Imagine you are accused of having committed a horrible crime. You are convicted despite your protestations of innocence. You serve your sentence in one of the more inhumane prisons in the country for over a decade. At that point DNA evidence and other material evidence reveals that you were indeed not the perpetrator. You are released, exonerated, given $5000 (for 10 years of your life) and then you meet up with the victim of the crime, whose eyewitness identification of you was the basis for your conviction.
How do you reconcile? In the specific case I have in mind, these two became friends; they are now on a lecture circuit warning against the dangers of reliance on often fallible eyewitness identification procedures. The ability to forgive on his part boggles my mind. The ability on her part to forgive herself and become a close friend even though she still saw his face in flashbacks of the rape for the longest time, leaves me speechless. Somehow they found a constructive way to integrate the tragedy they shared in different roles.
It does not always work that way, though. In a current case in Colorado a wrongfully convicted man is suing ex-DA Morissey and the city of Denver and various other defendants for compensation. The lawyers argue that “Mr. Moses-EL was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for more than 28 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC). He always maintained his innocence. But shoddy investigation, the willful destruction of exculpatory biological evidence and prosecutors blinded by the desire to obtain and maintain convictions regardless of the truth left Mr. Moses-EL in the cross-hairs of a powerful criminal-justice system that would fail him time and time again.”
I’d say. Imagine being convicted on the basis of your purported victim’s dreams and visions (she claims she’s always had visions that turned out to be true in her life), since she could not see anything in the dark when the horrible rape happened. Imagine having a judge vacate that sentence after 28 years because someone else confessed to the crime, and then have the DA re-try you, except now the jury acquits you. http://www.westword.com/news/clarence-moses-el-sues-denver-over-wrongful-28-year-imprisonment-9794307
His demand for $1.9 million compensation is refused by the current Denver DA because:“his acquittal through a jury does not mean he is innocent. There was just not enough evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict him….”
I opened yesterday with the fact that I have only questions and no real answers when it comes to reconciliation between parties where one wronged the other. That has not changed.
For today I picked a podcast that brings together descendants on both side of the Dred Scott decision, generally seen as the worst decision by any US Supreme Court in history. Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom across all instances, ending up in the Supreme Court, (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857,) which came down in a 7-2 landmark decision on the side of those who considered Blacks inferior: all people of African ancestry — slaves as well as those who were free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (legislation that restricted slaveholding in some territories) as unconstitutional. Well, what would you expect from 9 justices, seven of whom had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five were from slave-holding families.
Scott was bought by the man who had supported him financially and morally throughout the legal proceedings, and then set free. He died 9 months later.
Here is the conversation between Scott’s descendants and those of Chief Justice Taney who wrote the decision. Is this what you consider reconciliation?
No wonder then, that there is actually talk about reissuing the Green-Book….which helped Black motorists to traverse the US as safely as they could, particularly with regard to naming locations where no food or restroom or hotel rooms should be requested. Driving while Black is not a new phenomenon. http://www.history.com/news/the-green-book-the-black-travelers-guide-to-jim-crow-america
This week is devoted to the topic of reconciliation. I have only questions, no answers when thinking about reconciliation in numerous contexts. In this regard I seem to be in the company of minds smarter than mine and outside of the realm of souls more generous than mine. I will try and present conflicts that are between people, between groups, and within a single person. As far as I can tell, all of the conflicts I picked have a monumental structural component.
Since January 27, last Saturday, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’ll ask if reconciliation between Germans and Jews is possible when antisemitism is not only alive and well, but on the rise in both frequency and intensity of acts that attack and hurt Jews. Let me add right at the start, that antisemitism expressed by Muslim migrants and refugees in Germany is part of the story, but that 90% of the factual crimes are committed by Germans, as government statistics show.
I will report what I read in my daily dose of German news on 1/27.
On this day you found Angela Merkel expound on the shame that Jewish institutions, be they synagogues, kindergartens, community centers or schools in today’s Germany need constant police protection. She warned against rising antisemitism and xenophobia and announced the creation of a bureaucratic office in the new administration that is going to be in charge of these issues. It fell to Charlotte Knobloch, the past president of the Zentralrat der Juden, to point to the fact that the third largest elected party in that administration not only tolerates antisemitism and historical revisionism among its members, but encourages racism, rightwing extremism and populist nationalism.
A commentary in one of the largest daily’s on 1/27 was titled: What happened to us? It pointed to the fact that from early on Germans lacked the courage to address justice: of the 70.000 concentration camp SS personnel only 1650 received punishment by the courts after the war, often ridiculously small sentences with probation granted. And today’s acceptance of genocide across the world and of hate speech and violence within our own societies indicts us as having learned nothing from the Shoah.
Also on 1/27 a left-leaning daily interviewed Michel Friedman, member of Merkel’s conservative party, lawyer and TV moderator, who lost large parts of his family in Auschwitz. I found two of his arguments particularly resonant: Most Germans condemned the endpoint, the final solution, after 1945, but continued to be silent on what happened in the beginning. Millions of Germans were enmeshed in the looting, the destruction of synagogues and stores, the turning a blind eye to deportations. Do we find echoes of that silence in our own times?
Secondly, he argues that we need to educate the next generation to know how to engage in conflict. Rather than being silent in the presence of mental arson, as he calls it, latent or expressed antisemitism and xenophobia, people need to speak up and argue to avoid becoming a collaborator. Verbal sparrings solidify your own orientation, your political point of view, they need to be practiced in schools and at home, acknowledged as valuable tools against conformism.
I can only think of what Adorno wrote in 1959 when trying to point to the difficulty of internalizing the horror associated with German guilt (in my mind a prerequisite for reconciliation.) Loosely translated: You want to leave the past behind: rightfully so, since it is impossible to live under its dark shadow, and because the horror is unending …. wrongfully so, because the past you want to escape is quite alive and well.
Finally here is a new documentary that looks at the relationship between Germans and Jews. It can be seen in full on the web with registration or a small price at iTunes.
Photographs are from last Friday at the Portland Holocaust Memorial which is a strange beast, but obviously visited; I found freshly picked flowers stuck into the spaces in the wall.
I meant that title: decisions can be reversed; what lasts are the possibilities to choose from. Or more precisely, what lasts is the fact that there always are more possibilities, as long as we are not risk averse.
The reason this is on my mind has to do with my stumbling over a decades-old, short correspondence with Masha Gessen. Many of you know Gessen as a Russian/American journalist, queer activist and writer who documented the evolving political landscape under Putin’s regime and is highly critical of the Trump presidency.
After having left Russia in 2013 for the second time, likely endangered by being a critical voice in particular for LGTB issues, Gessen now teaches as a visiting professor at Amherst College and contributes regularly in the New Yorker, the NYT, and many other publications and is a recipient of a Guggenheim, an Andrew Carnegie and a Nieman Fellowship.
As a Russian (the parents emigrated with a young Masha) and a Jew, Gessen tackled issues of (not)belonging since a young age. As someone who had inherited genes predisposing of serious cancer, a decision to take preventative measures to fight the disease was on order some 14 years ago, given that many relatives had died of the scourge. Here we were two complete strangers and yet writing about the pro’s and con’s of preventative ovary removal, something I championed, something Gessen, who also already had children) declined, until just recently when it became unavoidable.
I have, I believe, managed to avoid pronouns up until this point because Masha Gessen, who used to be a woman, is now in transition to becoming a man. And rarely have I read a more eloquent and thoughtful description of the tackling of choices – from emigration to medical decisions to sex change – than in a recent article by him in the New York Review of Books.
The way he seeks out the world as an expanding universe that might hold a promise of belonging when one is open for change stands in stark contrast to what I believe underlies the populist, nativist movements of our time. I have written about it here last October, when discussing Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan in the context of the German elections. (Germany, by the way, STILL has no government since the parties seem to be unable to form workable coalitions.)
If you look at it closely, populist movements are against anything that represents pluralism – the coexistence of multiple options. Diversity is not only not desired, it is actively feared. To have too many options is seen as overwhelming; there is a longing for simplicity, redux, a singular structure that is preferred to the complexities of gender, nationality, culture and political movements.
Unfortunately such preference is not only voiced by those who lost status due to an increase in societal diversity and might regain it, but also by many who will be hurt if such a revisionist dream becomes once again reality. Clarity and structural regimentation are seen as antidotes to the chaos of an evolving world where national, cultural and gender boundaries are but in flux.
I hope the fact that so many fought for so long and so hard to implement changes means they won’t easily yield to the other half that wants to return to the old ways, (good old ways only in their imagination, if you ask me.) To have people like Gessen model the courage to radically reinvent ourselves gives me hope.
Photographs are of some of the many paths one could choose.
“Empty, hollow, thud,” is a phrase frequently heard in this household, muttered by various members of the family. It is meant to describe one’s emotional status (among other things after listening to the news.) The words originated in a classic 1970s paper in psychology titled On being Sane in Insane Places. Which would also describe the state after listening to the news, don’t you think? Details of the Rosenhan study, placing sane people into psychiatric hospitals with only those words (heard by fictional voices) offered as presenting complaint, and seeing how the fakers would be (in)correctly diagnosed, are described in the link below.
Since the phrase was prominently heard after last week’s tax vote and the decision to remove the US from the UN global compact on migration, I decided that I’ll dedicate this week to beauty wherever I can find it, and if I can’t find beauty I’ll make do with whimsey. Anything to cheer us up.
Now you might think that the last place to look for cheer is a cemetery, but you’d be mistaken. Cemeteries contain tons of beautiful details and many surprises. I was first alerted to this in the 1960s, when adorning myself like all other weekend hippies with lots of bead jewelry. A friend made me bracelets of tiny, tiny glass beads in an array of muted pastel colors in blues, purple, greens. Turns out, she was a grave robber. No joking, either, she took those beads from French cemeteries where they were lying around the disintegrating Imortelles, faded by the impact of the weather.
What is an Imortelle, you ask? They were extremely elaborate weavings of beads and wires that were put on the graves as funeral wreaths that lasted. At least lasted longer than real flowers. Here is what how it’s described on the web:
The art of making flowers out of beads is many centuries old. Although there is very little documentation on the development of this art, research has shown that the first primitive bead flowers may have been made as early as the 1300’s in Germany, when steel needles and wire were developed ….. One of the reasons that flowers are associated with churches has to do with beads. In the thirteenth century a form of prayer using a string of beads was instituted by St. Dominic. The string, called a rosary, consisted at that time of 15 units of beads. Each unit contained 10 small beads, preceded by one larger one. A prayer was recited at every bead. The word “bede” (sp) is Middle English for “prayer.” Because of the length of the original rosary, it became customary to pay someone, usually a resident of an almshouse, to recite the prayers. These people were referred to as bede women or men, and it was they who made the first bead flowers. ….The French used bead flowers as funeral wreaths. These wreaths were called “Immortelles,” and ranged from 3 feet to 4 feet in height. They would be left at the grave of the deceased. Since they were made on metal wire and were exposed to the weather, most of these items were destroyed within a year, but a few examples remain today. … Not only are there bead flowers mounted on the frame of the Immortelle, but the frame wires are wrapped in beaded wire as well. Wires strung with beads might have been coiled or braided as well before wrapping onto the piece. The whole surface of the Immortelle would be wrapped over with wire strung with thousands and thousands of beads.
My current take on cemetery flowers focusses more on the porcelain ones that you also find in France (today’s photographs – the other option would have been the flowers made out of fabric and plastic, but I like these better). My take on bead jewelry has changed as well. Still supplied by a friend, albeit a different one, but much improved in provenance – check her work out at http://www.jewelryatoz.net/, it’s delightful.
Note, on many of these flowers, nature is taking over in form of moss and little plants – the perfect mix.
The last entry in this week’s “recent encounters” category is a simple one: a conversation about aging.
As luck would have it, I am surrounded by numerous people who are aging truly gracefully. They serve as models, as reminders how attitude can make a difference, as a life-line on those days where I throw yet another temper tantrum directed at my uncooperative body or the even less cooperative mirror…..
From my recent conversation I learned that there are now classes offered that help people like me to get their act together…..
One of those, Aging With Grace and Mindfulness, will be taught in October at the Multnomah Athletic Club. Led by a close friend and teacher extraordinaire, the course will help participants start and/or maintain a meditation practice and a positive outlook that will address the difficulties we face as we age. Topics will include resiliency, positive thinking, coping with chronic pain and finding purpose in life.
For details you can call the MAC and ask for info about Class Number AEC115.
The reason I am plugging for this is twofold: for one, I believe that we are all – aging or not – exposed to a world where resiliency and positive thinking are needed more than ever, given the abundance of bad news. Secondly, when pain hits or other restrictions from illness and decrepitude set in, it is hard to shift from good intentions to the actual practice of positive thinking. Having a guide and a small cohort surrounding you with shared goals and efforts can be supportive.
My best in the moment-moments, are, alas, when I am traveling. Being in the air, above it all, catapults me into happiness, partly because I am still able to do it. For today, then, I’ll try to recapture that feeling with photographic assistance. And then I’ll listen to a travel writer giving a TED talk about mindfulness while sitting still….. https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_the_art_of_stillness
Yesterday I mused about how we can influence people’s attitudes by selectively presenting bits and pieces of photographed reality – leaving out the ones that would wake people up. Today I am turning to creating reality with pictures, a.k.a Hollywood movies.
I have talked before about the Implicit Associations Test – IAT – the psychological measure that confirms how many of us hold stereotypical assumptions associated with racism. It is a test that looks at the strength of associations between concepts and even the most liberal takers have gasped at their scores. Mind you, it does not mean you are a racist; it just tells us that we have all learned associations between concepts that involve negative stereotypes associated with Blacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test.
Where did you pick up these stereotypes, assuming you were not raised in a white supremacist household, taught by bigots, hired by the KKK? Most answers involve some vague pointing in the direction of our culture. Of how movies represent Blacks, how colors are weighted with negativity/positivity, how the media (over)represent crime statistics, how sound-bite hits like “welfare queens” take root in our minds. And then there are serious analyses, that are required reading like this article by Ta Nehisi Coates:
All this comes to mind because I have been in bed with a nasty virus and indulged myself with watching even more inane movies than usual. Having now gotten into episode 4 of a sci-fi concoction called Defiance I thoughtthe least I could do for my brain is to check for stereotypes. The story is structured like a good old Western: stranger comes into a town that valiantly struggles for survival and rescues it single handedly from attack(s.) Stranger is appointed sherif, torn between the desires of the flesh and purer feelings of the soul when engaging with two sisters. They, in turn, are a raven- haired beauty who runs the local brothel and a blond haired beauty who happens to be the mayor. Even her outfits of white blouses and breeches make her look like the plucky ranch wife out of a John Ford movie. Our hero is the rugged looking B-version of Indiana Jones, except that all this plays in St. Louis, altered by alien invasion, so let’s call him Missouri Jones.
8 (alien and human) races live in relative peace in the remnants of St. Louis with a token agreement that they can all preserve their traditions. Except when the humans decide they do not like something, like torture, and intervene and, since they are the good guys, sort of get away with it. There is a Romeo and Juliette subplot with, I swear, two 14 year-olds, from the two most powerful families in town. One that is human and looks slightly hispanic or native American, can’t tell. And one that is of an alien race that goes for all white all the time, preferably shot with a softening lens. They are the bad guys. Hm, you say, white=bad, that is progress. Not so fast. They are so white that they almost seem like albinos, and act so weirdly that they can more easily classified in the zombie family. Fear not then, the claim of white=good pretty much is untouched. Particularly when the white Missouri Jones displays knowledge of all kinds of alien technology that he scavenges from crashed spaceships and then uses as weapons against the primitive hordes attacking the town. Must have taken a long-distance course while slumming in the bad lands.
The number and variety of alien creatures threatening humankind must have had special effects guys drooling for months.
But the darkest danger comes from – hello – an old white woman, the ex mayor. I guess misogyny topped racism in this one, using every evil queen formula in the book. And, any Blacks? Yes, a token one, a single young, earnest guy whose role is mostly confined to being the love/hate interest of our hero’s alien sidekick, a young girl he rescued and raised.
My photographs will surround the isolated young Black deputy with a family today.
New Year’s resolution #3: We, as a nation, should do everything in our power to acknowledge the existence of racism, explicitly or implicitly expressed, and the hold it has on our society, preserving inequality and power structures.Then fight it. I am grateful for those who give much in this struggle.
I’ve talked about sloth, gluttony, envy and pride this week; proscriptions to work instead of play, accept a sparsely filled larder, resist comparisons to others and do all this meekly, were, I believe, given in one form or another during tribal, feudal, or modern historical times (capitalism and socialism, as enacted, alike.) They all came with the promise of some better life at some future point (and in some future realm if you believe in heaven.) Clearly something is needed to regulate human interaction before all hell breaks lose when competing for limited resources. Or resources that someone does not want to share, even if there was enough for all, in principle.
So if a world is structured by inequality, exploitation and effacement, how do you live a right (a good) life? I am picking up here on Judith Butler’s writings who, in turn, works on this very question originally posed in Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Perhaps you know her as one of the most famous American scholars of feminism. She has since turned to thoughts on how we can live with each other, in a world divided by nationalism, resentment and hatred, a fear of change and a return to autocratic longings.
Reading her texts is rough going, I admit, (the title of one of her recent books alone speaks of that….Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly) but the link below outlines an interview that I found clear and thought provoking, particular in light of our selective attention. Just think about two concurrent disasters – the rains in Texas and in SouthAsia. Close to 2000 people have died over there, rarely do we notice while discussing the plight of Houston.
Butler claims that we need to acknowledge our interdependence and our vulnerabilities in our interactions with those who are different from us; however, we have the opportunity at this historical moment, to seek change towards a less hierarchical and discriminating world by allying with those we traditionally shunned. In a world sliding into ever more precarious circumstances for an ever increasing number of people we can engage in a politics of alliance and make progress by living with each other, together, performing resistance not for personal liberty but for collective change.
My take-away, then, is that rather than worrying about the deadly sins, I should pour my energy into being part of a movement that is accepting, inclusive and hell bent on making this world more just. First step in that direction today: make my voice heard about the nixing of DACA. It might put my soul in limbo, but my conscience in just the right place.
Photographs are work in progress on the Refugee/Mobility series, showing (mostly) isolated figures in transit.
PS: Between Labor Day and travel next week blog will be catch-as-catch can.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like to cook. I like to eat but am pretty indifferent to what kind of food, and once I find a dish I like I am known to order it in perpetuity. That said, I’m a glutton when it comes to all things sweet. I inhale candy, chocolate, pastries, tortes, you name it and am forever grateful for those who indulge my sucrose addiction.
In unpleasant contrast, I find myself borderline, no, seriously puritan when it comes to other people being preoccupied with and fond of high-end cuisine. There is a little voice in the head that complains when I join my family at a restaurant for a meal the price of which could easily feed half of an African village for a week. Their appreciation and knowledge of, their joy and reveling in good food is completely supported by me, but my participation in those meals is somehow triggering a sense of guilt.
Memories of hunger’s destruction were never far in a post-war German childhood, some of them direct experiences of people close to me, with lingering consequences to their health. Being forced to eat unpalatable food, both at home and in boarding school, did not make it any easier. My political awakening during the late sixties was also colored by issues of famine: Stalin’s punishment for the inability to deliver his agricultural production goals was starving at least 3 million people in Ukraine. The deliberate starvation of Leningrad was the most notorious example of the Nazis’ policy of killing by hunger during their invasion, which in the early 1940s caused the death of four million Soviet citizens in the western parts of the Soviet Union they occupied. These numbers paled in comparison to Mao’s great leap forward which, combined with drought and poor weather-caused the deaths by famine of 36 million Chinese during the period from 1958-1961 (and that is not counting the 40 million births that did not happen because of these 3 bitter years as they are called colloquially.)
Hunger’s Bride (2011) from the Holocaust series: The Defiance in their Faces
One of my most vivid memories, now 36 years ago, is food related as well. I had just moved to NYC from Germany and found the apartment burglarized, most of what little stuff I had brought, including inherited pieces of jewelry, gone. The walls were smeared with food remnants from the fridge, and the cops judged it to be the work of junkies, who had managed to climb into the 3rd floor bathroom window the size of a postage stamp. I was pretty devastated until my roommate brought home a bagful of luxury food from Zabar’s. I exploded in wrath (another one of the 7 deadly sins.) And I mean exploded. How could you possibly offer food to comfort the loss of mementos? The realization of cultural differences did not help to make me feel better.
Village custom had the family of the deceased place a piece of bread on the departed’s chest, and someone hungry enough signed on to eat that bread believed to have soaked up all the sins of the deceased which would now lodge in you. Hunger making you willing to pawn your own soul….. and lest you think this was purely medieval superstition, the last known sin eater died in England in 1906!
