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Politics

Art and Politics (1)

Wouldn’t you know it. I thought I knew every major museum in NYC after having lived there for years and visited for many more. Turns out, I don’t – I have never been to the Queens art museum. This is a particularly regrettable fact given that the director of the museum is a woman of courage and deeply held convictions.

http://www.queensmuseum.org

Unlike almost all of her contemporary counterparts she is willing to engage in open politics – more power to her. The link attached below describes the role she has played in the last years and the causes she has fought for since Trump’s inauguration, the plight of the DACA recipients in particular. She is clearly paying a price for her outspoken involvement; although her Board seems to support her, various City councilmen are out to have her removed.

.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/arts/design/queens-museum-laura-raicovich-daca.html?_r=0

I know of only one other group of museums who were willing to step up and question the artificial separation between art and reality; see link below.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-march-museum-directors-react-to-proposed-1489682884-htmlstory.html

One can debate if the role of museums should be one of neutrality, as many insist, particularly the folks at the Smithsonian. The argument for taking the long view, letting art speak for itself rather than the museum speaking for or against political causes seems empty to me, when almost all museums show this or that work of political artists anyhow. If you curate shows that have political content, you might as well be open about where you stand regarding those contents. The viewers are smart enough to form their own assessments, as long as the opportunity to be exposed to differing points of view exist.

There will always be pressure from interest groups to have art suppressed – that has been true for as long as art exists. Just ask around Jewish museums in this country or in Germany, as one example. Or the Guggenheim, recently.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-spertus_21jun21-story.html

What we need now, in times where the role of art is undermined by those who have lots to loose with a more educated public, is individuals who stand up and speak truth; truth through the selection of what they are willing to show, as well as through directly addressing the relevant issues. Laura Raicovich is one of them.

Photographs are of street art found in various boroughs in NYC, most Bed-Stuy.

 

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The Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

Show me someone’s blog that opens with an Emma Goldman quote, consider me hooked. If that quote refers to small communal interactions forming the kernel of possible societal change, consider me sold. Let me introduce you to the Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Choir.

Who am I talking about? A group of activists/artists who do both concert stage performances and agitprop actions to raise awareness of how we are mistreating our planet and our neighbors. They fight for earth justice, against consumerism, for first amendment rights and much more. Their recent visit to Portland was once again a coup by Boom Arts – bringing progressive artistry to an audience that is in need of and grateful for cutting edge theatre.

The NYC-based troupe is led by Billy Talen, an actor who uses comic theatre and music to get out the message – in ways that often risk persecution by the powers that be who are quite aware of how he lifts the veil on capital’s agenda. The link spells it out in more detail:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/27/reverend-billy-church-of-stop-shopping-black-friday

On Sunday night the artists met with members of our community, including Portland Resistance and Portland Tenants United for a community supper.

And since this week’s blog is dedicated to women’s issues, let’s focus on the women I encountered.

There were young women of the choir who managed to travel across time zones with infants and toddlers, putting in full performances, and still had the energy to meet new folks; young women who sang with beautiful voices.

 

There was the director of the company, who writes beautifully and provides organization and structure. There was her daughter who clearly shared her mother’s fierceness as well as the theatrical brilliance of her father.

http://www.revbilly.com/about_savitri_d

There were the Portland activists who lead the cause;

There were the folks from Boom Arts who surprise me every year with procuring ever better acts; doing their magic in getting people to return, fostering relationships, helping to keep the company afloat –  a special welcome here to the recent NYC transplant!

And then there was the kind of woman who models for all of us how to bring more peace and justice to the world in everyday life, managing the Sunnyside Community Center. She was celebrated and shown expressions of gratitude that her kind deserves and yet so infrequently receives.

It was an evening that conveyed energy, activism, community and above all hope – so direly needed in these times.

The troupe is off to England for their next adventure – friends over there, be on the look-out. These are performances you might not want to miss.

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On Lace and Limitations

 

I had never visited a bridal store until last Friday. My own wedding dress was bought off the rack at a Laura Ashley’s. The pastel flowery concoction received the dry comment of “You look like Alice in Wonderland,” from one of the more observant wedding guests.

(Yes, we do like jokes in our family…even for the official wedding picture)

Judge for yourself, but it is true that I was looking for adventure and I certainly share Alice’s curiosity and willingness to go to strange places.

Hilary Schor who teaches English and Comparative Literature at USC argued that Alice in Wonderland  can be read as a feminist text. Alice went underground to question the rules, is not punished for her refusal to obey commands and above all, gets away with her curiosity. Curiosity did not just kill the cat – think about all the stories where it was cause for the downfall of women – Eve, Pandora, Lot’s and Bluebeard’s wives – you name it. Curious women can, after all, acquire knowledge which in turn could threaten patriarchy.

Well, here it’s 2017 and it seems we are all going down the rabbit hole, encountering people as rabid as Carrol’s anthropomorphic counterparts. Just think of the debate around issues of equality in large corporations, or congress men calling for women to go back to being mothers and housewives, or women being advised by a female (!) Fox host “to engage in a little horizontal hula and then make him a sandwich,” or urged to be “the beta in a marriage…by Phyllis Shlafley’s daughter

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/is-this-the-most-sexist-fox-news-clip-ever-natural-state-of-women-is-to-be-the-beta-in-marriage/

I felt like an old grouch thinking these thoughts while photographing a radiant, beautiful young bride trying on her wedding gown. Her thoughts were on anything but the future of feminism, and of course they shouldn’t be. She was surrounded by lace, and satin, and pearls and all things glittery, clad in a modern gown equally romantic and sexy.

There will be time to think about it later. When the moment arrives, there will also be good books to read: the attached review spells it out in detail.

The future of feminism

And as a bonus we can throw in some thoughts on fake feminism.

 

The Sculpture of a “Fearless Girl” on Wall Street Is Fake Corporate Feminism

For now I wish the young couple all the best, and the kind of happiness I felt for 31 years now in a truly egalitarian marriage. (Do I hear someone muttering in the background that he’s doing all the cooking?)

 

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The Dead Life

One chapter of Thomas Mann’s novel Magic Mountain is titled The Great Stupor. He refers to the years before the onset of the great war, perceived by his protagonist to be “life without time, without care or hope, life as a stagnating hustle-bustle of depravity, dead life…. There is an atmosphere of uncanniness, maliciousness and aggression. A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even melees.” Some of the conflicts eventually end in death (altho in the absence of automatic weapons not in those of hundreds of random victims…)

What so perfectly described that epoch is equally applicable for our times as well, I believe. That sense of “dead life” is likely experienced both by a large part of the Germans who voted for the populist AfD, whether as a protest vote or in desperate search for new meaning, as well as by the masses which support an American populist agenda. They see their old identities  threatened by globalization, cultural changes, the influx of immigrants, and their old standing within a hierarchy of power undermined by those who attempt to achieve more equality for the races and genders. It is not so much an economical issue – data in both countries confirm that those who tend toward a new extremism are not the poor – but an issue of feeling left behind and/or no longer valued and fallen down a few rungs on the pecking order ladder.

There is a longing for a structure that promises continuity, a structure that has disappeared with the opening of family, neighborhood, work place or politics to the unfamiliar. There is a longing to belong to a place that is known and which conveyed advantages to white males: AfD honcho Gauland put it precisely: the AfD voter wants his/her country back. The way to appeal to these voters is by appealing to emotions, stoking the fires of discontent and rage, as the historical example of the rise of the Nazis taught us all too well. And the best way to construct an emotional bond is by creating a common enemy: the Jews in the 1930a, Muslims or other immigrants in our time.

The new synagogue

Not all people who voted early  for the NSDAP were racists or antisemites. It was more of a collective protest vote against the status quo in the beginning. Not all AfD voters should be seen this way either. People in East Germany have still not fully processed the changes that came with reunification, changes that were not all for the good and certainly destructive to the familiar structures that ensured a certain safety net and standing. However, the AfD has components that make it a direct heir to the fascist ideology. One should be worried that its election success is not simply a German version of the increasingly prevalent populist movements across Europe. We have to be alert to the possibility that there is an unchecked, deeper

continuity to German history in its worst form.

It did not take 5 minutes for the Central Committee for the German Jews to comment on the election results about their deep fears of the implications of the vote. The head of the concentration camp memorials pleads not to have an AfD representative to chair a culture committee in parliament because holocaust denial has been publicly uttered by some, and a fight over the memory culture shared by many (not unlike what we here see in the confederate flag debate.) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-afd-bjoern-hoecke-berlin-holocaust-memorial-shame-history-positive-nazi-180-turnaround-a7535306.html

The hard work that has to be done, then, is to find a way to offer alternative identities, a sense of belonging, to those Germans who have given in to populism’s lure. It won’t help to announce that change is the way of the future, so just buckle up. It won’t do to just praise a vague promise of European citizenship without the specifics of how one can be anchored. I certainly don’t know how to do this – and I honestly believe almost all of us are clueless, otherwise it would have been done. If we want equality and integration, openness and justice, then those who benefitted fron inequality and racism are guaranteed to loose.

And here in the US?  Let me just point out that our racism, as instantiated by law and regulations, served as a template for the Nazis, eagerly studied and emulated at the time. The link below spells it out, brilliantly.  How distant are we from that, can you tell me?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/

Photographs are of Dresden, hotbed of neo-nazi activities, stronghold of the AfD and its precursor, PEGIDA. I have reported on the beauty of Dresden before, the art that you breathe in with every step, the left-0ver scars from the tragedies of the allied fire-bombings, the resilience of the people and their reconstruction efforts. It is hard to believe that it has been the breeding ground fore the brown menace.

And here are some ads from the AfD:

New Germans? We make them ourselves. – Burka? I prefer Burgunder (red wine). – Islam: doesn’t go well with our cuisine.

Have the guts, Germany!

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German Election Statistics

I am forcing myself to write today after the ongoing wave of horrendous news, millions of people in Puerto Rico threatened with death and disease, 9 million children having lost their health insurance this weekend when congress let CHIP lapse, and now, of course, the mass murder in Nevada.  So I am compromising: I will post some statistics today on the German election, and leave the harder part – the analyses – for later.

The table below (source: Spiegel.de) shows Merkel’s CDU on top, the social democrats next, then 2 leftist parties; the FDP is a deregulatory party of upper middle class business interests which came back into parliament; the AfD, Alternative for Germany, is the far-rift populist party that garnered almost 13% of the votes, bringing neo-nazi paroles, anti-immigrant, nationalistic sentiments into the government for the first time since WW II. The rest did not make it – note that we have 6 parties who will share in governing, and 42 parties that wanted to get votes. 61,5 million people were asked to vote.

The traditional big parties lost heavily; Merkel will only be able to find a majority vote in a coalition, which will no longer include the social democrats; they, after years of governing with her, now feel the need to regroup in opposition. The coalition that is discussed is nicknamed Jamaica for the assigned colors of the triad: Black (CDU), Green (the greens) and Yellow (FDP). Much talk about the curse of the caribbean (and not only in one of Germany’s most respected weekly’s.) 

The distribution of votes differed, as to be expected, according to region, but the percentages were astounding when you look where the AdD was elected – the further East you go, the more they scored, up to almost 36% in some of the districts.

Men are over-represented in AfD voters, as are middle-to low education groups, workers and the unemployed. Of the three million people who voted for the first time, the AfD also got a larger than expected share. And so they went from zero representation to 94 seats in parliament with the representatives on average being much more educated than those who voted for them and on the whole middle-aged white men.

Photographs (2013) today are from a small town East of the border that divided East and West for so many years, Salzwedel, in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt. The city is part of the Hanseatic League, the trading and seafaring conglomerate of yore, which always meant a bit more openness for the world. Its election results (district Altmark) mirror the average for Germany in %, with the exception that die Linke and the social democrats both got 19%; the CDU won, but lost almost 10 point compared to 2013, and the AfD scored 16.5%. It is a region that has been economically not as depressed as areas further to the East, and large gas reserves were recently discovered, promising some economic gain. (You can see how nicely the old house have been restored, for the most part.)

Sachsen-Anhalt, home to 2.277 million Germans, has about 9000 registered refugees. 80% of the citizens do not belong to a religious group, potentially a long lasting effect of GDR ideology condemning churches. About 16% are registered Christians, mostly protestant; in 2016 there where 1340 Jews (down from 1800 10 years earlier) who belonged to synagoges, so 0.06 % of the state population.There are no state numbers for Muslims; for Germany as a whole estimates are that  they comprise around 5.4 % of the population.

http://www.mdr.de/sachsen-anhalt/religionen-in-sachsen-anhalt-100.html

Karl Marx’ wife Jenny was born and is remembered here:

 

And if you think it all looks picturesque and romantic, think again.  The link below details some of the positions of those AfD representatives who got elected, Martin Reichardt for Sachsen-Anhalt. Read it and weep.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-1.813852

Or join the resistance:

(Nazis f…k off, this is our home.)

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Safety before Profit

If you asked me last week what I think when I hear the word Oklahoma I’d say: State in the mid-West and a hit musical by Roger and Hammerstein.

This week, on the other hand, the dominant association to the word Oklahoma is earthquakes. Maybe I’m reading too much for my own good. But the story about what’s happening in Oklahoma really exemplifies my quest as to what we as a nation should resolve for the New Year: listening to science – and act on what we learn –  to avoid disaster.

The links below provide details, but here is the rough version: By the end of 2014, 567 earthquakes of at least magnitude 3.0 were recorded in Oklahoma, more than the number of 3.0+ magnitude earthquakes from the previous 30 years combined. In 2014, there were over twice as many earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma as in California, making Oklahoma the most seismically active state in the contiguous United States by a substantial margin. In the last two years that number increased even more as did the magnitude of the quakes: the largest one recorded as 5.8.

The attached article spells out the consequences if we reach the magnitude of 6 on the Richter Scale in particularly sensitive locations, like Cushing, OK where 14 major oil pipelines intersect and hundreds of tanks holding 60 million barrels of unrefined oil are sitting targets (tanks are not subject to federal safety regulations, wouldn’t you know it.)

And I quote: if there were a major one that broke pipelines and split, say, half those tanks, the environmental disaster would make the Exxon Valdez spill of 260,000 barrels of oil near the Alaska coast nearly three decades ago look like the results of a kid knocking over her uncovered juice cup.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/14/1698565/-A-big-earthquake-could-turn-Cushing-Oklahoma-into-one-of-the-worst-oil-related-eco-disasters-ever

So what do we think causes this strange increase in earthquakes?

In one word: greed, in multiple forms.

Large companies drill for oil and gas in Oklahoma, making tons of money where labor is cheap and regulations scarce. The drilling process involves a lot of waste water that needs to be disposed of. For that purpose they create deep disposal wells even below the levels of oil and gas extraction and then pump the brine – now a mix of water and chemicals – into those wells. The EPA says there are about 40,000 disposal wells nationwide. The water that hits lower strata deep in the earth can set off seismic activity – after years of denial now even State regulatory agencies acknowledge the causality. After the 2016 earthquakes you saw 37 wells shut down because they were deemed too risky. Which is, of course a drop in the bucket.

That water could be recycled. People do it all over the States, but not in Oklahoma. The oil companies claim: “underground wastewater disposal is currently the safest and most cost-effective way to dispose of produced water.” Drillers also argue that recycling is more expensive, in part because they must pay to transport the wastewater to recycling facilities. But they promise they’ll check for safety gaps more frequently…..

The New Yorker story below is an in-depth description of what is happening. It also mentions that much of what you see when driving through Oklahoma is starlings and cows, which prompted the photo selection. And a goose, because they are everywhere, and I like them…..

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-underground

We all know the writing on the wall, but we do not act in time – we should change that, as a country, putting our citizens’ safety before the profit garnered by the energy giants. And this concludes our New Year’s resolution – l’Shana Tovah!

Earthquake Map

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Defiance

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:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=fbb

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 thought the 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.

Can Black Lives Matter Win in the Age of Trump?

 

 

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The Album of Death

The ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur give people who are not completely saintlike (those latter automatically inscribed into the Book of Life) or completely wicked (who will be inscribed into the Book of Death) a chance to escape the fate of death next year: by doing a lot of things that convince the scribe to put your name in the right book.

Death, then, is a concept that comes up a lot during the High Holidays, even if well meaning friends had not sent you a -as it turns out- quite moving essay from the New Yorker, when they know you don’t particularly like to read the New Yorker….  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/questions-for-me-about-dying   

What I like to read, wouldn’t you know it, are analyses that show how the manipulation of what we see or don’t see of death can affect our willingness to support our government’s decisions to go to war. Particularly if they are written by a smart legal scholar from Emory, who – Boston folks take notice -will talk on this topic at a Harvard International and Global History Seminar this Wednesday.

The link below is a short abstract of Mary Dudziak’s paper; the gist of which goes as follows: as long as we are prevented from paying attention to the product of war – dead human bodies – we will allow the restraints on presidential powers to shrivel. Our distance to visible death “helps to produce the profound apathy that characterizes contemporary American war politics. This apathy enables the current legal structure of war authorization: Congress fails to act, and presidents rely on new interpretations of outdated authorizations, or their own constitutional power. Ultimately, I argue, a crucial and unexamined factor in the atrophy of political restraints on presidential power to use military force is the distance between American civilians and the carnage their wars have produced.”

Her paper goes on to show how the US manipulated imagery so that war efforts were supported by the civilian population already during WW II. “Using censored and uncensored World War II casualty photographs, I show the way the very view of war death was managed by the U.S. government for the purpose of maintaining domestic mobilization. Civilians therefore engaged a curated view of death meant to enhance their support for the war effort.”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004292#.WXYfKGHPxhM.twitter

One of our nation’s New Year resolutions, then, should be an increased awareness of the multitude of factors that support war mongering. Only if we know the strategies used can we fight them to decrease our spreading of death across the world.

Assuming you have squeamish reactions to the chosen images for today, let’s just say they ain’t images of humans… just a lost doll and some beach jetsam.

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New Year’s Resolutions

This week we observe Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. It is the beginning of a ten day period of penitence that culminates in Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. It is customary to contemplate one’s missteps and symbolically throw them away with pebbles or breadcrumbs into a body of running water.

It is psychologically astute for religions to provide these points of renewal. Miserable behavior can only be changed if it is acknowledged in the first place, and the promise of forgiveness or some other form of clean slate enables contemplation rather than avoidance. I’ll leave it open as to what constitutes a sin (or why sins have been defined by those in power to regulate) but there is no doubt in my mind that we can all work on being better human beings. Well, I should and will work on it.

I wish the same could be said for nations, our’s in particular. So for this week’s blog I chose topics that warrant New Year’s resolutions of society at large to search for better solutions. I will start with one that is hyper-controversial: abortion.

Everyone agrees in the ideal there should be none.

Those who scream the loudest against them are also those who are the least willing to provide educational and financial resources to prevent pregnancies in the first place. For the time being, however, abortions are legal under certain conditions, although many factions in this country are doing everything they can to change that.

http://www.refinery29.com/2017/06/158903/abortion-laws-by-state

This includes pulling funding for the clinics that offer safe procedures, harassing the providers and patients to the point of maiming and killing them. On the legal end, we see this:” As long as Roe v. Wade stands, states can regulate abortion (before the point of fetal viability) as they see fit. It has allowed anti-abortion politicians to go on the offensive: In the first six months of 2017 alone, a total of 431 provisions restricting abortion access were introduced at the state level. Out of these, 41 had become law by June.” (Citation from attached link above.)

 

The working environment in women’s clinics reflects both the threat abortion providers are under and their indomitable spirit to fight for the rights of women with humor, bravery and remembrance.

They know that they offer a host of services that are invaluable for reproductive justice and healthcare for the poor, abortion being just one of them.

Today’s photographs, taken in the kitchens and hallways of women’s clinics, are witness to the conditions and determination described above. I wish we as a society would find a solution that protects women’s choices in ways that go beyond the letter of the law.

 

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Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.

· Wrong life cannot be lived rightly (Adorno) ·

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.

https://theotherjournal.com/2017/06/26/worldless-without-one-another-interview-judith-butler/

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.

 

 

 

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