Yesterday I had a few visitors in the backyard, which suited me just fine. I figured ending the week with tons of pictures rather than ever more words would do us all good.
You know me, though. Words snuck back into my head – words, alas, that refuse to make their way into print in this family friendly blog. So use your imagination as to what I was thinking when I learned that the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public, even for health reasons. House Bill 237 would extend to everyone, not just protesters towards whom this ban is of course directed, to wear medical masks.
A proposal to amend the bill to ban hate groups — explicitly the Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys — from being allowed to wear masks in public, which the law currently allows them to petition for (!), was shot down by Republican lawmakers with no debate or explanation, as were calls by Democratic lawmakers to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. So for immune-compromised people like me there is now the additional worry to either be arrested for wearing a mask or risking infection that can basically kill you. Not that I will ever see North Carolina again, but how many people who live there and can’t leave will be affected? and how does that not violate Federal laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act?
“The federal disability law requires governments to provide people with disabilities equal access to government programs, services and activities — including public transportation, schools, voting precincts and town meetings. Banning masks could diminish access to those kinds of services to people who are covered under the ADA, such as cancer patients who may need to wear a mask due to a weakened immune system, disability rights advocates say. It could also limit their day-to-day activities.” (Ref.)
I wasn’t the only one watching the deer decimate the apple trees and then leisurely chew cud while resting on the grass, ignoring a cacophony of noises – my dog barking his head off, the Thursday Pickup garbage trucks circling the neighborhood, and my neighbor using a chainsaw to deal with the winter windfall. Be glad to have these pastoral scenes without the sound track!
The crows watched as well, eventually doing some up and down flying maneuvers to get their own luncheon, served on my balcony. Up and down triggered the notion of upside-down, another image eliciting a number of words in my head, “We’re living in a FARCE,” among them.
The upside down flag, a symbol for “Stop the Steal!” used by Trump supporters, was apparently flying in front of Justice Alito’s home. According to the New York Times, the flag was up in January 2021 for multiple days, while the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case. We are, of course, still waiting on two other cases to be decided by the Supreme Court, involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. So far, no recusals.
Concerned neighbors took the photos and informed the Court at the time – what say you, Justice Roberts? We do know what Justice Alito had to say:
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Isn’t it funny how Supreme Court Justices are completely fenced off against the dealings of their wives, while the sitting President is supposed to be responsible for alleged misdeeds of his adult son? Just wondering.
Here is a crow’s reaction – you may use your imagination once more.
If your blood pressure reacts like mine to these news, here is the perfect music to bring it down.
Mothers’ Day is a fraught occasion for many. Those who want(ed) children but are unable to have them, might suffer. Those who don’t want to have children but were forced to carry them, might feel rage once again. Those who are mothers estranged from their children, might re-experience the pain. Those who lost their children to illness and death will freshly mourn. And those who lost beloved mothers will be raw with longing, at times. Loss through natural death is one thing, loss through forced family separation or violence another. Think of the tens of thousands of orphans currently surviving in Gaza and Ukraine, who will face a life without their mother.
Those who rejoice in being remembered by their loving kids, like I did this Sunday, have that nagging feeling that they are privileged, compared to those who feel particularly alone that day. Come to think of it, the only one who currently completely capitalizes from the occasion, is the flower- and greeting-card industry.
“Silent sentinel” Alison Turnbull Hopkins at the White House on New Jersey Day.
Imagine my surprise when I learned from historian Heather Cox Richardson this Saturday, a day before Mothers’ Day, that the origin of this celebration had nothing to do with familial relationships, but was instead a political movement started in the 1870s by Julia Ward Howe. The reformer had enough of the carnage produced by wars, the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War among them, and felt women needed to gain power to affect some change.
Mary Winsor (Penn.) ’17 [holding Suffrage Prisoners banner]
When the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution without allowing women to participate fully in the political (or for that matter, economic) arena in 1869, Howe and like-minded women soon founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, respectively, to promote women’s right to participate in American government.
It was first about the desire to counterbalance what they perceived to be male lust for war, power and aggression, with a female focus on peace. Howe called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines.”
It soon became clear that that could only be achieved if there was a movement towards equal rights for all. This included a change in how women were treated, among others, when they desired to leave abusive relationships, which at the time resulted in them losing all access to their children. And, at the core of it, it included the right to vote. The Suffragette movement was born.
Women marching in national suffrage demonstration in Washington, D.C., May 9, 1914.
As Richardson relates:
Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.
“Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”
I was looking at the historical photographs of women protesters I found at the Library of Congress archives and wondered what they would be thinking if they could see how the spirit of their path blazing efforts is systematically undermined today.
There are increasing demands that women should not be allowed to vote, or that it would be better to go back to a time where women lacked that right, as per Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson after earning the Republican nomination for North Carolina governor, for example. John Gibbs, a Michigan candidate for the US House backed by former President Donald Trump railed against giving women the right to vote, arguing that America has “suffered” since women’s suffrage. He praised an organization trying to repeal the 19th Amendment which also argued that women’s suffrage had made the United States into a “totalitarian state.”
Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan. 1919.
Rights to bodily self-determination that we had finally gained, have been taken away. It is not just about abortion per se, mind you. Birth control in all forms is the next target. There are also new Republican proposals on the table for a federal bill that establishes a registry for pregnancy. There are state law requirements that ask people about the dates and other statistics around their periods (often in the context of admission to a sports team.) There are serious concerns around period tracking apps which can be used by third parties to detect pregnancy and abortion, hence putting women at risk of being prosecuted. There are worries by Senators like Ron Wyden (OR) and Ed Markey (MA) that computerized car location data are freely shared by car makers with law enforcement (requiring only a subpoena, not a warrant signed by a judge.) If you are traveling in your car across state lines for medical treatment, you can be stopped or legally pursued. Privacy principles completely shattered.
No-fault divorce, a huge step towards women’s independence and ability to get out of a relationship that no longer work for them, is under threat as well, just look at legislative proposals in Texas, Nebraska, Louisiana and South Dakota. Details here, but the most extreme danger is for women in abusive relationships. If victims of domestic violence need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of court proceedings proving that they are being harmed, they will be exposed to prolonged and even aggravated abuse during the time it takes to get a verdict, or face prohibitive costs that will silence them. This affects not just the spousal victims, but also the children.
Of course the backlash against women’s rights is not restricted to the Western world. Women in Afghanistan or Iran have seen what few rights they had gained virulently taken away, with widespread discrimination and violent human rights abuses the order of the day. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bemoaned just 2 months ago about the ruling Taliban having barred girls from education beyond sixth grade, from employment outside the home, and from most public spaces.
Women Ask President for Equal Rights Legislation. Fifty prominent members of the New National Woman’s Party called at the White House today to ask the president’s aid in passing an “Equal Rights Bill” in the next Congress. The bill would give women full equality in the government
Over 30 years ago, Pulitzer prize-winning author Susan Faludi wrote a book about Backlash. Much of what was discussed then is still an issue, or has become even worse, including the fracturing of a feminist movement that limits how much we could act and vote as a strong, united block.
At the time she observed: “In the past, women have proven that they can resist in a meaningful way, when they have had a clear agenda that is unsanitized and unapologetic, a mobilized mass that is forceful and public, and a conviction that is uncompromising and relentless.”
We will see how the absence of an organized mass movement will shape the November election. I hope we will nonetheless make our historic protesting sisters, the ones that initiated Mothers’ Day, deeply proud.
Imagine waking up from a dream with nagging questions. This happened to me a few days ago, when I dreamt that a full headshot of me was plastered across the front side of the New York Post (!) with the caption, “Retired professor admits: I should have said freedom, not …”
Not what? What did I say instead? What was I talking about? Why did I make my way into a conservative tabloid? Then an immediate association to a German idiom, “nicht jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen,” “Don’t put every word onto a gold scale,” best captured as “Don’t take everything so literally or with a specific meaning.”
I guess the dream pointed to a deeper issue for me right now, the fact that I am hesitant to write about politics and the unfolding catastrophes caused by political and military decision making in Israel, Gaza and their proxies. The overriding reason for my silence is that I cannot face the horrors on a daily basis and so don’t gather the information necessary to write something sufficiently informed. I have also gotten a lot of feedback that readers could use some cheer in these dark times and so are perfectly excited to see yet another photograph of nature.
But another reason has to do with the choice of words and how much they weigh – a certain amount of censorship in my own head. If I’d commit to a particular vocabulary – genocide, apartheid, anti-zionism, zionism, etc. I would need to write at length how these terms are defined, and how the various, differing definitions are (un)acceptable. It’s too much for me, during times of emotional upheaval. What I have done instead, just so I don’t drift into apathy, is to establish a file where I am collecting many different voices that have thoughtfully and passionately argued about the issues around the student protests and the perspectives of both Israelis and Palestinians on what is unfurling in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks and the now 7 months of war. Maybe there comes a time when we can dig into these sources together. Not now.
That said, I do have one political beef I need to get off my chest. It concerns our upcoming local elections. Specifically, I am aghast at how information that might very well influence our vote, can be hidden until it is too late, if you, like I, vote when your ballots arrive at home, long before the actual election date, 5/21. Portland has a few hotly contested races this year, among them a competition for the 3rd Congressional District in the Democratic primary (not my district, btw.) Former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, a progressive, runs against Maxine Dexter, a state representative and medical doctor, who all of a sudden received financial support to the tune of $1.7 million, from a 314 Action Fund.
The fund, claiming to want to support science backgrounds for office, conveniently waited to donate until April. Why? That makes it legal to delay the disclosure of its donor until May 20th, a day before the election. Now, if you are like me, wouldn’t you want to know WHO funds certain candidates? What if we learned that those organizations to whom the candidate is obliged pursue politics incongruent to our own goals? Or that we realize someone we agree with stands firmly behind one of the candidates? (As it turns out Dexter’s campaign is financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which funneling money into the race through 314 Action Fund.) (Ref.)
For some strange reason, in another critically close race, for Multnomah County District attorney, we have heard a lot about the funding for the progressive incumbent, Mike Schmidt, who I – could you guess? – support. Headline in The Oregonian 2 days ago: Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt campaign gets boost from progressive philanthropist George Soros. If you take the effort to dig into the article, you learn a bit more: it’s $213.000 in in-kind contributions, by the working families party of Oregon. They, in turn, received money from the Working Families Party National PAC, who in turn was given money by the Democrat PAC, which was given funds for its first quarter by Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform, Voila, Soros supports Schmidt!
Schmidt’s challenger, a DA who is campaigning against his own boss, and who used to be a Republican until he became an Independent in 2017 and has registered as Unaffiliated since 2023, endorsed no less by Portland’s police union, has raised much more money than Schmidt. Do we hear much about his sources? Rhetorical question. A hunk of his funding comes from Portland’s business elite, including Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Columbia Sportswear’s Tim Boyle, and Schnitzer Properties. His largest contributions come from Leadership PACs, as opaque to me as the 314 Action Fund mentioned above.
Maybe it was all about freedom of information in my dream.
Better back to pigeons …. who were courting with abandon yesterday at the park,
the river slow and steady,
Public art glowing with light,
and the young sunbathers, blooming like flowers on the grass, oblivious to the damage done to their aging skins. Then again, maybe they were all covered in SPF 70 sunscreen and just eager to escape the ravages of the real world. Let’s end on that positive thought!
This week I received an email with one of the irregular posts by the Public Professor, whose writing I cherish. Akim Reinhardt, whose shifts in careers and locations exceed even mine, has the gift to combine learnedness with humor and a way of simplifying complex issues in his writing so that pretty much everyone gets it. What could be easily didactic and preaching, instead often elicits a “Man, so clever and so true!” reaction in me.
When I saw the title – The Barbarians Won – I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, prescient lines written in 1898. The poem inspired Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) a novel by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Both poem and novel are considered crucial metaphors in literary reactions to western colonialism and the war on terror.
But Cavafy’s poem was sardonic, while Reinhardt’s latest musings seemed atypically pessimistic (and they were written even before the abysmal farce happening at the SKCOTUS (Supreme Kangaroo Court) hearings this week.) He grants the Barbarians their overall victory and ends with a line, “I should leave.”
I agree that an occasional time-out, a pause to replenish, is restorative and necessary to keep up the good fight – to wit my last month which filled me with joy, among others, watching the ravens. But leave?
The barbarians and their fascination with gadgets have won, the newest one appearing daily. Our eyes forever fixed on blinking toys.
The barbarians and their craving for the now have won, clocks all clicking in time. We march, bedraggled, to the sound of clanging bells.
The barbarians and their printed words have won, page after page stacked and bound. No matter what we want, they cite a passage of denial; no matter what we avoid, they read a mandate.
The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.
The barbarians and their cars have won, sleek tonnage racing along endlessly. Road kill marks the miles.
The barbarians and their lines have won, squares and rectangles laid about and stacked all around. The circle of life has been shaved and shoved into corners.
The barbarians and their foods have won, boxed mac n cheese and flour tortilla tacos washed down with Diet Coke. We check our cholesterol and blood sugar.
The barbarians and their fashions have won, fast and ready to wear. There’s elastic in our jeans and advertisements on our shirts and hats.
The barbarians and their time have won, clocks spinning and blinking and buzzing. We march on their schedule.
The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from mouths and ears. We can think only this way.
The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them.
The barbarians and their freedom have won, forever doing whatever they want. Individuals left alone to fend for themselves, to decide what miseries they will inflict upon others or endure alone.
The barbarians and their colors have won, white and gold exalted. The black and brown discarded.
The barbarians and their bureaucracies have won, victory in triplicate. We stand in line, waiting to fill out forms and be bound in red tape.
The barbarians and their erasures have won, clean scrubbings of the past. Can we still remember what the barbarians did?
The barbarians have won, and now we are waiting for them to leave.
I should leave.
Generally, I think departing and declaring victory for the bad guys is premature. Let’s focus on some positive occurrences across the last weeks to keep us from despairing:
Ukraine Aid made it through congress, better late than never.
More student loan forgiveness
The FTC banned the use of non-compete clauses, huge bonus for labor.
The DOL strengthened overtime rules
The FCC restored net neutrality
The DOT expanded protections for airline passengers
The School Voucher scam in TN failed to make it through this legislative period.
The Arizona house repealed the 1864 law (even if it took three tries to get there.)
Major American Unions endorsed the democratic Presidential candidate.
Trump LOSES his bid for a new trial or a judgment overturning the more than $80 million verdict for E. Jean Carroll in the second trial.
Even though it looks like a majority of SC judges are perfectly happy to reinstall a monarch (as long as he is not a Democrat) the proceedings in other law arenas seem to indicate that accountability is still on the table. An Arizona Grand Jury charged 11 AZ Republicans and seven former Trump aides with felonies around a fake elector scheme. In NYC, the trial proceedings reveal a flailing, shrinking, feeble defendant – regardless of outcome, the image of a cult leader is starting to crack.
If you have time to read, here is a fascinating essay by John Ganz on the ways Trump embodies two different personae – the actual banal criminal (as seen in the Manhattan proceedings), and the sovereign king with impunity for all crimes (as discussed in the SC proceedings.) The man will eventually succumb, but the idol might very well be enshrined into our laws, if the extremist have their way.
If this is not enough of cheer leading, we can always turn to Marc Aurelius, who was born on this day in 121 AD: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I’ll go watch the birds some more…. while listening to music about ravens.
Changing times and changing technology can sometime steal from us things we once had. And sometimes what they steal is hard to replace. Consider the means we have all had and used for knowing the world, and knowing what is real. The common expression is “seeing is believing.” The courts rely on witness testimony and reject as hearsay second-hand evidence. And in a range of moral and religious settings, we emphasize the importance of bearing witness.
Photographs today are from my favorite Chilean Puppet Theatre Group SILENCIO BLANCO. Make believe where it belongs: in art and on the stage.
There is surely no question that first-hand viewing of an event or a situation is enormously compelling. Consider a peculiar Gedanken-experiment: imagine that we have you stand at the edge of a roof, blindfolded, and we urge you to step off the edge. We race to reassure you, though, that you will fall only 18 inches, because there is a safe and secure net positioned so that you are in no danger. We tell you this. We arrange for your best friend to tell you this. We arrange for your spiritual advisor to tell you this. But no matter who tells you, surely you would be more comfortable if you could lift the blindfold and inspect the safety net for yourself. There really is no substitute for first-hand, visual evidence.
This reliance on first hand-experience, and the powerful visual evidence it provides, is at risk from multiple threats. In a recent NYT editorial on partisan perception, Paul Krugman lamented that in our insanely polarized world, we have to reverse the original aphorism, because now “Believing is Seeing.” In other words, people’s opinions and beliefs are so heavily entrenched that they are ready to discount, or reinterpret, or flatly refuse the evidence of their own eyes. We see this, for example, in people’s refusing to acknowledge the videos by eyewitnesses documenting the horrors and war crimes happening in Gaza, or the carnage wrought by Hamas on October 7th.
In some cases, people are so committed to their views, that they refuse even to consider, even to look at visual evidence that will challenge their view. In other cases people choose not to look, because seeing would be too painful. This is understandable, but means people underestimate, or fully fail to understand, the extent of the horrors. Importantly, in many cases, people flatly deny the truth of what they see and declare it faked. In still other cases, people are not permitted to see the visual evidence – a state or an agency monitoring what gets published, fully aware of the impact the prohibited visuals might have.
All of these points are fueled by the rapid advances in digital photography. Speaking as a well practiced montage artist, I, of course, have a sense of how easily images can be manipulated to make them show what you want to show. But what artistry allows is dwarfed by what digital technology makes available to anyone who wishes to manufacture bogus evidence for almost any claim they wish to advance.
Here is a short list what bad actors using AI have already managed to fake in order to influence the 2024 elections. We are stuck with a situation where multiple factors combine: videos are either true or false, and we are told that they are either true or false (irrespective of their actual truth content) and we ourselves have to decide if we trust them or not- a difficult task, magnified by our desire to believe those we generally trust and who tell us to adopt their claims.
(If you are interested in a deeper exploration of the legal issues around regulating media deep fakes in the political arena, the Brennan Center for Justice has a great overview here.)
What to do? The power and immediacy of first hand experience is likely hardwired into us, making us appallingly vulnerable to things like deep fakes. The apprehension that we encounter fake input and fall for it can lead to a different disaster, however: to avoid being duped, we end up trusting no input. The solution may require a set of new habits. When you encounter information, do what you can to check it against other independent sources. (This is, of course, increasingly difficult as Murdoch and Sinclair take over more and more media outlets.) When you encounter information, do what you can to scrutinize who it is that is supplying the information. Be wary of “semi-anonymous” reporting, with entries like “a new study has shown…” or “it is reported that.”
The deepest problem here, though, is that many people don’t have the skills, resources or the inclination to take these cautionary steps. And so instead, they simply latch onto a single source that they deem trustworthy. Unfortunately this choice may lead them to rely on lunatic propaganda. Furthermore, selecting different sources of input as trustworthy, with the young relying on social media videos coming directly out of Gaza, filmed by eyewitnesses, and the old relying on Fox news, or the main stream media that avoid showing videos of the suffering unfolding in Gaza in the first place, further feeds the political polarization (one only has to look at the generational divide in people’s taking sides in this conflict, which doesn’t come out of nowhere.) “Propaganda!” each societal subset shouts against the other.
The habit of seeing is believing cements in place views that may be based on incomplete or distorted input. Something that once was a valuable capacity can these days become an obstacle to the truth. I wish I had a solution.
As an antidote to my habitually bleak news these days, I thought I’d collect and present what brought me fun, knowledge and/or encouragement across the last week.
Below is what demonstrators got to see on a high-rise in Düsseldorf.
“The difference between 1933 and 2024? You!”
EDUCATION:
And also this…..
I did not know that.
RELIEF:
The International Court of Justice in The Hague walked a fine line in their ruling on the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa; here is a compilation of short, informative expert opinions on the implications, offered by the Atlantic Council (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism). Here are the take-aways from The Guardian, slightly more to the left. And here the ruling is declared a historic victory for the Palestinians by The Intercept. Then again, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir declares it: Hague Shmague. Fact is, the case is taken up, will stretch out for years, but importantly for now, the court ordered Israel to “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza, a ruling that is, however, unenforceable.
FUN:
I discovered a site, Artbutmakeitsports, that manages to combine knowledge of art and sports in ways that had even me, the least sportive person in the world, laugh with delight.
Autumn, by Mikhail Larionov, 1912
The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.
Last, but not least,
CONTENTMENT:
I finally managed to bring some of my affairs in order, figuring out what to do in the case of eventual demise. Unlike those whose adherence to religion faiths proscribes what to do, I had to make difficult decisions myself. I’ve never wanted to imagine myself cooped up in a coffin. I did not like the idea of cremation due to its horrid environmental impact. They now offer an alternative, where your remains get literally composted and then, except what urns relatives might claim, gets used to fertilize reforesting projects in the PNW forests. “Mami Mulch!” as my beloved declared. And now I don’t have to think about it ever again…
When I am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
I came across the document from 1944 by chance, but was immediately intrigued. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was originally written by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services,) the forerunner to the CIA, an organization formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces.
It gives detailed instructions how to harm productive outcomes in organizations of all kinds and was distributed by the Allies to cooperative citizens in Europe during the war. Declassified in 2008, finally, it has made the rounds in business schools and board rooms. (Ref.)
Part of the instructions focus on slow-walking the decision-making process, trusting that a delayed outcome, as it often does, has adverse consequences. In that regard it reminds me of the insane slow-walking by multiple players that we are seeing in our current political landscape. Those in power can delay and defer, until it is too late – court cases becoming moot, or their outcomes no longer able to influence real world results. Simple sabotage? I’d say a more serious one, if you consider the real life consequences of these actions.
As one example, think of gerrymandering election districts, which will remain on the ballot if the judges don’t pick up the cases or slow-walk them through the court system. A good example here is the Supreme Court’s glacial pace in the Alabama gerrymandering case which led to allowing maps it later held were unconstitutional and discriminatory to be used in the 2022 midterm election. Citizens were deprived of their rights simply through slow -walking.
Currently, the Ohio AG is slow-walking a petition to put an anti-gerrymandering amendment onto the November 2024 ballot, again potentially curtailing significant rights to Ohio citizens. (Ref.)
Another issues is connected to Congress’ slow-walking of aid decisions – any delay of potential help for Ukraine, for example, indirectly aides and abets the aggressor in this war, with irreversible consequences, if the delay leads to Russia winning the war. Here is an excellent essay about this topic by Yale historian Timothy Snyder from just yesterday.
Another example that springs to mind are the legal issues associated with Trump indictments, across multiple states and for diverse accusations.
Judge Cannon in Florida, presiding over the stolen documents case, for example, has managed to drag out the proceedings in ways that will open possibilities for the accused to claim political interference in the election campaign once he was chosen in the primary, or, worse, allow himself as future president to attempt self-pardoning.
Then there are the cases that are on hold while the issues of absolute immunity, claimed by Trump, are waiting for appellate or Supreme Court decisions.
In addition, we are waiting to see how the Supreme Court contorts to handle the Colorado and Maine 14th amendment cases where Trump was not permitted to appear on the ballot for the primaries (note, NOONE has said or argued that he is prohibited from the ballot in a general election, as afar as I know, so far.) A timely decision is of incredible importance, since recent polls reveal that Americans who plan to vote for Trump in 2024 claim they would change their vote if a jury convicts him of a crime.
The best summary of the 14th amendment issues, pro and against Trump, can be found here, by legal scholar Ian Millhiser. Another great break-down of what individual scholars of constitutional law fear or predict regarding the SC decision-making process was offered in yesterday’s Washington Post.
As you will see, slow-walking is high on the list for an institution that wants to see a certain outcome without making itself vulnerable to accusations of putting – yet again – a thumb on the scale of an election outcome….
Photographs today show cloud-laden vistas, the fog of war against democracy was my immediate association. The sabotage manual and its instructions to fog up the process is still in use.
Music is Debussy’s Fog (Brouillard) from the Preludes.
Here is the full Prelude set, if you want to have your dark winter evening filled with light….
I figured I’d offer some reassurance at the beginning of 2024: YDP will be as eclectic as ever, as haphazard in what gets picked up and woven in with the rest of what fills my brain, so that you can rely on at least one thing remaining the same in your lives.
For a start it’ll be some thoughts by the Italian Marxist Antonin Gramsci, a poem by Ruth Awad, a Lebanese-American poet who is also a tattoo artist and an insurance manager who collects rescue Pomeranians, and some views of my pear tree. How is that for a mix?
House Finches
Regular readers are familiar with the pear tree, and its neighboring hawthorn tree, seen from my chair where I hang out when my body – what else is new – vetoes the plans for various hikes and outings yet again. It is where I found myself last week, amazed at the variety of birds who kept me company this late in the season, a humming bird included.
Anna’s Hummingbird
It gave me time to reread Gramsci, in particular his apropos musings on (not) celebrating the New Year. I don’t share his sentiment of hating the occasion, although I don’t love New Year’s either. At my age, frankly, one of the thoughts that is inescapable when you are feeling lousy and the numbers change from ’23 to ’24, is personal: will this be the year I die? After all we lost a lot of friends this year – here is an Oregon ArtsWatch list which included a mirror photograph I took of Henk Pander during our Mutual Portraits project, a close friend enormously missed.
But Gramsci sets me right in the rest of his one page-proclamation: you want to focus on continuity and spirit, not on breaking points and final balances, filled with resolutions that you will not keep.
“I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself…..I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed.”
Song Sparrow
In one of the stranger deliberations I’ve read in a while, he also hopes for the arrival of socialism in order to jettison the celebration dates handed down by the ancestors. I guess it would give us something to talk about, shared hopes for differing reasons….
Thrushes
Not so sure what I would talk about with today’s poet, Ruth Awad, whose work, as far as I’ve read it, lacks the balance of emotionality and intellect that I so crave. If that sounds condescending it is not meant to be – there is much to be said for the offerings of the Ruth Awads or Maggi Smiths of the world, embraced by contemporary readers for their accessibility and courage to be sentimental. If it keeps an interest in poetry alive, so be it.
I mean it.
Black capped chickadees
The poem below, published in The Atlantic at the end of the year, drew me in, though, for one specific sentiment, expressed in the last words:
“…if only you’ll let he world soften you with its touching.”
To let the world soften us, or even better, to comfort and fill us with occasional awe at a time when we tend to harden from fear and/or sorrow, we have to attend to it. The “world” is all around us, easily, constantly available, no extravagant or even local excursions needed. You just have to sit and look, birds perching in the pear tree, reminding us of an existence not governed by dates, or resolutions, just renewal from hour to hour, here, now, in 2024.
Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony, a strategy of power pursued through cultural work, can wait. So can my knitting. Or folding the laundry. I just look at the birds. It is healing.
White crowned sparrow
Reasons to Live
Because if you can survive the violet night, you can survive
the next, and the fig tree will ache with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives
first at your window, quietly pawing even when you can’t stand it,
and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards of the house you filled with animals
as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form fully in their roots, their golden manes
swaying with the want of spring— live, live, live, live!—
one day you’ll put your hands in the earth and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,
but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing, and the dogs will sing their whole bodies
in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay down their pink crowns, and the rivers
will set their stones and ribbons at your door if only
you’ll let the world soften you with its touching.
Yes, the plan was to brighten the pre-Christmas week with something up-lifting. It has changed, wouldn’t you know it.
Yes, there were matters important enough to discard my good intentions, namely events in Germany with lessons for us here in the U.S. as well.
And yes, lots to read and digest today. I will reward the patient readers with Poulenc’s choral Christmas music in the end, however tangential it might be. It is of ethereal beauty.
Two seemingly irreconcilable events happened some days apart, both echoing a darker German past. One was the election of Germany’s first mayor as representative for a right-wing extremist party (as officially declared by the German FBI,) the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in Pirna, Saxony.
The other was a shitstorm descending around the recipient of this year’s Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought, Russian-American journalist and writer, Masha Gessen. After they published an essay in the New Yorker that critically examined current events in the Middle East and compared them to a fascistic historical context, all hell broke loose. Jewish organizations in Germany officially complained and the foundation that awards the prize officially distanced themselves and retracted the invitations to a planned celebratory reception, as did the host city of Bremen. The prize itself could not legally be withdrawn, and a presentation of the award happened in the end, under much reduced publicity and with the police attending to “protect attendants.”
Let me provide some background on both events.
Pirna is a city the size of Portland, OR, in Saxony, a state known for its considerable base of right-wing extremists who carry anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments on their banner. The first round of this year’s mayoral elections (a 7 year cycle) saw three candidates split the vote pretty evenly. One from the conservative party CDU, one from the center-right Freie Wähler, a party mostly operating on communal levels, and Tim Lochner, a carpenter with no political experience, representing the AfD. He won the run-off election last Sunday, since the other two parties were unwilling to compromise and withdraw one of the candidates in order to consolidate the reciprocal vote which would have spelled a certain loss for the extremist. Clinging to power against the odds (as well as very low turnout) threw the election to a neo-fascist.
This is particularly horrifying in light of the history of the city.
Pirna was one of six sites that served as the laboratory for killing human beings in gas chambers on an industrial scale, before transferring the method to concentration camps. A psychiatric facility, located in the old fort/castle Sonnenstein above the city, housed mentally ill and people with disabilities from the 1800s to 1939. It was declared an euthanasia institution in the context of the “Aktion T4” (the systematic killing of “unworthy life”) and between June 1940 and August 1941 almost 14.000 patients from all over Germany and an additional 1000 prisoner transfers from the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps were gassed in the basement showers. It took until the year 2000 (!) to inaugurate a memorial to the victims in situ.
So here the city elects a mayor who is affiliated with a party known to carry the legacy of national-socialistic times with gusto, hoping to re-install the “values” of the Reich, normalizing racism, violence and anti-democratic leanings, among others. His first actions upon taking office? “I will meet with all individual members of city hall and check their loyalty.” Sounds familiar?
Major Jewish organizations commented on the election results, including the International Auschwitz Committee, seated in Berlin. They see the outcome of the election as a bitter signal to democratic parties that their willful competition with each other plays into the hands of extremism, enabling the steady march of the right-wing extremists into positions of power across all of Europe. (Ref.) Think of this in our own election year, with the likes of No-Labels potentially wreaking havoc, but also inner-democratic-party fighting weakening what needs to be a united force not to loose the election to Trump. It will take astonishingly few votes to shift the outcome – here is a detailed analysis.
The warning is on the wall: only mobilization to vote and consolidation of democratic forces can stop the destruction of democracy.
***
Cancelation of speech is a time-honored tool of autocratic regimes. That does not prevent officially democratic societies to go there as well, Germany among them, with explicit, much more restrictive laws governing speech that is deemed as inciting hatred or, in particular, anti-semitic. Article 5 of our Grund Gesetz (the German Constitution) defines freedom of speech. The second paragraph of Article 5 restricts freedom of expression “in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honor.” Big difference to the US regulations concerning freedom of speech.
Currently, people on all sides of the political spectrum agree that there is a wave of repression of political thought occurring in Germany.
“Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, virtually every major institution in Germany has been engaged in a wave of repression of ethnic minority communities — the scale and intensity of which is unprecedented in Germany’s postwar history. The targets are Palestinians, other people of color and Jewish anti-Zionists alike.”
In today’s climate, Jewish refugee Hanna Arendt herself, highly critical of the political positions of Israel and full of controversial opinions about contemporary Zionism, from 1942 until her death in 1975, would likely be silenced in Germany. Masha Gessen’s provocation, triggering the uproar around the prize they were awarded, was this paragraph of taboo comparison, from an essay in the New Yorker:
“But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards –Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
Some people would have predicted this to happen, scholars of history like A. Dirk Moses, the Anne und Bernard Spitzer Professor für Politikwissenschaft am City College of New York, among them. Here is a warning from 2 years ago, a critical view of Germany’s attempt to deal with the guilt of the past, a desperate grasp for redemption.
“For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism.” (Ref.)
His description of the German “Catechism.”
The Holocaust is unique because it was the unlimited Vernichtung der Juden um der Vernichtung willen(exterminating the Jews for the sake of extermination itself) distinguished from the limited and pragmatic aims of other genocides. It is the first time in history that a state had set out to destroy a people solely on ideological grounds.
It was thus a Zivilisationsbruch (civilizational rupture) and the moral foundation of the nation.
Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany, and a special loyalty to Israel: “Die Sicherheit Israels ist Teil der Staatsräson unseres Landes” (Israel’s security is part of Germany’s reason of state)
Antisemitism is a distinct prejudice – and was a distinctly German one. It should not be confused with racism.
Antizionism is antisemitism.
Masha Gessen, Jewish herself with a greatgrandfather murdered by the Nazis in the Bialistok ghetto, violates the rule that equates anti-zionism with antisemitism and, further more, proves willing to engage in comparisons, questioning aspects of the uniqueness of a singular event. I am linking to their brilliant speech, given in the context of the truncated award ceremony, that explains the legitimacy, importance and necessity of such comparisons. If you cannot open the link (in english) I can send you the full text. ) Also, here is a smart interview with them, can be switched to English.)
Gessen’s message: historical events unfold over time. At some point it might be too late to prevent unimaginable horrors when our lack of imagination is surpassed by reality. But we, now, no longer have to imagine – we know what is possible.
Consider it another, urgent warning.
“The Holocaust was singular in part because of how many people were killed over a short period of time. But even the Holocaust took years. People lived, had hopes, tried to make sense of what was happening, and resisted…. Over time, political positions changed, imagination changed, the idea dawned that a Holocaust would be possible ….
We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible….
And this is why we compare. To prevent what we know can happen from happening. To make “Never Again” a political project rather than a magic spell. And if we compare compellingly and bravely, then, in the best case scenario, the comparison is proven wrong.“
