Politics Archives

Free Speech, my Hat

Politics
Nov 16, 2016
1 Comments

Do you know that feeling when so may things simultaneously vie for attention in your brain that you can’t formulate a single, coherent thought? And do you agree that the timing of this always seems to be the worst kind, when grant deadlines beckon or important letters need to be written?

This week is one of those weeks, which is why you are getting a lot of text from other people, rather than my own musings. Just as well – probably these texts are more informative than much of what I have to say a week after Black Tuesday. Really an offense to that beautiful hue – maybe we should call it gold-plated Tuesday.

In any event, I am introducing you today to a woman of valor, who stood up for her values and was imprisoned for them, many months before gold-plated Tuesday arrived. One only wonders if these kinds of assaults on free speech will be the new norm. But her story is one of courage, determination and a will to stand against the justice machine, or the mad conductors at its levers….. I guess that is a mixing of metaphors. Told you, can’t think particularly straight. Bright spot, as promised. Echoed by the images from the 2015 Harvard Law School graduation that sent more valiant young people out in the fight for justice.

Here goes: imprisoned for wearing a Black Lives Matters pin in court.

Social Justice Attorney Andrea Burton: Jailed for Refusing to Remove Black Lives Matter Lapel Pin

Moving forward

· In memoriam Gwen Ifill ·

Politics
Nov 15, 2016
5 Comments

One of our brightest, most honorable journalists died yesterday at age 61 from cancer. Gwen Ifill leaves a gaping hole in the current media landscape at a time when she and her smart analyses were most needed. I think she would have wanted us to move forward and so the American (and German) voices about moving forwards are dedicated to her. The citations brighten my horizon because I feel I’m in good and diverse company even when it seems that time is going backwards. (I photographed the tiled images in the NYT subway system.)

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values — that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness

—James Thurber

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.—Franklin D. Roosevelt

I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world in which we will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

—John F. Kennedy, speech at Amherst College, October 26, 1963

I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don’t think there is anything such as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you’re happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven’t reached that stage yet.

—Rosa Parks

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Serving in War

Art, Politics, Portraits
Nov 13, 2016
1 Comments

Poverty, inequality, healthcare, racism, sexism, a general hatred for those who pray or love or define themselves differently from traditional Western norms, will probably be with us for the next foreseeable future. Perhaps in FAR worse forms than before. What will affect the world beyond American borders are war and climate change denial. I am not denying the fact that present and past administrations have been warmongering, more so perhaps than we are aware of. I also thought the least desirable aspect of HRC was her hawkish inclinations. Yet the thought that an unpredictable narcissist with fascistic leanings and a coterie of sycophants has the finger on the nuclear button gives me nightmares.

For paintings I chose one of my favorite and one of my least favorite painters. The former captures the horror of war like no one else. Otto Dix painted The War between 1929 and 1932.

More on it here:http://www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/archive/otto-dix-der-krieg-war/

The latter artist, Anselm Kiefer, is discussed in the link below (take it with a grain of salt) but painted something for a Paul Celan poem that I really like.

Anselm Kiefer’s Heady and Heavy-Handed Behemoths

As photographic counterpoints I chose portraits I took of our young women and men who will be the potential canon fodder should war be part of the Trump presidency. I, of course, have no access to those who will be killed by drones, bombs, mines or nuclear missiles in the rest of the world. And so, so young.

Strong Women

Art, Politics, Portraits
Nov 12, 2016
1 Comments

I can wrap my mind around the fact that men feel threatened by women being their boss, taking their jobs instead of their orders. A shift towards equality always hurts those who were in dominant positions. I cannot understand, however, how women can long for a return to a status quo that celebrates their subjugation, narrows their independence, controls their bodies. Making decisions that give other, competing women the finger.

Maybe the fantasy held by anxious, disenfranchised males that a strongman will reinstate control and status at large is reflected in the fantasy of women that their prince will come through the house door, no longer angry and punitive with his place in the world restored.

Let’s look at those who never bought into that and held their own in a misogynistic world. I am linking to an article about an extraordinarily strong woman I had never heard about. What a discovery.

368 Years Before Hillary, This Trailblazing Feminist Demanded Her Right to Vote

Then there are portraits of those who shaped their households or their surrounding culture or their countries’ fate by various forms of leadership.

Quentin Metsys Portrait of a Woman

Date: ca. 1520

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Raphael Soyer, Golda Meir (1975)

Hannah Arendt in a sketch seen in VOGUE….

Muhammad Yungai Angela Davis

Barbara Berney Indira Ghandi (2010)

As for photographic portraits, here are some of my own role models when it comes to fierceness and determination: those who are or have been fighting cancer and excel in competitive dragon boat races.

May they inspire us and our children.

Moral Minority

Art, Politics, Portraits
Nov 11, 2016
1 Comments

Jan Mijtens Portrait of Margaretha van Raephorst with Servant (detail) Holland (c. 1650)

There are people who do want to turn the clock back. We knew they existed. We did not know how many of them, we lived in the bubble of our comfortable existence and lacked imagination just as much as contact with Trump voters or contact with those who feared his win all along. We perhaps slung around terms like white identity politics, but honestly had no clue. At our own peril. Worse, at the peril of those who pay a higher price, here and in the world at large. Privilege permitted ignorance.

Joseph Wright A Conversation Between Girls (1770)

I call those who do want to turn the clock back the immoral majority. Today’s oil portraits depict Black children who were servants, slaves or toys and, most of all, commodities that could be bought and sold. The paintings might stimulate the phantasies of racists, even when they hesitate to admit it. Although obviously, that shame has evaporated for some, now that Sauron, who currently has the ring, allows them to make their views public.

Peter Lely Lady Elizabeth Noel Wriothesley (1660)

Pierre Mignard Portrait of Louise de Kérouaille

The photographic portraits, on the other hand, hopefully show the vision of the rest of us: the strength, innocence, potential of some of the most vulnerable segments of our society – something we, the moral minority, HAVE to protect.

The images come from my work with an after school program in North Portland that is comprised of African immigrant and African American kids. They learn dancing and drumming, get instructed in their cultural history and bits of language, and are part of a whole that structures their lives and sustains them. They also get food during their rehearsals at the Salvation Army Building.

And here I am breaking protocol of some kind or another, I am sure. A fundraiser for this group is once again upon us. If you feel inclined to join me in support of these children, go to http://www.kukatonon.org/donate-2/

and help us out.
If you feel irritated by my plea I have just one answer: Trump made me do it.

RESIST

Politics
Nov 9, 2016
8 Comments

Resist despair.

Don’t yield to resignation.

Do not withdraw into the safety of some privileged, private life.

Now is the time to learn from 1933 and organize help for those who are the most vulnerable.

Support education so rising generations have the tools to deal with the life long fall-out of this catastrophe.

On the Eve of the Election

Art, Politics
Nov 7, 2016
2 Comments

And now we wait.

All arguments (or the absence thereof) have been offered, inspected, weighed, and, one fears, often dismissed.

A wonderful painting by Richard Caton Woodville, Politics in an Oyster House (1840), shows how that went on in the 1840s :

From the Walters museum website:

Woodville adopted the subject of newspaper reading seen in works by his Düsseldorf contemporaries Johann Peter Hasenclever and Wilhelm Kleinenbroich, placing it in a distinctly American interior, described by a contemporary critic as “one of those subterranean temples devoted to the immolation of bivalves . . . vulgarly known as oyster cellars.” After their meal, the younger of the two figures, bearded and wearing his top hat indoors, leans across the table, counting arguments off on the fingers of one hand and clasping the newspaper that fuels his opinions in the other. The older man, balding, ruddy-faced, and red-nosed, warmed by the liquor in his half-empty glass, looks out with amusement at the viewer. The booth in which they are seated, with its red privacy curtain pulled aside, creates a shallow proscenium stage for this scene of intergenerational argument. The characters are engaged with the politics of their time, on which Woodville, characteristically, takes no stand.

Woodville exhibited a copy of this work with the title A New York Communist Advancing an Argument to some acclaim at the Royal Academy in London, where he was then resident, in 1852. A woodblock print of the painting illustrated the review of the exhibition in The Illustrated London News, which called it “a spirited little piece . . . of more than ordinary merit.” The lithograph of the picture, produced by Fanoli, printed by Lemercier, and distributed by Goupil & Co. included a “dedication to John H. B. Latrobe, Esq.” (see fig. 38 and checklist no. 21). It was offered in a full-page advertisement, along with several prints after works by William Sidney Mount, in the December 21, 1850, issue of The Literary World as “a most exquisite representation of American politicians.”

And here is the contemporary ending of that argument:

(from a rehearsal by the Jewish Theatre Collaborative – oh how I miss them!)

Let us hope that the social realistic art of Ben Shahn, depicting a demonstration in 1933, does not presage the next couple of days, months or years…

Too little water

Nature, Politics
Oct 13, 2016
1 Comments

Remember the old Mark Twain adage “Water, taken in moderation, has never hurt anyone?” That’s no longer funny when considering how many people in the world experience water shortages, or are forced to migrate because there is no longer enough water to sustain human dwellings.

Here are some predictions from the UN:

http://www.juancole.com/2016/05/climate-change-water-wars-to-create-40-water-shortfall-in-15-years-un.html

And I quote: “The figures continue to be staggering: despite improvements, at least 663 million still do not have access to safe drinking water. And projecting into the future, the United Nations says an estimated 1.8 billion people – out of a total world population of over 7 billion – will live in countries or regions with water scarcities. The crisis has been aggravated by several factors, including climate change (triggering droughts) and military conflicts (where water is being used as a weapon of war in several war zones, including Iraq, Yemen and Syria).”

One often neglected factor in water scarcity is also land grabbing – buying inexpensive swaths of land in developing nations and using it for agricultural production. If the land is in an area with heavy rainfall, then irrigation is no problem. But if the land is in drought afflicted regions, investors will tap into water supplies from the ground, depriving the native population of an already scarce resource. Saudi Arabia, for example, has bought tons of land in Africa to grow all of its wheat, using their water, thus protecting its own resources.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/01/a-parched-future-global-land-and-water-grabbing.html

Simple conservation won’t do – global political solutions are necessary to prevent catastrophe. And lest you think we, in this country, are somewhat safe, here is an eye opener:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/megadroughts-arizona-new-mexico/503531/

Fauna in Fall (of an election year)

Nature, Politics
Sep 27, 2016
1 Comments

I am writing this about an hour before the presidential debate – you will be reading this the day after. Any of today’s photos of animals preparing for the season could have a different meaning, depending on the debate outcome.

Sheepish, bullish, lies multiplying like rabbits, pecking, pouncing like a praying mantis –

take your pick.

I think that’s what we call ambiguous pictures ….. which is fine as long as the debate outcome is unambiguously in favor of a candidate who is not racist, not scheming, not narcissistic, not mendacious, and above all able to handle a world in turmoil with sufficient intelligence, information and respect for the facts that we will not descend into further wars and inequality.