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Stones on the Heart

Once you have crossed Portland’s Burnside Bridge you will encounter a building on the Eastside that has large sheets of paper hanging in its windows. They are printed with a poem by Oregon’s current poet laureate, Anis Mojgani. It is an appeal which addresses us with loving flattery, perceptive about potential burdens we might carry, and enthusiastic in its belief that there are remedies that can help you drop the stones of your heart, as he puts it.

The suggestions made me smile, made me frown, made me feel seen as one of the multitudes who experience themselves these days as “dark and angsty” as he says. (The word angsty, by the way, from the German word Angst (anxiety) was introduced as early as 1849 by English writer George Eliot. But it became popular in the 1940s when translations of Freud’s work promoted it in the context of neurotic fear, guilt and remorse.)

I was in a dark mood indeed, having been accused of neurotic fear, well, not in those words, but in a closely related term, namely being prone to conspiracy theories. Heated voices had been raised over an essay that I tried to summarize and that found nothing but scorn in the ear of my listener. The essay was published by Timothy Snyder, author of an interesting series of essays currently on the web, Thinking Aloud. He teaches history at Yale, and is a tenured fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His work concerns East European history, the Holocaust, the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of Ukraine, and he has been published in the NYT, the L.A.Times, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor and many more. I dwell on the pedigree so we can agree this is not some random fantasist, dabbling in pseudo-Freudian analysis, or simply a moron (one of the less condescending terms emerging in our “debate.”) Not that learned people cannot be idiots, but I think there is something else going on here. Hear me out.

The essay is titled Killing Parents in Bad Faith. – How historians will remember the pandemic.The main argument offered is that reckless behavior of maskless younger people endangering their older relatives, or reckless refusal of politicians to implement measures that protect the elderly and anyone else against the ravages of the virus is not simply based on stupidity. Instead it is a return to the (falsely applied) maxim of the survival of the fittest with the added benefit that it triggers wealth transfer that is direly needed by a younger generation who has seen the promise of upward mobility ground into the dust by decades of Republican politics. The author goes so far to talk about elder cleansing and generational harvesting, which would be clearly revealed in retrospect by future historians.

An extreme position, not backed up by empirical evidence, yes, I understand the varied reactions ranging from crap to idiocy I have heard when I talked about it with people. So why do I, not the most irrational person on the planet, see reason to keep an eye on the argument with a possibility that it might be true? Why do people who fully acknowledge that Republicans have embraced Social Darwinism, have refused vaccinations on the basis of non-scientific, ideologically driven beliefs, have shown publicly a willingness to sacrifice older generations, can’t go as far as acknowledging that there might be a condoning acceptance of lethal consequences when younger folks expose their elders to the virus,(if intentional parricide is a step too far?)

I wonder if Snyder’s arguments are deeply influenced by his immersion into Holocaust research, and my openness to them affected by being German. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a whole section devoted to the way Nazism, German people, average citizens like you and I, betrayed people deemed unworthy of life in ways that insured economic benefit to the perpetrators. As early as 1933, laws were established to force the sterilization of all persons who lived with diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. These people were colloquially called useless eaters.

Daily cost of feeding a disabled person and a healthy family.

The program escalated but 6 years later with Operation T 4, which instated “mercy death” of non-Jewish German and Austrian citizens by gassing. By the end of the war an estimated 275.000 people living with disabilities had been murdered. These included people who were brought to the authorities by their families for no other reason than being “difficult” spouses or defiant daughters (blamed to have mental illness) or elders who did not want to dish out an early inheritance. The euthanasia program explicitly included incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.

There has been a lot of psychological research looking at how the elderly are valued over younger lives, with decisions made by participants across the world that IF they have to sacrifice some life, it will be the elderly over the teens. Those sentiments are enhanced during times of crisis. Public discourse during the epidemic (social media content analyzed by scientists) showed an increasing amount of ageism with some proportion alluding to senicide (the killing of or abandoning to death of the elderly.) Real life scenarios certainly happened in several countries across the pandemic where a lack of ventilators forced doctors to do triage with a cut-off of age as low as 65 in some places where you were no longer eligible to have your life saved. Princeton Psychologist Susan Fiske who studies prejudice and ageism finds in her surveys that “younger people want to be sure that the elderly don’t hog a disproportionate amount of time and resources. Older people are expected to step aside.” The only American cultures that have consistently positive views of the elderly are African Americans and Native Americans.

Prejudice against old people is of course a far cry away from stepping up and actually killing the old by active measures. One can look at the moral deprivation of murder at one extreme of the scale. On the other end of the continuum would be the morally justified decisions by doctors to grant survival to those who benefit most of it, the young, when means to ensure survival are limited. Then there is the vast area in-between. There is morally unacceptable action – the decision to expose vulnerable populations to maskless visitors, say or state decrees forbidding mask mandates. Or equally debatable inaction of the authorities to demand protective devices or order vaccinations mandates for people who come in contact with vulnerable populations, or the personal decisions by police, firefighters or nurses not to get vaccinated.

To get back to Snyder’s Covid scenario, yes, it might be .0002 % or whatever tiny proportion of maskless visitors to retirement homes who have consciously nefarious motives. Bad apples, etc. pp. Once a political administration justifies the sacrificing of this or that constituency under the mantle of Social Darwinism, however, personal motives can find political backing, ruthlessness can be uncorked, as history has shown. And we are very few steps away from such an administration in the years to come. Looking at some State governments, we are there already.

Stones on my heart, indeed.

Music more representative of fall than spring, but there’s still hope that spring might be rushing back….

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Unimaginable

The light was strange. I walked the Sandy River delta for the first time since January, so grateful to be back and a bit worried if I had the strength for the full round in the 90 degree September heat. Thoughts of the fragility of existence, my companions for too long, were underscored by the wind that came down from the mountains, making the dry branches and grasses bending and trembling, the poplars noisy with their rattling silver leaves, upended by the gusts.

Claude Monet Haystacks 1885

The gusts were hints of colder times, easily ignored during this endless summer, perhaps perceived only because my thoughts were swirling around the essay I’ll urge you to read today, if you have time to read anything (I’ll keep my own remarks correspondingly short.) Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a neoconservative scholar, lays out what quite likely might be ahead for us as a country, and it is frightening to hear its measured analysis by a conservative, no less.

Ermenoville, Department Oise

Yes, politics. Yes, more bad news. Yes, I know the feeling of not wanting to hear one more scary thing in a world full of them.

Claude Monet Poplars at Giverny 1887

Do read it.

Camille Pissaro Poplars, Eragny 1895

You want to be prepared for what one might once thought unimaginable. Even though it is tempting to ignore that there is always a second act in the wings. One we might not like.

I might mention the German election results in passing…. major parties had a head-to head competition with a razor thin edge going, for now, to the Social Democrats – a centrist party who will need to form a coalition with any number of smaller parties to govern, an unwieldy moloch marked by political compromises. All signs point to continuation of the familiar paths rather than radical re-orientation in view of the needed actions for climate change. For me the most frightening number was the fact that among those voting for the first time a higher number picked a business friendly, conservative party (FDP) over the Green Party – so much for the “youth will save us.” And two large states in the Eastern parts of the country, Thuringia and Saxony, went all in for the right-wing extremist AfD. Berlin will have a mayor whose phD title was rescinded for plagiarism and who gave up her ministerial seat as minister for family in the wake of the scandal, now to oversee the government of the capital.

Claude Monet Wind effect (Poplar Series) 1891

I’ll sweeten the reading assignment with some classic paintings of poplars that were brought to mind by the beauty in front of my eyes – in black and white to emphasize the structure and pattern (and similarities) of these wispy trees.

Vincent van Gogh Poplars at St. Remy 1889

Maybe the river will have water again (photograph of the tree lined water is from 2 years ago around this time) – right now it is unimaginably low.

Claude Monet Poplars at the Epte 1891
Vincent van Gogh Poplars near Nuenen 1884

Soon the trees will shed their leaves, and the scent of decaying silver and gold will emanate from the layers and layers that soften your step. I’ll be out there again, soon.

Paul Gauguin Landscape with Poplars 1875

Today’s music acknowledges that somehow most of these paintings seem to have originated in France, even though Germany and the PNW is full of poplars as well. The selection of pieces by Ravel is quite representative of his best work.

Sue Darius Lombardy Poplars

And here is a poem from the late 1800s :

Binsey Poplars

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
  All felled, felled, are all felled; 
    Of a fresh and following folded rank 
                Not spared, not one 
                That dandled a sandalled 
         Shadow that swam or sank 
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 
         When we delve or hew — 
     Hack and rack the growing green! 
          Since country is so tender 
     To touch, her being só slender, 
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 
     But a prick will make no eye at all, 
     Where we, even where we mean 
                 To mend her we end her, 
            When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 
     Strokes of havoc unselve 
           The sweet especial scene, 
     Rural scene, a rural scene, 
     Sweet especial rural scene. 

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Rebels Welcome

The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)

I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.

The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)

What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.

What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?

The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“

Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)

Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.

Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)

Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.

Let’s read up on our history!

Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.

Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.

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This Bunch or That?

It is the season for bunches, bands and batches, swaths and clusters of flowers in the meadows.

Yesterday’s photographic harvest was mostly common tansy, yarrow and goldenrod, all seemingly humming, which on closer inspection was, of course, the music of the bees.

The tightness of the clusters, the masses of plants all bunched together, reminded me of the polar opposite, isolation, and how that term (or state) has become such a focus for explanatory models of people willing to join groups or cults, when otherwise they’d never would have.

What do we know about that? Researchers have shown that people in places with high “social capital”—relationships and networks that connect us and enrich our lives – are more immune to being lured into cult-like groupings than those living in regions with low social capital.

And if you are lonely, belonging to the MAGA crowd has immediate rewards: you have an instant community, can travel with like-minded friends from rally to rally, feel connected through inside jokes and swag, just like following your favorite bands in days long gone. As one recent author, writing in the context of Trumpism preying on an emotional void, put it:

“There’s a reason vulnerable people are drawn to street gangs. There’s a reason Charles Manson preyed upon teenage runaways, and there’s a reason why so many poor Black women died in Jonestown. When you are down-and-out and lonely, you cling to the people who care enough to give you hope.”

Given the situation that we now face, I really want answers to the more immediate question, namely what it takes to get people out of cult-like existences. We cannot easily fix the causal societal ills of anomie and isolation and lack of community, although efforts in that direction have to be strengthened. Even if we did, there are reasons to fear that it would not necessarily make people leave Trumpland, and simply make a U-turn.

A convincing explanation for that sad fact, along with helpful suggestions, can be found here. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay focusses on witness testimony of people who lived under historical authoritarian strong-men. She observes:

“Just as cultivation and conversion leverage strong positive emotions (belonging, inclusion, safety, rapture), so does disengagement evoke strong negative emotions (shame, humiliation, abjection) that many wish to avoid.

Shame and fears of punishment, ridicule, and loss of status can motivate individuals who have been victims of con men to stay silent. They can also lead people who start to realize that they have been misled by authoritarian propaganda to double down on their convictions out of pride. 

Saving face can seem like a psychic necessity as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the leader’s untruths and destruction, and individuals may feel betrayed as well as humiliated.”

We need to add to that list the fact that psychological losses loom larger for us than potential gains, something called loss aversion (part of the psychological literature since Kahneman and Tversky published their seminal work in 1979.) Even if I start doubting the wisdom of the Elders of Trumpland, I would still loose the community I’ve just found, the sense of belonging that I so yearned for, if I were to leave now. It seems also to be the case that cultures that favor individualism and masculinity, like our’s, tend to display a higher degree of loss aversion. (Ref.)

Ben-Ghiat concludes:

“This is why experts emphasize the importance of avoiding judgmental attitudes when dealing with people disengaging from cults. We should also resist the temptation to present individuals with evidence of the failure, corruption, or nonsensical nature of the cause they embrace. Such evidence will come from sources that are still tainted for them, and likely makes use of  language and reasoning they have been taught to distrust.“

That is, of course, more easily said than done. How can you not try to reason? Never mind assumptions about blood-slurping pedophile rings in the subterranean regions of the White House…. how can you not confront (dis)beliefs with visible, undoubtable facts of close to a million people dead in this country from a disease that could have been conquered with timely and appropriate measures? Do you really have to “empathize” with Covid-deniers, as the National Review suggested?

Some people furiously disagree, sociologist Brooke Harrington among them. Here is a drawn out thread on her argument. She summarizes:

“The “moral failure” of the COVID+ pandemic deniers & anti-vaxxers ranting from ICU beds is to prioritize saving face over saving other peoples’ lives. They could do the latter by telling the truth & exposing the con, saying “COVID is real, get vaccinated.” But they don’t.…. Since they’ve chosen moral failure, & now endanger us all with their face-saving maneuvers, the pragmatic question is: How do we keep them from killing the rest of us?“

As it turns out, she believes (on the basis of sociological science) that only people who are trusted, family and former fellow cult members or current leaders associated with it, are in a position to help change minds, minimize shame and need for face saving for cult members trying to turn around.

Which means, most of us get a pass, right?

Not much going to happen, either.

The flowers didn’t care. They just radiated warmth and color and purloined sound, making me happy, willing to forget about politics and psychology for an uplifting hour.

You should experience the same by listening to this music: Mahler’s 4th which describes heaven through a child’s eye.

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Where next?

This week I reported on the willingness of large swaths of the population to blind themselves against the facts of science for reasons of tribal loyalty. I am afraid I have to add to that report describing the willingness of many other people to remain blind to the futility of voting rights legislation. Democrats assume that if the voting rights bills in question are thoughtful and fair (and miraculously passed, a whole other story,) they will not be rejected by the Supreme Court. This, of course, is a belief born out of despair over how far we’ve sunk, and in no ways supported by anything we know to be true of this Court – read the not-so-fine print of the decisions of the last years. A concise and non-technical analysis of the status quo of voting rights and the future of the American experiment can be found here. The essay is a short, worthwhile read, ending with the observation that nothing but an expansion of the Supreme Court is potentially going to rescue our democracy.

I am bringing all this up because I have had churning reactions to two books I read this week, one that came highly recommended and that I intensely disliked (why, so often?) and another that I chanced upon and devoured. They both made me think about what affects change and the scale of personal involvement, from ethereal withdrawal into a universe of feeling (if that) to the justification of taking personal action, violence included.

What are you going Through by Sigrid Nunez and White Tears by Hari Kunzru have one thing in common: they both integrate a systemic conflict, the climate crisis for the former, racism and exploitation of Blacks for the latter, into the narrative.

Nunez uses it as a cardboard foil for her larger subject of presence or absence of hope and empathic attachment. Her story is told by a woman who is asked by a distant friend facing terminal cancer to accompany her on her last weeks before actively ending her life with pills. The narrator is all over the map, in a dithery fashion mostly describing other women, from close friends and relatives to mere acquaintances or public figures in faintly, irritatingly misogynistic ways. She herself remains a stick figure, not imbued with any reason for us to root for her, least of all a deplorable tendency to name drop literary greats, with paragraphs of precise quotations.The only names, by the way, offered at all. The story’s inhabitants are all nameless, a successful distancing device. Well, that’s how I reacted. Others disagree (the linked review is typical of the praise the novel received.) In fact, Nunez conveys less a woman racked by feelings – the break-up with an ex-husband, a life without children, the newly blossoming attachment to her friend overshadowed by the impending suicide – than a woman trying on those feelings for size to see how they can be told as stories. An eternal distancing, from the fragility of close human interactions to the large scale one of the intensity of the climate threat. Drifting with willful oblivion along in the wake of death.

Kunzru’s novel is the polar opposite. The characters are so vividly drawn you might as well have met them in real life, even though for most of us they live in a realm somewhat outside our comfortable White middle-class existence. Two young people embark on a search for musical authenticity that leads one of them from New York City to the South, get into huge problems along the way, drawn into events of the past that reverberate into the present and future. The story evolves in ways that manage to surprise and shock, and hook you onto empathizing with the narrator(s) in a way that lures you into a complete understanding of their decisions even thought these eventually include unjustifiable acts.

Bits of magic realism seamlessly fold into a contemporary setting. The deeper issue, the systemic exploitation of Blacks through slavery, prison labor and a music industry commodifying traditional Black music, emerge as a core challenge to our thinking, rather than a foil. It is a novel that explores the toxicity of White appropriation, of the systemic degradation of anything Black – which is of course why it links back to my musings at the beginning of this blog on the chances of a voting right act to come into existence as one of the many ways needed to change race relations. Every page contains complex psychological material, an invitation to think difficult things through while simultaneously offering a grand mystery and real action, compared to the flat vignettes of observed fates in the first book. Here is an insightful review that provides you with details of the narrative.

Neither protagonist, the passive narrator of Nunez’ novel, suffused by diffuse reactions to the world around her, floating in a private universe of sadness, or the active protagonist of Kunzru’s tale, driven into mad acts by a revenge fantasy fed by assumed guilt and responsibility, can be our role models. The question of personal agency and efficacy towards bringing about change, if “only” to the size of the Supreme Court, remains unresolved. More books to read. And this.

Music today is the Blues, given its huge role it plays in White Tears. Photographs from South Carolina, providing a glimpse of the South now.

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No good guys. None.

“So who are the good guys?,” my Beloved asked. “What do I know,” was my response, having only vague associations with Haiti, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, paramilitary violence of the Tonton Macoute, and devastating earthquakes. Crash course in history ensued, immediately regretted, given the revelation of nothing but horrors.

The small French-Creole nation occupies the western third of the Caribbean Island Hispaniola. Its inhabitants are the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with ⅔ of its children malnourished, and 1 out of 5 dying before the age of six. 60% of Haitians live on fewer than $2 a day. About half the population does not know how to write or read. How did it get there?

The island was claimed by Columbus for Spain in 1497, but the French took over in the 17th century and soon colonized it as a slave state raising sugar cane. Hard labor, torture and tropical disease ravaged the slave population, with endless slave ships arriving from Africa to keep the required numbers up around 800.000 slaves working for the French colonial masters. Definitely not good guys. In fact, really bad guys, because after a successful slave rebellion in 1804, they “negotiated” for years with the help of war ships to be paid reparations for their lost colony and human capital, eventually settling Haiti with a crushing debt of 150 million Francs to achieve indemnity, the acknowledgement of independence. With interest the debt was paid off finally in 1947. By then the necessary borrowing to be able to make the installments had undermined any chance to build a functioning educational and health system or public infrastructures. Details can be found here.

So the slave rebels were good guys? Hm, not entirely. The consistent rape of Black slave women by White slave owners had led to a separate class of Mulattoes who sought domination over the Black population after the uprising. Long story short, much infighting ensued between groups that really should have united forces against the colonial masters. The Mulattoe elites often used Black generals or politicians as puppets or their interest. Eventually the country divided in North and South being ruled by two different factions. The South clung to the ideal of the French revolution, with land being distributed to the poor. There, the average Haitian was an isolated, poor, free, and relatively content yeoman. In the north, the average Haitian was a resentful but comparatively prosperous laborer under restrictive rule of a royalist king.

Continued factional fighting and bloodshed eventually led to an occupation by US forces in 1915. Good guys? Ahem. Occupation was driven by interest in access to the Panama canal and vying for control of the Caribbean over European, particularly German interests. The occupation lasted until 1934.

Fast forward to 1957 with the election of Francois Duvalier, Papa Doc, who installed a regime of terror with the help of paramilitary executioner forces, the Tonton Makoute. Evil guy. More than 30.000 Haitians considered opposition were killed during his reign. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc, took over after his father’s death but had to flee to France when the extent of his kleptocracy, his regime’s theft and corruption became public. The role of the US? Bad guys. In the course of pursuing cold war interests, they did nothing to stop the atrocities or persecute those responsible later on, not even during human rights-focused administrations such as Jimmy Carter’s. “Butch Ashton, a business man who made his fortune during the Duvalier dictatorship by establishing corporations such as Citrus (a fruit exporter) and the Toyota dealership in the country’s capital, vehemently claims that the Tonton Macoute militia was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps and that the highest levels of the American government were complicit in this arrangement.” (Ref.)

And here we are in demand again, or so it is claimed by political observers who suspect that Haiti’s elite was behind last week’s murder of the current president, hoping to stave of a brewing revolution by the ever more impoverished population, suppressing it with the potential help of an American military intervention alongside Colombian and Honduran forces. Who was President Moïse, assassinated by a tightly organized group of paramilitaries pretending to be US Drug Enforcement agents, Americans and Columbians among them, apparently supported by Columbian ultra right-wing President, Iván Duque Márquez, bosom buddy of Brasilian president Bolsanero? (Particularly bad guys.)

Moïse a good guy? Nope. He had been clinging to the presidency even though his term was over; he had been syphoning away the money given through the Venezuelan funded program Petrocaribe to offset the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake – 300.000 dead eventually and over a million Haitians made homeless, migrating to the cities in search for escape from starvation. Mass demonstrations against corruption and repression, urging his removal stoked fear in the 12 or so elite Haitian families who indirectly control the country.

There is clearly increasing rebellious fervor coming out of the millions of people cooped up in Haitian shantytowns. Marauding forces (no good guys either) were for the last decade a scourge on both the rich and the poor, with indiscriminate kidnappings and murders. Some of these gangs were hired by the business- and landowning mid- and upper class to protect their interests. Others formed as a response to the increasing poverty, particularly after the earthquake. Enter Jimmy Cherizier, a cop with an elite unit of the Haitian National Police called UDMO, the Departmental Unit of Maintenance of Order, who has organized many of these “gangs” into a G9 unit of vigilance on steroids and the expressed goal of cleaning up the rot of Haitian elites’ repression and extortion.

Moïse’s assassination might very well have been a means to an end to invite Columbian, Honduran and, in the end, UN or US forces, as a powerful barricade against a threatened revolution from below. In the meantime people starve to death, die of Covid-19 (inoculation has not even started,) and are kidnapped for ransom on random bases. No-one official coming to their rescue, as far as we can see, certainly no functioning government. Ariel Henry, the man who Moïse appointed prime minister just before the assassination claimed the right to lead Haiti, pitting him against acting head of state Claude Joseph, whose government has so far managed the response to the killing. Head of the Supreme Court, Judge René Sylvestre, who could have been Moïse’s successor, died of Covid-19 last week. No-one is certain who is in charge, when the next election will be, how to get a handle on the proliferating violence.

Repeat: no good guys. No easy solutions, either.

Music is a medley of Haitian musical styles from a recent performance at the Kennedy Center.

Montages are from my 2020 art series Setting Sail.

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Cross Roads

If you had asked me some months ago what Critical Race Theory is, the likely answer would have been, “Huh?” These days, there isn’t a news outlet that doesn’t engage the term on a daily basis, with emotional appeals to ward off the Right’s attacks on racial reckoning, or accusations of Leftie indoctrination of blessed little school children (let’s equip teachers with body cameras so we can control if they are indoctrinating!, let’s pass state laws that prevent school curricula from teaching CRT,) or scholarly treatises that try to explain why this or that approach to teaching history must not/must include this or leave out that.

I figured we could use a most basic description of the issues in order to understand where the roots for the mobilization of the current hysteria about the evil of Critical Race Studies lie. And I mean basic. The long versions from which I summarize, can be found here and here.

Critical Race Theory is a body of work that is anchored in legal scholarship, with three complex principles under constant evaluation (certainly not found in any primary school curriculum!) The debate established three main principles: that there is a Constitutional Contradiction, an Interest Convergence, and the Price of Racial Remedies. The Constitutional Contradiction, scholars argued, describes the framers’ choice to privilege the rewards of property over justice. Interest Convergence refers to the demonstrable fact that Whites will promote racial advances for Blacks only when they also promote white self-interest. The Price of Racial Remedies assumes that Whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status.

More generally, these days we see a lot of scholars, historians and journalists engage in Critical Race Studies, which basically try to teach us why the undeniable inequality, the ongoing differences in experienced violence and trauma for Blacks is not just an outcome of racist acts committed by some biased, racist people. Instead, they argue, the roots for the differences in lived experiences between Blacks and Whites, lie in systems that perpetuate the original power differential and beliefs in the supremacy of one race over the other – systems that include parts of our culture and the way it teaches history, parts of the social infrastructure that allows those on the top to stay there and prevents others to get a leg up, and institutional set-ups that perpetuate a certain order.

According to the Right, slavery, racial subjugation, segregation and inequity did (or might have) existed, but that’s a thing of the past. We now have – at least theoretically – equality before the law, they say, and so any differences in economic or educational attainment, in longevity or susceptibility for diseases etc., is due to personal choices, engagement, or absence thereof. No need to bring the subject of racism into the classroom, where it makes white children feel bad, raises ugly memories of a Civil War, and subverts the origin story of this proud country from individual freedom and initiative to a nasty tale of the original sin of slavery.

Not so, counter the progressives, we have an ongoing process of racial discrimination that can only be changed if we tackle the origins and point to the continuity built into our institutional systems, from prisons to schools to banks. We are at a cross road. The rising awareness of parallel lives in our society, embodied most dramatically in the killings of Blacks by police in recent years, have alerted and concerned enough people that a more truthful debate about our history can begin and should be carried into the schools.

History is mobilized, then, for political purposes, on each side. That is nothing new, of course, except that the dominant class, those in power, always had a monopoly on what and how history was taught, at least officially. With the ability to access other sources, for both students and teachers (who, for example, can benefit from the NYT’s 1619 project’s syllabi) that exclusive right is now under attack. Having lost other battles in the culture wars,(the majority of Americans now thinks positively of same-sex unions, for example,) CRT is the perfect new bogeyman that can whip the base into a frenzy, race having always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around, given how it can be used to stoke white resentment. Nothing more threatening than losing control over what your children think, or how critical thinking is encouraged in the first place.

Of course, if you intentionally and repeatedly misrepresent and distort the facts of what the engagement with our racist history in schools implies, if you lie about the present-day existence of racism and its systemic roots, you do not just undermine any possible objective discussion, but you endanger the entire democratic project that the founders tried to establish.

That said, making history culpable for the present, singularly dwelling on it instead of looking how to fight for a better future is to be avoided. As Frederick Douglass said in his Speech for the 4th of July: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”

Or as Princeton historian Matthew Karp put it (from whom I also borrowed above quote):

“The past may live inside the present, but it does not govern our growth. However sordid or sublime, our origins are not our destinies; our daily journey into the future is not fixed by moral arcs or genetic instructions. We must come to see history… not as “what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by,” but rather as “what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”

And while we’re at it, one of the most accessible books about how the history of slavery is transmitted these days, is Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. Written at times poetically, always absorbingly, it is a must read. Review can be found here.

 

Music is by the Fiske Jubilee Singers.

 

 

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Narrative grab

Yesterday’s NYT had an opinion piece on aliens – you know, the extraterrestrials who are rumored to exist, evidence of whom is alleged to have been carefully hidden by US State agencies. It is actually a thoughtful piece that offers a Gedanken experiment as to what would happen if we would indeed find some alien flight object crashed onto Oregon soil. What would the consequences be for the world, how would we react, as individuals, as a nation, as part of humanity at large? Would it unite or divide us?

A particular aspect that struck me was the discussion of not a land- but a narrative grab, a competition for interpretation that would have enormous consequences in allocating resources (let’s arm ourselves even beyond our teeth vs. let’s fund science to explore space and find these visitors,) or influence reactions (this is ours! No-one allowed to look at it! vs. let’s share among nations, since all of humanity is at stake.)

We don’t have to look to the extraterrestrial universe – the reality of narrative grabs is all around us and astoundingly dangerous. Whether we are talking about the Big Lie about a stolen election, or the conspiracies peddled by anti-vaxxers, or the testimony given during trials of police shootings, or the current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East – narratives are developed and disseminated to peddle influence, justify actions, distort the real picture, gain attention and adherents, shape tales of heroes, villains and victims.

This is particularly true if a conflict has hardened. It is also true if the narrative can no longer be controlled by those who were used to control it. If people can videotape events, if police have their own camcorders recording, the narrative from the reports can be offset by the visually documented history. To control the damage to those who used to call the shots, it becomes imperative to stop disseminating these sources. Whether it is police recordings that no-one is allowed to see, or iPhone videos that are blocked by undefined censorship rules on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook or whatever, the narrative is shaped by those who have the power of the domain. (One of the few things the Right and the Left agree on, by the way, each claiming to be silenced in egregious ways in different instances.)

There is a different psychological aspect of narrative grab, though, that we are also exposed and victim to, namely the way language shapes the way a situation is framed, and the way interpretation disambiguates a potentially ambiguous photograph in ways consistent with a particular narrative agenda. The overused “my terrorist is your freedom fighting martyr” example aside, there are other ways of shaping opinion.

Portland is a Warzone comes to mind, a description of protests that shaped the national conversation last summer, when really that was only when you saw select images and paroles on the Internet. Not that the city did not suffer from destructive action, or that those actions had consequences for more peaceful protests, but overall life was as undisturbed in most parts of the city as it had been. Which would be hard to believe if you consumed photographs of fiery walls, smoke filled streets, phalanxes of the feds and rioters, snapshots ripped out of the larger context. Note my wording: rioters, not protesters; phalanx as a military term; smoke filled streets hinting at fires out of control. Choice of words structure the narrative.

Another example is yesterday’s generalized accusation by Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, that Muslim youths are responsible for the current antisemitic acts in the country and need to be flushed out by police. German-Jewish reaction has been one of disbelief: the pervasive German anti-Semitism, more and more unabashedly out in the open, has been exchanged for a narrative that puts blame on another stigmatized minority, immigrants.

Given that we can probably agree on the fact that narratives are created, controlled and used for particular purposes, I believe we have the obligation to collect narratives from all sides, to learn about differing perspectives before we make up our mind about fact and/or fiction. This might be harder when sources are scant and monopolized, but it is possible. It is also more difficult when a particular narrative has dominated discourse for ages, prohibiting glimpses of the accounts of the other side.

I try to read widely nonetheless, not just the sources I trust and find comfortably echoing my own political inclinations. I welcome suggestions for reading sources I might not even know about that provide food for thought. It is work, agreed, and undermines all those nifty heuristics our minds use to make life easier, confirmation bias, anchoring and representative bias among them (I wrote about these cognitive short-cuts in reasoning and decision making in detail some time back here and here.) It is also our only chance to break patterns that are obstacles to finding solutions for dire problems, even life-threatening ones, be they pandemics, war or colonialism.

And just maybe, aliens.

Photographs today are open to differing narratives. Are those cute little insects helpers in the garden (aphid patrol) or pests that will go on to eat everything? Or both? Or different ones at different times? Unambiguous answers only.

Music today is about the Queen of narratives: Sheherazade. All she grabbed was time to live….

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Mother’s Day

Let me take yesterday’s Mothers’ Day as my annual occasion to remind all of us that mothering would not be possible but for those who support it, parents and non-parents alike. Let’s celebrate ALL who make raising children in this world a shared adventure.

In this particular year my heart goes out to mothers who have lost their children in the pandemic, upending the natural order of parents dying before their offspring. I cannot imagine anything more painful than to lose a child. The hardest hit geographic areas, Brazil, Uruguay, India have also seen a huge percentage of young people killed by a virus that could have been contained, the latter a fact that adds insult to injury for the bereaved.

Gustav Klimt Mother with two Children (1909/10)

I cry with the mothers who have seen their children killed by political violence. Scores of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, this weekend alone. In Syria, the war has injured or killed one child every 8 hours in the last 10 years. In Yemen, at least 3,153 children have died and 5,660 children have been injured, according to a report by UNICEF. On average, 50 children are killed and 90 are wounded or permanently disabled each month.

Kaethe Kollwitz Die Eltern (plate 3) from War (1922)

The numbers for the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel vary depending on what source you read, but they are shockingly high even when reported by neutral parties. The deaths caused by IDF or settler activity are just the tip of the iceberg. The threats to health imposed by blockades, restricted access to medical care, electricity, food and water have their own consequences. A Human Rights Watch report can be read here and one specifically for Palestinian children by War Child, an organization that supports children in 17 war-torn countries, here. While bereaved families on both sides try to work together and plead for reconciliation, the violence against Muslims continues to increase, as we have seen this weekend in the shocking events at the Al-Aqsa mosque during end of Ramadan prayers. As reported in the Times of Israel, the Red Crescent was blocked by Israeli forces to come to the aid of the 200 wounded, many under 18 among them.

Tears for the mothers in our own country, too. In the last 6 years police have shot 22 children under 16 fatally. According to the Equal Justice initiative, the risk of being one of those victims is 6 times higher for those kids who are Black. If we look at mortality statistics for young Black men and teens, the risk of dying in a shooting, by police or by gang conflict, is increased 20 fold. Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation’s population, but they were among 37% of gun homicides in 2019 according to the CDC.

Heartache for the mothers and their children who flee unsafe lives for hope of asylum, only to perish on the perilous path across seas or deserts, or to be separated violently at the point of arrival.

Diego Rivera The Family (1934)

Solidarity to the women activists, many of them mothers, who are willing to face separation from their children, and/or threats to their health and lives by torture in prisons around the world: in Saudi Arabian jails, in Iranian jails, in Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian and Philippine jails, a list by no means exhaustive.

Kaethe Kollwitz The Mothers (plate 6) from War (1922)

Children should be safe. From war, from political conflict, from systemic, state sponsored violence, from racism, from hunger, from being ripped away from their families. Mothers should never have to bury a child.

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Burying Democracy

Yes, I know. You are sooo done, at least for a while, with my lamenting around politics. Can’t we have a little break, you wonder? Some more memes, perhaps? Or a nice excursion into extraordinary art?

All in good time. First I had to get this off my chest, since I believe it is important to greet this new era with realistic expectations. (And you will get a break, I am taking the latter part of this week off. I need a break too!)

About a week ago, a consortium of scholars of democracy proposed some structural changes to our current political system. They see this as the only way to curb minority rule – a rule that increasingly spells the end of democracy given the number of voters who get overruled in these modern times. 50 Republican Senators can stop the legislation proposed by Democrats who represent 41 million more voters than their opponents.

The link contains their proposal in full, but here are the key suggestions:

“The Congress should take the following steps to enhance democratic equality and fairness:

  • Defend and expand the right to vote for all Americans.
  • Require nonpartisan commissions in each state to redraw congressional and state legislative districts, so that state legislatures can no longer gerrymander districts to advantage their party.
  • End the ability of a small group of ultra-wealthy donors to secretly bankroll candidates and parties by requiring transparency in all political spending.
  • Narrow the conditions under which the Senate filibuster can be used as a tool of legislative obstruction.
  • Grant the people of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico the right to vote for statehood, which would provide full and equal representation to nearly four million Americans who are currently disenfranchised.
  • Establish a nonpartisan, independent federal elections agency to ensure that the voting process is fair, consistent, secure, and legitimate.
  • Study ways to reduce politicization of the federal courts.

Why are these efforts needed? The sad reality is that President Biden has much less power to combat minority rule than we wish he’d have. A fact that motivated today’s blog, given all of our expectations – even if I’ll be accused of spoiling the mood….. The opposition is at it already.

Yes, he can make federal agencies provide voter registration services via executive order. Yes, his DOD can enforce the Voting Rights Act and file lawsuits against voting discrimination. Yes, he can prop up the postal system and regulate the Census.

What he cannot do is pass a new Voting Rights Act or overrule Republican gerrymandering or change the nature of the Senate or the courts without Republican help. And that will arrive when the cows get home. (This is a summary of what I learned here.)

Here are the simple facts about minority rule:

New and improved laws? The filibuster requires 60 Senate votes to pass legislation. GOP senators from 21 small states who represent less than a quarter of the population can thwart bills supported by a clear majority of Americans.

Fight it in court?  234 Trump judicial appointments will happily hear your case, then nix it. Biden has now inherited fewer than 25 judicial openings. The Supreme Court has excelled in curbing voting rights, and so it will be from the top down.

Redistricting?

“Following the 2020 census, they’ll get to craft the maps again in 20 states where they control the redistricting process, compared to seven for Democrats. (The rest have divided governments or independent redistricting commissions.) As a result, Republicans will draw nearly three times as many US House districts as Democrats will, a disparity that could easily cost Democrats the House in 2022. The maps passed in 2021 will likely be even more extreme than in 2011 because the Supreme Court has said that federal courts cannot review maps drawn for a partisan advantage, and states with a long history of discrimination will no longer have to get federal approval for those maps under the Voting Rights Act.”

The temptation to give up is understandable. Alternatively, let’s role up our sleeves and tackle the next fight. I’ll enjoy your company. It helps if you think of the consequences…

Photographs are from cemeteries in Charleston, South Carolina, a state that was one of the Southern segregationists after Reconstruction using the Filibuster to stop civil rights laws.

Music is a piece that will cheer you to no end after all this doom and gloom reading: Mozart’s Sonata Nr. 17 in C major. (The movements are unfortunately separated by ads…) I DO try to provide some balance…

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