If you drive north along palmtree-lined Bay Road, passing the Bay Bridge,
the Piers,
and somewhat confusing public art,
you’ll eventually end up at Crissy Field, a large expanse of park, with a bit of marsh enclosed, and sandy beaches to walk on.
The views of the Golden Gate Bridge are postcard material, and as such sold in every tourist trap in town. That said, the views are gorgeous.
Walking in those green meadows and along the pristine beach you wouldn’t know that the area was for the longest time one of the major military air fields on the West Coast if not the country. Parking lots and concrete- plastered runways covered the area since 1921, with barracks on the infill of what was once a marsh housing enlisted men, and other buildings serving as administrative offices and officers’ quarters.
Fog made for difficult flying conditions, as did the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. After World War II the field was primarily used to received MedEvac flights bringing wounded Vietnam soldiers from Travis Air Force Base to Letterman Hospital. It closed eventually in 1974.
The bridge is in that cloud!
In 1994, Crissy Field and the rest of the Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, under the care of the National Park Service. Three years later they started enormous restoration efforts, the results of which are now enjoyed by throngs of people, tourists and neighbors alike.
About 230,000 cubic yards of soil had to be removed from Crissy Marsh alone to transform it from a parking lot back into a habitat for plants and animals like herons, egrets, crab and fish. The rest of the area had to be cleaned from decades of accumulation of hazardous materials, an undertaking that was supported by millions of dollars in donations from citizens and organization alike.
Here is a detailed history provided by the National Parks Conservancy, with remarkable before and after photographic footage of the transformation. A true restoration.
Have we learned anything? Cargill Inc., the nation’s largest privately held company, recently wanted to develop nearly 1,400 acres of the shoreline along the San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, destroying existing marsh land. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency tried to give the green light, ignoring both it’s own agency regulations and the Supreme Court’s decision on the Clean Water Act.
Save the Bay, an energetic environmental protection organization, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and three other environmental organizations sued the EPA and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler over the agency’s March 2019 decision not to protect the salt ponds under the Clean Water Act. A federal judge has now ruled in favor of the environmentalists, but one wonders, of course, what will happen if and when the issue winds its way up to the newly configured Supreme Court.
Why is it that every bit of nature has to be ripped out of the maw of forces trying to destroy it in these urban environments? Why do always either the state or private business reap the economic benefits of their strongholds, while the damage removal has to rely the generosity of citizens’ purses or the tax payer stepping up? And are people even aware of the work and time and money and sweat and tears provided by conservancy organizations who try to rescue what they still can? Rhetorical question, I admit.
Birds of a feather, and loners. Time to share some the birds that hopped or flew across my way while in San Francisco, or simply hung out to be admired.
Looking at them will be the easy part. Reading assignments for today, on the other hand, will involve some effort, one, I PROMISE, that will be highly rewarded. Not a coincidence that I am posting some of my favorite subjects – the birds – after a particularly depressing day given the travesty of the new Supreme Court appointment, and offer readings that will help us battle our despondent states. Or so I hope.
The two authors I picked are birds of a feather in some ways – progressive, politically engaged, extremely talented writers who tackle the pressing issues of our time. Smart women with a laser focus on the topics of their choice, the legal system in one case, women’s issues in the other, both within the context of the history of power distribution in our country.
Dahlia Litwick has a background in Law (she holds a JD from Stanford and clerked for the 9th circuit Court of Appeals) and writes for publication as diverse as Newsweek, The New York Times Op-Ed page (as guest columnist) and Slate, where she is Senior editor. Her writing has developed over the years, becoming increasingly passionate, committed, but never shrill. Two years ago she received the prestigious Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, deemed to be the best legal commentator in the last many decades. I could not agree more – I turn to her writing on a regular basis, both for the amount of information conveyed, the ease with which it enables me to digest complicated issues, and the cleverness of the way she creates concepts that feel intuitively like perfect descriptions of a given situation.
Case in point: Litwick’s latest essay talks about the mechanisms in which current power distributions both within the legal system and the political realm at large have been cemented and simultaneously used to make us willing participants in a move towards minority rule. If you don’t have the time or energy to read her short piece, here is one excerpt that exemplifies what I mean:
If nobody in any position of authority feels the need to provide information, it’s a decent bet you aren’t in a functional democracy anymore. And I am not here to tell you how to fight the cynicism that comes with being lied to or told you can’t change anything. I am just here to note that the inchoate rage and despair are real, and that even the possible resounding defeat of Lindsey Graham in his race for his Senate seat may not be enough to cure it. I am also here to remind you that some of the reflexive reaction to the daily reminders of your own powerlessness—including your possible hopelessness, blame-shifting, and the ritual saying of “who cares”—really is the reaction they are trying to elicit. It is the object of the exercise. You’re now in the autocracy trainee program. Mitch McConnell’s court coup is designed not just to decrease your political power but to teach you that you should expect yet more political powerlessness. That is how they are trying to ensure that even though there are more of you than there are of them, it doesn’t matter and they still get to call the shots.
Autocracy training program: the perfect encapsulation of the goal to keep the citizenry in check. As she points out eventually, though, it’s up to us to refuse hopelessness. There are ways to resist.
This is a point that is echoed in Rebecca Traister‘s writing as well, the second author I’d like to introduce today. In fact, her most recent book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger is all about the ways of organizing resistance in these times. Writing for New York Magazine and its website The Cut, editing for Elle Magazine, and some years back interestingly also for the New Republic, Traister’s gift for analysis and her wit are equally sharp.
If you have time, DO read the attached article from yesterday’s The Cut. It is long, I know, and the real meat appears way into the description of all of the movements uniting to fight our slide into autocracy, not just the women’s movement. The author is at her best when she lays out the dangers and complications arising from the diverse strands of groups and ideologies who should, must unite to fight the onslaught onto our democracy. Her optimism is tempered by pessimism, which both reflects what so many of us are feeling, and also makes it hard reading because we are so brilliantly reminded of the mountains that need to be climbed, even if the election should produce a new and improved government.
Not to read these kinds of pieces, though, is exactly giving in to the danger that they point out: the fatigue, the helplessness, the retreat into passive lives. I know, I’m prodding. Yield already! Anyone who called on Obama to seat a judge on the US Supreme Court who is a cross between Rachel Maddow and Emma Goldman (in 2009 no less, anticipating what would eventually come true), is worth your time!
I, for one, find the kind of hedging, waffling, side-stepping, equivocating, prevaricating, stalling and evading we have witnessed in the last few days of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings plainly poisonous. And may I remind all of us, that psychologists consider omissions, restructuring, denial, minimization or exaggeration a form of lying.They do speak to the character of those engaging in these actions, or shall we say the absence thereof, but they bring about malaise nonetheless, given what is at stake and given that the absence of character will not matter one bit when it comes to the votes.
Let me post an antidote – words that are unequivocal, honest, no holds barred, emphatic and firm. Words that were true then and are now.
Photographs are of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Yerba Buena Gardens, right in the center of San Francisco. The selection of his words is printed on glass plaques and placed behind a gorgeous waterfall.
I will report more on the gardens tomorrow, not wanting to dilute the power of the words displayed above today. But here is the blurb about the memorial from the website:
The vision of peace and international unity is enshrined in this memorial featuring a majestic waterfall and shimmering glass panels inscribed with Dr. King’s inspiring words, poems and images from the civil rights movement. Artist and sculptor, Houston Conwill, created this memorial in collaboration with poet Estella Conwill Majoza and architect Joseph De Pace.
Two nights ago, purportedly enraged about what Columbus Day represents, some protesters in Portland, OR, toppled two statues in a city park and vandalized the Oregon Historical Society to the tune of $25.000 or more. Sheer lunacy. OHS has been involved in uncovering and teaching about the history of our state from a progressive perspective, most recently examining in depth the racist roots of so much what has happened in Oregon, including quarterly publications that were frank and unflinching in confronting an ugly past. This year they unveiled a cornerstone exhibit in cooperation with the nine federally recognized OR tribes, called Experience Oregon.
I will not enter the debate of when and whether violence and vandalism ever have a role to play in a struggle where power is unevenly distributed. But I will say, that actions like these – broken windows, fire torches thrown into the building, a mid-centennial quilt by African-American women stolen and left in the wet streets further down the block – undermine a larger struggle that has been heating up in the last few years: the fight for the integrity of history education, historical research, national identity, and collective memory.
If you blindly rage against any kind of “official” site or organization that engages in historical education you provide grist for the mills of those who are really actively trying to constrain and direct the kind of history we all are supposed to accept, and our children are supposed to learn.
There is an ideological divide between those who want to uncover historical truth, however shaming, ugly and unnerving it may be, on the one hand, and those who want to maintain an ideological view of our nation that distorts, white-washes or erases historical truth to be more in line with their preferred mode of operations, some of which include a active program to undermine democracy.
Making it harder for the former, in whatever fashion, vandalism included, plays into the hand of the latter. This is, of course, not just a theoretical consideration. Look at the very real 1776 Commission appointed by Trump with the mission to create a history curriculum for American schools, intended to be “pro-american,” and feared to deliver state-sponsored propaganda averse to true scientific historical research, just like all the other anti-science initiatives of this administration.
Add to this his promise to defund schools that use the 1619 Project (an in-depth exploration by numerous writers and historians of our slavery- defined past presented by the NYT) as well as other curricular platforms that bring attention to historical facts and truths that counter the “official” curriculum, and you put the nation’s collective historical memory under siege, with public education bearing the brunt.
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
And here is Weiner’s assessment:
“The Trumpist crusade against American history education needs to be understood against the backdrop of the administration’s recent actions against refugees, Black Lives Matter protestors, Muslims, and working people of all races and ethnicities. All of these actions suggest an administration hell-bent on breaking the civic bonds between whites and blacks; new immigrants and old; Christians, Jews and Muslims; LGBTQ peoples and heterosexuals; and the poor, working and middle-classes. Trumpism is an ideology of disunity, ignorance, and division; it thrives on conflict, dis-information, mis-education, and social chaos.”
We don’t have to add fuel to that chaos by rowdy actions that are politically unwise, providing grist for the mills of those trying to silence the truth.
Music today by Native American Artists in honor of Indigenous People Day!
I haven’t touched politics on this blog in a while, partly because my brain’s average speed is slow-motion these days, and partly because I wanted to counterbalance the woes of our world with something more positive, viz. poetry.
However this weekend I came across an article that taught me something new, and I think in the context of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination and the sly refusal to say the quiet parts out loud by certain members of the current administration and Congress, it’s worthwhile reporting what I learned.
Randall Balmer, an eminent historian of religion who holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth at Dartmouth College and is also an Episcopalian priest, has extensively written on religious subcultures and politics in the U.S., his most recent book Evangelicalism in America. Much of his work teaches us about the history of evangelicalism and the fact that it was not always allied with the Religious Right, but instead had progressive historical roots which saw a remarkable resurgence in the 1970s, after evangelicals had withdrawn into a more isolated subculture during midcentury, fearing the corruption of their children by the world at large. Last year he wrote,
“evangelicalism, in contrast to the Religious Right, has a long and distinguished history. Evangelicals set the social and political agenda for much of the 19th century. They advocated for the poor and the rights of workers to organize. They supported prison reform and public education. They enlisted in peace crusades and supported women’s equality, including voting rights.”
Here is the, for me, new and interesting fact of how evangelical leaders and the Religious Right joined forces in the 1970s, ousting one of their own, Jimmy Carter, and forming the basis of the movement that in 2016 had sworn allegiance to our current president – 81% – 4 out of 5! – of evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016.
Although Falwell and his minions claim that coalitions were formed around the issue of abortion, the inconvenient truth is that they mobilized politically to defend the tax exemptions of their racially segregated schools, including Bob Jones University. The tale that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling outraged enough Christians to the point where they joined the Religious Right, Balmer claims, is just that: a convenient tale around an easily communicable issue of morality. If you look at the early reactions among Evangelicals to the Roe ruling, there was either silence, or approval, or at most mild criticism of the ruling.
Instead, it was another court decision that lead to the jointly organized political power we see on the Right today: it was about segregated schools and their tax exempt status as charitable institutions. In the aftermath of desegregation of public schools, the number of private schools that enrolled only White kids exploded. It was all about keeping Blacks out and preventing White children from being influenced by a worldly culture that questioned traditional norms and the tenet of the separation of the races.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a ruling Green v. Connally that upheld a new IRS policy instituted by Nixon:
“Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
Eventually in 1983, the US Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision (those were the days) ruled against Bob Jones University as a tax exempt institution. The Moral Majority wouldn’t have it – but was also clever enough to know that it could not run publicly under the banner of racial discrimination. What standard to rally around then? Religious freedom? School prayer? Hey, legalized abortion! The perfect decoy.
If representatives of the Religious Right, of which Barrett surely is one, are to become Supreme Court Judges at a time where racism, racial segregation and voter suppression along the lines of race are central to the body politic, it seems to me that this is what needs to be explored in the nomination proceedings, rather than allowing abortion – and obfuscation on positions regarding abortion – to be dominantly used as a screen issue.
To end on a slightly comforting note, here are some encouraging thoughts, although they might involve a time horizon that is too late for many of us:
Yet that same conservative court majority may also serve to isolate and limit the Republican Party’s appeal in a country growing more racially and religiously diverse. Already, according to Public Religion Research Institute data, fewer than three in 10 adults younger than 30 identify as White Christians. The GOP is installing a court majority whose views may collide explosively over the coming decade with the dominant perspective among millennials, Generation Z and the younger generation behind them on questions ranging from abortion to racial justice, climate change and gay rights. Replacing Ginsburg with Barrett on the Supreme Court represents a triumphant moment for the conservative social and legal movements. But if the court majority cemented by Barrett alienates the rising generations who will represent the nation’s largest voting bloc by the middle of this decade, that judicial victory could turn to electoral ash.
Now why does that bring Actus Tragicus to mind? Bach will help us start the week….
Photographs today are mostly from my outer Sunset working class neighborhood.
On my way to the car I walked by this building on 4th St yesterday, after the announcement that the Grand Jury had not held any officers responsible for the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in her own home.
The words of James Baldwin rang true more than ever.
The stenciled art along the walls only reinforced that sense of despair in view of the cruelty extended to those deemed barely human, subject to slavery and free for the killing.
Henry Box Brown (1816-1889) had himself put in a steamer trunk to escape slavery near Richmond, Virginia and shipped 250 miles via boat, horse-drawn carriage and train to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. Upon passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Brown left the United States for England and worked as a featured speaker in England’s abolitionist circuit.
Emmett Louis Till (1941-1955) was fourteen when he was tortured and killed in Mississippi after allegedly having insulted a white woman (he whistled at a store clerk.) Armed men kidnapped Till, slashed out one of his eyes, and tied a 100-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire. Till was severely beaten, shot in the head, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Two fishermen found Till’s mutilated and unrecognizable corpse three days later. At a later trial, the all-white, male jury deliberated for only sixty-seven minutes before acquitting the two murderers, the clerk’s husband and his half brother. Historically no jury in the State of Mississippi had ever convicted a white person for killing a black person if the crime involved sexual aggressions towards a white woman. Four months later, Bryant and Milam admitted to the murder to journalist William Bradford Huie for an article that appeared in Look magazine. They received $4,000 for their interview.
Ada (Mother) Wright fought for justice her two boys, aged 13 and 19, who were among the nine black youths were arrested in 1931 at a place called Paint Rock, Alabama, and accused of the rape of two young white women on board a train from Chattanooga, Tennessee, a charge that was subsequently withdrawn by one of the women. The youths were quickly tried in the nearby town of Scottsboro, pronounced guilty, and sentenced to death. Mother Wright, a poorly educated Southern woman who was a domestic worker and had never spoken publicly, embarked on a tour through Europe to appeal for her sons’ lives. The Scottsboro case, with the help of many progressive organizstions in the US and abroad, made it to the Supreme Court where the death penalty was not upheld, although many of the youths were held and mistreated in prison up to 20 years later.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist influenced by Booker T. Washington. His program within the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA,) located in Harlem by 1917, resonated with Southern Blacks who fled for the industrial North, returning Black WW I veterans, working class urban Blacks. It focussed on industrial education, economic separatism, but also strict social segregation, which led to his naive belief he could cooperate with the KKK, since both organizations believed in “pure” race. This garnered the wrath of African American leaders and multi civil rights organizations, which led first to imprisonment and eventually to deportation to his place of birth, Jamaica. He never recovered his political fortunes and died in London in 1940.
Bobby Seale (1936-) was a cofounder and Chairman of the Black Panther Party, founder of the War on Poverty program, and one of the Chicago 8 defendants accused of inciting a riot outside of the DNC in 1968. After his arrest, he requested that his trial be delayed so his lawyer could recover from surgery. When denied a delay he requested that he represent himself, which the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman, also refused. When Seale made repeated attempts to represent himself in court, Hoffman ordered Seale to be literally bound and gagged. Hoffman then sentenced Seale to four years in jail for contempt of court.
Today he is a political activist, community organizer and lecturer. Here is an interview with him from 2 months ago. “You cannot fight racism with racism. You have to fight it with solidarity.”
Claudette Colvin (1939-) refused to give up her seat in a bus to a White person 9 months before her more famous compatriot, Rosa Parks, became a cause celèbre. Colvin was promptly arrested, taken to the city jail, and was charged with disturbing the peace, breaking the city’s segregation ordinance, and assaulting policemen. She went to Montgomery juvenile court on March 18, 1955. She was found guilty, sentenced to indefinite probation and made a ward of the State. The conviction started a boycott movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Colvin served as a witness in the eventual Supreme Court Case, Browder v. Gayle, which explicitly overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, ending segregation on buses.
Forgive me if my mind wanders even more than usual these days. I used to think of my habit of forming strange and far-reaching connections as an asset; these days associations come unbidden, feeling more intrusive than clever or surprising. Be that as it may, here is the most recent chain of thought, originally triggered by a day of darkness.
Literal darkness, that is, as you can discern yourself when realizing today’s photographs were taken at noon, overlooking San Francisco Bay, some days ago. A darkness likely to have enshrouded the Oregon landscape as well, a consequence of the devastating fires.
It brought to mind Lord Byron’s poem, Darkness, attached below. It was written in the summer of 1816 after the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815. The eruption killed more than 10,000 people, while an additional 30,000 across the world perished from the crop failures, famine, and disease that resulted from extreme weather triggered by the explosion. Volcanic ash blotted out much of the sun for more than a year, having people believe that the sun was dying. The average global temperature dropped by a whole degree. The poem reads like a prescient description of both climate change and/or the more figurative darkness that surrounds us in these days of the demise of our democracy.
Darkness
BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d, And men were gather’d round their blazing homes To look once more into each other’s face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the world contain’d; Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d And twin’d themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food. And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again: a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was death Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devour’d, Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answer’d not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they rak’d up, And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d They slept on the abyss without a surge— The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before; The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
The poem’s apocalyptic tone was not just caused by the strange, dark weather. Byron himself was at one of the lowest points in his life, his reputation shattered by revelations of his incestuous relationship with a half-sister, and public disclosure of his marital cruelty (he was sexually and emotionally abusive to his partners, men and women alike, throughout his life time.) He left England in disgrace at age 28, never to return again, wracked by debt and alcoholism. He died in exile from illness contracted through exposure to the elements. Notorious to the last, and yet he was a shining star in romantic poetry’s firmament, of bright intensity or intense brightness, your pick.
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Notorious is also a term for me, for many of us, prominently associated with RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may her memory be a blessing, died last week on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a bright sun extinguish’d. For all she fought for, trailblazed, conquered, for a life lived with integrity at the opposite end of the spectrum from Byron, she, too was not granted a peaceful death. The very knowledge that her passing would be exploited for yet another power grab by those who care for nothing but, must have weighed heavily for someone ready to be freed from the ravages of cancer and yet clinging to life in hopes of gaining time towards the election. It was not to be.
We must mourn her, and then tend to her legacy by whatever means we have. I find it heartening to be reminded that this is not on individuals alone. If you reread the poem above, look at the lines that signal connectedness – “And men were gather’d round their blazing homes To look once more into each other’s face” – we are in this together. Or the lines that point to a future, even if shrouded by fear – “A fearful hope was all the world contain’d.” And then various descriptions of how people, other than those giving up, acted on that hope.
The poem does not end happily, but rather in desolation. That is a choice, but one the poet himself did ultimately not give into. Byron dreamt of revolutionary changes for the world and actually fought for social justice in his few years in government service. So did Bader Ginsburg in her reckonings with the powers that be. Here are Byron’s words from Canto IV of Childe Harold:
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain, But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire [.]
For the rest of us: let’s tire, if not torture or time, then at least the current President and Senate hellbent on filling a Supreme Court Seat that does not belong to them. Make them weary with an onslaught of action. Exhaust them, weaken them by all means in our repertory. Unless darkness becomes the universe.
Music today uses the words from another Byron poem, She walks in Beauty. Rest in power, RBG. You have not lived in vain.
In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About thedark times. –Bertholt Brecht, Motto to Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark, 1939.
Some people sing about the dark times with their camera, documenting state imposed cruelty as much as the defiance by those affected. One of those contemporary photographers is Ximena Natera, a Mexican reporter and documentary filmmaker who specializes in migration, human rights violations, peace processes and collective memory in the region. Her work with Pie de Pagina’s investigation unit – they support at risk reporters in conflict zones – has been recognized by Mexico’s National Journalism Award, Gabriel Garcia Márquez Foundation, and Pictures of the Year Latam.
Ximena Natera
She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, while attending the documentary photography program at the International Center of Photography in New York on a Jan Mulder Scholarship prize.
Ximena Natera
I had known about her work given my interest in issues of migration, but was reminded of her when a recent issue of Mother Jones featured her brilliant portraits of young children who attended Black Lives Matter marches, gatherings and other communal functions.
The photos were taken in the beginning of June, 2020. At that point, no-one would have hesitated to take their children to marches and demonstrations against police brutality and racism, that would take place in city squares, in front of public buildings, the streets of various cities in this nation. They would have been able to sing about the dark times, gaining a collective memory of civic action, learning that each voice counts at a young age.
Ximena Natera
Can you imagine now, with teargas, toxins and other ammunition shot randomly into peacefully protesting crowds of mothers, dads, veterans and nurses, how a child could be traumatized, if not physically hurt? They have to stay home, or do their little neighborhood bike parades which are gratefully happening all over Portland, deprived of large communal experience that would guide them on their path to be engaged citizens. The political implications of the current PDX situation will be far reaching and long lasting. Dark times, indeed.
And yet, seeing the photographs of the NYC kids create pure hope. Hope for a better future.
My own photomontages for today were the results of working at a peace camp with children of all religions some 7 years ago.
Today the text is the music and the music is the text. The words of the 1948 UN Human Rights Declaration, in their demands for and implicit belief in humanity – the vision of a better and fairer world that is within our reach if we choose it – remind us that we still have a long way to relieve the trauma that millions of people undergo everyday, imposed by cruelty, greed and injustice.
Eleanor Roosevelt, credited with its inspiration, was the chair person of the UN Committee that drafted the document. She referred to the Declaration as the “international Magna Carta for all mankind,” and considered the 30 Articles of the Declaration as her greatest achievement. It was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Here is Roosevelt reading the preamble.
Composer Max Richter put her words to music, incorporating her reading of the preamble into a piece called All Human Beings from his new album Voices, to be released by the end of July. He then crowdsourced hundreds of readers of all ages who repeated the words in various languages, interwoven with the music. They are the voices of the title.
Here is an interview with the composer about his approach to music as a conduit for political or philosophical thought and here is a play list of his works broadcast on NPR.
Photographs today are a variety of finches, gold finches, house finches – the male plumage still intense for mating, to produce a second clutch of eggs. Their color comes from pigments in the food they eat, and so varies depending on the quality of the food. The better quality food, the more intense color, the more likely to be chosen as a mate by Ms. Finch….
I chose finches because they range across the entire world – in tune with the United Nations mission. Bunting, canary, cardinal, chaffinch, crossbill, Galapagos finch, goldfinch, grass finch, grosbeak, and sparrow classify as finches.
3: to cause to cease hostile firing or criticism// silence the opposition
Silence, in other words, is not just a desirable state to enable contemplation or soothe our stretched nerves. It can also be used to achieve certain communicative goals: keeping a secret (which can be good or bad,) signaling who belongs to certain groups or serving as a means of exclusion, or as manipulation in the service of power. You can be silent because you have nothing to say, or you don’t want to say something or you are not allowed to say something.
There are controlled, calculating silences: The majority of Republican politicians, until yesterday, were silent on the wearing of masks even though all scientific evidence pointed to them as effective in slowing the pandemic. Being silent on the numbers of infected people seems to be a magical tool to make the disease disappear, whether we are talking the President’s proposals regarding testing, or the disappearance of hospital admittance statistics across red states.
Then there are resigned, powerless silences – children who are undergoing traumatic experiences often cease to speak. People who have never been listened to don’t want to waste energy by futilely raising their voices.
Silence is often socially and culturally regulated: who gets to speak first or who does not get to speak at all tells volumes about power hierarchies. There are not many languages who do not have proverbs that allude to the desire to silence chattering women folk, for example. And we can finally put a myth about gossiping women to silent rest: new research shows they don’t do any more of that than men.
Many terms in both German and English connote a critical or negative perspective rather than a positive one: “Shut Up!, wall of silence, I’m lost for words, under the cloak of silence, speechlessness, the silence treatment, shocked into silence, hushing something up. (The German translation for the last one, by the way, is literally “killing with silence,” totschweigen, wanting to make something disappear for good.)
Silence, then, can be political. Some years back, for example, a famous German author, Martin Walser, talked in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade about the “instrumentalization of the Holocaust” and the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz as a “moral bludgeon.” Let’s no longer talk about it, we feel bombarded! He recommended that Germans withdraw to their own conscience, to a place of “profound inward solitude” and engage in “the withdrawal into themselves.”
All hell broke loose. The solution to return to the individual conscience in order to avoid the public remembering, silencing it, in effect, was not something that sat easily with many people who had worked hard to educate about the Holocaust particularly in light of the rising neo-fascist tendencies in younger generations as well. The Jewish community was mortified, with its then-leader Ignaz Bubis decrying the re-establishment of a scenario which has nourished anti-Semitism for hundreds of years: the revengeful Jew, who doesn’t want to make peace and the poor Christian victim who seeks salvation through his quiet lonely suffering. (Ref.)
Closer to home we have a great many examples of silence in politics to choose from – beginning with Richard Nixon’s invocation of the silent majority in 1969. Or think of the current debate around the persistence of racism in all of its ugly forms. Pence, for example, has not allowed the words Black Lives Matter to cross his lips even if directly asked in interviews. Police departments around the country are silent on crimes committed against Black citizens, until public pressure boils over. The current failure of the Senate to pass pending legislation – The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill – is another example of silence on the part of the American state. No federal law was EVER passed to criminalize the practice of lynching.
The moment of silence that is invoked like clockwork in our age of mass shootings is a tool as well: we do not wish to acknowledge that gun suicides claim more than 20,000 lives in the United States annually; that American women are 11 times more likely to be shot and killed than their counterparts in other high-income countries; that black men account for 6 percent of the U.S. population but half of its gun homicide victims. With its roots in religious practice the gesture seems to indicate that we are helpless to prevent something we’d like to think of as an act of G-d, rather than the outcome of profit motives for the weapons industry combined with structurally racist policies.
Back to the word itself: silence has its etymological root in the latin verb desinere: to cease, stop, desist, abandon. Silence across history has been responsible for abandoning those who needed a voice, their own being stopped. Silence, if you want to reverse the letters, gave license to the abuse of power. Let’s desist.
Photographs today found on a walk along NE 22nd and surrounds.
Music by Sir John Tavener, composed to capture his escape from a near-death experience.
