A closer look at the GOP platform makes you shiver and fear for our children and grand children, potentially forever deprived of one of the great treasures of this country: open space. Of course nothing is sacred when it comes to making a quick buck. And why not when climate change – the nonexistent one, the hoax, the scientific myth – burns or washes it all away anyhow?
I believe this tune applies…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLr3FzgpOY
There are many points on the Republican platform that one can argue with (or despair over). None is more important and further reaching than measures about climate change. Or, shall we say, the absence thereof. It goes beyond willful ignorance. I see it as aiding and abetting a catastrophe that will be a defining feature of the future of the entire world.
Check out this National Geographic Series that covers the range: http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com
And, of course, you know who will get hurt the most at early points.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/24/african-methodist-episcopal-church-climate-change-letter
Better get these in-action figures made to finance the fight for climate action: http://www.climateinaction.com
The British former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs once said that optimism and hope are not the same thing. Optimism is the belief that things will improve. Hope is the belief that we together can change things for the better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. “You don’t need courage to be an optimist,” said Sachs,”but a lot of courage is required to hope.”
I think we are beyond hope – all we have left is action. Many of us will not live to see the changes – but our children will. We owe them and all other future generations action before they drown.
Is there any constituency other than white, male Trump delegates that has not been publicly shamed or denigrated by Trump? With the exception of a token nod to gays, (and not the entire LGTB spectrum mind you), I can think of Vets, the disabled, the press, the labor movement, the environmental movement, democrats, women and, of course, Blacks who have been targeted as inferior.
Here is a 2 minute video of Senator Booker making the point succinctly. https://www.facebook.com/moveon/videos/10153588169650493/
Trump insists he is not a racist, and yet there are numerous recorded statements that prove otherwise – here is one example: Laziness is innate to Blacks, they can’t help it…..
His constituency is fine with that since downward comparison – feeling superior to a group that is worse off than oneself – and scapegoating – selecting a group that becomes the target for displaces anger – are typical relief valves for pent-up fear and frustration. Shimmering on the horizon are of course Trump’s promises to reinstate prior status and economic security – promises as empty as his slogans are full of hatred.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/donald-trump-scandals/474726/
It is a volatile mix, a dance on the volcano. When groups are existentially threatened, as the recent history of being Black in this country has demonstrated, when groups are systematically marginalized and kept uneducated and in poverty, there comes a time when the boiling point is reached. It sometimes seems that is almost what Trump and his acolytes desire – an eruption of violence that will justify law and order of the kind we’ve only known from the history books.
Below are some quotes to hold a mirror to Trump who actively abhors inclusive tents, building walls outside of them instead.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/07/19/1549792/-Donald-Trump-The-Divider
“We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.” (Woodrow T. Wilson)
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” (Benjamin Franklin)
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Divider or Uniter? You judge.
Remember Napoleon and Snowball, two of the main protagonists in Animal Farm? The ruthless leader, the fleeing rebel (assumed to stand in for Stalin and Trotsky respectively) at the time? Orwell’s parable was not just a veiled condemnation of (communist) autocratic rule. It also mirrored the use of language as a tool of seduction, oppression and incitement of hatred. Yesterday I pointed to the language heard at the RNC that focussed on condemnation and call to violent action.
Here is the original (not prescient) review of the book:https://newrepublic.com/article/114852/1946-review-george-orwells-animal-farm
Let me make a related point today: Language can work on an everyday basis as well to establish or perpetuate stereotypes, stereotypes that will be used by authoritarian regimes to rouse the people against ready-made scapegoats. I have two simple examples in mind that I grew up with – every German person in the last 200 years or more grew up with; as innocuous as they seem they stand for a wider cementing of stereotyping.
This plant’s name in German is Judentaler – Jew silverling or coin. The association between money and Jews gets firmly rooted in everyday language. 
Another German expression when meeting someone greedy is: Der ist vom Stamme Nimm! He is a member of the tribe Grab. MOT or member of the tribe is of course a reference to Jews, and in the context of grabbing, taking or greed the old imagery is reignited.
The young get subtly educated by this kind of language without anyone noticing – which is probably the point.
And of course gestures are another way of communicating – this one by Laura Ingraham straight from the RNC….
Where is the uproar?
The title is borrowed from Timothy Egan’s astute editorial in the NYT a day after the National Republican Convention was over.
I can’t help it – must talk about the RNC as well this week. Will make it short, and let the images speak for themselves.
Who could have imagined that we would publicly witness convention speakers associate another presidential candidate with Lucifer, the devil? (Read Nicholas Kristof on Time for Exorcism here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/19/opinion/campaign-stops/Republican-Convention-Day-2-Campaign-Stops.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region)
Why the pig? Biblical lore has it that the demons, about to be exorcised, begged Jesus to be transplanted into a herd of pigs which promptly, like lemmings, jumped off the cliff to drown in water. If I weren’t so committed to peace, I’d wish the story could be applied to some other piglets we know.
Who could have imagined that the rabble in the hall would chant “Lock her up” after invited to do so in a mock trial by, of all people, Chris Christie? http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/christie-whips-crowd-into-a-frenzy-about-clinton-lock-her-up/article/2597041
Who could have imagined that New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who is also a delegate for Trump, would ask for her execution:”Clinton should be shot for treason!” on public radio?And others want to see her hung on a tree?
It seems, the vultures are no longer circling, they have landed.
Note to Trump: it takes more than balls. (And I politely will not make size comparisons either.)
Don’t you love it when a book review leaves no doubt about what to read? For example, Andrea Wulf writes, “Here is my review of Stephen Buchmann’s “The Reason for Flowers” – which is a pretty terrible book. Very rambling and not enjoyable. Shame.” She herself is the justly celebrated author of The Invention of Nature, a fabulous book about the ecological visionary and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt. Ok, ignore one, read the other.
Also on my reserve-at-the-library – list: A Walk in the Park, by social historian Travis Elborough. I read the attached review in the Financial Times and was sold, particularly since the writing was claimed to have a “Monty Python-ish strain.”
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5b07fe36-2bf5-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc.html
According to the review the book traces the history of public parks including their role (in the eye of philanthropic Victorians) to pacify the urban poor. Post WW I park creation was increased to enhance physical fitness in young men, having shown lamentable lack thereof when conscripted earlier. And of course now parks are making way for ever larger number of shopping malls… I find it interesting to learn about what social, political or economic pressures shape environments that we take for granted.
Take the cultivation of poppies, for example, the plant from which opium and its derivatives are extracted (the German company Bayer started to produce heroin in the late 1800s, sold by the truckload to combat opium addiction in the US until it became clear that it itself was highly addictive.) The review from The Guardian below makes it clear that Julia Lovell’s book Opium War Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China should be quite the eye-opener when it comes to politics and flowers. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/02/opium-war-julia-lovell-review
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the West has declared a war on drugs in the 20th century, when Great Britain and later France declared war twice on China in the 1800s because it tried to prohibit Western nations to sell opium in China? In the 1820s China had up to 10 Million opium smokers and addicts because of the import of opium by the British from Burma in exchange for the coveted Chinese tea. The emperor decided to ban the use of the opium which did not sit well with the sellers. The West was victorious in both wars and extracted hefty concessions from China, both monetary and in terms of ceded land (think Hongkong.) More long lasting, though, is how these wars shaped Chinese nationalism and its underlying structural narrative. It might still come to haunt us.
These days Afghanistan has surpassed Burma in production of opium and participates in a multibillion dollar heroin trade that benefits not just indigent political movements like the Taliban, but also organized crime and a lot of our own financial institutions because of money laundering in Western banks. The numbers about the production are mind boggling and can be found here http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghan-opium-survey-2014.pdf
And all this from such a dainty little flower……
Emil Nolde: Grosser Mohn 
On December 17, 2012, the Simon Wiesental Center issued a travel advisory for Copenhagen and Denmark, following a warning by the Israeli Ambassador to Denmark, advising Israelis not to wear kippot, jewelry with religious symbols, or to speak Hebrew on the streets of the Danish capital. The advisory followed reports of physical attacks on Jews in Copenhagen. This in a country which throughout Nazi occupation during WWII treated their fellow Jewish citizens as equals. And in striking acts of courage and humanity, Danes saved all 7,500 Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis by spiriting them out to neutral Sweden. Norway had issued a travel warning already in 2006.
Last year the Central Council of Jews in Germany advised against wearing the traditional Jewish head covering in what they called “problematic areas,” later named as Muslim neighborhoods in Berlin and other large cities. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-jews-advised-against-wearing-kippah-a-1020890.html This year, the head of the Jewish Community in Marseille followed suit, sending out a warning after an attack on a teacher (although France’s head Rabbi Haim Korsia urged Jews not to follow that advice. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/france-marseille-jews-urged-not-wear-skull-caps-public-1537608 .) Note, by the way, that many of us recoil at the idea of seeing people forced to give up their traditional religious clothing for fear of persecution, but have little to say about the state bans of wearing Hijab in many countries.
The lead montage is based on a photo taken at the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Albertine Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, by August Kaselewsky.) The museum’s paintings and photographs of middle class German Jews (see below, Max Slevogt, Familienbild Plesch 1928) bring home once again the striking fact how completely integrated and indistinguishable Jews were from the rest of the population – little did it do to prevent catastrophe.
Shout out to a Jewish Museum of our own: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education http://www.ojmche.org – do yourself a favor and grab the last days of their current exhibit of photographs of photojournalist Ruth Gruber who was a twentieth-century pioneer. The photographs in this exhibition span more than fifty years, from her groundbreaking reportage of the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s and iconic images of Jewish refugees from the ship Exodus 1947, to her later photographs of Ethiopian Jews in the midst of civil war in the 1980s.
Dufur, population 607, is a small hamlet south of The Dalles. I found those antelope skulls in a shop window, years in a row, I might add. Photographed them on my way South to Harney County, paradise for bird lovers and hell for inhabitants visited upon by marauding militias. The attached article is a political piece on the threat to our public lands – I felt it was instructive, saddening and infuriating in equal measure. Be warned, it’s also quite long.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176141/tomgram%3A_william_debuys%2C_no_more_wide_open_spaces/#more
I wonder if it was a coincidence that the occupation of the Malheur Refuge Field Station happened in a county that had made enormous progress in forging alliances and compromises between players at various ends of the spectrum, from conservationist to land owners to state administrators. But the very fact that a shared attempt towards problem solving was in the works gives me hope – so let’s focus on that.
Regardless which way you travel through Oregon, you find vistas of irreplaceable beauty in those various open spaces, from the aspen groves on Mt. Hood, to the canyons of Eastern OR to the beaver creeks of Harney County. And here I’m with Woodie Guthrie:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s – it’s our land.
I cannot take credit for inventing this slogan – it is the name of a movement that fights against state laws and community bans on drying your laundry outside. Officially more than 60 million Americans are prohibited from hanging their laundry outside, in their own yards or balconies and porches. The 2 minute clip below is a poignant introduction to what served the interest of the electricity industry (with former President Regan and Nancy as their spokespeople!) and those selling dryers. https://vimeo.com/36605168
Hurrah for sustainability movements that fight these bans with clever digging out of laws that can be used against them. As of 2012 they voided the ban (or made it unenforceable) in 19 states (including Oregon) by referral to solar access laws. Many of these are from the 1970s and hidden clauses in state property laws. A 1979 Oregon Law, for example, says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.” Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s and other states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Given how much electricity and money you save, prolonging the lifetime of your clothing and eliminating pollution, it seems insane not to allow outside drying. (However, my clothesline does not look as arranged as this one….)
Since my photos were taken in Italy I though it fitting to match them with Lavanderas, by an Italian painter, Antonio Donghi (1897- 1963), who was part of Italy’s neoclassical movement in the 1920s and was sometimes compared to Rousseau. 