy"? Are you calling my neice "illegitimate"? Is there something "illegitimate" about her because the psychologically broken man who donated his sperm to create her took off two weeks after she was born? I'm sure it can't be intended that she is less "illegitimate" because she is white rather than a member of the African American communities whose sexual and relationship choices so concern white America. Is it "illegitimate" that my sister was been able to exist, and has been able to raise her daughter, because of welfare? Should we make it harder for her to do that?
Give me a break. Yet again, she's arguing for liberals to pay more attention to those centrists and right-wing folks who wanted to reform welfare, and not a word about listening to anti-poverty groups led by people on welfare. While a few of the things she suggests would be on the wish lists of such groups, my experience of working with such groups in Canada leads me to believe that the "unintended consequences" harped on by the right and seemingly pushed as worthy of attention by this author would not have been high on their priority list. Truly listening to such groups and advocating their agenda in strong terms would certainly not decrease political polarization in the United States.
This is a very long and meandering post, and I apologize for that. It is all designed to wander around the point that this article, and others like it, espouse "listening" but frame it in a way that only allows such listening to have an impact in one particular direction -- it's hard to tell if the article just assumes that only moderating content will be heard, or if it assumes that content that would point in more radical directions can't lead to anything practical so should be listened to, recorded, and ignored. It completely misses the point that there are lots of people with a progressive vision who are not urban, middle-class liberals. A good place to start listening would be to them. And then a good thing to do would be to turn over the resources that organizations currently dominated by urban, middle-class liberals possess to activists who are based in working-class communities, both white and of colour, who are active in feminist and anti-racist and worker and queer struggles.
As the Dissent article notes, the biggest barrier to progressive social change is the power of the right in this country. I'm not forgetting that. But I'm following its lead and looking at issues that are internal to "us." If urban, middle-class liberals wish to create changes that will result in justice and liberation, middle-class preaching won't work. Contrary to what this article advises, middle-class listening isn't even enough. There needs to be real sharing of power and resources.
In some ways, the willingness of middle-class progressives such as the one who wrote this article to recognize that they are not and should not pretend to be working-class, and pose questions about how "we" should relate to "them", is a positive thing because it recognizes on some level the importance of privilege and oppression in shaping standpoint. Except it doesn't, really; even the idea that middle-class liberals should "listen" ends up being tacit support for them retaining the control required to translate "listening" into action, rather than encouraging the acceptance of leadership from already active progressive and leftist working-class women and men, of colour and white.
The title of the article is "Why Don't They Listen to Us? Speaking to the Working Class" and her concluding paragraphs are:
There's much to do in the coming years to build a set of institutions that can begin to compete with the highly organized, enormously well-funded network of newspapers, periodicals, think tanks, publishing houses, and television and radio stations the right already has in place. But no institutions will save us until we find the way to reframe the debate so that it's on our terms, not theirs. That means opening up discussion among ourselves to debate and develop positions and strategies that, while honoring our own beliefs and values, enable us to build bridges across which we can speak to those who now see us as an alien other.
It's not enough to speak in another voice, however. We must learn to listen as well, to develop a third ear so that we can hear beneath their rage to the anguish it's covering up. Only then will we find our way into the hearts and minds of those Americans who have been seduced and exploited by the radical right into "strangling their own life chances." Only then will we be able to stop asking, "Why don't they listen to us?"
On the surface, while the title sets off a few warning alarms in my mind, the conclusions seem reasonable enough. "We" need to build counter-institutions in the media realm, "we" need to be critical of "our" own ways of talking about issues, and "we" need to listen. All good.
But.
The article begins as follows:
While the intensity of political polarization that grips the nation today is relatively new, America has been drifting to the right for decades. Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, only three Democrats have occupied the White House, and of those, Bill Clinton alone survived for more than a single term. Although poll data show that most voters think the Democrats are better on such central issues as the economy, jobs, health care, and education, they continue to return Republicans to power. Republicans now occupy the governors' mansions in twenty-eight states and own both the House and Senate, where leadership has been increasingly drawn from the radical right.
With the untimely death of Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, we lost the most consistently progressive voice in either house of the United States Congress. If our ideas and our politics have been in the service of those less advantaged, as we believe so passionately, why have we had such a hard time making ourselves heard in ways that count? How did our voice-the voice of economic opportunity, the voice that speaks of justice in education, jobs, health care, and taxation-find so little resonance with the very Americans for whom we claim to speak?
In other words, it starts off defining the problem purely in terms of electoral politics and implicitly identifying the Democratic Party as "we." This does not treat social movements as independent entities, and it links both author and reader in an uncritical way to a party that may sometimes present candidates worth supporting on tactical and strategic grounds, but which has been complicit in empire abroad and in inequality at home in massive ways. Submerging onesself in such a "we" with out the slightest caveat, proviso, or objection -- well, it says something about where the article is coming from and where it is going.
The preamble continues:
Let me be clear: I don't take a backseat to anyone in my anger at the right, especially the radical religious right and its neocon partners. Their ideological inflexibility, the way they manipulate the facts to fit their preconceptions and sell their falsehoods to the American public, is both outrageous and frightening.
Excuse me? Inflexibility and deception are presented as the main reasons to be angry at the right. Sure, those are bad things. But how about lots of death and human suffering and destruction of the natural world? Or does dwelling on those things make the Dems only incrementally better record at home and equally bad recrod abroad make bringing that up too rhetorically dangerous?
She continues:
[M]y concern here is to examine the political behavior of the millions of other Americans-those working-class and lower-middle-class women and men who are not driven by ideological rigor, who are not convinced that they speak the word of God, yet who listen appreciatively to the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Bill O'Reillys as they rail against us as "liberal elites" who have lost touch with the people
Fair enough. That's a good question. She begins the answer by a nod towards the structural advantages of right-wing forces, but decides (and I agree this is a worthwhile thing to do) to focus on problems internal to "us".
As I've explored before on this site "we" is a problematic term in liberal/progresive/left/social movement politics, and to her credit she realizes this:
But, one might ask, who is the "we" of whom I speak? It's a legitimate question, one I've asked myself as well, since there is no easily identifiable left, no progressive group that can claim to speak for the variety of people and positions that lay title to the left side of the political spectrum, no "we" that speaks with the kind of authoritative and unified voice we hear from the conservative right. Not since the heyday of the American Communist Party, whose adherents spoke with the kind of on-message discipline we now see among right-wing conservatives, has any group or organization on the left been able to enforce that kind of control. Even the antiwar movement, the closest thing we have to a movement capable of mobilizing tens of thousands of people to action, is an amalgam of individuals and groups whose politics range from liberal Democrats to the various shades of the fractious left.
Okay. Good question.
Nevertheless, there is a more or less unified sensibility among these people and groups who form the "we" I refer to. They are dominantly well-educated urban folk who find common ground on political issues-most important, on the war in Iraq-but also on economic and social policy issues such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, poverty, gun control, civil liberties, and civil rights, as well as on the lifestyle and cultural issues that have roiled American politics so deeply: abortion, gay rights, the role of religion in public life, divorce, family values, stem cell research, the very meaning of life itself, to name a few. And while the academy may not be the hotbed of left politics the right portrays it to be, liberal and progressive social scientists from universities around the country have increasingly sought to become public intellectuals, part of the march of pundits across our television screens and the pages of our daily newspapers, in the service of defending against the right's onslaught in the culture wars.
Lousy answer.
She completely accepts, without critical engagement, that the heart of "we" is urban, middle-class liberals. In some ways, this makes sense as they disproportionately control the institutions which she is concerned with (which I assume to be the Democratic Party, the explicitly para-Democratic Party organizations, and the major issue-based organizations affiliated with or at least kind of associated with social movements in the U.S.). But there is no effort to question why this understanding of "we" is useful, and no effort in trying to figure out if maybe it is unfair and oppressive.
The failure to give a better answer to the question above is at the heart of the problems with this article. Maybe, just maybe, it is the fact that urban, middle-class liberals control all of these institutions that is the problem. Maybe, just maybe, urban, middle-class liberal complicity or active collaboration in the silencing of non-right-wing voices outside of this identity over decades has contributed to the way things are. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the author finds it so easy to put urban, middle-class liberals at the heart of hope for a humane, sane, and progressive future in this country is a symptom of what is wrong.
African American communities are consistently the most progressive polities in the country, and other working-class communities of colour (excepting a few clusters of right-wing Latino/a exile groups) are still significantly more so than white folks. Even if you accept voting Democrat as an indicator of progressiveness, and even if you just look at income as a proxy for class, the poorest folk in America in the last election were still more likely to vote Democratic than Republican for president.
Why on earth is it acceptable to construct the core of "we" as urban, middle-class liberals? (A category that it would also be fair to say, by the way, would be white-dominated, with token people of colour.) Why is it considered to be so natural and or inevitable and or appropriate for this group to have the institutional and, by extension, discourse-controlling dominance that they have in liberal and progressive contexts at the moment?
The article goes on to ask:
Yet our voices rarely rise above a whisper in the public consciousness. Why have we had such a hard time making ourselves heard?
And the article goes through some examples.
First the standard immoral, elite liberal contextualization of Vietnam. It says that counter-cultural movements of the '60s and '70s were
leavened, if not sparked, by massive disillusionment with a government that, using tactics ranging from dissimulation to outright deception, escalated the war in Vietnam, which, even with the sacrifice of nearly sixty thousand American lives, we couldn't win.
The millions of dead in Southeast Asia don't merit a mention, apparently; the main governmental offenses are again "dissimulation" and "outright deception" rather than mass slaughter of civilians; and for some reason the fact that "we couldn't win" is somehow relevant to the characterization of Vietnam as a bad thing. The deaths of millions would've been better if the U.S. had won?
The article then attributes the fertile ground which the right has tilled to reaction to "disconcerting and somewhat alarming" changes to various cultural practices, and to the social place of women, queer people, and people of colour. I think there is some truth to this, and it is probably correct that we don't always do as good a job as we could at engaging with the angst thus generated, but the article leaves out other important factors, like the increased economic vulnerability because of changes in the economy since the 1970s, the erosion of the manufacturing base, and the rush towards neoliberal economics. That kind of insecurity has a tendency to make people lash out against feared "others" as well, but it isn't mentioned; perhaps that's because of the inability of liberals to offer sound alternatives, and the fact that they have often been complicit in such changes.
I want to talk about us, about how we promulgated and enforced a politically correct line on a series of key social-cultural issues that played into right-wing charges that we were out of touch and helped to consolidate our virtual isolation from America's lower-middle and working class.
So the diagnosis of the internal-to-"us" portion of the problem is politically correct enforcement of liberalism within urban, middle-class environments. But the article is curiously one-sided in describing that phenomenon. Every single example that follows is about the failure of the gatekeepers in liberal and progressive institutions to lend an ear to or speak in defense of points of view she links with mainstream moderation rather than politically correct excess. There is not one word of recognition that truly listening to the experiences of people outside of the urban, middle-class liberal identity might lead to policy proposals and political agendas that are not more centrist but, rather, more radical. The article does not devote one word to problematizing why it is these gatekeepers that need to be doing the listening, i.e. why power is concentrated in their hands. Nor does it talk about what might be gained from admitting left voices engaged in struggles on the ground to these elite liberal circles.
For example:
Unfortunately, our silence creates emotional and intellectual conflicts that can be costly both personally and politically, as I found out a decade ago when I published Families on the Fault Line, a book about working-class families. Some readers of an early draft of that work criticized my use of the word black (the designation almost all the people I spoke with used to identify themselves) instead of African American, which was then the politically correct term. Others questioned the fact that I referred to illegals (the word used by every Latino I spoke with) instead of the newly minted undocumented workers. And still others told me I should "push the delete button" on my computer before going public with my doubts about the efficacy of bilingual programs, even though these were also the concerns voiced by many of the Latino and Asian families I interviewed.
I struggled with these criticisms, fought silently with my critics and myself, and finally decided to write about the intellectual and emotional dilemmas they posed. In the final version of the book, therefore, I recounted the criticism and mused aloud about the constraints of needing to be politically correct. What obligation, I asked, do I have to honor my respondents' definitions of self and their opinions on the red flag issues of the day? What responsibility do I have to the political subtleties of the time? To my own political convictions? How do I write what my research told me was a true picture of the lives I wanted to portray and not give aid and comfort to right-wing bigots?
This example is framed around the author's silencing, or attempted silencing, by other academics, without recognizing that this can happen because the realities of working-class communities of colour do not already shape in concrete, embodied ways the politics and practices of supposedly progressive academic spaces. And the only words funneled through the author into this progressive space that she worries about being silenced or dismissed are those that would tend to push liberalism towards the centre. But you would also, in such circumstances, encounter words and recommendations from interview participants that pushed in a much more radical and left direction than the liberal policy establishment would be interested in going. Can anyone doubt that a criticism of bilingual education by its participants, for example, could easily be used to construct a more radical agenda than the status quo around education, language, and whatever else was related?
Another example from later in the essay:
Move up a couple of decades to the 1980s when "crime in the streets" was the biggest issue in American politics. While the right argued for more police, for tougher sentences, for trying juveniles as adults, we insisted that racism and overheated media coverage were at the core of the furor, that the perception of crime didn't match the reality, and with as much fanfare as we could muster, presented statistics to prove the point. It struck me even then that we were mistaken to try to reorder perceptions with facts, partly because we failed to take account of the psychological reality that experience overwhelms statistics no matter how compelling the numbers may be, but also because the perception of crime wasn't totally illusory.
Not that there wasn't truth in our side of the argument; it just wasn't the whole truth. I believe unequivocally that racist assumptions are built into the American psyche but, in this case, they were fueled by the fact that a disproportionate number of street crimes were committed by young African Americans. The media were often irresponsible and always sensationalist in reporting crime, but they didn't make it up. Crime was on the rise; the streets in urban communities had become more dangerous; and, while most people were never themselves mugged, it was enough to know someone who had been-whether a personal acquaintance or a victim encountered on the eleven o'clock news-to create the kind of fear that was so prominent during those years.
Back then there was a saying that "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged on his way to the subway." When I first heard it, I was outraged by those flip words; now it seems to me that they weren't entirely wrong. So today I wonder if a conservative isn't a working-class guy who heard the "liberal elite" (as the right has effectively labeled us) tell him he had nothing to fear when experience told him otherwise-not just on crime but on a whole slew of issues that have turned the country into a cultural and political battlefield.
There are several things I could say about this, including what seems to be a dismissal of the racism embedded in the media construction and policy response to the urban crime issue in the '80s by the sly device of acknowledging it and moving on rather than suggesting how white fears of crime and people of colour experiences of police harassment could both be accommodated in a progressive policy approach.
But more importantly: the article posits two possible poles for responding to this issue. There is the liberal pole, which she says didn't take white working-class fears seriously enough, and the conservative pole, which took advantage of the hype and hysteria and racism to go beyond what might be a sensible, measured response. But it precisely that sensible, measured response somewhere between the two poles that she seems to be calling for. No mention is made of a response with a powerful leftist component: heavy state intervention in the economy to create jobs for working-class people of all racial groups, sharp redistribution of wealth downward, and generously funded training programs and support programs for people with addictions. (There might be some need for changes in policing along with that, because those solutions are more medium to long term.)
If you rule leftist answers out a priori, as right-wing demonizing has taught liberals in the U.S. to do for decades (even where they weren't so inclined already), then you have a hard time presenting alternatives to working-class people that don't come across as liberal preaching or conservative fatalism.
I have several more examples marked out in pen, but I'm getting tired and this post is excessively long so I'll restrict myself to one.
Whether on welfare, race, or identity politics, we kept silent when we might have built bridges. We resisted talking about the role of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the rising rate of illegitimacy in the African American community and called those who did racist. I don't say this as an advocate for the Clinton welfare reform program, which has its own serious deficiencies: not enough effective job-training; no adequate child care to allow a mother to work in peace even if she finds a job; and perhaps worst of all, no guarantee that she will keep the health care her family was entitled to under the Medicaid program once she has a job. My argument is simply that our opposition to the reform of AFDC, even after it became clear that its unintended consequences had created a whole new set of social problems, left us with little influence either with policy makers or the general public in the debate about how to change it.
"Illegitimacy"? Are you calling my neice "illegitimate"? Is there something "illegitimate" about her because the psychologically broken man who donated his sperm to create her took off two weeks after she was born? I'm sure it can't be intended that she is less "illegitimate" because she is white rather than a member of the African American communities whose sexual and relationship choices so concern white America. Is it "illegitimate" that my sister was been able to exist, and has been able to raise her daughter, because of welfare? Should we make it harder for her to do that?
Give me a break. Yet again, she's arguing for liberals to pay more attention to those centrists and right-wing folks who wanted to reform welfare, and not a word about listening to anti-poverty groups led by people on welfare. While a few of the things she suggests would be on the wish lists of such groups, my experience of working with such groups in Canada leads me to believe that the "unintended consequences" harped on by the right and seemingly pushed as worthy of attention by this author would not have been high on their priority list. Truly listening to such groups and advocating their agenda in strong terms would certainly not decrease political polarization in the United States.
This is a very long and meandering post, and I apologize for that. It is all designed to wander around the point that this article, and others like it, espouse "listening" but frame it in a way that only allows such listening to have an impact in one particular direction -- it's hard to tell if the article just assumes that only moderating content will be heard, or if it assumes that content that would point in more radical directions can't lead to anything practical so should be listened to, recorded, and ignored. It completely misses the point that there are lots of people with a progressive vision who are not urban, middle-class liberals. A good place to start listening would be to them. And then a good thing to do would be to turn over the resources that organizations currently dominated by urban, middle-class liberals possess to activists who are based in working-class communities, both white and of colour, who are active in feminist and anti-racist and worker and queer struggles.
As the Dissent article notes, the biggest barrier to progressive social change is the power of the right in this country. I'm not forgetting that. But I'm following its lead and looking at issues that are internal to "us." If urban, middle-class liberals wish to create changes that will result in justice and liberation, middle-class preaching won't work. Contrary to what this article advises, middle-class listening isn't even enough. There needs to be real sharing of power and resources.
In some ways, the willingness of middle-class progressives such as the one who wrote this article to recognize that they are not and should not pretend to be working-class, and pose questions about how "we" should relate to "them", is a positive thing because it recognizes on some level the importance of privilege and oppression in shaping standpoint. Except it doesn't, really; even the idea that middle-class liberals should "listen" ends up being tacit support for them retaining the control required to translate "listening" into action, rather than encouraging the acceptance of leadership from already active progressive and leftist working-class women and men, of colour and white.
This Week's Second Adventure
Me and L. Alone together. For 36 hours.
That may sound like no big deal for a veteran stay-at-homer such as yours truly. But L still nurses at night (more for its emotional than its nutritional value, at this age) and this was to be our very first experience of being overnight without Mommy, her comforting presence, and her oh-so-useful skill in lactation.
Would he awaken at 3 AM, freak out at the absence of milk, and roar for the rest of the night? Or would he sleep, a blissful little angel from set-down to wake-up? Our one ill-starred attempt at night weaning, back before Xmas, provided horrifying precedent -- a miserable night of anger and sadness on his part, and altogether too little sleep for all of us.
Turns out, thankfully, last night wasn't much of an adventure after all. There were a couple of instances of restlessness that were enough to wake me, and one full blown awakening which resulted in some crying and required cuddling and soothing words to remedy. But soon enough his eyes closed again. Sure, when he woke halfway at 6:30 and sleepily demanded nursing, its absence caused him to wake up the rest of the way, which in turn forced me to wake up rather earlier than I like, but if you haven't learned to function on too little sleep after 19 months of parenting then you haven't learned anything at all.
What's interesting to me about all of this is that it is another reminder of the role of practical, physical limitations in shaping our experience. That may sound like a silly thing to need to be reminded about, but I think those of us who live in industrialized societies, particularly those of us with a certain amount of privilege, have developed ways of being in the world that don't really appreciate that fact. Such limitations are sorted into two categories: "natural and inevitable", in which case they are not even really seen, and "irritating and solvable", and we expect technology to take care of them for us. Gravity is natural and inevitable, and it is so integrated into our ways of being in and perceiving the world that we hardly see it at all. The fact that person A wants to watch the game while person B wants to watch Law & Order is irritating and solvable by either purchasing a second television or perhaps by putting the game on frame-in-frame if you've got a snazzy TV.
The key is to see limitations that are grounded in physics and biology and cannot be easily transcended technologically, and then really think about them. How do they shape our experience? How can we really see the ways in which they enter our experience in socially mediated ways? Should we accept those limitations? If we choose not to accept them, how do we want to respond to the biological or physical facts in behavioural and social ways?
So...yeah...all of that is a long way of admitting that, 19 months ago, I really had no concept of ways in which the biological realities of nursing shape the experience of parenting. Which is not some fancy way of conceding to the right that biology really is destiny. It just recognizes that biology presents certain facts, and the ways in which those are dealt with socially at this time causes the parenting experience to be quite gendered in subtle and profound ways, though nothing about those social aspects is immutable. Which means that though my partner and I try to resist sexism in our parenting practice, it was still a big deal, with L almost 19 months old, for him and I to be spending a night without Mommy. There's something kind of ridiculous about that.
I think truly dealing with the ways in which experiences of parenting are gendered requires social change, not just behavioural choices at the level of individuals and household units. But I also think we need to write and talk more about the ways in which, for example, the biologically-based division of nursing labour is translated through social practices and behaviour into a gendered experience of parenting. That sort of material is probably out there somewhere, but in my fairly modest amount of pre-natal reading about parenting I didn't find it treated in ways that really helped me get it beyond a purely intellectual level -- and to you naysayers out there, I think text is actually capable of creating understanding that goes beyond just the mind. Anyway, those kinds of stories/analysis need to be easier to access, to allow us to make behavioural choices in the space that we have to do so, and to allow us to set agendas for social change.
That may sound like no big deal for a veteran stay-at-homer such as yours truly. But
Would he awaken at 3 AM, freak out at the absence of milk, and roar for the rest of the night? Or would he sleep, a blissful little angel from set-down to wake-up? Our one ill-starred attempt at night weaning, back before Xmas, provided horrifying precedent -- a miserable night of anger and sadness on his part, and altogether too little sleep for all of us.
Turns out, thankfully, last night wasn't much of an adventure after all. There were a couple of instances of restlessness that were enough to wake me, and one full blown awakening which resulted in some crying and required cuddling and soothing words to remedy. But soon enough his eyes closed again. Sure, when he woke halfway at 6:30 and sleepily demanded nursing, its absence caused him to wake up the rest of the way, which in turn forced me to wake up rather earlier than I like, but if you haven't learned to function on too little sleep after 19 months of parenting then you haven't learned anything at all.
What's interesting to me about all of this is that it is another reminder of the role of practical, physical limitations in shaping our experience. That may sound like a silly thing to need to be reminded about, but I think those of us who live in industrialized societies, particularly those of us with a certain amount of privilege, have developed ways of being in the world that don't really appreciate that fact. Such limitations are sorted into two categories: "natural and inevitable", in which case they are not even really seen, and "irritating and solvable", and we expect technology to take care of them for us. Gravity is natural and inevitable, and it is so integrated into our ways of being in and perceiving the world that we hardly see it at all. The fact that person A wants to watch the game while person B wants to watch Law & Order is irritating and solvable by either purchasing a second television or perhaps by putting the game on frame-in-frame if you've got a snazzy TV.
The key is to see limitations that are grounded in physics and biology and cannot be easily transcended technologically, and then really think about them. How do they shape our experience? How can we really see the ways in which they enter our experience in socially mediated ways? Should we accept those limitations? If we choose not to accept them, how do we want to respond to the biological or physical facts in behavioural and social ways?
So...yeah...all of that is a long way of admitting that, 19 months ago, I really had no concept of ways in which the biological realities of nursing shape the experience of parenting. Which is not some fancy way of conceding to the right that biology really is destiny. It just recognizes that biology presents certain facts, and the ways in which those are dealt with socially at this time causes the parenting experience to be quite gendered in subtle and profound ways, though nothing about those social aspects is immutable. Which means that though my partner and I try to resist sexism in our parenting practice, it was still a big deal, with L almost 19 months old, for him and I to be spending a night without Mommy. There's something kind of ridiculous about that.
I think truly dealing with the ways in which experiences of parenting are gendered requires social change, not just behavioural choices at the level of individuals and household units. But I also think we need to write and talk more about the ways in which, for example, the biologically-based division of nursing labour is translated through social practices and behaviour into a gendered experience of parenting. That sort of material is probably out there somewhere, but in my fairly modest amount of pre-natal reading about parenting I didn't find it treated in ways that really helped me get it beyond a purely intellectual level -- and to you naysayers out there, I think text is actually capable of creating understanding that goes beyond just the mind. Anyway, those kinds of stories/analysis need to be easier to access, to allow us to make behavioural choices in the space that we have to do so, and to allow us to set agendas for social change.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Old Reds
I peer at the front page of the print edition of the LA Times most days, when I pass newspaper boxes or in the grocery store, though I rarely buy it. I can't believe I missed this story about an LA retirement home founded back in 1924 for aging religious liberals, and gradually transformed into a place for old leftist activists. Some progressive Canadian academics that my partner had dinner with at a conference last night in Orange County brought it do her attention after hearing from her about my project. The home's residents are dying off and it is threatened with closure, hence the publicity. I can't decide if the article's tone intends to provide a nostalgic window back to the day when the United States actually had a viable left (as opposed to today's liberals who sometimes claim that label, and who themselves are seeming less and less viable with every passing year), or if it is using the perceived exoticness (to people who have only known today's political climate) of the residents' politics to indulge in a kind of smug affirmation of the triumph of the current status quo. In any case, an interesting institution, an interesting article, and surely some fascinating people.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
New News Link
I just added a new news site link (Anti-Racism Net) and put that short list of links in alphabetical order.
Another Lebanon Link
Not sure why exactly I'm feeling the urge to post links to material on Lebanon. Perhaps it's because the things I've heard about it from more moderate alt/indy media spaces in the United States seem to be doing a significantly poorer than usual job of questioning the spin put on events by the Bush administration. Anyway, here's a post by Raed in the Middle talking about the sitaution. In talking about the recent massive pro-Syrian demo, Raed writes:
That last sentence is the key, I think, that the North American liberal/progressive sources/people I've seen sometimes miss.
HALF A MILLION said no to little bushy and his aggressive administration.
You know why?
No, not because we like the Syrian government..
No, not because we like the Iranian government..
We have been fighting against the mistakes and corruption in our national governments since decades, for tens of years. We lost many of our beloved people; We had good times and bad times living in our independent developing countries. My parents took a part in trying to kick the Syrian forces out of Lebanon. We fought against the Syrian presence for years.
BUT, these are OUR problems, and we'll solve them one day on our own.
That last sentence is the key, I think, that the North American liberal/progressive sources/people I've seen sometimes miss.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
More About Lebanon
Here is an article by Ghassan Makarem on the situation in Lebanon. It's a couple of weeks old, and there have been significant changes since then -- at least one of those changes (according to this morning's Democracy Now!) is that Hizbollah has ceased sitting on the fence and has mounted pro-Syrian demonstrations dwarfing those organized by the anti-Syrian opposition over the previous few weeks. But the Makarem article is useful for context, as is the post via which I found it, on The Killing Train.
Some IWD Links
I've come across and/or received some interesting things related to International Women's Day, which it still is in my time zone for a few more hours, and I thought I'd post 'em.
We'll start off with some random women's history links at Early Modern Notes, found via Philbiblion.
Then we'll move into the sexist Bell Canada ad, blogged about at Mouse Words and Feministing, and written about in more detail at Rabble.CA.
And finally some reports from the Canadian Feminist Alliance For International Action on the status of women in Canada (in PDF format):
These links, courtesy of an email from FAIA that came to me via the PAR-L list, demonstrate that:
We'll start off with some random women's history links at Early Modern Notes, found via Philbiblion.
Then we'll move into the sexist Bell Canada ad, blogged about at Mouse Words and Feministing, and written about in more detail at Rabble.CA.
And finally some reports from the Canadian Feminist Alliance For International Action on the status of women in Canada (in PDF format):
- Canada's Damaged Relations with Aboriginal Women: A Lost Decade a chapter in Beijing Betrayed: A Global Report by the Women's Environment and Development Organization.
- A Decade of Going Backwards: Canada in the Post Beijing Era -- A Response to the UN Questionnaire on the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) and the Outcome Document (2000)
- Canada's Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last Ten Federal Budgets
These links, courtesy of an email from FAIA that came to me via the PAR-L list, demonstrate that:
- The depth of poverty has intensified for many women in Canada.
- The last ten federal budgets have overlooked most women's realities.
- Aboriginal women's human rights are ignored in critical areas in Canada.
- Political representation of women in elected bodies remains low in Canada.
- Women's access to justice in Canada has deteriorated
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
This Week's First Adventure
The first step is to get in a monstrous rental car and drive east as far as you possibly can, so far you think it will last forever, on highways no narrower than eight lanes. Then stop for a pee break at the information centre of a small, posh, private university of which you have never heard -- well, driver and one passenger pee, and the other two passengers play hackysack. Then back on the highway, and you can see that it really won't go on forever because it narrows to six lanes, practically a bunny-filled meadow after where you came from. Of course concrete doesn't give up that easily, and you go under five -- count them, five -- tiers of overpasses swooping this way and that above you all at once.
But eventually it really does start to look like nature. Of course, you knew it was coming, because there have been mountains visible for ages. Or at least kind of visible. In fact, only the snow-sprayed peaks have made much of an impression above the patented, Angelean hazey smog smoggy haze that lets straight up seem blue while straight ahead fades to grey before it goes too far. But eventually that's gone too. Instead of comparing this highway to other stretches of highway you have known -- some like the QEW between Toronto and Hamilton, some like the 401 across Toronto, some like the 400 headed north from Toronto -- you start comparing the hills and mountains and greenery. Some looks like a mix of northern Ontario and the Canadian Rockies, particularly the early portion of the Alberta side. But sometimes it looks more like the Scottish highlands. And pretty soon it just looks like itself -- hills, but kind of crinkled. Then there are hundreds of electricity generating windmills, and a gradual transition from green to brown.
You get there and it is like a landscape from the original Star Trek series. You are on a dirt track. The Joshua trees look like something from the golden age of pulp sci-fi, with their fluffy brown trunks with puffy green tips, and the random boulders and great hills made of stone seem to have been rather gaudily and deliberately put there just for effect. When you drop off your passangers, you take a few brief seconds to put the palm of one hand on a twenty foot high granite rock and watch a rosey sunset over jagged edges.
Then it's back in the car for a lonely drive back into the depths of LA in the dark, where a cosy warm peopled apartment awaits.
But eventually it really does start to look like nature. Of course, you knew it was coming, because there have been mountains visible for ages. Or at least kind of visible. In fact, only the snow-sprayed peaks have made much of an impression above the patented, Angelean hazey smog smoggy haze that lets straight up seem blue while straight ahead fades to grey before it goes too far. But eventually that's gone too. Instead of comparing this highway to other stretches of highway you have known -- some like the QEW between Toronto and Hamilton, some like the 401 across Toronto, some like the 400 headed north from Toronto -- you start comparing the hills and mountains and greenery. Some looks like a mix of northern Ontario and the Canadian Rockies, particularly the early portion of the Alberta side. But sometimes it looks more like the Scottish highlands. And pretty soon it just looks like itself -- hills, but kind of crinkled. Then there are hundreds of electricity generating windmills, and a gradual transition from green to brown.
You get there and it is like a landscape from the original Star Trek series. You are on a dirt track. The Joshua trees look like something from the golden age of pulp sci-fi, with their fluffy brown trunks with puffy green tips, and the random boulders and great hills made of stone seem to have been rather gaudily and deliberately put there just for effect. When you drop off your passangers, you take a few brief seconds to put the palm of one hand on a twenty foot high granite rock and watch a rosey sunset over jagged edges.
Then it's back in the car for a lonely drive back into the depths of LA in the dark, where a cosy warm peopled apartment awaits.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Canadian Anti-War Events
The Canadian Peace Alliance has a list of anti-war events taking place in cities across Canada during the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, on or about March 19.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Some Reading
- I was standing in line at the grocery store today and thinking about the cultural phenomenon that is the celebrity gossip magazine. Then tonight I read this article called "Inside the Committee that Runs the World" from the elite U.S. journal Foreign Policy, which focuses on a more materially important collection of people, those in charge of foreign policy in the Bush administration. But it is, at heart, a gossip piece. So what is more messed up, the fact that lots of people like to get fleeting distraction from difficult lives by dipping into glossy pictures and fabricated scandals of fabricated people who happen to have physical reality, or that it is actually useful to read this kind of quasi-academic "he said, she said" to understand a bit more about who decides who lives and who dies in the world? (Via Left is Right)
- And while we're on the world of U.S. foreign policy, here is an article from a retired intelligence official trying to make sense of what's going on with respect to the U.S. and Iran. (From AlterNet)
- Some interlinked posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) by feminst bloggers on violence against and other abuse of women by men. (Originally found via Feminist Blogs)
- An interview with the author of a book on gender in mainstream U.S. politics. It's interesting as far as it goes, but it indulges in the tendency to critique the masculinity of the other side while remaining silent about less overtly reactionary masculinities, which thereby constructs masculinity/male supremacist socialization as a whole as "their problem" rather than something that is an issue that shapes personal and political realities across ideological labels. (Via BlackFeminism.org)
Friday, March 04, 2005
Citizenship and Political Activity
In a recent post I included an aside mentioning that I was thinking of doing a future post that would examine issues of engaging with politics in a land not (originally) your own. This is that post.
Though I gave this issue quite a bit of thought back when we first moved to Los Angeles, I have come back to it because of a comment left in response to this post and pursued in a brief comment-dialogue after this post. For the most part I will dissociate this discussion from that particular issue (the recent right-wing attacks on Ward Churchill), those particular posts, and that partiuclar dialogue, but that's where I'm starting from.
Now, admittedly I was lazy in writing that post, and basically just said "What they said!" to justify my position rather than doing the work to at least summarize what I thought was useful from the articles cited. However, though I couldn't fully articulate it at the time, looking at the initial comment to both of those posts (it's the same thing posted twice) the fact that I am Canadian was used in conjunction with a number of other things that seem to be intending to mark me as "not plain folks" to delegitimate whatever I had to say in the original post without engaging with the substance of what I was saying. In the course of the dialogue, it should be noted, that changed.
But even though that appeared to be how the pointing out of my nationality was functioning, what about the substance of that declaration? As far as I can tell, a reasonably fair formulation of what was being implied -- and at this point I am not necessarily concerned if it was actually this poster's intent, because I think it's a sufficiently common sentiment to be worth addressing -- was that it is appropriate to butt out of the affairs of a polity of which you are not a member, and the main criterion of membership that is relevant in this instance is citizenship.
First of all, I am wary of the concept of citizenship. I don't completely disregard it, because it is a concept with such functional power behind it -- just ask people who are stateless or refugees. But I am wary of it. In some senses, it has always been a concept devoted to exclusion, a way of keeping some of the people who live in a given area from participating in political processes, whether it was women and slaves back in Athens, or whether it is undocumented migrants being kept powerless in the United States so their labour is easier to exploit. Even those who are formally citizens can be functionally excluded from the full benefits of citizenship in many different ways. For example, this report, of which I was one author, has some discussion (especially in Section 4, but throughout) of the ways in which racial minorities in Canada are kept from full exercise and enjoyment of citizenship. In the modern world, citizenship also serves to regulate who has access to resources under the control of a given state -- resources accessible via the market economy in that state, or directly from the state. This is in a world in which a legacy of empire and oppression has, over many centuries, concentrated resources in certain states and robbed them from others, and the flow of resources is still in those same directions. So citizenship is a way of excluding most of those whose resources we have stolen (and are stealing) from following those resources and trying to get a piece of them where they are controlled now.
When deployed in this way, particularly by right-wing nationalists in the United States, ideas of citizenship and sovereignty also have huge elements of hypocrisy. It is another example of the pepetual double standard that many U.S. leftists are continually pointing out, between the way that mainstream standards differ for "us" and "them" or "worthy" and "unworthy." It should just be screaming off the screen why it is ridiculous to invoke citizenship and, by extension, sovereignty against a lone voice in a neglected corner of cyberspace with no power to do much of anything to anyone when it is raised to comment on something pertaining to the U.S., while supporting a U.S. state that itself intervenes in the internal affairs of countries all over the world, all the time. This includes fairly blatant open interference in elections, covert interference in elections, supporting coups, imposing sanctions, supporting proxy armies to attack countries, and actual invasion, among other things.
There is a particular twist on this with respect to Canada. For one thing, it's not as blatant or direct or horrible as it has been and is with U.S. interference in lots of other countries. However, though I reject the position of some Canadian left nationalists that blame the U.S. for entirely too much and paint domestic elites in ways entirely too favourable, and also ignore the already-integrated nature of the political economic forces that shape both countries, there are still ways in which the United States functionally shapes and constrains domestic realities in Canada. A clear, if not particularly crucial example is with respect to the decriminalization of marijuana -- a Senate committee recommended doing that as far back as the early '70s and it again came to the front of the policy agenda recently, but pressure from the U.S. continues to play a role in preventing it from being implemented. More broadly, the economic dependence of Canada on the United States limits the ability of Canada to set both domestic and foreign policy that strays too far from what the U.S. wants. To take an extreme example, you are kidding yourself if you believe that if the Canadian state started nationalizing industries left and right, even if for some reason it had the support of the majority of Canadian elites, that there would not be consequences from the U.S. Anyway, though the case of Canada is a moderate example by global standards, it still illustrates the hypocritical ways in which the right (and probably other parts of the political spectrum) in the U.S. tends to recognize and mobilize concepts like "citizenship" and "sovereignty".
My vision of democracy is one that is participatory, liberatory, and with control over decisions dispersed and held in direct proportion to the impacts of those decisions, with due consideration of past history and current realities of hierarchies of power and privilege. This leads to a much more complex consideration of where one has the right to stick one's nose than depending exclusively on the binary variable (either you is or you ain't) of citizenship.
For example, there are enclaves of oppressed people centred around a common (if diversely inflected and experienced) oppression to which I would have no claim of membership, like LA's African American communities or a rape crisis centre collective. It would be imperative that I not interfere with some internal debate or process going on in a site like that. That doesn't mean I should have no opinion, and maybe there would even be appropriate ways, under appropriate circumstances, to express those opinions -- a discussion with a friend/ally/loved one who was a member of such a collective, for instance. But in general, a substantial degree of discretion and reserve would be called for; this example is, for me, fairly clear.
But more generally, I can't present hard and fast rules for when I think it is appropriate to speak up and when to shut up, and in what ways, and with what qualifiers, and so on. Like I've written before, my political participation in the United States while I live here is not the same as it would be in Canada, and it will continue to not be the same. However, one important element that will guide my decisions is something I tried (poorly) to express in the comment-based dialogue that triggered this reflection and this post: It's not just that the same problems exist in Canada and the United States, but rather that they stem from the same source. It is the same oppressive structures causing both, and while there is often some local variation in articulation, they are of a piece.
This means, for example, that I feel I am within my rights to speak up in defence of leftist intellectuals, because I suppose I sort of am one (even if I'm an invisible, tiny, and irrelevant one except maybe to a few wonderful folks who know and love me) and if I were to be designated as being worth demonizing (and considered to be an easy enough target despite not being racialized or a woman) it would be the same forces, the same process, the same agenda, causing that to happen whether it happened in the U.S. or Canada.
It also means that I will feel no hesitation in speaking out to support Aboriginal struggles, wherever they happen to be located on Turtle Island. Colonization has been and remains one big process, whether it has happened to result in one settler state, or two, or ten. (And despite racist mainstream quibbling about blood quantums, the whole Churchill thing is still very much related to Aboriginal struggle.)
It means that I will feel compelled to be active in struggles for peace and against imperialism, in whatever small way I am able to be given my current circumstances. War and imperialism are produced by the same system in which the Canadian state is embedded, and they have the potential to both benefit and cost those of us who live there, and those of us who have mostly lived there but now live elsewhere. So we are morally complicit (if in a somewhat different way) even if war and imperialism are originating from the U.S. state because our companies will profit from the slaughter, and the preservation of the current global flow of resources will benefit those who live in Canada, as well as those who have mostly lived in Canada but now live in the U.S. And besides, war and imperialism certainly are impacting lots and lots of people around the world who are no more able to vote in U.S. elections than I am, so it's just a common humanity thing to get involved.
It means I will stick my nose into lots of other things, both in body and in words. But not into everything, and not into everything in the same way. I'll know my boundaries when I see them, in each situation.
I welcome dialogue about this issue.
Though I gave this issue quite a bit of thought back when we first moved to Los Angeles, I have come back to it because of a comment left in response to this post and pursued in a brief comment-dialogue after this post. For the most part I will dissociate this discussion from that particular issue (the recent right-wing attacks on Ward Churchill), those particular posts, and that partiuclar dialogue, but that's where I'm starting from.
Now, admittedly I was lazy in writing that post, and basically just said "What they said!" to justify my position rather than doing the work to at least summarize what I thought was useful from the articles cited. However, though I couldn't fully articulate it at the time, looking at the initial comment to both of those posts (it's the same thing posted twice) the fact that I am Canadian was used in conjunction with a number of other things that seem to be intending to mark me as "not plain folks" to delegitimate whatever I had to say in the original post without engaging with the substance of what I was saying. In the course of the dialogue, it should be noted, that changed.
But even though that appeared to be how the pointing out of my nationality was functioning, what about the substance of that declaration? As far as I can tell, a reasonably fair formulation of what was being implied -- and at this point I am not necessarily concerned if it was actually this poster's intent, because I think it's a sufficiently common sentiment to be worth addressing -- was that it is appropriate to butt out of the affairs of a polity of which you are not a member, and the main criterion of membership that is relevant in this instance is citizenship.
First of all, I am wary of the concept of citizenship. I don't completely disregard it, because it is a concept with such functional power behind it -- just ask people who are stateless or refugees. But I am wary of it. In some senses, it has always been a concept devoted to exclusion, a way of keeping some of the people who live in a given area from participating in political processes, whether it was women and slaves back in Athens, or whether it is undocumented migrants being kept powerless in the United States so their labour is easier to exploit. Even those who are formally citizens can be functionally excluded from the full benefits of citizenship in many different ways. For example, this report, of which I was one author, has some discussion (especially in Section 4, but throughout) of the ways in which racial minorities in Canada are kept from full exercise and enjoyment of citizenship. In the modern world, citizenship also serves to regulate who has access to resources under the control of a given state -- resources accessible via the market economy in that state, or directly from the state. This is in a world in which a legacy of empire and oppression has, over many centuries, concentrated resources in certain states and robbed them from others, and the flow of resources is still in those same directions. So citizenship is a way of excluding most of those whose resources we have stolen (and are stealing) from following those resources and trying to get a piece of them where they are controlled now.
When deployed in this way, particularly by right-wing nationalists in the United States, ideas of citizenship and sovereignty also have huge elements of hypocrisy. It is another example of the pepetual double standard that many U.S. leftists are continually pointing out, between the way that mainstream standards differ for "us" and "them" or "worthy" and "unworthy." It should just be screaming off the screen why it is ridiculous to invoke citizenship and, by extension, sovereignty against a lone voice in a neglected corner of cyberspace with no power to do much of anything to anyone when it is raised to comment on something pertaining to the U.S., while supporting a U.S. state that itself intervenes in the internal affairs of countries all over the world, all the time. This includes fairly blatant open interference in elections, covert interference in elections, supporting coups, imposing sanctions, supporting proxy armies to attack countries, and actual invasion, among other things.
There is a particular twist on this with respect to Canada. For one thing, it's not as blatant or direct or horrible as it has been and is with U.S. interference in lots of other countries. However, though I reject the position of some Canadian left nationalists that blame the U.S. for entirely too much and paint domestic elites in ways entirely too favourable, and also ignore the already-integrated nature of the political economic forces that shape both countries, there are still ways in which the United States functionally shapes and constrains domestic realities in Canada. A clear, if not particularly crucial example is with respect to the decriminalization of marijuana -- a Senate committee recommended doing that as far back as the early '70s and it again came to the front of the policy agenda recently, but pressure from the U.S. continues to play a role in preventing it from being implemented. More broadly, the economic dependence of Canada on the United States limits the ability of Canada to set both domestic and foreign policy that strays too far from what the U.S. wants. To take an extreme example, you are kidding yourself if you believe that if the Canadian state started nationalizing industries left and right, even if for some reason it had the support of the majority of Canadian elites, that there would not be consequences from the U.S. Anyway, though the case of Canada is a moderate example by global standards, it still illustrates the hypocritical ways in which the right (and probably other parts of the political spectrum) in the U.S. tends to recognize and mobilize concepts like "citizenship" and "sovereignty".
My vision of democracy is one that is participatory, liberatory, and with control over decisions dispersed and held in direct proportion to the impacts of those decisions, with due consideration of past history and current realities of hierarchies of power and privilege. This leads to a much more complex consideration of where one has the right to stick one's nose than depending exclusively on the binary variable (either you is or you ain't) of citizenship.
For example, there are enclaves of oppressed people centred around a common (if diversely inflected and experienced) oppression to which I would have no claim of membership, like LA's African American communities or a rape crisis centre collective. It would be imperative that I not interfere with some internal debate or process going on in a site like that. That doesn't mean I should have no opinion, and maybe there would even be appropriate ways, under appropriate circumstances, to express those opinions -- a discussion with a friend/ally/loved one who was a member of such a collective, for instance. But in general, a substantial degree of discretion and reserve would be called for; this example is, for me, fairly clear.
But more generally, I can't present hard and fast rules for when I think it is appropriate to speak up and when to shut up, and in what ways, and with what qualifiers, and so on. Like I've written before, my political participation in the United States while I live here is not the same as it would be in Canada, and it will continue to not be the same. However, one important element that will guide my decisions is something I tried (poorly) to express in the comment-based dialogue that triggered this reflection and this post: It's not just that the same problems exist in Canada and the United States, but rather that they stem from the same source. It is the same oppressive structures causing both, and while there is often some local variation in articulation, they are of a piece.
This means, for example, that I feel I am within my rights to speak up in defence of leftist intellectuals, because I suppose I sort of am one (even if I'm an invisible, tiny, and irrelevant one except maybe to a few wonderful folks who know and love me) and if I were to be designated as being worth demonizing (and considered to be an easy enough target despite not being racialized or a woman) it would be the same forces, the same process, the same agenda, causing that to happen whether it happened in the U.S. or Canada.
It also means that I will feel no hesitation in speaking out to support Aboriginal struggles, wherever they happen to be located on Turtle Island. Colonization has been and remains one big process, whether it has happened to result in one settler state, or two, or ten. (And despite racist mainstream quibbling about blood quantums, the whole Churchill thing is still very much related to Aboriginal struggle.)
It means that I will feel compelled to be active in struggles for peace and against imperialism, in whatever small way I am able to be given my current circumstances. War and imperialism are produced by the same system in which the Canadian state is embedded, and they have the potential to both benefit and cost those of us who live there, and those of us who have mostly lived there but now live elsewhere. So we are morally complicit (if in a somewhat different way) even if war and imperialism are originating from the U.S. state because our companies will profit from the slaughter, and the preservation of the current global flow of resources will benefit those who live in Canada, as well as those who have mostly lived in Canada but now live in the U.S. And besides, war and imperialism certainly are impacting lots and lots of people around the world who are no more able to vote in U.S. elections than I am, so it's just a common humanity thing to get involved.
It means I will stick my nose into lots of other things, both in body and in words. But not into everything, and not into everything in the same way. I'll know my boundaries when I see them, in each situation.
I welcome dialogue about this issue.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Another Historical Quote
On the wild, lonely road between Jerusalem and Jericho the desperate plight of the stranger would arouse some sense of duty in the most primitive man. But when at breakfast this same modern man reads that, through the negligence of someone, ten workmen [sic] were mained for life or hurled into eternity -- well, what is that to him? He hardly pauses as he sips his coffee. His eyes and his attention pass to the next news item -- the rise in the price of wheat or the account of the great race. Even if he should own stock in the corporation in whose factories the unfortunate workmen [sic] had been employed, it would hardly occur to him that he was even remotely responsible for their injury or death.
-- J.S. Woodsworth, minister, preacher of the social gospel, and social reformer in early 20th century Canada, in My Neighbour (1911)
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Direct Action Works
A new piece of research on environmental activism and environmental legislation between 1960 and 1994 in the United States has shown that:
(Via an email from Brian Burch on the SAN list)
- pro-environment bills have a much better chance of being passed in a Congress controlled by Democrats
- pro-environment bills have a slightly poorer chance of being passed under a Democratic president
- but most importantly of all, the researcher
examined the impacts of working inside and outside the institutions of government. Working inside the system, which is how business is generally conducted in Washington, D.C., includes lobbying, petitions, voter-registration campaigns and court cases. Working outside the system includes protests and marches, sit-ins and boycotts.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, working from the inside has not had much of an impact and, in general, public opinion doesn’t matter,” he said. “Most people say they are for the environment and lawmakers say, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ but they don’t do anything unless people start protesting. Protests amplify public opinion by directing politicians’ attention to the public’s interest.”
(Via an email from Brian Burch on the SAN list)
Learning 'bout Lebanon
He's away and probably not blogging for a few days, so it may not stay entirely up to date, but I'd like to point people towards The Angry Arab News Service by Lebanese American political science professor As'ad Abu Khalil, for informed and cutting commentary from an idiosyncratic leftist perspective on what's going on in Lebanon during the current crisis there. Juan Cole is also a good place to look for context on this and related issues, though I'm less impressed overall with his politics.
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