A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
– Ernest Hemingway
Fifty years ago, Ernest Hemingway, writer, sportsman, big-game hunter, soldier, poseur, genius and Nobel Prize winner shot himself with his favorite Boss doublebarrel shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. His wife Mary at first pretended it was an accident, but nobody bought that fairy tale. He'd been suffering almost every imaginable physical and some mental problems, including writer's block and, so it is said, impotence.
In previous months, he had submitted to more than 15 punishing ECT (electroshock convulsive) treatments at the Mayo clinic, due, in part, to his fear that the FBI was shadowing him. Paranoia? In fact, the FBI's director J Edgar Hoover hated him as a "Communist" for raising money for ambulances to the antifascist loyalist side of the Spanish civil war and sheltering anti-Franco refugees. Hoover kept a 124-page file on Hemingway, and had ordered his agents to trail the writer's movements. His doctors, family and friends saw Hemingway's anxiety as proof of his mental instability requiring shock treatment.
Since his death, it's been chic to spitefully pick over his moldering bones to psychoanalyse and thus not-so-subtly degrade Hemingway's work and life. A much-quoted secondhand "psychological autopsy" of Hemingway's suicide by an American shrink, who never met the writer, finds him guilty of "narcissistic personality traits" and – of course! – "bipolar disorder". And – predictably – "an Oedipal desire to kill his father". To add to this bill of indictment, an English literary critic recently slammed Hemingway's "psychotic self-dramatisation".
There's a lot there to pick apart in the man: the bluster, exaggerated machismo, mood swings, four marriages, alcoholism, death-wooing in the bullring, at the D-Day landing, and in bed. No small ego there. But, in all the fancy analytical footwork, it's sometimes forgotten that, like Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, Hemingway explored "strange new worlds … to boldly go where no man has gone before". His powerfully insinuating prose practically took over the style of many young writers, including me, as did Salinger's for a later generation. Some of Hemingway's novels, and many beautiful short stories like "Big Two Hearted River" and "In Another Country", will live as long as literature.
To read Hemingway afresh is to be reminded of Goya's "The Disasters of War" aquatints and Picasso's "Guernica", but also of some of the great writers of the natural world like Turgenev (whom he admired) and even the gentler poets like Keats and, yes, Emily Dickinson. His physical observation of rivers, mountains, trees, animals – our place in nature – is keen, fresh and now, severely disciplined and celebratory at the same time. Despite his boastful "primitivism" – he talked to bears and claimed they talked back – and love of shooting, today he'd be on the side of the eco-angels.
After a 1935 Katrina-like hurricane killed 400 jobless, mentally-ill war veterans in a Key West, Florida work camp, where they'd been sent by President Roosevelt to rid Washington, DC of potentially radical elements, Hemingway wrote a raging "Who Murdered the Vets?" article, demanding, "Whom did (the vets) annoy and to whom was their possible presences a political danger?" Given his feeling for ordinary soldiers, I can imagine him doing the same thing today for veterans shortchanged by the military bureaucracies.
I always feel a bit defensive about my love of Hemingway. His man's man pose may not go down well in today's gay and feminist influenced culture. It tends to be a guy thing. His women – Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms – are stoical, long-suffering, loyal and sexy. I can't imagine any of them having a life separate and autonomous from Jake Barnes, Lt Henry or Robert Jordan at the bridge.
And it's true that, especially as he grew older, his machismo could be absurd and self-parodying. But to love a writer is to embrace all of him, cruel and sensitive, brave and bitchy. For some of us, his sudden death was like a punch in the gut, the loss of an alpha-male family member, almost a father. People usually remember exactly where they were when John F Kennedy was murdered or when the 19 jihadists flew into the World Trade Centre on 9/11. When we heard the news of Hemingway's death, I was in a Bayswater pub, having a drink with another writer, who was, like Hemingway, a wounded soldier; he simply said, "Jesus, he finally found the bullet that had chased him all his life." Or, according to the shrinks, that he'd been chasing since childhood in a suicide-prone, dysfunctional Chicago family.
Up to the very end, Hemingway put up a tremendous battle to stay alive as a writer, despite severe wounds that never healed from air crashes, boat accidents and large living. The Garden of Eden, his last, unfinished book, published posthumously, was a daring, heroic attempt at a summing up on a grand scale. It experimented with androgyny, and sex reversals, and clearly was a painful effort to demasculinise and broaden his writing. It's a crime that the published novel compared to the unfinished original is a cartoonish cut-and-paste job. (I'm indebted to the literary archaeological digging of the K, who tracked down Hemingway's original draft in a Boston library.) He'd worked on this magnum opus for 20 years, and if anything killed him, his Promethean struggles with The Garden of Eden did.
Remember the times – and our own. He grew up with terror. His father shot himself, and other family members also committed suicide, including his actor niece, Margaux. The miserable Italian campaign of the first world war, where, as a Red Cross volunteer, he saved a soldier's life and almost lost a mortar-shattered leg to a surgeon's knife; the following "small wars" in Europe and Asia Minor, and his boisterous joining the 4th Infantry division for its liberating drive to Paris, were no picnics. From the start, most poignantly in the Spanish civil war, he threw himself body and soul into the "struggle against fascism". Some psychosis.
It’s a mystery why John F. Kennedy is still regarded as the family moderate—cautious, pragmatic, shrewd and calculating—while brother Bobby gets to be portrayed as the impetuous, left-leaning, idealistic humanitarian. It’s a mystery because even a cursory examination of history reveals that that wasn’t Bobby.
For openers, Bobby Kennedy was about as “leftist” as Douglas MacArthur. In truth, he, like his brother John, was a shrieking anti-Communist. The Kennedys were not only Cold Warriors, they were fairly paranoid about it—confusing progressivism with Bolshevism—which is why they believed, ludicrously, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist, and is why they (John as president and Bobby as Attorney General) had King’s telephone tapped.
How much of an anti-Communist was Bobby Kennedy? Consider: During the early 1950s Bobby served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yes, that Joseph McCarthy. His witch-hunting senate committee ruined the careers of scores of Americans through the use of smears and innuendo. It’s a fact. Bobby (“Don’t get mad….get even”) Kennedy was Joe McCarthy’s boy.
It was only after family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, advised his son to jump off the McCarthy bandwagon (alas, “Tail-Gunner Joe” had become an embarrassment, having degenerated into a clownish, alcoholic demagogue) that Bobby sought a new vocation. It was only after Papa Joe urged him to abandon Commie-hunting and focus on another bogy man that Bobby Kennedy decided to make America’s labor unions his next victim.
Obviously, there were many corruption targets to choose from. He could have gone after Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, defense fraud, payola in the record industry, etc., but because Joe Kennedy had no ties, no loyalties, no connections of any kind to the working class—indeed, he held the common working man in contempt—organized labor became Bobby’s new whipping boy. Best to leave those well-groomed gentlemen in the three-piece suits alone, and go after the guys in the watchmen’s caps and mackinaws.
As for Bobby’s celebrated social conscience, that’s another exaggeration. In his award-winning history of the CIA (“Legacy of Ashes”), Tim Weiner reports that it was Bobby himself who spearheaded the plan to murder Fidel Castro. It was Bobby Kennedy who not only initiated the assassination plot, but who—following one ignominious failure after another—flogged the hare-brained operation to keep it going. After all, he was the president’s brother. Who was going to tell him to back off?
All those conspiracies—the exploding cigars, the LSD-laced coffee, the chemical additives to cause Fidel’s beard to fall out (!), bribing trusted Castro associates to poison him, hiring out-of-town Mafia hitmen to murder him outright—those were all sanctioned by Bobby.
Based on documents released via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), as well as material gleaned from numerous first-person interviews (“Legacy of Ashes” has 150 pages of notes), Weiner made the case that Bobby Kennedy was obsessed with killing Fidel Castro, that he ate, drank and breathed Castro assassination fantasies.
It’s also been documented that Bobby Kennedy bullied Lyndon Johnson into continuing the Vietnam war. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin (in “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream”), Bobby insisted to LBJ that President Kennedy would have done everything in his power to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the Communists, and that it was therefore incumbent upon Johnson to honor his dead brother’s legacy by not abandoning the war. He pressured LBJ to remain in Vietnam, arguing that pulling out would be the act of a coward and traitor.
It was only after the Vietnam war had become toxically unpopular and been deemed unwinnable that Bobby, who was now seeking the 1968 presidential nomination, reversed his position and declared himself America’s “peace candidate,” harshly criticizing Johnson for his hawkishness. So much for Bobby’s principles….and so much for Brother John’s “legacy.”
While Bobby Kennedy obviously had some good qualities, it’s a mistake to regard him as heroic—as a combination of Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara. Bobby was no hero. He was a hardboiled player. If we insist on making comparisons, he was a combination of Lee Atwater, John Gotti and Henry Kissinger.
President Obama's speech in El Paso on May 10 put the immigration debate back on the table. In reaffirming his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, he attempted to reframe a debate that has been dominated by a focus on security.
The president began by rightly noting the primary motivation for the presence of some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
"…The overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families". Obama referred to comprehensive immigration reform as "an economic imperative", essential to eliminating an underground labor economy and protecting middle-class salaries.
Although Obama's attempt to reframe the debate moved discussion back into economics, he left out any structural explanation of what pushes migration in a globalized world. He portrayed U.S. companies that employ undocumented labor as rogue rule-breakers, and simultaneously exalted migrants as valuable assets while still describing them as global interlopers.
Even as he sought to rescue the debate from the false obsession on border controls, he did not once discuss the root causes of immigration.
What are the conditions that drive thousands of people a year to assume the risks of migrating to the United States to "provide for their families"? How can development policies be coordinated, in both sending and host countries, to build employment options for people at home?
The Development Disconnect
As both the US and Mexico turn political attention to the 2012 presidential campaigns, the role of development in migration seems farther from the agenda than ever. Experts from Mexico and the United States recently met to figure out how to change that. Brought together under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a binational group of policy analysts, migrant leaders, non-governmental organizations, farmer and labor organizations and foundations gathered to analyze what many see as a crisis and explore options and reforms. Some 60 percent of undocumented workers now in the U.S. are Mexican, so the U.S.-Mexican relationship offers an excellent place to start in understanding the opportunities and obstacles and exploring alternatives.
The initial premise seems self-evident: Migration cannot be viewed as a system divorced from broader issues of regional labor markets, development and economic policies. But despite being obvious, the reality is that in public policy and discourse it is routinely and systematically separated from its roots in what Jonathan Fox of the University of California at Santa Cruz referred to as the "persistent disconnect between the migration agenda and a development agenda that goes beyond local infrastructure."
When you add in the disconnects between sending and receiving nations; federal, state and municipal government; and national security and human rights priorities, it's no wonder that the immigration debate has become mired in half-truths and knee-jerk politicking.
U.S.-Mexican migration is a classic example of how the obvious can be obfuscated. Even when politicians pay lip service to poverty and development issues as push factors, the rhetoric has not translated into coherent public policy–especially in the crucial area of employment–within Mexico and much less within the binational relationship.
Rodolfo Zamora of the University of Zacatecas noted that the lack of links between development and immigration is not an accident or an oversight. Both U.S. and Mexican governments ignore the economic causes of migration—among them, the regional integration model, concentration of wealth and dual labor markets. This is because they benefit powerful interests that then deflect blame by criminalizing the migrating workers caught up in the dynamic they created. The current system reinforces power structures. It means that overcoming these biased approaches is a major political and organizing challenge that requires empowering actors in society, particularly migrants themselves.
One of the major tasks to get policy back on track is to figure out how to mainstream discussions on the links between development and migration, among media, the public and policymakers. As demonstrated in Obama's reframing speech, in the United States the question of what leads people to migrate remains taboo in the immigration debate. Even though a consensus exists on the need for an integral approach to migration, the experts gathered in Mexico City recognized serious obstacles to breaking through the taboo and confronting the complexities of a broadened debate that includes development issues.
Taking binational responsibility for the reasons behind a migrant's decision implies humanizing an important social actor who has been relegated to the inhuman status of "illegal" within the security framework. It reveals the bureaucratic walls built between development and migration policy that must be broken down to construct lasting solutions. Finally, it opens up areas of civil society involvement on both sides of the border that combine grassroots initiatives with policy reform efforts.
The Context
The disconnect between migration and development didn't always exist. Fox pointed out promoters of regional economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) argued that it would directly lead to a decrease in migratory pressures. When that proved false, the resulting crisis did not lead to a reassessment of the links between economic policy and migration. With labor market integration left out of the model and no compensatory mechanisms built in, increased migratory pressures based on demand for undocumented labor in the U.S. and lack of employment in Mexico have been effectively ignored by both governments.
Clemente Ruiz Duran of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) described the crisis that has resulted. The Mexican economy has grown at an average rate of merely 2.7 percent since NAFTA, with marked instability and dependence on the U.S. economy. A growing working population combined with low job generation has led to high unemployment, underemployment and eroding working conditions. The economy is characterized by the growth of the informal sector (29% of jobs), low wages, inequality, speculation and a lack of productive investment in the country. Ruiz summed up the situation: Mexico has developed an economy "that grows little, invests little and punishes wages."
The task of predicting and managing regional labor flows normally depends on an analysis of supply and demand. Raul Hinojosa of the University of California at Los Angeles pointed out that U.S. immigration policy generates demand for low-wage migrant labor that lacks basic protections and rights. Hinojosa stated that migrants earn 15-20% less than native workers, creating an artificially high demand in the U.S., while at the same time denying responsibility for legally integrating necessary foreign labor.
The elevated cost of sending remittances creates another barrier to using the full potential of migrant earnings to contribute to development goals. These added costs generate a series of problems for the home country including inflation, productivity decline, inequality and dependence on migration.
Government policies that do not address these problems aggravate them. Fox referred to recent research that shows how misplaced rural spending in Mexico contributes to out-migration. The first problem is that rural policies do not place a priority on employment and many current policies finance activities that create few jobs and threaten existing jobs. Since NAFTA, rural employment has dropped from 10.7 million in 1991 to 8.6 million in 2007.
At the same time, the government doubled spending in the sector between 2000 and 2009. Much of the public budget goes to northern states where industrial agriculture can compete more efficiently on the global market and benefits large agricultural companies with little employment. Small-scale production in the south, which employs a large part of the farming population, has been virtually abandoned in public policy except in cash transfer programs. U.S. subsidized imports also led to massive job displacement
In the relationship between education and migration, there seem to be more questions than answers. Silvia Giorguli of the Colegio de Mexico explained that schooling has increased in Mexico at the lower levels, but shows major gaps between regions and has still not reached universal coverage. In zones of high expulsion, the impact of migration seems to be mixed. On the one hand, since 40% migrate before the age of 20, many leave the educational system to seek jobs in the U.S. On the other hand, some families use remittances to finance education. Public policy should address the pressures to leave school caused by migration in these areas and the challenges to integrate returning youth into the educational system.
Other questions pertain to the lack of linkage between school curriculum and employment, although several participants noted that the structure of the U.S. migrant labor market does not guarantee that higher education leads to better jobs for Mexicans.
Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute analyzed U.S. policy on development and migration, characterized by what he called a complete lack of dialogue between the agencies and actors in involved in immigration policy and development/aid policy. The logic and the institutional structures of the two areas differ enormously, leading to an inability to understand shared problems and goals, let alone coordinate policies.
The point was seconded by Oscar Chacon, director of the National Alliance of Latino and Caribbean Communities (NALACC), who noted that in the U.S. Congress the committees on development and migration issues rarely interact.
He added that from the point of view of migrant organizations, to talk about development in either sending or receiving countries is to talk of health, education, identities and democracy. Presenting an integrated set of issues to the public is often rejected as too complicated. Another challenge in linking development and migration is to communicate effectively. Although the integral approach involves broadening the scope of issues, it must be presented clearly as the only real way to understand the dynamics and develop lasting, just and effective measures.
Remittances and Beyond Remittances
To advance debate into areas where progress can be shown and made, many of the "big questions"—What is meant by development? Does Mexico have a national development plan? What are the structural and political limitations to linking migration and development?—were set aside to dive into evaluations of past experience and proposals regarding specific strategies.
A huge body of literature has been devoted to the billions of dollars in remittances generated by the global migration boom, especially between the United States and Mexico. Debates about the use of remittances and their potential use for development in communities of origin often focus on how they fit into family economic strategies, whether they can be harnessed effectively for public purposes, the costs of transmission and the role of financial services.
Mexico's 3×1 program where federal, state and municipal governments match migrant remittances to carry out public works projects, provides over a decade of experience to evaluate the potential for using remittances in development. As Xochitl Bada pointed out, however, the results are mixed. Most projects center on building local infrastructure, leading to few long-term job opportunities. The program has been successful in implementing projects in some communities outside the municipal seat that traditionally receive little public funding. But the program still has problems channeling funds to communities with the highest poverty and expulsion rates and 59% of projects are concentrated in only three states: Zacatecas, Michoacán and Jalisco. Bada recommended that the program be reoriented to include more initiatives and participation from Mexican communities, to streamline procedures and to modify the rules of application for greater accountability and transparency.
The goal of creating strong links between remittances and development has shown limited advances, as productive projects constitute only 3.5% of the projects approved and around half fail in the marketing phase. Growth areas for the program should include investment in human capital by offering scholarships and increased educational opportunities and productive projects that focus on the domestic market.
Raul Hinojosa and Paule Cruz described work on reducing the costs of sending remittances and the potential for development implied in reduced costs and increased use of financial services. The North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA has been mapping transnational corridors to study the flow of remittances. In Mexico, one of the largest obstacles is the lack of reliable information.
The potential of new technologies such as mobile phone transfers can reduce costs of sending remittances up to 75%. These technologies can be coupled with the creation of community credit unions or the use of stores or post offices where there are no banks. They potentially offer options to the poor that are usually only available to the wealthy. The City of Oakland developed a project that offers a debit card to migrants that can be used to send remittances.
Along the same lines, Isabel Cruz of the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS) stated, "We cannot influence development if there isn't widespread access to financial services." She asserted that remittances dedicated to family needs can serve development purposes, if they are converted into migrant savings through access to community banks and credit unions. Accessible savings mechanisms for rural communities reduce vulnerability and create virtuous circles of savings and reinvestment in the community. The public policy agenda must include the creation of microbanks and community banks, and the elimination of barriers in the transnational financial system.
Migrants as Agents of Change
The lack of trained leadership and of national and regional development plans has hindered progress on linking migration and development and migration in policy, according to Chacon. To become more effective, migrant organizations must make alliances with other sectors of Mexican civil society and be recognized as social actors. Chacon lamented that Mexico and other countries frequently view their migrants in the United States as an addendum to the agenda of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. This means that they may receive specialized support programs or services but are not seen as full citizens or political and economic actors.
Zamora gave a rundown of international efforts to advance the development and migration debate. To date the United Nations has sponsored four Global Forums on Migration and Development, four Social Forums on Migration have been held and the International Network on Migration and Development has been established. Last year the meeting of the People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights was held alongside the UN forum in Mexico. All these experiences have helped to link migrant organizations strengthen migrant voices in policy debates and actions, and share ideas and tactics on development in communities of origin. Nonetheless, the issues remain somewhat marginalized in the migration debate, with gaps between organizing processes in host countries and home countries.
To strengthen those processes, migrant organizations have worked to open up debate and assure that the progress made in international forums filters down to the grassroots. For example, after the Global People's Action and the Global Forum of 2010, NALACC organized public events in Chicago and other cities to publicize the and build awareness of the links between migration and development.
In Mexico, the lack of public policy in development policy with a focus on rights holds back efforts to consolidate linkages between development and migration. Often times, Congress claims it doesn't have the resources to support development measures in sending communities but a close look at the budget shows that the real problem is skewed priorities, waste and corruption. Zamora suggests that a possible solution would be to establish mechanisms for participatory budgeting like in Brazil. Again, building democracy in general emerges as a part of the migration and development agenda.
Efraín Jiménez, migrant leader from Zacatecas in the U.S. noted that, "There will be no development unless we have someone to fight for it, we have to do it ourselves." He pointed to the need for strong and organized communities and a permanent battle against corruption. Although academics have promoted the linkages, they have little influence in government and migrants lack representation. The Zacatecan Federation has worked to develop projects, identify needed legal reforms and modify existing programs. They are also working for immigration reform in the United States. " Latin Americans are a large population but we need to develop strong voices to call for new development strategies and not the unfair free trade agreements."
Jorge Romero of the International Network on Migration and Development started with the question of what an integral development should look like. Although organizations have identified the right focus in linking development and migration through an integral framework, they lack focus on the tasks at hand, he said. There's also a lack of clarity on how to link the development and migration debate with urgent human rights issues. Within official forums, the issues continue to be fragmented. Nonetheless there have been important gains in migrants taking their rightful place as key actors on the national and international level.
The relationship between migrants and communities of origin shares a goal beyond creating better living and working conditions back home. That is the defense of the right to remain. Although international migration has both costs and benefits, what is unquestionable is that forced migration violates basic human rights.
Although the two are certainly not mutually exclusive a tension exists within the development and migration debate over whether it's more effective to build grassroots projects or to pressure governments for changes. Ivan Polanco of the National Association of Rural Commercialization Enterprises (ANEC) placed the responsibility for the lack of development and employment firmly with the state. He criticized the fact that in Mexico migrants send money back to poor families while the wealthy transfer money abroad in investments and foreign bank accounts. "The poor are generating development out of their wages, and the rich are taking capital out of the country and absorbing government subsidies," he said. Chacon added that government policies favor an irresponsible economic elite in the U.S. as well.
Polanco posits that the inverted priorities of the state indicate the need for a new national pact, and not just tweaks to the old model. The Food Sovereignty Law presented to Congress seeks to reorient policies to encourage food production for local markets, for example. Other policy changes should focus on supporting small and medium producers, with special emphasis on women, youth and indigenous peoples.
It would be impossible to sum up in a neat package the wide range of recommendations, concepts, experiences and demands that fall under the rubric of migration and development. Moreover, they sometimes present contradictions or are at a very initial stage of elaboration. Even "visualizing the agenda and the paths to get there", as suggested by Chacon, may still be a ways off. But in recounting part of the discussion, he affirmed that the common ground is agreement that migration is central to development and vice versa and that migrants must play an active role on all policy levels.
Gaspar Salgado-Rivera of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) explained that migrant organizations in the United States have proposed the formation of a large network to leverage political influence and define agendas. Among the focuses are the role of public policy, transparency and human rights.
Development usually is and should be the responsibility of governments. Creating jobs should be the natural outcome of a healthy economy. The Mexican economy cannot be counted in that class. The World Bank recently stated, "Mexico is a star country in the area of macroeconomics but the big mystery of Mexico is why it doesn't manage to generate more growth." Why it doesn't generate jobs must be an even bigger "mystery" to the World Bank. The dialogue on development and migration insists that the links can and must be understood, and policies changed.
Pressure is building on both sides of the border for those changes. How can binational efforts contribute to solving the problems? Polanco said, "We ask our colleagues in the US to talk about what its like for us here. We want to come together to demand the renegotiation of NAFTA."
That's just an example of the areas for cooperation. As North America becomes the world's most integrated region, it's not acceptable to delink issues as critically linked as migration and development. The loose coalition of people working on migration and development has built up an impressive array of skills, ideas and resources. Most of that has been done from the bottom up, despite rather than through government programs. Migrants have had to recreate communities, fight to maintain cultural identity and economic solvency. The initiative to apply these skills to development in their home country of Mexico has only just begun.
It is early evening in Ram, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Jerusalem. The workers are on their way home to their families. The queue is long. I am sitting in my Audi, in the diplomats’ queue. I am alone, there’s no queue, but I’m waiting.
She stands twenty meters in front of me. Military clothing, with an AK4 over her shoulder. I watch her. Her movements, her face, her youth. A year or so older than my youngest daughter. I see her but she does not see me. She does not see the workers. She only sees her colleague, a boy in the same age as her. The boy is dressed in military clothes and an AK4 hanging nonchalantly over his shoulder.
A boy and a girl by a gate. But nobody gives them a coin for their troubles. No beautiful words, no looks of praise.
A boy and a girl about to become adults. They were just teenagers. Now they are playing power games. A boy and a girl who for a while forget where they are. Forget that they are at a checkpoint. Forget that they are maintaining apartheid, that they are separating Palestinians from Palestinians.
Instead they begin to flirt. Touch each other, nudge each other and turn their backs to reality. Point towards the queue of workers, say something, laugh. Meanwhile, the queue becomes longer and longer.
I don’t know what they are saying. See that the Palestinian workers are becoming annoyed. It is Thursday evening. After a long work week they want to return home for the weekend. They have nothing to do standing in this queue.
The workers see how the checkpoint for a while becomes a meeting point between a girl and a boy. Two young people with their origin in Ethiopia. We see how the young people play theater. The theater of reality. A theater without a script, with Palestinian workers as extras. I get to be the audience. I watch the blending of war and peace, love and fear. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s fear.
I open my car window. I hear Eric Clapton’s music from a small radio on a cement bloc. ”I don’t want to be lonely tonight…”
After a bit over a half hour, the girl with the AK4 approaches my car. Laughing. The last thing he said must have been funny, maybe something beautiful.
I ask her how she is doing. She freezes and asks me why I’m asking her that. I smile confidently as I say that I’m just asking how she is doing.
She repeats why I am posing such a strange question.
”Well,” I say, ”I actually wanted to ask you if you are happy or sad. It is as if I know you. It is as if I’ve seen you before. I have lived in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. Have been sitting here and watching you for a long time. I am wondering who you are?”
”Why do you ask that?” she wonders.
”Maybe because we are both strangers here,” I say. ”I am from Sweden, have lived in Ethiopia but do not speak Amharic or Arabic and you are from Ethiopia but haven’t learnt how to speak Hebrew. We are two strangers who meet at a loathsome checkpoint a bit outside Jerusalem. I am just wondering how you are doing.”
Mats Svensson, a former Swedish diplomat working on the staff of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, is presently following the ongoing occupation of Palestine. He can be reached at isbjorn2001@hotmail.com.
“I will have a degree,” the Harvard graduate student sneered, “and you will be serving my kids fries at a drive-through on our way to a skiing trip.” “Maybe,” Will replied, “but at least I won’t be unoriginal.”
-- Good Will Hunting (1997)
There are numerous social contracts that exist in today’s society. According to the historian Thaddeus Russell in his recent review in Reason Magazine (May 2011), I broke two with the publication of my book Fear of the Animal Planet. The first of those contracts has to do with class. The second has to do with species and class. Both are interesting points and needing of consideration.
To the first point, Russell wastes no time in reaching it. By the second sentence, he calls me “an obscure semi-academic” and my publisher “tiny and idiosyncratic.” Russell carries on through the rest of the review with a general tone of derision. No attempt is made to hide his distaste of the ideas that I use. While some might be put off by such curtness, I find it refreshing and instructive. For the issue at hand is made very clear to me, this is about socioeconomic class and the ways in which it manifests itself. In other words, Russell is teaching me a lesson in class relations. It has not been my first time.
My initiation into the working class was given in the summer before the start of 5th grade. I had been sent to a camp by my then step-mother. It was run by a large Evangelical church. I was not member of the church and my experience in theological matters consisted of one-year spent at Christian Life Elementary School in Rockford, IL. Nevertheless I would do my best to fit in at the camp and the other attendees were, at least on the surface, friendly enough. The days were spent intermixed with playful activities and bible study. Near the end of our stay, an exam was given. It was comprehensive, serious, and tested our knowledge of the New Testament. The head pastor’s son would go on to score the highest mark and he received numerous accolades for doing so on our final night together. This seemed to everyone as expected. He should have won.
The unexpected came the following morning. With the parents arriving to pick up their children for the return homeward, the truth was told to me privately. I had tied for the top mark on the exam. The church elders, however, had apparently felt it necessary to conceal this fact. They believed that I neither deserved recognition nor the award. The reasons behinds their judgment were not supplied. But I was old enough to figure it out on my own. I was not a pastor’s son.
The next lesson happened in high school. I attended Dakota High School in rural NW Illinois. The student body was quite limited in number, comprised mainly of kids from small farms and villages. On the outskirts of the district, there was Lake Summerset. This private, gated community contained a comparable wealth and it stood out. Its members carried themselves differently—with a certain level of arrogance and aloofness. In my high school, this disparity in wealth meant a disparity in treatment ranging from noticeable to stark. Encouragement, attention, and advanced coursework were lavished on the few. These students needed to be prepared for college. As for the rest of us, we were left scrambling for crumbs. We simply did not merit such consideration. This arrangement seemed normal to people. Wealth bought privileges.
College came after and it had its own particular set of teachings. They are the three C’s of liberalism: conformity, cynicism, and conservatism. To start, we were never taught directly about class. There was talk about the cultural politics of race, ethnicity, and gender. But we appeared to live in a classless society. There was the ubiquitous middle class but it turned out to be more of an ideology than anything else: a potent cocktail of individualism and objectivity. I came to identify more with those of wealth. If you looked the part, weren’t you one of them? I thought that selfishness could be rationalized. Isn’t it reasonable to look out for yourself?
Then there was cynicism. I gained a very real sense that people were powerless to the forces around them. Effort didn’t make that much of a difference. Sure there were the great social movements of our time. But those had more to do with progress and civilization than agency. Weren’t civil rights and women’s rights inevitable? It certainly looked that way. The past did not have much of a connection to the present. History seemed to proceed without struggle. I stopped caring.
Finally, there was conservatism. When Sir Thomas More wrote his monograph Utopia (1515), he would not take a side on what the idea of utopia actually meant. It could be either the Greek eutopia (the good place) or outopia (no place). Why the uncertainty? “More,” Lewis Mumford explained, “was a punster, in an age when the keenest minds delighted to play tricks with language, and when it was not always wise to speak too plainly.” The situation has not changed and, in the modern university, carefulness has become something both required and cumulative in its effects. I learned that idealism and romanticism were bad and should be reacted against. Realism and skepticism, however, were good and could be used as a cover for lack of engagement. “Words” should be put into quotes. The passive voice should be used. Language and ideas should be postmodern and kept purposely complex and obtuse. Knowledge itself seemed to be evolving ever more specialized and closed off.
This takes us to Russell and the latest lesson. Why would he so rudely dismiss anyone as “an obscure semi-academic”? The answer is that the university remains a rigidly class-based institution—not only in what it teaches but also in how it operates. Russell himself has written about being a C student from the high schools in Berkeley and Oakland, who magically went on to attend two private schools: Antioch College and Columbia University. The first was best known for its rich hippy kids and the second continues to be known for just being rich. Only it was not magic that got him there; it was money.
The recent New York Times article, “Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite,” continues with this well-trotted theme: undergraduate admissions at leading colleges and the gross inequalities that exist therein. For today, it is not enough that the children of wealth to attend the best funded primary and secondary schools with the smallest classes, most advance courses, and most diverse curriculum. Such students now get their own private college admissions counselors. They get $90 per hour tutors and test preparation workshops. They load up with extracurricular activities: Spacecamp, Earthwatch, Habitat for Humanity. The key is to impress the admissions boards and why not? It’s the golden ticket and the costs can be socialized. The top 100 research universities regularly give as much or more financial aid to families making over $100,000 a year than to those making less than $40,000. But the problem of inequality extends far beyond there, for it gets worse the further up the ladder of education you go.
The American Historical Association released a related study in 2005 examining the quantitative trends in graduate schools for the social sciences and humanities. It found that, over the past 40 years, PhDs from these fields are “growing less diverse and more likely to draw from a narrow range of elite institutions.” Moreover, previous attendance at highly-selective, private liberal-arts schools—such as Williams, Bryn Mawr, Oberlin, Pomona, etc—plays a disproportionate role in the selection process for doctoral programs. In other words, not only do an ever growing number of PhDs come from the most exclusive universities, but these same students first attended the most exclusive colleges. The AHA’s concluding advice on the matter: “the beginnings of an academic career can play an important role in the way it ends.” About as political of a statement the organization could muster.
But the AHA was right. The funnel of education narrows and compresses. Along the way, privilege becomes more important and potent, and merit comes to matter less and less. The anthropologist Franz Boas warned that “academic teachers are apt to consider themselves a privileged class in whose hands the development of university teaching and the advance of science rests.” Boas, who obtained his position at Columbia through his family’s connections, understood this well. He would join the Committee of Social Investigation at Greenwich House in order to help fund research for those outside of the university. But that was 100 years ago. Today, you get people like Professor X.
Remember Professor X? He wrote that popular, anonymous piece, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” for the Atlantic a few years ago. It argued without apology that some people should not attend college, for they are ill prepared for the intellectual rigors and it does not ultimately serve their interests. Who are these people? For Professor X, this meant adult education, nontraditional education, and education for returning students—in other words, education for the working class. It is a very good thing that he was never my teacher or I would have never finished my undergraduate degree. I was working class. I attended a junior college while working a second and third shift job. I bounced around various state schools. I was dyslexic and struggled mightily with my writing. Professor X would have given me an F and been done with it. I didn’t belong in college.
Russell believes the same thing. He got his PhD from Columbia. I got my PhD from Toledo. He is significant. I am obscure. He is a professor. I am a semi-academic who teaches part-time ESL to immigrants. He has a literary agent and published his latest book through the Free Press. I had to often choose between grocery money for the month or coming up with the funds for the research of my book, and it would be published by Counterpunch and AK Press. Russell had to stoop low to review my book and he wants everyone to know it.
The class divide is apparent. And it is beyond arrogance, self-entitlement, and exclusion. This divide is manufactured and corrupting. Professor X and Russell have come to outwardly speak for it. Many people quietly believe in it. Society is taught it. If you are poor, your only chance to make it and achieve your dreams is to get that rare scholarship to Amherst College. This is eugenics—the belief that class determines intelligence.
***
The second of the social contracts that I broke has to do with species and class. My book, Fear of the Animal Planet, chronicles the actions of captive animals. It considers the context in which those actions happened and the consequences that resulted, and it makes interpretations. This is what historians do. Yet, according to Russell, this is not allowed. Animals may have actions but those actions are not open to interpretation. The thoughts of other creatures cannot be known. Any attempt towards such a direction will result in the erroneous imposition of consciousness upon the subjects. It is to become a ventriloquist for the powerless. Many people would agree with Russell’s assessment. I would have too but not for a fundamental change that occurred in my thinking several years ago.
Towards the close of my master’s degree, I had become indoctrinated by the teachings of liberalism. I was conformist, nihilistic, and timid in my thought. I would have never believed that animals could resist. Yet I had reached a point where I had finally begun to do some thinking on my own and I knew I was headed in the wrong direction. Sure it was the direction where everyone else was going; nor could I, at the time, have told you why it was wrong. What I needed was a significant and demanding intellectual overhaul. I started looking for help and ended up turning to the historian Peter Linebaugh. My overall knowledge of history as a discipline was meager, as I studied anthropology. But I had read enough to understand that history from below was fundamentally different. It was perhaps more influential outside the university than it was inside. It was imaginative, optimistic, and not afraid to take on a challenge. Many professors seemed genuinely frightened of it. That was a good sign. The world needed to be turned upside down.
The initial journey was not without its bumps. There was a good deal of learning to be done and I had a lot of images to erase. I remember when I first arrived to Toledo a small group of us met weekly to discuss the early drafts of the Many Headed Hydra. One night, while considering the first chapter, “The Wreck of the Sea Venture,” I accused its author of being idealistic in his views of Algonquian culture. He understood what I meant and a row ensued. But I eventually figured it out. Utopia wasn’t no place; it was the good place.
My interest into the history of animals began as a complete accident. I needed a topic for a first-year graduate seminar. The Toledo Zoo was local and there were plentiful primary sources. That was the only reason I chose to write about it. I had no interest in animals at the time. I was not an animal lover. I did not believe in animal rights. At best, I was indifferent towards the abilities of other animals. At worse, I was negative. Could animals even have a history? No way.
The project began as a history exploring the early years of the zoo and its administrators. The animals themselves were to play a part in the story but only in a passive role. How would they do anything different? As my research expanded, however, I began noticing things that did not fit. Some captive animals were escaping. Others were attacking their trainers. And it was not just a few isolated cases. This was happening with frequency and patterns. I began asking questions. Animals do not magically appear in the zoo. How do they get there? Why do zoos take the young and not the older? What are the training methods? What are the conditions of daily life? What are the social relationships within the institutions? What are the consequences of those aggressive actions? My conventional history was falling apart, as were all of my ideas concerning other animals.
It would take another decade to fully answer each of those questions and the end result was Fear of the Animal Planet. My argument is basic and straightforward. Captive animals are resisting. They are resisting the way they are taken, held, trained, and worked. They act with intent to make space for their own wants. They shape their social relations and alter human structures. Each of their actions leads to a consequence: good or bad, short-term or long-term. Captive animals are making history.
This narrative can be difficult for people to wrap their heads around because it challenges our paradigm. Russell, for instance, has trouble understanding many things. How could I ever connect words like exploitation, struggle, and autonomy to other animals, he asks? The reason is because those words express a very real, empirical relationship that exists within zoos and circuses. I use exploitation because these institutions are seeking power, control, and profit. I use struggle because there are two sides to this relationship. Captive animals are neither inert nor passive. They assert their wishes and attempt to control the various situations they find themselves in the best way they can. This is the seeking of autonomy. What is freedom if not the ability, however limited, to shape and guide your own destiny?
Russell wonders how I could claim to know the reasons behind Tyke the elephant’s rampage and death in Honolulu in August of 1994. In the court of law, motivation and precedence are essential in proving your case and with Tyke we have both. She had to endure 20 years of contract work and constant travel in poor, cramped conditions. She would have been chained for more hours of her life than not. She would have been beaten regularly with a bullhook from the time she was young. Her particular company, Hawthorn, had been fined repeatedly for not providing adequate medical care to its elephants. Several of the company’s elephants would die because of this lack of care. This is the reality of the circus industry. It is how it operates and accumulates. Tyke had to live this life and it provided her motivation.
As for precedent, there were related incidents leading up to the fatal one in Honolulu. Tyke had escaped during a show in Pennsylvania in April of 1993. Police wanted to shoot her straightaway but she would be brought under control. Two months later, she attacked a groom and sprinted into the midway of the state fairgrounds in North Dakota. The man said afterwards: “the elephant was definitely trying to kill me.” These incidents matter because they represent a pattern—a pattern not uncommon among captive animals. There will be a slow build up of events that can, if ignored, ultimately lead to a stunning finality. This is what happened with Tyke.
It might be tempting to dismiss Russell’s objections and criticisms as being solely about species and the belief in human superiority. But that would be a mistake, as Russell makes it clear “that translating the revolutionary consciousness of voiceless animals is no more silly than doing the same thing for human beings.” He is against all of social history—whether it is about elephants or humans. This might seem strange considering that Russell just wrote a book called Renegade History of the United States, which contends that slaves, pirates, prostitutes, and delinquents expanded freedom by doing what they were not suppose to. How could Russell, who promotes himself as a bottom-up historian, be against bottom-up history? The answer is liberalism.
Russell emphasizes conformity. He states that the majority of captive animals, like humans in general, do not resist. This is the most important fact to him. I take the opposite view. I look at the context in which this conformity is created—from captivity, to indoctrination and training, to punishment—and I am amazed that resistance occurs as much as it does. When a gorilla escapes from her enclosure, my focus is not on whether she later returns willingly to her cage, but rather on the fact that she ever escaped in the first place.
Russell believes in voicelessness. He cracks a joke at the start of his review that my book proposes an argument “that will make anyone other than the fiercest PETA activist smirk.” But this is not funny. For a long while, the majority of animal-rights supporters did smirk at my ideas. They thought I was nuts for proposing that animals had agency and could resist. This view has begun to change, but some still do not get it. How could self-proclaimed animal-lovers have been so opposed to such possibilities? The same reason as Russell, because they were taught to think so. In the university, animals are portrayed as the pejorative, the subaltern, the other. They may have emotions and intellect but they can never have the ability to actively shape the human world around them. Animals have to be powerless. To do otherwise would invert the entire social order—both in terms of species and class.
Russell is certain that social historians are imperialistic and impose political consciousness upon those populations who have none. But again he has it backwards. It was Tyke, Tatiana the tiger, and Tilikum the orca who imposed a consciousness upon me. Their individual actions had broad ramifications that became politicized. This forced me to consider the context, confront issues, and make changes in my thinking. This is inductive reasoning. I did not need to get into their minds nor have an understanding of their language to do this. Actions can speak louder than words. Tyke, Tatiana, and Tilikum converted me. I am now on their side.
Jason Hribal is a historian and author of Fear of the Animal Planet: the Hidden History of Animal Resistance (CounterPunch / AK Press). He can be reached at: jasonchribal@yahoo.com.
When I wrote last week about the Nebraska reactor surrounded by floodwaters I, like most, still considered it a highly remote possibility of cataclysm.
Upon further investigation, it seems much more likely now. The New York Times has exposed some major criminal negligence and game playing with the safety of the nation by the plant's operator. Peter Behr's June 24th report examines what we've been told vs. what's there on the ground at Fort Calhoun's nuclear power station. This is truly frightening with water levels approaching the 1007 ft. above sea level mark.
The "aqua berm" collapsed on Sunday, and nothing holds back the waters but random chance at this point.
The Ft. Calhoun reactor was repeatedly reported to be in "cold" shutdown, with an endless supply of happy talk in the press about how safe the situation remains. Not one of these reports gives the actual temperature inside the reactor. "Cold" is a relative term when dealing wtih nuclear reactors.
A June 22 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) press release inspires no confidence whatsoever:
"If there is a complete loss of power on site temporary pumps that run on gas can circulate cooling water through the spent fuel pool and reactor core."
And reactor core? But I thought it was in "cold shutdown?" Why would that be necessary? The NRC release avoids the word "cold," and merely restates the term "shutdown."
The Omaha World Herald offers another clue:
"The NRC says its inspectors were at the plant when the berm failed and have confirmed that the flooding has had no impact on the reactor shutdown cooling or the spent fuel pool cooling." (Sam Womack, June 26)
The term "reactor shutdown cooling" implies it is not quite "cold" but requiring cooling still.
In an outstanding bit of hubris, the second threatened plant at Cooper is still operating at "full power." It's as if some are incapable of learning any lessons whatsoever.
CNN -- and almost all other news sources -- is still reporting the claims of the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) unquestioningly:
"The [Ft. Calhoun] plant is designed to withstand waters up to 1,014 feet above mean sea level, according to the OPPD."
That reassuring number ignores quite a bit. In the end it may prove to be the equivalent of the TEPCO assurances and the Japanese Government's claims that no meltdowns had occured.
"But a year ago, those new defenses were not in place, and the plant's hard barriers could have failed against a 1,010-foot flood ... at flooding levels above 1,008 feet, the plant "would experience a loss of offsite power and loss of intake structure" (NYT)
The NRC gave the operator OPPD a wristslap last October 6 to try and force some improvements of "substatntal importance" to the facility. The OPPD predictably stalled and tried to fight spending any money on improvements up through this year.
The plot thickened back in the 1990s, where a series of floods threatened the area. The Army Corps of Engineers warned the plant operator to increase its defenses by at least 3 feet, back in 2003. The plant however did not "properly act" on the "deficiencies." No surprises there.
When a senior nuclear investigator for NRC was asked how these situations can go on so long with no meaningful action taken to protect the public from disaster, Gerond George answered, "We only sample certain parts of their design basis..." This admission reveals gaping holes at the NRC.
Now it gets ugly. The plant was not actually "designed" for the 1014 ft flood level at all. Whether sufficient "improvements" to the original design have been implemented properly is anyone's guess. The plant was originally created to:
"The precise level -- 1,009.5 feet -- is written into the plant's operating licenses as a flooding 'design basis' threat that the plant must be guarded against." (NYT)
Here's the Omaha Public Power's solution to historic floodwaters lapping at their reactor:
"OPPD planned to extend the barrier to 1,014 feet by stacking sandbags on top of some steel floodgates that protected the auxiliary building, and to use more sandbags to safeguard the water intake structure and its essential cooling water pumps. "
You can't make this stuff up.
Yes, there's a reactor at Diablo Canyon in Southern California near an earthquake fault and designed magnitudes short of what could be unleashed there. Yes, they drilled so far below the Gulf of Mexico that they couldn't plug a leak until the Gulf was thick with oil and toxins. And yes, people in charge of the public safety at a Nebraska nuclear reactor thought piling up sandbags five feet high would safeguard against massive flooding.
These are the same geniuses who allegedly have performed the upgrades as instructed by NRC, just this year, to reluctantly fortify the plant against raging floodwaters.
I won't be touring the site personally.
The OPPD remains out of jail and in control of the situation. Its spokesman Michael Jones explained:
"We presented our analysis to [NRC] which we felt indicated that the design basis [for the flooding threat] should remain 1,009 feet," rather than 1,014 feet, he said." (NYT)
The current river level is just below 1007 feet.
"At 1,008.5 feet, the technical support center used by emergency technicians would have been inundated... At 1,010 feet, water would begin to enter the auxiliary building, "shorting power and submerging pumps. The plant could then experience a station blackout with core damage estimated within 15 to 18 hours..." (NYT)
The OPPD still clung to the absurdity that their fire truck would simply pump out the auxiliary building. That's their ace in the hole, apparently. One can picture Slim Pickens at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove riding the nuclear warhead down and proudly waving his Stetson about with a victorious holler.
The NRC, it was reported deadpan, found that "it was not clear how workers could operate a crane to lift the fire truck into position if outside power were lost."
The Times waited until the end of the two page story to finally let the hammer drop:
"The NRC has not completed its evaluation of the new defenses installed at Fort Calhoun..."
The plant has not actually passed inspection, nor was it originally designed to handle the current reality. Its operator is criminally negligent in the extreme and incompetent also in the extreme. The operator has clearly fought the very safety improvements that are now desperately needed to hold back the river and avert a possible full meltdown a la Fukushima.
The age of nuclear power should be swiftly coming to an end. Do you really trust your family's lives to the sandbag plan? To the men who fight any reasonable action to make the nuclear reactors they have been entrusted with as safe as possible?
It's an indefensible industry. The situation is profit vs. public safety. The latter stands no chance over the long term.
Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: a Supernatural Satire. He edits the Political Film Blog. He be reached at: polfilmblog at gmail.
For students of the IMF vs. Chinese theories of economic development, I think the details of the Chinese struggle to keep its Congo copper project going in the teeth of Western disapproval strikingly illustrates some conspicuous and interesting differences.
For people who like a good anti-imperialist horse-laugh, there's this: United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a swipe at China in a June 11 press conference in Zambia, urging African nations to resist "new colonialism" and for foreign investors to practice "good governance". "We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave," Clinton said in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, before flying off to Tanzania. "And when you leave, you don't leave much behind for the people who are there. We don't want to see a new colonialism in Africa."
Although she didn't mention China by name, officials traveling with Clinton said she wanted to stress that African countries should hold Chinese investors to the same standards that they apply to Americans and Europeans. Clinton said the United States didn't want any foreign governments or investors to fail in Africa, but wanted to make sure that they give back to local communities. "We want them to do well, but also we want them to do good," she said.
This declaration appeared at the same time that America's most conspicuous post-colonial initiative in Africa - the bombing of Libya - was entering its third month with a cost approaching US$1 billion and no end in sight.
It was the same week that the world got another look at the US exercise of good governance in Iraq, courtesy of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The George W Bush administration had airlifted $12 billion in cash into post-conquest Iraq. $6.6 billion - more than half - cannot be accounted for. It is now assumed that it was stolen, perhaps "the largest theft of funds in [US] national history".
The LA Times reported: U.S. officials often didn't have time or staff to keep strict financial controls. Millions of dollars were stuffed in gunnysacks and hauled on pickups to Iraqi agencies or contractors, officials have testified.
House Government Reform Committee investigators charged in 2005 that U.S. officials "used virtually no financial controls to account for these enormous cash withdrawals once they arrived in Iraq, and there is evidence of substantial waste, fraud and abuse in the actual spending and disbursement of the Iraqi funds."
Pentagon officials have contended for the last six years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records. But repeated attempts to find the documentation, or better yet the cash, were fruitless.
In the requisite ironic coda, it turns out that the billions weren't even American taxpayers' money. The US government pulled the cash from the Development Fund for Iraq administered by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The fund accumulated the proceeds from Iraq's energy exports during the Saddam Hussein oil-for-food sanctions years for eventual disbursement for the benefit of its true owners: the citizens of Iraq.
Tough luck, Iraqi citizens.
If China decides to take the US fiduciary meltdown in Iraq as precedent for its overseas activities, the bar for "doing good" and "giving back" to the local community is going to be extremely low. For those keeping score, $6.6 billion is 66 million $100 bills. It is 72 tons of shrink-wrapped cash. It is the payload of three C-130 Hercules transports.
It is also the stated value of the Sino-Congolese infrastructure-for-copper agreement, trumpeted as the "deal of the century".
The much-touted neo-colonialist Chinese penetration of the Democratic Republic of Congo , in other words, is roughly equivalent to an American imperialist rounding error.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
Like the editors of the New York Times, we have no idea. That said, we were struck by this morning’s scolding editorial on the subject.
This is one of the ways we liberals lose, the analysts sadly said.
The editors believe that Obama should declare his support for same-sex marriage. On the merits, that would be fine with us, but we were struck by the political cluelessness evinced all through their piece. In this passage, the editors explain the politics of the matter as they understand it:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (6/27/11): Why is Mr. Obama so reluctant to say the words that could lend strength to a national effort now backed by a majority of Americans?
In the 2008 campaign, when Mr. Obama said he supported civil unions and believed marriage should be between men and women, he may have wanted to appeal to slightly more conservative voters who were wary of him.
After he took office, it became evident that Republicans intended to portray him as a radical, out-of-touch leftist no matter what he did. Supporting same-sex marriage at this point is hardly going to change that drumbeat, and any voter for whom that is a make-or-break issue will probably not be an Obama supporter anyway.
Firm support for gay marriage is, on the other hand, likely to help him among his cheerless base. Mr. Obama opposes the Defense of Marriage Act and is presiding over the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He signed the United Nations declaration on gay rights, and allowed the Census to count same-sex relationships. But he has been absent from the biggest and most difficult drive of all.
Public opinion has swung toward acceptance of gay marriage since 2008; five more states and the District of Columbia have lifted marriage bans. Thousands of gay men and lesbians now possess marriage certificates and many former skeptics have come to realize that the moral foundation of the country has been strengthened. It is long past time for the president to catch up. He often criticizes discrimination with the memorable phrase, “that’s not who we are.” Favoring this discrimination should not be who he is.
“Why is Mr. Obama so reluctant to say the words that could lend strength to a national effort now backed by a majority of Americans?” When our intellectual leaders are so clueless, is it any wonder that we liberals have failed so badly down through the years?
Has support for same-sex marriage become a political winner on a national basis? It’s possible, but you can’t make that judgment by consulting the national poll to which the editors link. To the extent that this may be a re-election concern for Obama, his advisers would, among other things, be looking at polling results among unaligned voters in swing states. They would devote no attention to the numbers from large blue states like New York and California.
Those numbers would tend to tilt the outcome of national polls. But if we’re talking about the politics of this issue, they wouldn’t likely influence Obama’s advisers at all.
Is it possible that a declaration of support might help Obama politically in the ways the editors imagine? Yes, it certainly is—but presumably, a declaration could hurt him on the politics too. It’s typical of fuzzy heads like those at the Times that they can only imagine a good political outcome from a position they favor on the merits. Needless to say, Maureen Dowd was on the same page in her latest attempt to write a political column:
DOWD (6/26/11): The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.
Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe.
Maybe, given all his economic and war woes as he heads into 2012, Obama fears the disapproval of the homophobic elements within his own party. But he has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.
Dowd is still eager to let us know what “any girl” would tell us.
For the record, “the country” had already had an eight-year “break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry” when Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008. But it gets no break from the ongoing plague of Dowdian dumbness. That highlighted attempt to imagine the politics is just astoundingly dumb. (Why would Dowd think that the politics of this issue would turn on the reactions of “homophobic elements within” the Democratic Party?)
Might we make a note about the foolishness of the editors’ eagerness? Let’s consider what Barney Frank recently told the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg about this type of political issue. In this passage, Frank explains what Obama may have thought about same-sex marriage when we was a candidate:
STOLBERG (6/19/11): The White House would not comment on whether Mr. Obama was ready to endorse same-sex marriage. But one Democratic strategist close to the White House, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said some senior advisers “are looking at the tactics of how this might be done if the president chose to do it.”
And Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is gay, said in an interview that a top adviser to Mr. Obama, whom he would not name, asked him this year, “What would be the effect if he came out for same-sex marriage?”
“My own view is that I look at President Obama’s record, he was probably inclined to think that same-sex marriage was legitimate, but as a candidate for president in 2008 that would have been an unwise thing to say,” Mr. Frank said. “And I don’t mean that he’s being hypocritical. I mean that if you live in a democratic society, it is a mix of what you think the voters want and what you think is doable.”
Duh. Frank understands the way American politics works. More specifically, he understands that it doesn’t all come down to the question of what Daddy (the president) says on some issue. In fact, gay rights groups have made tremendous progress in the past few decades without the support of major national Democrats on same-sex marriage. We can think of few major social movements which have had smarter leadership; part of this movement’s leadership smarts has involved the understanding that social progress comes from the efforts of an extended village—a village which may not include the president at every juncture. Gay rights leaders have been very skillful and very wise in the ways they’ve negotiated national politics. On the other hand, progressives are also stuck with the low-IQ instincts of society’s most visible clowns:
DOWD: Still, Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.
But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.
Really? Dowd can’t understand why Obama, who must appeal to a national electorate, might defer to Cuomo, who is the governor of a socially liberal blue state? In similar ways, these savants often wondered, in Campaign 2000, why Candidate Gore sometimes took less progressive positions than Candidate Hillary Clinton, who was running in New York only. But then, this gang’s capacity for understanding nothing at all has long been its most obvious trait.
(Some readers will be old enough to remember when this same sort of analysis was adopted with respect to the death penalty, a killer for national Democrats as late as 1992.)
This brings us to today’s basic question: Who is Alexandra Petri?
Last Saturday, the analysts had finally had it! It had become fairly clear that Petri is now a regular Saturday columnist at the Washington Post. The analysts wailed when they read her latest analysis of the 2012 race. Once again, this was just fatuous:
PETRI (6/25/11): A candidate whose name I haven’t already heard a dozen times? Are you crazy?
Forget people. People can change. We don’t want change, in spite of what we said during the 2008 election.
Instead, we want brands.
[…]
The biggest complaint about the Republican primary field, so far, has been that people don’t already know what they think of the candidates. “I don’t have any preformed opinions about them,” they mutter. “Can’t we draft Giuliani?”
But it’s hard to blame us. Everywhere you turn, you can customize your settings. Don’t like Hillary Clinton? There’s an app for that. Don’t want any opinions from the wrong side of the aisle? Just click a button or flip the channel.
[…]
Palin’s flagging now—not because she’s changed but because she’s stayed the same, and we’re getting tired of it.
But old habits die hard. If the brand fails, we produce a shinier wrapper. Don’t retreat! Reboot! Rebrand! Mitt Romney unbuttons his collar. Miley Cyrus removes all her clothing and dresses up as a bird. Even Osama bin Laden bought into this; some of his e-mails suggested that al-Qaeda should just rebrand itself to build appeal. How about putting Jihad back into the name?
It would be hard to overstate the fatuity here. For starters, no one is trying to draft Giuliani; this notion came and went a few weeks ago in roughly a New York half-minute. Meanwhile, two relative no-names—Bachmann and Cain—have been the growth stocks in the GOP polls. Beyond that, is Palin flagging “because she’s stayed the same, and we’re getting tired of it?”
Good God, the analysts cried. Where do they find these people?
They were thinking back to one of Petri’s recent columns, in which she got all over Mitt Romney for his hair and his clothes (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/8/11). The analysts came to us with a question: Who is Alexandra Petri? they demanded. Where did the Post ever find her?
We thought the answer was interesting. The Post found Petri—where else?—at Harvard, from which she graduated in June of last year. Presumably, she has shot to her current status as a weekly columnist because of her fatuous take on political news, not in spite of it.
Petri is the daughter of a Republican congressman. In 2001, at the age of 11, she got a poem published in Highlights for Children. (Someone should have seen the problem coming.) Before too long, she was writing generally pointless columns for the Harvard Crimson (so what—she was just a college student) and doing stand-up at Boston’s Comedy Connection (no one is good when they start.) By the summer of 2009, she was interning at the Post.
By the summer of 2011, she was writing fatuous columns in the paper’s Saturday edition. She was reciting standard drivel about one of the candidates’ wardrobes; she was offering absurd accounts of why “we” have judged the GOP candidates in the ways “we” have done.
Can we talk? Thinking back on her earlier piffle about Romney, we were surprised by Petri’s youth. At one time, young people couldn’t get his fatuous this fast. It took a few years among the swells before they developed a nose for the inanity which constitutes mainstream discourse—before the natural spirits of youth gave way to the rigid demands of scripted political nonsense.
Petri has made it to fatuous very fast. For decades, fatuity has been the soul of the nation’s political press corps. Dowd advances the culture at the Times—and the Post has now found its own star.
Can a modern society run on The Stupid? Actually no, it really can’t, as we’re all finding out at this point. That said, the nature of this death-dealing problem still seems quite elusive.
MODAY, JUNE 27, 2011
The editors (attempt to) explain the problem with inequality: Last Sunday, Peter Whoriskey wrote a front-page piece in the Washington Post about the enormous growth in income inequality over the past forty years.
Yesterday, the editors discussed Whoriskey’s piece in their featured editorial. We were intrigued by the things they said—and by the things they didn’t.
As they started, the editors voiced their concern about the growth in inequality. “The details never cease to amaze,” they said—although they would soon ignore some of the most basic points Whoriskey made in his piece:
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (6/26/11): There’s nothing new, alas, about the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, where the share of national income, including capital gains, claimed by the top 0.1 percent of earners rose from 2.5 percent in 1975 to 10.4 percent in 2008. Still, the details never cease to amaze. In a recent Post report, Peter Whoriskey documented the fact that the average executive’s annual pay has roughly quadrupled since the early 1970s, while average wage income has crept up only 26 percent. No one who cares about the social cohesion of a society premised on the idea that all men and women are created equal can view such statistics indifferently.
The question, though, is what to do about it.
In the highlighted passages, the editors took the progressive position, identifying this inequality as a major concern. For our money, they made little attempt to explain why they find this situation so troubling. But before we ponder that omission, let’s consider a few other things the editors said.
In his piece, Whoriskey focused on a changed corporate culture, a culture in which greed became good over the past forty years. From his first paragraph forward, he focused on this changed culture as part of the explanation for the growth in inequality.
But when the editors summarized Whoriskey’s report, they didn’t mention this thesis at all. Instead, they highlighted a familiar, shopworn explanation—an explanation Whoriskey had explicitly challenged. This was their full second paragraph:
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: The question, though, is what to do about it. Some of the growing income disparity results from long-term social changes or market forces that are either inherently benign or practically irreversible. The statistics partly reflect the spiraling rewards to superstar talent in entertainment and sports. The golden age of U.S. income equality—from World War II to the 1973 Middle East oil embargo—stands out as an exceptional time when American wage workers were still mostly shielded from Asian and European competition.
“The statistics partly reflect the spiraling rewards to superstar talent in entertainment and sports?” Presumably, that is technically accurate. But Whoriskey explicitly said that this explanation has been vastly overplayed; he specifically noted that athletes and entertainers account for only three percent of America’s biggest earners. We thought it was odd that the editors specifically cited this shopworn (and rejected) thesis, without ever mentioning the cultural change Whoriskey highlighted.
Did the editors read Whoriskey’s piece? We’ll let you decide.
As the editors proceeded, they offered a string of wonkish suggestions for governmental action. These suggestions were all focused on reducing upper-end income; none of them addressed the possibility of raising incomes in the middle. But let’s return to a more basic question: How well did the editors explain why this inequality is a problem? They seem to think it’s a very big problem. But again, this was the best they could do when it came time to explain why:
“No one who cares about the social cohesion of a society premised on the idea that all men and women are created equal can view such statistics indifferently.”
Plainly, the income gap has grown. Plainly, the highest earners are now gaining a larger percentage of national income. But why exactly is that a problem?
The editors didn’t say.
Alas! The editors adopted the progressive view—and they adopted a progressive instinct in the process. They seemed to feel their noble view was evident on its face. Unfortunately, we live in a society where corporate interests have spent the past forty years promoting ideas which undercut this progressive view. In the comments to yesterday’s editorial, you can sample the views of many voters who don’t see a problem with inequality.
Our view: If we progressives want to advance the reach of our views, we have to explain their merits.
As the liberal web has grown in the past few years, a great deal of liberal talk has rather clearly been aimed at other liberals. This makes us liberals feel very good. But there is one attendant problem: It changes nobody’s vote.
Why is income inequality a problem? For ourselves, we know where our own explanation might start. But what is the general progressive view? And why exactly is it so hard to answer so basic a question?
Monday, June 27, 2011
Candidate Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that if elected president, he would end the war in Vietnam. In 1972, President Nixon, campaigning for reelection, assured the nation that “peace is at hand.”
In 1973, Congress passed the War Power Resolution to check the power of a president to commit the United States to war. Nixon’s veto of the Resolution was overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
On 9 August 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency to escape impeachment for obstruction of justice and failure to uphold and defend the Constitution.
On 23 April 1975, in a speech at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford declared that the war in Vietnam was “finished as far as America is concerned.”
On 30 April 1975, newly installed South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh surrendered to the North, seven years after Candidate Nixon promised to end the war and after 116 years of wars alongside or against countries that included France, China, Japan, Britain, and America.
A routing survey of the more conspicuously contaminated muskegs of the information environment reveals that some of its most toxic denizens are calling to have Obama impeached for contriving his illegal non-hostilities war in Libya. John V. Walsh, one of the paleo-hooligan pens-for-hire at The American Conservative (one of my former gigs), recently redefined “yikes” by calling for Obama’s ouster on the basis that his disregard of the Constitution is in stark contrast to the understanding of and devotion to that document displayed by Tea Bag Barbie Palin and her adoring idolaters. One of the wags at Gordon Liddy’s beloved Washington Times (to wit: Eugene G. Windchy) wails that we’re “in a constitutional crisis” because of the way Obama is stiff-arming the War Powers Resolution, the law that, ironically, Dick Cheney and other leading neocons argue is unconstitutional because it hinders presidents from encroaching on the legislature’s exclusive Constitutional prerogative to declare war, and you didn’t hear Windchy or anybody else in the Big Brother News Network screaming about constitutional crises when Cheney was in power.
As distasteful as I find the agenda mix in every flavor of the political right, I’m inclined to sympathize with their desire to rein in the totalitarian tenor of Obama’s reign, but impeach the guy? Come on. Not even Denny Kucinich has a serious notion of doing such a thing. In the age of the New American Centurions, we don’t impeach presidents for taking us into illegal wars. These days we only impeach the most powerful politician on earth for lying about his inability to keep his orbs and scepter in his pants. (Interestingly enough, the last guy we impeached, Bubba Clinton, was the one who told Pavlov’s Dogs of War to take their letter demanding that he invade Iraq and stick it up their collective nose.)
We’ve been in a full-blown constitution crisis since 1950 when Harry Truman committed us to a full-blown war in Korea that ended in a negotiated tie with a foe that still flares up on us like a wicked case of facial herpes. The constitutional crisis Obama has created is just another twig on the pyre of our republic; making a federal case out of it (hah) won’t help anything. And after the Bush and Cheney administration flushed shame and irony and truth and accountability and the bill of rights all the way to the Congressional Cafeteria, who will ever impeach anyone for anything ever again?
Nor is it likely we’ll ever be able to vote the warmongers out of office. If you’re not curled up in a sleeping bag with the war profits machine you don’t get elected. Remember all that yak from candidate Obama about 16 months and we’re out of Iraq? It isn’t happening. Did you hear the yak from President Obama the other night about how he’s going to draw us down from the Bananastans? That prevarication had barely left his mouth before King David Petraeus was telling the little war correspondents embedded up his rump about how, well, he’d go along with it, but it wasn’t the way he’d like things done, no sir, if Obama was listening to his generals he’d be drawing down a darn sight slower, that’s what. And it wasn't long after King David’s press ploy that Obama started this standard shuffling retreat, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the military’s top bull feather merchant, announced that generals Obama was giving commanders “wide latitude” to execute the president's “broad timelines.”
And what were those broad timelines? In Obama-speak, "Starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year." What in the wide world of sports, arts and sciences is that supposed to mean? I want to view the video of that speech in slo-mo so I can see Obama’s tongue flicking in and out.
The guy has fed us another bowl of horse plop and told us it’s chocolate ice cream, but that’s not going to keep him from being reelected. The only way South Side Slick won’t serve another term is if extra terrestrials reveal themselves to us and tell us that Obama not only wasn’t born in America, he wasn’t born on earth, and produce the original of his Vulcan birth certificate to prove it.
The only way I see us extracting ourselves from what even Uncle Bob Gates admits are “wars of choice” (he’s weary of them even though he had a huge hand in ensuring they never end) is if major political and media figures start stating in plain unvarnished patois that we’re pouring national blood and treasure into wars that have nothing to do with our national security aside from eroding it by creating a new generation of foreign terrorists willing to die to strike at America…
Catch the rest tomorrow…
Spite. Look it up.
I was on the cusp of 15. About to begin high school. I'd be older than everybody else, but then, I always was.
The currents of fate and bureaucracy had decided not only would I be forced to spend the next four years at a high school with zero of my friends, but I'd also be jettisoning those relationships with gusto by spending my final summer before high school isolated some 881 miles away in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Fuck it. I'd be older. I'd be smarter. I'd be punk rock about the whole thing.
And I'd certainly need some spite to survive.
So, aside from a summer spent vandalizing the hallmarks and institutions of civil society in Cheyenne, I would also spend many many hours poring over the words of Noam Chomsky (for the knowledge), Richard Adams (to soften the blow of an imminent loss of innocence), Franz Kafka (masturbatory yet self-explanatory self-serving artistic self-preservation nonsense) and Jello Biafra (cue the spite.)
In a surprisingly well-lit basement I found myself alone and in the best of company.
Of course, Jello Biafra's words came accompanied with music that sounded like Dick Dale on dextroamphetamine. These were your, our, the Dead Kennedys. America's foremost political punk rock band and one of the most seminal groups of all time.
It was the purest, fastest, nastiest and most abrasive music still capable of retaining melody. And it came outfitted with anthemic battle cries, calls to action and instructions on how squares ought to fuck right off. I was no intellectual. But this was music with so much intelligence, passion and daring that it seemed as if Rimbaud picked up an Armalite and joined the fifth column.
I was a spite-ridden, angst-driven, punk rock-obsessed teenager with the world at my feet. I was ready to smash it.
But let's pause before we get worked up into a frenzy of unhelpful imagery about what punk is and means.
From the beginning: the counter-cultural movement we've all come to know, understand, love and hate has been exactly that: a counter-cultural movement.
For the purposes of utilizing and becoming part of something bigger than one's self (and surely some will differ, and many more will not) punk can and should be understood as an art movement with distinct and loud politics and myriad forms of music hustled underneath an edgy umbrella of defiance. Punk was heavily infused with the Situationist critique of capitalism and the requisite attention to destroying it with fun from the get-go. A way to create, form and sustain communities [Or 'scenes' as they came to be known. A term that attracts both affection and derision.] outside of the conservative, passive consensus of society writ large.
Punk has always been dangerous. (Or has at least considered itself to be.) Not for the nihilistic caricature conjured up/embraced by some or the tendency to gravitate towards small-scale brawls with cops or stake out emotional territory with a closet full of offensive t-shirts. Punk was dangerous then for the challenges it presented to the structures and assumptions of the days in which it was born and discovering what it stood for. It's less dangerous now due to massive amounts of recuperation by the charlatans, corporations and, yes, the sell-outs who've decided to trade in complacency for cash. But whatever. Punk still retains a degree of danger for the alternative world in which it operates and still insists -demands- is possible.
The insistence on likening punk to nihilism is based on a cursory and intentionally ignorant misreading of a few wayward Sex Pistols lyrics taken out of context (and perhaps in tandem with the myopic notion of letting Sid Vicious ever speak into a microphone.) And sure, there are certainly nihilistic infiltrators ready to take any sort of anti-establishment concept and dilute it so much they mistake it for essence. Calls to "Turn on, tune in, [and] drop out," are always heeded by the self-absorbed no matter which decade they belong to. Some even take the time out to write on their clothes and purchase multipacks of safety pins.
In terms of music, nihilism is best embodied by the glamour, excess, materialism and self-indulgent drug use typified by the bloated rock stars that punk rock was and is still railing and reviling against.
If the scenes are stale (and they are) then the idea, never fully realized, is as fresh as ever: That a destructive force is capable of harnessing anger, rage and spite to build something new, different and maybe even better. At the very least it won't be quite as boring.
Punk rock gave the world The Clash. And as we grew bored of bloated '70s rock stars here in the States, The Clash grew bored of the U.S.A. and set a standard for purposeful defiance. You could have your punk and actually delineate your politics, too. It need not be vague. Without going off the deep-end of romanticized myth-making about Strummer, Jones, et, al. suffice it to say that there was a clarion call. And the guys who became the Dead Kennedys, led by Biafra's vitriolic and acute tirades against empire and injustice answered that call and then some.
The Dead Kennedys helped any discerning punk understand the dictum made famous by Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin that the passion for destruction can be a creative passion, too.
What gives the Dead Kennedys staying power and makes them so attractive to so many punks and other assorted margin-walkers is not necessarily the bizarre combination of surf-guitar, hardcore beats and full-throated rage--you can get at least two out of the three from so many acts of the era--but the words scrawled and wailed into the collective consciousness of all those within earshot of their lyricist, lead-singer and frontman Jello Biafra. Words that don't simply cry or yearn for justice über alles. Words that demand it.
Without getting mired in the intricacies of Biafra's politics and song lyrics, suffice to say the Dead Kennedys were what happened when The Clash crash-landed in San Francisco, got louder, meaner and more direct. And railed against empire at home, conservatism in all forms, sacred cows of all stripes (especially within the punk scene) and decided that the destruction of society itself was the end goal...if we really felt like being decent human beings to one another. [For a lyrical primer check out "Stars and Stripes of Corruption".]
So, when I heard that Jello Biafra was bucking the BDS boycott and had even considered playing a show in Tel Aviv, I was quite simply heartbroken. I wanted to break a violin.
When I read his justification for deciding to cross the picket line I was moved to anger. This was a man from whom, quite literally, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of young people have, for better or for worse, and for decades, found at least the seeds of their own political and moral compasses. Midnight Apache helicopter raids against the civilian populations of the West Bank? I first heard about it on one of Biafra's spoken-word albums. The image stuck. But now the source seems like a quivering and faulty projector.
Biafra's justification is callow. It's craven and self-serving. Most of all: it's insistently wrong and timid.
Being insistently wrong and timid (re: conventional...or if you're into that, read Time) is how the oligarchs, plutocrats and all their fawning, slightly-liberal court-jesters move up in the world.
Sure, punk rock can be wrong. It should be wrong on occasion. It takes leaps into crowds and ideas. It dares. Yet it also demands boldness. Playing a show in the de facto capital of apartheid Israel (after being begged not to by those on the front lines of the struggle) with the implicit and explicit suggestion of equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians is less than even the opposite of bold. It's Tom Friedman. With guitars.
Jello Biafra is going to play a show in Tel Aviv first and foremost to play a show in Tel Aviv.
This isn't the conundrum of whether Paul Simon traveling to South Africa to write and record with black musicians violated the cultural boycott of that apartheid country. There's no debate to be had here. There's nothing vague about what's going on: Israel is an apartheid country and Jello Biafra wants to sell concert tickets there. He's on tour. This isn't a fact-finding mission. It's a money-grab wrapped in the garb of measured and reasoned concern. In academic terms: It's bullshit.
Jello Biafra is trying to act like a Very Serious Person. You know the type. They get to sit down for the Sunday morning talk shows. They get book deals, best-sellers and respectability. They dismiss activists and thumb their aging noses at new ways of resistance.
Much hay has been made (by outside detractors and navel-gazing punks alike) of the idea that punk rock is just canned rebellion. A product. An image without an idea. Something to temper and guide one's adolescent urges to act out and then, to eventually grow out of. It's always been a silly argument made by the cynical and defeated. It's the refuge of assholes.
Jello Biafra, because of his elder-statesman, warlord-like status has the opportunity to weigh in heavily on that argument. By playing in apartheid Israel he just might win it for those same people who've always dismissed him, his life work and all the millions of people around the globe who've found something good and real and pure there.
Punk rock doesn't need that. And if Jello Biafra refuses to see the light on the situation in Israel and Palestine, punk rock doesn't need him either.
If this sounds particularly harsh and rigid, demanding and dogmatic, even frothing and fundamentalist, then let's get back to spite.
And, finally, let's simply quote Biafra at Biafra and anyone who defends his decision to play in the cultural capital of apartheid Israel at the height of a cultural boycott observed by the Pixies, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz, Roger Waters and the late Gil Scott-Heron amongst others:
Jello, if you play your scheduled gig in Tel Aviv and thereby normalize the standards of repression that you have always so fervently and forcefully spoken out against, you're simply and forever a "chickenshit conformist like your parents."
Colin Kalmbacher can be reached at: colinkalmbacher@gmail.com.
