Explore with me, for a second time this week. Checking out a community garden in Altadena that allots parcels of land for growing all kinds of things, though mostly vegetables. And then visiting Arlington Garden in Pasadena, three acres that the city entrusted to a non-profit that collaborated with a host of other groups to establish a botanical garden. The city of Pasadena, Pasadena Department of Public Works, and Pasadena Water & Power, with help from Pasadena Beautiful Foundation, the Mediterranean Garden Society, garden clubs, local businesses, nurseries, neighbors and friends established the garden and continually support the maintenance of the site.
Community gardens provide a terrific way of growing inexpensive, nutritious and organic food. Wait lists are long, because people enjoy the possibility of working their own little plot just as much as the output. Health benefits are not restricted to better food, though. These gardens serve as meeting places where people mix, get to know each other, share common interests and often join to improve local conditions, all of which combats isolation and other adverse psychological states.
Arlington Garden is a bit more ambitious in creating an environment for an entire community, not just plot leasers who happen to cooperate here or there. The garden introduces different forms of landscapes, thus teaching about botany and water efficient gardening.
It has locally sourced art positioned throughout, magnets for kids who squeal over the discovery of yet another frog, and grounds for benign amusement for discerning adults…
Poor St Francis of Assisi has a crack in his neck….
Importantly, it has tons of opportunities for sitting and enjoying the garden, from single chairs to large groups of furniture, inviting friends in. As a certified wildlife habitat garden it attracts tons of insects and birds – I am sure to hang out there quite a bit with the camera in the coming weeks.
The communal aspect is of considerable interest given that we have new archeological findings that document the advantage of communal efforts. It’s actually fascinating stuff. A group of archeologists investigated 24 central places in prehistoric (1000 – 300 BCE) Mesoamerica (now Mexico,) some of which lasted for over 1000 years. The researchers were interested in why some of these cities existed longer than others, and looked at a number of variables that might have contributed to or deterred from the sustainability of these centers. Some of the key factors that contributed to longevity were early infrastructural investments, high degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between domestic units, and collective governance. In other words, autocratically governed cities were disadvantaged during antiquity.
The establishment of housing that was densely built and connected with paths to each other and the creation of large, central, open plazas were two of the factors that helped cities to flourish. In addition to these architectural specifics they found this:
” In general, more collective organizations were funded by internal financing—labor drafts and staple goods exacted from local populations. This contrasts with the external resourcing associated with more autocratic regimes, dependent on elite estates, monopolization of the exchange of precious goods, and war booty. Collective governance tended to be ‘faceless,’ associated with offices rather than aggrandized individuals, with power distributed. Concentrated power arrangements tended to be personalized, frequently tied to descent and often conspicuous in individualized funerary treatments and monuments to specific rulers. Whereas autocratic governance frequently was focused on the palaces or mortuary monuments of individual rulers, characterized by restricted access to non-elites, more collective formations tended to be associated with accessible plazas, open access ways, and disseminations of public goods.“
Public spaces mattered, for contemplation, information exchange and communal expression. Some of the longest lasting centers had up to 20 ball courts where people could meet, and all had central plazas. Pooled labor mattered, since terracing for food production and appropriate drainage could only be achieved communally. The interconnectedness between households prevented population flight, keeping population density high which in turn helped to produce labor that fed and maintained the citizenry.
It makes, of course a difference if you have 40.000 people, or 3.8 million, like the greater L.A. area, for the ability to make communal decisions, and not govern from above. But we should pause and think through the principles that conferred resilience to these ancient population centers, many of which lead back to connectedness and openings for communication. What you find, on a micro-level, when hanging out in a free, communal botanical garden.
Here is some music reminiscent of mesoamerican traditions.
⅔ into Black History month I figured it’s time to contemplate cultural offerings that embody what’s encapsulated by the terms above. Coincidentally, my friend Catón Lyle posted photographs I had taken of him and his students 8 years ago this week on Facebook, images of people I deeply care about and worked with, now likely strong and resilient young adults either in Highschool or off to college. Institutions where Black history is no longer guaranteed to be taught across the country.
Catón Lyes, drummer extraordinaire
Let’s look at possibilities to learn about Black History outside of the educational settings, then. When it comes to ferocious women, none portrays them better than Viola Davis in her magnum opus, now on Netflix, The Woman King. The actress is a marvel (in everything she touches). Here she was training in her late 50s for a physically demanding role as an African warrior leading an army of women in the State of Dahomey (now Benin) in battle and for the political future of a kingdom contemplating to step away from participating in the slave trade.
The film is an epic mix of action movie, intergenerational, intra- and inter-tribal conflict, serious depiction of slavery, with a hint of romance thrown in, involving a non-African man at the behest of the studio bosses who wanted a White man role for sales points and settled for someone with a White father and a Black mother. Various, really numerous, subplots tug on every emotional register imaginable.
Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood together with screenwriter Dana Stevens had to fight for 6 years to get this film made, and only got green light after the success of the Black Panther pointed to the possibility of having this kind of film be a box-office success. It was “the product of a thousand battles.” The obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women and a State that celebrated gender equity until the French colonialists crushed it, are at length described in this review in the Smithsonian. The public reaction to the finished product has also been fierce: the extremist Right condemned it for Black women killing White men. Some Black organizations found fault with the depiction of African nations actively participating in the slave trade, which is of course historically correct, and brave to be acknowledged in a Hollywood film that wants to convey history, if you ask me. But the worry remains in the eyes of many, that it partly absolves the Euro-American slavers from their responsibility.
Then there is the complaint that the film’s narrative alters what actually happened, making the Kingdom of Dahomey into a place that abandoned the slave trade, when it actually didn’t. A general complaint regards the fact that a major Blockbuster Movie could have chosen a positive event in Black history, rather than one marred by complexity of historical trade alliances.
The film’s take on history is indeed stretched and to be taken with a grain of salt, or with the understanding that movies need to entertain, and have some lines that help us identify with good or evil. The choice of featuring a female standing army, the historically real Agoodjies with all their strength and complicated lives, though, should be a boost to a current generation of women who are searching for role models in an era that is dead set to roll back both women’s and civil rights (not necessarily in the setting of the military, but fighting everyday challenges.) If you want to learn more details about the actual history of the Agoodijes, there is a smart guideline, The Woman King Syllabus, provided by a group of US-based historians, Ana Lucia Araujo, Vanessa Holden, Jessica Marie Johnson and Alex Gil.
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When it comes to brave women, do I have a book for you. Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing is a stellar compendium of sources that help us understand the Black radical tradition, from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. If we can, for a moment, put aside our immediate reaction to the term “communist” in the title, still associated with extreme negative reactions, we might particularly benefit from the section that exposes how White supremacists have always successfully used the tool of the communist specter as a weapon in their political crusade. The book, edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, also teaches a lot about the fight against fascism on the one hand, and organizing of labor on the other, both topics of obvious contemporary relevance.
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And last but not least, when we look for resilience and decisive action, there is a new, digitally available, resource that I strongly urge you to sign up for: Hammer and Hope, a magazine of Black Politics and Culture, founded by Jen Parker and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Or at least read the poem, Come In, by Ashley M. Jones, the current poet laureate of Alabama, in call and response with an image by photographer and performance artists Carrie Mae Weems, who was born in Portland, OR 69 years ago and is one of our most impactful and famous contemporary artists. It sets the tone and invites all of us to cross a threshold into a community of diverse backgrounds but shared goals.
The name for the new magazine, suggested by Derecka Purnell, a brilliant young lawyer and abolitionist, is a riff on a book, Hammer and Hoe, by Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of American history at U.C.L.A.
The goals could not be clearer and more decisive:
“….a hammer to smash myths and illusions.”
“And our hope? It is not the false optimism of liberals or the fatalism of armchair revolutionaries or the pessimism of pundits waiting for the end of the world. James Baldwin understood hope as determination in the face of catastrophe: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” … victory is never certain but if we don’t fight, we can only lose. Hammer & Hope is here to fight.”
“Our mission is to collect, preserve and share the stories, oral histories and artifacts of Portland’s Chinatown as a catalyst for exploring and interpreting the history of past, present and future immigrant experiences.” – Portland Chinatown Museum (PCM) Mission Statement
The Lunar New Year – The Year of the Water Rabbit – started yesterday and the Chinese government expects about 2.1 billion journeys to be made in Asia during a 40-day travel period around the celebration as people rush back for the traditional reunion dinner on the eve of the new year. I took a short trip to Portland’s Old Town Chinatown instead on Friday, an annual pilgrimage to admire the beauty of Lan Su Chinese Garden with its festive decorations for the occasion.
This year I added a second stop, a first visit to PortlandChinatownMuseum (PCM,) which is just a block away on NW Third Ave, and not too far from the Chinatown Gateway. The museum opened in 2018 and did not appear on my radar during the pandemic years. I cannot recommend a visit strongly enough: opening hours are limited from Friday to Sunday, and the current temporary exhibition will close on January 29th. So if you can, make it down there next Friday or Saturday between 11 am-3 pm, there is some revelatory art on display.
The history of the museum’s founding can be found here. Like other Old Town institutions devoted to collecting and preserving immigrants’ histories, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education among them, PCM offers a permanent exhibition depicting the lives and plight of the Chinese immigrants. Beyond the Gate: A Tale of Portland’s Historic Chinatowns provides a comprehensive look at historical artifacts, some arranged in diverse dioramas, and guides you through the various aspects of the immigrant experience with informative exhibition texts and archival photographs.
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Two separate galleries provide space for the work of contemporary Asian American artists, currently showing Illuminating Time, installations by three different artists-in-residence working with different media. The exhibition is exquisitely curated by Horatio Law, one of the PNW’s premier public art and installation artist who serves as the Artist Residency Director. It echoes the permanent exhibitions’s themes of loss, hope and belonging, so familiar to all immigrants.
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一方有难,八方支援 “When trouble occurs at one spot, help comes from all quarters.” – Chinese Proverb
The theme of community, integral to collectivist cultures and so prominent in the museum’s permanent exhibition of historic Chinatown’s structural support systems, is picked up by Alex Chiu. Known to many of us for his vibrant murals that can be found across PDX, he undertook a series of ink drawings of community members that are displayed in the entrance hall of the museum. Placed against the backdrop of a stylized rendering of the Chinatown gateway, they depict a range of characters of all ages and degrees of visibility, pointing to the diversity of Portland’s Chinese population. Expressive and detailed, these portraits are a lively counterpart to the archival photographs of the Chinese ancestors who set foot here in the 1800s.
The juxtaposition between the traditional valuing of community and the artist’s modern ways of portraying individuals reminded me of the current trends in social psychology exploring the status of young Chinese who grow up in a world where the traditional collectivism of their culture and the modern demands and offers of Western individualism intersect. It is interesting work, based on spontaneous recollection of Chinese proverbs by these college students, reflecting which values come to mind first and how they are weighted. A changing world, yet heavily anchored still in tradition.
Clockwise from upper left: Portland Chinese Community Portrait Series: Billy Lee, Beatrix Li, Roberta Wong, Terry Lee.
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“Take care of each other. Take care of the soil.” Shu-Ju Wang, in conversation.
Off to the side of the front venue is a room dedicated to Shu-Ju Wang‘s exploration of the history of Tanner Creek and its connection to the Chinese laborers and farmers who tended to its surrounding fertile soil to grow vegetables for both, sale and consumption. Her installation consists of multiple parts, prominently displaying a wooden slide constructed to represent the topography of the waterway with its angles and gradient. It is actually a marble run, and visitors are invited to play around, connecting through interaction. Above it hangs a mobile, made from silkscreen and gouache with a top part that was embroidered on paper tinted with gouache as well. It represents rain drops, a sense of fluidity enhanced by the aqua color range and the lightness of the material that slightly trembles in the draft. The sturdiness of the wood and the fragility of the paper assembly complement each other, rather than being opposed, representing aspects of nature that remind us of its power as much as its vulnerability.
Wang’s interest in and facility with science is evident in the exhibition posters that provide facts about the history of the creek within the build-up of Portland, the encroachment endangering the creek’s initial free run and displacing those human communities that had respected natural cycles of flooding necessary for fertile ground. Creatively, these narrative are told in letters from the creek to us, making a personal statement in a voice that I can see as particularly effective for young minds, children feeling addressed and drawn in. That said, it sure got my attention. The remaining walls are hung with the artist’s recent paintings and printings of nature-related topics, the theme of the need for environmental stewardship pervasive, meticulously and insistingly expressed.
Left to right: A fold-up book Castor and Sapient; A Study of Home (2021) Silk screen, pressure print and collage; a basket by Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) woven from native plant materials to catch the marbles.
I walked out with a plant cutting in hand, small annuals which are offered for free – by March, when this part of the exhibition is likely still on, it will be vegetable plantings to connect to the Chinese farmers’ history at Tanner Creek.
If we link the immigrant experience to the past, present and future, as the museum intends to do, then Wang’s depiction of the past and Chiu’s capture of the present is joined by Roxas-Chua’s work incorporating the future. That might seem counterintuitive given the prevalence of allusions to memory, including the title for some of the major works.
Yet I was flooded with an impression that the work was about opening towards something, with the release that comes with the acknowledgement and acceptance of grief.
Detail: Gold Lighting and Lullaby Scripts
Part of that might have been triggered by the realization of the ephemeral character of both materials used and conceptual expression. The artist will destroy all that was presented by the end of the exhibition’s run and bury it at its source, the places in nature from which materials for the ink and paper were borrowed, and from which the inspiration was drawn. What is gone makes room for the new.
Left and RightL Gold Lighting and Lullaby Scripts. Center: Stone Satellites over an Excavation Site in John Day, Oregon.
Part of it can be found in the way Roxas-Chua’s calligraphy is open to interpretation. The technique of asemic writing that he uses is a form of communication that is unconstrained by syntax or semantics, an aesthetic rather than a verbal expression. It is the perfect medium for someone who is overburdened by the demands of too many languages (In Roxas-Chua’s case four) or too little rootedness in each.
Excerpt: Three Oranges and Blue Mountains Moon
For the viewer this opens space to connect to the calligraphy in ways unrestricted by formal demands. Unsurprisingly for me, who has spent her scientific research years studying memory, the art appeared as patterns of synaptic connections, but also of plaques causing retrieval failure, of parallel processing and encoding bias. The malleability of memory was perfectly caught in the flow of these marks, the way how present context is re-shaping, even altering what is remembered, ultimately influencing an assessment of the future.
How we approach the future is not just guided by how much our memory has changed over time, shifting away from facts and towards a narrative that helps emotional adaptation. How much any of us can remember the specifics of our past also plays a big role.
In many realms, all of our thinking about the future is rooted in memory. Policy planners, for example, routinely contemplate past patterns as a way of anticipating things to come. At a much more personal level, researchers suggest that a sense of hopefulness, or its lack, depends on how specifically we remember the past. Think about someone saying, “I cannot see how that could possibly happen,” or the opposite, “I can easily imagine how that can come to be.” That step of imagination is arguably central to how hopeful someone will be about the future, or not. And that ability to project is clearly linked to the specificity of your memory of how things unfolded in the past. Remembering opening the path to hope.
Excerpt: Three Oranges and Blue Mountains Moon
For the artist it was perhaps a way of connecting to the various landscapes and human sources that linked to the past of Chinese immigrants, from John Day to Astoria, where he interviewed people and recorded soundscapes of the environment (QR codes direct you to a listening experiences that captures these sounds, or music, or the artist’s poetry, providing additional levels of experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the totality of each artwork.)
Loss and re-emergence are central to the work. It was, I believe, most urgently captured in The Weeping Script.Please Be Guided Accordingly, the poem that accompanies the calligraphy, seizes the stages at which death rips a loved one away from you, bit by bit. There’s a release provided by inklings of hope and uplift in the future, though tempered by the knowledge that it will be a cold, lonely run. Maybe not the entire three year mourning period proscribed by Confucius, but the concession that grief exists and yet can be turned around. It calmly points to opening of new horizons.
For anyone mourning it will be brutally moving, and yet it is incredibly beautiful, hopeful work.
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And now we turn to the elephant in the room. If the consummation of loss is part of the art inside the museum, wait until you see it instantiated in the suffering of the houseless in real life outside. The many houseless in the neighborhood, their tents, their misery, their detritus, are something the Old Town businesses are trying to deal with.
City plans almost a decade in the making have not yielded visible results, even though the mayor’s office claims progress. In October 2021, spurred by the rise in crime, violence and public camping in the Old Town neighborhood, the leaders of four cultural institutions — Lan Su Chinese Garden, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and Portland Chinatown Museum — wrote a joint open letter asking each city and county commissioner for immediate help. In March of last year, Old Town Community leaders unveiled a plan to repair and reopen the neighborhood, which included goals like reducing 911 call answering times, improving lighting in the area, and reducing tent camping by one-third.
The right words were said: “As Portland’s oldest neighborhood, home to immigrants who overcame decades of discrimination and indignity, and today, home to so many who are fighting just to stay alive, we must to whatever we can to respond to the crisis of humanity unfolding around us. And we must do it today,” said Elizabeth Nye, the executive director of Lan Su Chinese Garden, “the local government’s inability to safeguard Old Town disrespects its history.It is particularly devastating to our houseless neighbors who deserve more from their government.”
Mural on NW Davis St
The subsequent reality, however, amounted to an exponential increase in sweeps of the neighborhood. The 90-day “re-set” led to a particular form of camp removal, structure abatement sweeps, that can be ordered by the police chief or engineers in two different bureaus overseen by city commissioners. The standard Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, or HUCIRP, sweep provides at least 72 hours’ notice to unhoused Portlanders so they can gather their belongings and voluntarily move before city contractors remove them from a given area. The structure abatement approach extends 1 hour warning, if that. If you happen to be away from your tent or belonging, all is lost. (For a detailed description of the way things unfolded last summer, here is a report by advocates from Streetroots, an organization where I taught writing workshops for the houseless until the pandemic started.) Shelter referrals given during or after sweeps are not enough – you can stay for one night, after having been completely uprooted. Many feel unsafe in shelters even for that one night, or can’t apply because they have pets.
Mural on NW Davis St depicting the view South on NW 4th Ave
Do these sweeps help solve the situation? Of course not. They clean up the streets for a short time or for a particular event, while making people less stable, re-traumatizing them, and shifting the entire problem just to a different location. Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan’s five October 2022 resolutions on homelessness included a ban on unsanctioned camping and the construction of compulsory mass homeless encampments, which would host up to 250 people. This can only be seen as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision letting the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals re Martin v. Boise decision stand, stating that a houseless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in absence of alternatives.
Mural on NW Davis St
Of the six promised safe-rest villages only 2 have opened so far. Evictions from rental properties have skyrocketed since the renter protection during the pandemic was lifted – in the first 10 months of 2022 alone there were 18.831 evictions, as reported by a PSU research group. According to the 2022 Multnomah County Point-in-Time Count report, 24% of those experiencing unsheltered homelessness reported COVID-related reasons as the cause, adding to increased inflation and rising rent costs. Despite the stereotype, these are not all people with criminal records, or mental illness, or living with substance abuse problems. And even if they were, they would have the same human right to shelter as we all do. On top of it all, Senator Wyden’s DASH Act, (Decent, Affordable, Safe Housing for All) languishes in committee, even though it has support from all sides, business owners, land lord organizations and advocates for the houseless included.
I completely understand the need for businesses and institutions to be able to function in a safe environment and one that does not interfere with business under the specter of violence and crime. But let us acknowledge that the reaction so far has been to try and disperse the unhoused, without providing sufficient, actual housing, the only permanent solution to homelessness.
Archival photograph of NW Fourth Avenue
Until something changes structurally and expediently, I fear museums like the Portland Chinatown Museum will not get the exposure they deserve because many people hesitate to visit Old Town. It is truly sad, given what is on offer. But it is heartbreaking to see the suffering and loss in the surrounding streets, with poverty levels probably comparable to those experienced by the very first Chinese immigrants that came to seek a better life in a new home, leaving famine and disease behind. Past, present and future connected at the most basic level of human experience, daily survival.
Portland Chinatown Museum
127 NW Third Avenue Portland, OR 97209
Friday – Sunday 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Docent-led group tours are Friday through Sunday by reservation only.
Current exhibition Illuminating Time closes on January 29th.
Join the museum on Saturday, January 28 at 10:00 a.m. for the seventh annual Lunar New Year Dragon Dance Parade and Celebration, presented in partnership with the Oregon Historical Society.
The 150-foot dragon will be celebrating the holiday with lion dancers, performers, and a lively community parade through Old Town, Downtown, and up to the Oregon Historical Society Park
I was born in the year of the cop-out, double speak, dust bunny, group think, fairness doctrine, junk food, mass-market, neoconservative, split decision, swing state, tax shelter and wrongful death, among others. Don’t believe me? The Thesaurus offers the fun opportunity to enter your birth year and be presented with all the words that were first used in print that year. Oh, I forgot, kvell was amongst them, the yiddish term for being extraordinarily proud of something. The word is derived from the German word “Quelle,” a source of water erupting. Kvell’s counterpart is kvetch, habitually complaining, as I am known to do. It is derived from the German word “quetschen,” to squeeze to the point of pain. This as an entry, you guessed it, to another round of griping while reveling in the inventiveness of the German/Yiddish language. (Patience, we get to politics in a minute…)
Thinking of words was triggered by reading about the numerous phrases that German holds for pedantry or nit picking. Pea counters (Erbsenzähler) is among them, as is Korinthenkacker (‘currant crapper’) and Paragraphenreiter, which means ‘paragraph rider,’ related to the ways laws are numbered (§), laws that you insist on while doing it by the book, context be damned. Of course, pedantry about applying the law only occurs if it suits those who dispense it.
Take Germany, for example, and consider how unevenly justice was meted out for individuals and corporations that engaged in profiteering during the Nazi era. A new book by investigative journalist David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires, explores the ways how fortunes were made by German tycoons working within the Third Reich’s business and industrial structures. Already rich industrialists (with the exception of the founders of Porsche cars who started poor) profited from the production of weapons (forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.) Then, with the introduction of the Nürnberg Race Laws, they disenfranchised and eventually expropriated Jewish businesses. Robbery and theft of business assets continued once foreign territories were occupied in those countries.
By 1941, they also used “forced slave labor from mass deportations of people from European countries and Russia, some 12 – 20 million people of whom more than 2.5 million died from horrific working conditions in factories, mines and work camps.” Besides deportations and prisoners of war, concentration camps provided slave labor for private companies, a collaboration of the SS with big companies like BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Dr. Oetker, and companies controlled by Günther Quandt and Friedrich Flick.(Ref.)
What happened to the these corporate perpetrators of crimes against humanity after the war? The book explores how only three trials were held, bringing Friedrich Flick and his managers, Alfred Krupp and his managers, and the entire executive board of IG Farben to justice. All other trials were canceled by the Americans, because they had policy interests that trumped justice. “The Americans limited the number of trials against industrialists because they didn’t want to put capitalism on trial. At that time, the Cold War was getting started, and the Americans made this policy decision where they wanted to rebuild West Germany as a democratically viable and economically strong state, which would act as a buffer against the Soviet Union and the encroachment of communism.”
So people were not dragged into court, were allowed to keep their assets (in the West) to stabilize the newly created republic, and never had to admit to culpability or take responsibility for their crimes. Historians believe that to be true for hundreds of thousands of people who escaped de-nazification under the sheltering embrace of the American occupying forces. Nowadays, some rich families do damage control (some billionaires give away money to relevant charities) often after public outcry. Others create foundations that investigate issues associated with macro-violence, or even recompense forced laborers directly, out of moral obligation, like the heir to the Reemtsma fortunes, fortunes which were partially derived from using slave labor in their factories. Before it went public at the stock exchange last September, Porsche, as another example, tried to remedy parts of its history by negotiations with the heirs of Adolf Rosenberger, the company’s cofounder, who was pushed out of Porsche in 1935 and erased from Porsche company history for being Jewish. But these are drops in the bucket compared to the overall numbers.
I wonder, of course, how much the dispensation of justice – or absence thereof – via the legal system, criminal courts, impeachment trials, ethics commissions and so on is guided by the very same mechanisms right here and now in the U.S. Putting our trust into the likes of the Muellers, Garlands, Smiths of the world might be naive in light of historical precedents that showed nations willing to sacrifice justice on the altar of economic and political imperatives. With the arrival of the 118th house of representatives and their interest in protecting the monied elites we will not even be able to hope for justice. As I write this, the Trump Org CFO Weisselberg was sentenced to five months jail for 15 years of tax fraud, in exchange for a guilty plea and testimony that concerned the Trump organization, but did not flip on Trump personally. The original charges implied a prison sentence up to 25 years. On a five month sentence, he’ll serve approximately 100 days. Compare that to a typical NYC public defense case where people are sentenced to 3-6 years (and will serve 1500+ days) for stealing a jacket. Justice?
70 years after the words first appeared in print, tax shelter, cop-out, double speak and fairness doctrine are as relevant concepts as ever. And now I go and chase dust bunnies.
It was not only industrialists who turned Nazi collaborators. So did the musical world overnight. Here is a Deutsche Welle documentary film (translated into English) that looks at some aspects of music in that era, including how it saved the lives of camp inmates.
We were iced in for a bit last week, although thankfully not for long or as intensely as much of the rest of the country. Photography was restricted to what was available out of the windows, ample traffic given the cold. All those birds made me think of my unhealthy preoccupation with the demise of the bird app: TWITTER.
Nuthatches galore (Kleiber)
Scold me all you want (you know who you are), my time spent on that medium was not preoccupied with “doom scrolling.” It has been a source of information about politics I care about that would have been – is – otherwise unavailable. A lot of the European news are behind paywalls, and some not published in the main media at all, as for example a lot of the discussions among young, progressive Jewish voices in Germany. A lot of Black voices opened new horizons not easily accessible otherwise.
Twitter has been indeed a platform that allowed marginalized voices to communicate and to be heard, internationally it was the choice for many movements that were able to organize this way and get the news out. With the arrival of Emperor Musk, as many call him, although I prefer Elmo, the safety of those voices is endangered. Next to the monopolized print press in large parts of the world, a platform that allowed new collectives to form has now become the plaything of yet another oligarch, his whims defining the rules.
Plaything is too harmless a word – the site is now a weaponized tool that can wield large influence, not least over the upcoming 2024 election in this country. But it can also wreak havoc abroad. Major investors in Musk’s take-over of the company are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Quatar Investment Company and Binance, the massive crypto finance company founded in China. They have been given special access to confidential company information. (Ref.) There is a huge worry that so far anonymous voices of dissidents will be outed, leading to their persecution. In Saudi-Arabia alone, 40% of all citizens are on twitter, anonymously.
As owner and CEO, Musk has removed the entire human rights team, as well as the team dedicated to disabled users, and the old content curation team which dealt with fighting disinformation. His next move was to ban the accounts of people publicly critical of him, journalists included. The re-admission of previously banned, extremist sites en masse has of course led to explosions of lies, racist and anti-Semitic tropes and disinformation, much to the satisfaction of the owner who encouraged voters to choose far right candidates during the mid-term elections. Just yesterday he tweeted, once again, a word that squarely panders to the extremist belief system that nefarious Jewish powers plan to replace the white US population with Brown people.
Flicker (Goldspecht)
Wren (Zaunkönig)
Importantly, and that is why I think I am so preoccupied with it all, there are no mechanisms that could curb the whims of an emperor. Maybe the financial chaos, with advertisers leaving as well as the important content providers, will lead to bankruptcy. But given that there is a network of unimaginably rich individual and state entities across the world that support his political ambitions, I don’t believe lack of money will be the downfall. Unfathomable riches of a few allow manipulation of public opinion and elimination of critics, quite literally.
Likely a hermit thrush, I learned, an unusual bird here at this time of year (Drossel)
Here is one of my favorite political reviews of the year that speaks to the choices the powerful have, reminding us of and analyzing a biting poem by Browning in this context, no less. Greg Olear’s column Prevailhas been a recent discovery for me and a source of pleasure. So are the birds, to which I will now return, hidden behind the window frame, camera in hand.
When I came again across Helga Stentzel’s whimsical laundry lines this week I thought of one of the very first blogs I had written here some 6 years ago with a message that deserves recycling.
It was about “The Right to Dry,” the name of a movement that fights against state laws and community bans on drying your laundry outside. “Officially more than 60 million Americans are prohibited from hanging their laundry outside, in their own yards or balconies and porches. This 2 minute video clip is a poignant introduction to what served the interest of the electricity industry (with former President Regan and Nancy as their spokespeople!) and those selling dryers.”
By 2012 the ban was voided (or made it unenforceable) in 19 states (including Oregon) by referral to solar access laws. Many of these are from the 1970s and comprised of hidden clauses in state property laws. A 1979 Oregon Law, for example, says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.” Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s and other states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry.
***
It is winter. No-one hangs their laundry outside now. Those who are privileged to have dryers or basements with laundry lines have no worries. I am thinking, though, about what happens when poverty and restriction of energy sources soar, like now all across Europe.
Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898 Women Washing on the River Bank, n.d. Oil on panel,
Most severely in Ukraine, of course, where the war destroyed most electricity grids and basements are used as bomb shelters. Besides individuals for whom all reliable daily functions have been bombed out, think of institutions. Hospitals, for example. Can you imagine the volume of laundry that is now to be washed by hand and dried – where? And the implications of soiled linen for (re)infections?
Anton Mauve Woman at a Washing line in the Dunes/ Woman at a Washing line (both undated watercolors)
It is tempting to think of war as happening primarily on the battle field, soldiers and their families the visible victims, but the impact on civil society goes so much further than our imagination provides. Hunger, cold, unsanitary conditions fostering more disease are all cards played by the invaders.
Paul Gauguin Les Lavandières à Arles I 1888
And speaking of imagination – today’s paintings of washer women often repeat the tradition of depicting them as a busy bunch, happily doing their work outside, or in the calm of their yards.
Left to right: Edgar Degas The Laundresses (c.1884) – Hubert Robert Ruins of a Roman Bath with Washerwomen (after 1776) – Pierre-Auguste Renoir Washerwomen (188)
The more likely reality is captured here.
August Sander Waschfrau NB VI/42/14 CTC — ASA 3/42/17
Tourist snaps of pittoresque Italian laundry lines non-withstanding, laundry has been a hard and dirty business.
“What are the chances…” was the beginning of a sentence that cropped up with astonishing frequency this week.
“What are the chances, seriously, that more people voted for Walker than the Rev. Warnock?” was me fretting half-way through the evening when election statistics had the former ahead of the latter for a short amount of time. Still in disbelief after all these years in this country that it could even come close. The good guy won, eventually, but the margins were too close for comfort.
***
“What are the chances that Sinema leaves the Democratic Party before Manchin?” High, it turns out. Her voting behavior cost us higher minimum wage, extended child tax credits, and voting rights protections. Seems there is little variability in her moral compass – it’s stuck on amoral.
***
“What are the chances, that I would find myself in any way connected to one of the right wing extremists arrested in Germany during a nationwide raid this week?” Low, really an outlier. 25 people (with more assumed to be associated) are accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the state with armed attacks, former members of congress and military and ex-military para-trooper members among them. Many are now in pre-trial detention, suspected of forming a terrorist organization. The defendants are closely linked with the Reichsbürger movement, who believe that the 1871 borders of the German empire are still in effect, tend to be far-right extremist, do not accept the legality of the Federal Republic of Germany, and, according to the prosecutor, “followed a conglomerate of conspiracy myths consisting of narratives of the so-called ‘Reichsbürger’ as well as QAnon ideology.”
New “head of state” was supposed to be Heinrich VIII Prince Reuss, a 71 year-old of aristocratic lineage, and one of the purported ring leaders. Here’s where six degrees of separation makes an appearance, however: as an 18-year old I was invited to visit a branch of the Reuss family for Easter. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I scored the invitation or why I accepted it (certainly no romantic involvement) from Heinrich IX Prince Reuss (must have been a cousin), they all get the same name, just numbered in succession…
We drove south in a car from Hamburg to his parents’ castle (literally) near Frankfurt. Arriving too late for dinner, we were led to our rooms. I appeared, starving, the next morning, Good Friday, in the breakfast hall. The horror! I was not dressed head-to-toe in black, mourning garb required for this Holy Day, apparently, in arch-conservative households. Back to your room, have the maid rummage for a fitting outfit! Well, it was off to a train station for me.
***
“What are the chances“, I thought, when following the complicated Supreme Court hearings about the Independent State Legislative (ISL) theory on Wednesday, “that I’ll be able to write about that in ways that get the legal details and importance of the Moore vs Harper case across?” Slim, as it turns out, even with the example of an iceberg….
In a nutshell, the case is about extreme gerrymandering, the possibilities (or not) of stopping excesses, and, more generally, the power of state courts and/or legislative bodies to shape aspects of federal elections. SCOTUS heard plaintiffs’ arguments that under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures retain exclusive power over federal redistricting and election rules, while state constitutions, state courts, governors, or voter-approved ballot measures have no power to check, balance or even review those laws. Yup. -. It is, as legal observer and author Elie Mystal pointed out, all about trying to take power away from non-partisan state actors and putting it solely into the hands of partisan state actors.
That’s as far as I can go – the rest of the arguments, delivered in detail, clarity and with focus on the implications to what remains of our democracy, can be found in VOX, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, the NYT, and the National Review. Take your pick – any one but the last helped my understanding of the matter.
And since we’ve landed on the topic of relative probabilities, we might as well end the week with my favorite poem about Statistics. Chances are, you’ll like it, on average.
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.
Ready to help, if it doesn’t take long: forty-nine.
Always good, because they cannot be otherwise: four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy: eighteen.
Led to error by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with: four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear of someone or something: seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure.
Cruel when forced by circumstances: it’s better not to know, not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight: not many more than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty (though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just: quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand: three.
Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine.
Mortal: one hundred out of one hundred — a figure that has never varied yet.
Photos today from Frankfurt and environs, in honor of another weird episode in the life of Heuer, filed under Frequency Distribution.
Statistics? No Problem. (Sorry for the annoying ads interrupting today’s music, could not find an alternative.)
Chances that this photograph relates to today’s text? Nil. I just love it, the matching colors, the symmetry and patterns of vertical lines, the contrast of work boots and fur jacket, this stranger’s strutting towards the center of the gate posts in completely empty space. It happened to be shot near Frankfurt.
There are days when the universe throws a gift into your lap, or has it flutter into your inbox, as the case may be.
Last week I had one of those days. A new acquaintance sent me a link to his website of photographs taken in the 1960s, capturing everything from agricultural workers, navy wives, political figures, to some of the great musical artists of the times. Maybe I reacted so strongly because it was a stroll down memory lane, but I think my appreciation was equally if not more driven by the quality of the portraiture across the board – mastery of candid shots.
Here is the link to the Steve Rees’ site Music and Mayhem, so you can see for yourself. I recommend you look at all of the subcategories in the header bar, much to explore.
I figured I’ll pick some of Rees’ musicians’ portraits and match them with songs that comment on the events of last week, which turned out to be a pretty momentous ones both here and in Ukraine.
Let’s start with the prediction business, prognoses, manipulations and wishful thinking around the Midterm Elections in the U.S. November 8th turned out to be a surprise, defying many voices and many agendas. What better fit than Jefferson Airplane‘s White Rabbit. Remember? “Logic and proportion have fallen softly dead…. “
Signe Anderson (left), Jorma Kaukonen (center) and Paul Kantner (right) at the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice When she’s ten feet tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you’re going to fall, Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call. Call Alice When she was just small.
When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low. Go ask Alice I think she’ll know.
When logic and proportion Have fallen softly dead, And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!” Remember what the dormouse said: “Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head”
Of course all these predictions were accompanied by endless requests for donations – I stopped counting how many folks asked for money in the run up to the election. Time to answer with the Grateful Dead in Build to Last
Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron McKernan, Jerry Garcia at the Human Be-In 1967
There are times when you get hit upon Try hard but you can’t give Other times you’d gladly part With what you need to live
Don’t waste your breath to save your face When you have done your best And even more is asked of you Fate will decide the rest
In the end, November 8th produced some serious tears – of rage, I guess, and narcissistic insult. Cry Baby, by Janis Joplin comes to mind, although, if up to me, they can all stay out in the cold…
Janis Joplin at Monterey Pops (With Big Brother and the Holding Company.)
Then there was the takeover at Twitter, reminding us of Big Mama Thornton‘sDown Home Shakedown. Of course it will end in tears, his hopefully – as hound dogs deserve it.
Big Mama Thornton at Monterey Jazz Festival 1966
And here is Eric Burdon, with the classic “Got to get out of this place.” It was the song played throughout the Vietnam years for soldiers yearning to make it out alive. I am sure the cannon fodder in the current war feels no different. May the retreat from Kherson be the beginning of the end of the invasion.
Eric Burdon at Monterey Pops.
I’ll leave you with an album that was one of the earliest ones I bought Eric Burdon’s War. (Frank Zappa’s Burnt Weeny Sandwiches was the first ever.) I’ll be humming right along.
1. Stop here and now with the fall clean-up of your garden, should you be lucky to have one. Leaf blankets, flower stalks, withering vines all provide much needed survival help to pollinators and birds, many of whom have not had the easiest of times. (One exception: clean vegetable patches IF they had some serious pest issue. You don’t want to give those critters a chance to overwinter in place.) If you don’t trust me you can read more professional explanations here and here. “Wild” gardens provide many more food sources and places for shelter to the birds in winter. Drop the rake until February…
2. Besides the avian beneficiaries of inaction we humans benefit as well. Here is a neat study showing that the exposure to the sight and sound of birds improves our wellbeing. In case you need scientific evidence for that.
3. All this came to mind when listening to a podcast about birds. A special bird, in this case who turned out to be a hybrid between two different bird species, a truly rare event. Hybrids occasionally happen between close cousins (1 in 10 000,) but the two parents of the bird under consideration hadn’t shared a common ancestor in over 10 million years. The specimen was a mix between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager (whose song he sang, while the looks were more like the grosbeak mom.)
The scientific assumption is that these “evolutionary experiments” confer a survival advantage to the hybrid, which in turn might shore up an avian lineage that is endangered. (Contrary to popular belief, hybrids can breed – if the hybrid mates with another hybrid, or with the same species as one of its parents.)
“It allows… independently evolved groups to share, that they’re, you know, sort of trading information back and forth on solving problems that the environment presents to them. So this might actually be important for adaptation to climate change, for example.”
4. Which brings us – you must have been waiting for it already if only as proof that my brain is back in action – to hybridization as a religious and political issue. As any number of nationalist Christian websites will tell you (and no, I am not linking to them) G-d does not want animal species to mix, or human bloodlines to merge in ways of racial intermarriage. This Divine command is found, they claim, in verse after verse in the bible – all conveniently and selectively cited – and originated as a punishment for transgression against Noah by one of his sons, the dark Ham, who in perpetuity is condemned to be inferior and whose descendants are to live in slavery. Japheth, the second son, is an idealized and blessed form of humanity superior to Ham in every conceivable way, representing Whiteness, and Shem is an archetype in between. In one foul swoop you have: an established hierarchy between White and Black, the former superior, prohibition of intermarriage, and a justification of slavery on divine authority. (In fairness many other Christian websites point out that this is false biblical interpretation.)
Note, these are not considerations of the American Antebellum South, when they were prominent. Or occurrences of the 1950s and 60s, like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia citing the Bible in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Reverend Jerry Falwell attributing the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision to Chief Justice Warren’s failure to know and follow God’s word, or Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo explaining that “miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance with the will of God.” Ref.)
Race separation as a Divine decree and the dominion of Whiteness are making a comeback in ever louder public voices and votes here and now in 2022. Consider the issues of the constitutional right to intermarriage: some weeks ago, 157 House Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine marriage equality in federal law. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana explicitly stated that not banning interracial marriage was a mistake. Regulating racial boundaries has been a main topic for international right wing forces, as heard in Hungarian PM’s Victor Orban’s speeches against mixing races, which were loudly welcomed by right wing audiences in the U.S. As the conservative legal movement grows more emboldened, are there any protections that we can unquestioningly rely on?
5. I am writing this on the day this Supreme Court is hearing arguments about Affirmative Action at a Public University. You can figure out for yourself why that came to mind in my hybridizing thoughts.
The idiom “Pig in a Poke” refers to a person making a purchase sight unseen and getting something inferior to expectations. It’s assumed to come from butchers wrapping lesser cuts of meat in a sack—a “poke”—for unsuspecting customers.
This came to mind when learning about recent deliberations of the Supreme Court in a case brought on by the National Pork Producers Council (National Pork Producers Council versus Ross – (Ross is the Secretary of the California Department of Food & Agriculture.)
At stake here is the 2018 California Ballot Initiative 12 that required bigger cages for certain farm animals, including breeding pigs, veal calves and egg-laying hens on moral and health related grounds. People overwhelmingly approved the measure which prohibits sales of pork meat in CA if it was raised outside the standards set by morality and health considerations, whether inside or outside the state. (To give a sample argument: the way sows are raised now in cages in most parts of the US would be like a human spending their entire life span more or less in an air plane seat.) In effect voters decided by a large majority that the half million pigs slaughtered each day in the US should have better lives before their demises, across the country, if they wanted to be sold in CA.
Big Meat sued, arguing that since 99% of the pork sold in CA comes from outside its borders, California was essentially imposing its laws on other states in violation of the U.S. Constitution, specified in the Commerce Clause. Their argument was supported in court by the Biden Administration: it would throw “a giant wrench into the workings of the interstate market in pork.”
So what is this (dormant) Commerce Clause invoked by the pork producers?
“It is basically a principle that the court has implied from the text and the structure and the history of the Constitution that is understood to limit states ability to burden interstate commerce. So specifically, states under the dormant commerce clause are not supposed to be able to discriminate against out-of-state commerce.”(Ref.)
As an example, Oregon could not prohibit sales of goods imported from Texas that are not produced with Union labor. Texas could not prohibit sales of fruit raised and harvested by undocumented labor in California. Political standards couched in morality issues, in other words, are not legitimate to justify disruption of commerce. Goods and commerce cannot be discriminated against by one state imposing their preferred regulations on another.
Hm. How do we think about this specific case? Should the voters’ will to protect animal rights be upheld? I predict most of us would spontaneously say, of course! I don’t want to participate in animal cruelty and so I don’t want the proceeds of that being available in my state, if only to force pork breeders across the nation to improve their practices. I will not be complicit in immoral activity!
It is more complicated than that, though. (When is it not?)
If we open the door to allowing our moral considerations to impinge on other states, then the reverse is also true. Their’s can affect us. The most obvious issue is abortion as a health care right. The sales of abortion pills sent from one state to another, abortion travel to abortion providing states, criminal pursuit of abortion providers across state lines are all potentially affected by a SC ruling that would affirm the law’s constitutionality. So would be measures concerning climate change (a law preventing, for example, any sales of goods that produce pollution, on the basis that it is immoral to burden future generations with our planet’s destruction.) Or state legislation involving union busting, immigration, LGTBQ rights, gun control, you name it. Once you open the door to using immorality as a path towards prohibition, you enable all kinds of political maneuvering.
And who is to say which morals are superior? If a pork producing state says our moral imperative is to provide affordable protein to people which involves producing on the cheap (that includes tight caging,) is that preferable to the moralism concerning animal welfare? The fact is that we see ever increasing disagreements on what is and is not immoral. The culture wars have divided the country. For every Texas that allows private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy there is a California that allows any citizen to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells certain illegal firearms. And in fact, during the oral proceeding in last weeks SC deliberations, the justices from both sides of the political spectrum were concerned with “Balkanization” of the country, something the Constitution worries about. Is legislation really about protecting your citizens, or is the intent to force your own values on other states?
What further complicates this case is the fact that Californians voted in this ballot measure on both morality and health regulations, and we’ll never know what mattered for what proportion of the voters. Health issues could confer a real justification to ban unhealthily raised pork – we know that disease flourishes in overcrowded pig factories and the rise in zoonotic diseases under those conditions is becoming more evident. The Justices asked questions about this as well. Justice Jackson suggested that a labeling of pork not raised under desirable conditions might be a way to warn CA citizens without forbidding sales outright – after all we have all kinds of labeling that warns about health related issues already on meat and other alimentation products.
And just in case you want to consider added complexity: here is a short but interesting introduction to the issue of Ballot Initiatives (like Prop. 12 was in CA) across the country for the midterms. Ballot Measures are tools that allow voters to pass our own laws directly, often with a simple majority of votes (not in Oregon, mind you,) not surprisingly adopted dring the Progressive Era. It is direct democracy, sometimes going over the heads of the states’ legislatures like when Maine, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah voters, for example, expanded access to Medicaid via ballot measure.
Pushback ensued. These days, many states are trying to make ballot initiatives harder to pass, by changing rules of the number of signatures required, or the qualifications of those collecting signatures, and now by direct vote on restricting ballot measures themselves, almost all of them in Republican held states. Critics of (democratic)California’s penchant for direct democracy also say it has led to higher taxes and a not-in-my-backyard mind-set, exacerbating a housing crisis and driving away businesses.
A ruling on the pork case is expected next summer. It might be a pig in a poke – a win for California could open the lid of Pandora’s box: allowing the growing ideological divide between the states to regulate — and respond to — actions in other parts of the country.
By the way, today’s photograph are from a pig farm that only cages the nursing sows when safety issues demand it. The pigs have plenty of inside and outside room to roam.
Here is Hausegger’s song about his piggy….. based on a Robert Burns poem.
What will I do gin my Hoggie die? My joy, my pride, my Hoggie! My only beast, I had nae mae, And vow but I was vogie! The lee-lang night we watch’d the fauld, Me an my faithfu’ doggie; We heard nocht but the roaring linn, Amang the braes sae scroggie.
PS: My computer needs maintenance – if I don’t post in the next days it’s under repair. Too many cookie crumbs…..
