Author: asitoughttobemagazine

IN SO MANY WORDS: THE OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION OF ART, CULTURE AND POLITICS

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Franz Kline, “Mahoning”, 1956, from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art

IN SO MANY WORDS: THE OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION OF ART, CULTURE AND POLITICS

by Diana Cristales

Has the way we discuss art, culture and politics become a kind of verbal masturbation? After all, who are we really speaking to? We say that we want to participate in shared dialogue, but perhaps only with those with the same educational background or those who might share the same perspective. Are we able to speak to a person whtat has a sixth grade education about their perspective on art, politics and culture? Do we even want to?

When I was in my twenties, I loved going to art shows.  Hearing people discuss, analyze and elaborate. That was joyful for me.  Years later I find the talking more of a distraction from the art itself.  I stopped wanting to talk about art and realized that for me, making art was enough.

Remember when art was simple?  As children and we didn’t have the need to attach our own opinions or understandings to other people’s artwork in order to enjoy it.  We accepted it as it was.  Accepted its beauty and flaws.  Then in grade school you either liked someone’s work or you didn’t.  Simple.  It was in college where many of us learned the importance and value of a good critique. We started to project our own observations, reference points, even our own personal baggage to other people’s art.  We adopted the audacious right to validate someone else’s creativity.  Suddenly other people’s art became either worthy or unworthy of value, all by the mere use of words.  But what use do words serve if you bore your audience by the use of too many.

In reference to politics, it is easy to be put off by the use of too many words.

I would assume that the general public wants a politician to say what they mean and make it happen.  Most people learn as much as they can before voting, ask someone they trust, seek out key issues, vote and then trust that the rest will take care of itself.   Then they watch the network commentators battle it out after debates or speeches and whoever resonates with what they believe the most, or speaks loudest wins.  Intellectual bullies seem to have more power than the candidates themselves.

When things become too confusing we just change the channel and trust it will work itself out.  Meanwhile lives are lost, decisions are made and economies are disrupted.

We are doing a disservice to ourselves by making the things we value difficult to understand.   Ask yourself, can people actively participate in something they do not understand?  Isn’t it easier to manipulate the general public if they don’t even know what you are talking about?  Making politics understandable is a revolutionary act!

A greater understanding of the decisions being made might inspire active participation in making positive changes.   Perhaps the general public wouldn’t be so wary and disenfranchised with politics and politicians and the value for arts and culture would be more widely shared

Diana Cristales is a visual artist, community worker and mother of three, who resides in Lake Tahoe, California.

Health Care Reform

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Eight Single Payer activists were arrested in May for attempting to tell the truth about health care reform at the Senate Finance Committee meeting.

Corporate Dems, “Single Payer” Health Care, and Two Party System Failure–All Made Real Simple

–Kara Allison

It is only natural that so many people are talking about health care and health care reform these days. I cannot express how excited I am to see the grassroots effort that many of my friends and colleagues have participated in, finally get the national attention it deserves.

But I have to be honest here…

Most of the conversations I hear swirling in and out of coffee shop doors, hovering outside entrances of local pubs, and even those that have boldly entered the confining walls of academia are incredibly misinformed. In these conversations I hear people throwing around words like “single payer” and “universal” interchangeably… Using words they don’t even know the meaning of, like they coined the words themselves.

At a social networking website recently, I noted one person admitting in a comment thread that he knew nothing about Obama’s proposed health care plan, but acknowledging, in the same breath, that reform is needed.  This person took the “I trust Obama, so just pass the bill through” stance.  I navigated away from this site only to return to someone else grumbling about how he shouldn’t have to pay another dime to support the “deadbeat Americans who are too lazy too work”.

I looked down at my check stub for a moment and did some quick math.  Then I decided to visit the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website to look at their health care rankings. France currently holds the number 1 ranking for the best health care system in the world. Their citizens pay about 10% of their income in taxes.  This includes militia, health care, transportation, etc. I looked down at my check stub again, noting duly, that I pay roughly 23% more in taxes than the average French citizen, work more hours a week on average, and if I get sick, well… I’m fucked.

This past week the House Democrats presented their health care reform bill.  While many people believe that a step in any direction, is a step forward regarding an issue that has been immobile for so long, Obama’s plan—even if it passes—it destined to fail.

Single Payer Action’s http://singlepayeraction.org/index.php Russell Mokhiber, in an email earlier this week, tells us why:

    Because it keeps the insurance industry in the game.
    It will cost a trillion dollars over ten years.
    It won’t cover tens of millions of Americans.
    It won’t control costs.
    And it’s a bailout for the insurance industry.
    Only a single payer — everybody in, nobody out — national health insurance bill (co-sponsored by 85 members of the House — most recently by Congressman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) will hit the grand slam — cover everyone, save money, control costs, and fix a broken health care system.
    But what struck me yesterday while watching the Democrats was the depth of their deception.
    There was Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
    Both heaping praise upon and honoring Congressman John Dingell (D-Michigan).
    And his father — John Dingell, Sr.
    John Dingell, Sr. represented Michigan’s 15th district for 22 years until his death in 1955.
    John Dingell, Jr. has represented the district ever since.
    But not once during the press conference did anyone mention that it was John Dingell, Sr. who first introduced a single payer bill in Congress in 1943.
    And it was Democratic leaders in Congress and President Barack Obama who took single payer off the table.
    The Republicans will tell you straight up — we’re for big business.
    Single payer is socialism.
    And that’s why we’re against single payer.
    When the Democrats are out of power, they will tell you what you want to hear — we’re for single payer.
    They then take power, and all of a sudden, they are against single payer.
    Take Henry Waxman (D-California) as a case in point.
    For years, Henry Waxman was a co-sponsor of HR 676 — the single payer bill in the House.
    Until earlier this year, when he became part of the leadership in the House.
    Then Waxman took his name off the single payer bill.
    In 2003, Barack Obama said he was for single payer.
    Obama said at the time that we would have single payer in America only when the Democrats took back the White House and Congress.
    Last year, Obama and the Democrats took back the White House and Congress.
    And now President Obama is opposed to single payer.
    The reality is that there is only one solution to the health care crisis — get the insurance companies out of health care.
    The Democrats are now engaged in what Dr. Marcia Angell — former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine — calls “the futility of piecemeal tinkering.”
    Angell and a majority of doctors in the United States — and a majority of the American people — believe that only a major single payer overhaul will get the job done.
    That’s why we’re challenging the Democrats around the country.
    And we will continue to challenge them, and the health insurance industry to whom they are beholden, until single payer becomes a reality in America.

Many health care reform advocates warn that we need to press for “single” payer” and not the “public option” for many reasons: the public option is NOT single payer, it does not confer the benefits of single payer, and is too expensive. The inevitable failure that will result from the “system” including the public option but which also preserves the insurance companies, will only serve to discredit the idea of single payer and set back present and future efforts.

So what’s the solution?

I believe Dennis Kucinich is headed in the right direction with HR676, which is explained in the following:

    Healthcare: Change the Debate
    Support a Real Public Option
    In mid-May, in an effort to reach consensus, President Obama secured a deal with the health insurance companies to trim 1.5% of their costs each year for ten years saving a total of $2 trillion dollars, which would be reprogrammed into healthcare. Just two days after the announcement at the White House the insurance companies reneged on the deal which was designed to protect and increase their revenue at least 35%
    The insurance companies reneged on the deal because they refuse any restraint on increasing premiums, copays and deductibles – core to their profits. No wonder a recent USA Today poll found that only four percent of Americans trust insurance companies. This is within the margin of error, which means it is possible that NO ONE TRUSTS insurance companies.
    Then why does Congress trust the insurance companies? Yesterday HR 3200 “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act,” a 1000 page bill was delivered to members. The title of the bill raises a question: “Affordable” for whom?.
    Of $2.4 trillion spent annually for health care in America, fully $800 billion goes for the activities of the for-profit insurer-based system. This means one of every three health care dollars is siphoned off for corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paper work, (which can be anywhere between 15 – 35% in the private sector as compared to Medicare, the single payer plan which has only 3% administrative costs).
    50 million Americans are uninsured and another 50 million are under insured while for-profit insurance companies divert precious health care dollars to non-health care purposes. Eliminate the for-profit health care system and its extraordinary overhead, put the money into healthcare and everyone will be covered, everyone will be able to afford health care.
    Today three committees will begin marking up and amending HR3200. In this, one of the most momentous public policy debates in the past 70 years, single payer, the only viable “public option,” the one that makes sound business sense, controls costs and covers everyone was taken off the table.
    In contrast to HR3200 … HR676 calls for a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, Medicare for All. It has over 85 co-sponsors in Congress with the support of millions of Americans and countless physicians and nurses. How does HR-676 control costs and cover everyone? It cuts out the for-profit middle men and delivers care directly to consumers and Medicare acts as the single payer of bills. It also recognizes that under the current system for-profit insurance companies make money NOT providing health care.
    This week is the time to break the hold which the insurance companies have on our political process. Tell Congress to stand up to the insurance companies. Ask members to sign on to the only real public option, HR 676, a single-payer healthcare system.
    Hundreds of local labor unions, thousands of physicians and millions of Americans are standing behind us. With a draft of HR3200 now circulating, It is up to each and every one of us to organize and rally for the cause of single-payer healthcare. Change the debate. Now is the time.

There are approximately 200 countries that exist on our planet and each of these countries has devised its own plan to meet the health care needs of its citizens.  When studying collectively the health care systems of the world, one will note that four patterns tend to emerge.  Hence, health care systems can be divided, for the most part, into four basic models.  A brief outline of  the four health care models can be found at : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html.

The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the U.S. system; it’s fairer and cheaper, too. The time for health care  reform in the United States has finally come.  It is imperative that we educate ourselves and press our government to make the right decision.  A weak foundation now, will be the cause of failure in the future.  How much more failure can we afford?

Kara Allison is an academic librarian, freelance writer, and activist living in Cincinnati, Ohio.


ART REVIEW

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William Theophilus Brown, Untitled #3, 2005, Acrylic Collage on paper.

A BLOGAGE PLANE

by Jack Freeman

Bill Brown’s collages in paint start from scratch. This began when he started cutting up his old palettes to glue into his art. Now he squeegees, brushes, splashes paint on paper then cuts them up. Palettes are amazing things. Rubens, realizing what amazing surprises can happen between the mind and hand, the unconscious being an unknown concept in the 17th Century, said that even his paint rag is art. I use mine as a guide to let me know how I am using color or at times I somehow paint another, freer landscape and hang it on the wall. For Bill it is a new beginning and there is a wealth of images to tear up and make new, in this case using primarily in primary colors.  They leave you undone, wanting more to discover like he did.  His gallery director, Mr. Eagles-Smith was nice enough to let me see some which are now in the corner of the office, this afternoon.

Matisse said he chose colors without theory. He let his hand do it, randomly.  Some part of collage art should be done that way too. Not that you can’t carefully cut out stuff. With Bill however, it is more like without Mercy. The only rule is there are no rules. A new vocabulary can literally be discovered that way for is not unlike scat-jazz, words torn up and rearranged vocally. Anita O’Day said she was often describing something someone in the audience was wearing, and at times not.  It was an idea she got from painters… and their palettes.

The last time I saw Bill was at dinner with some friends: Paul Reidinger, the local food critic for the Bay Guardian, Steve Weisner, MD, Jane Brady and my wife Nancy…. Might as well add their names to this blogage because friends never are included in reviews and they are an indispensable influence on what is done in the studio. Bill 90, was sipping blue/green Chartreuse at the end of the table, at the end of dinner last time I saw him. We were talking about maps, a globe sitting in a frame in the far corner, as an orderly, visual reference to places recently travelled. Bill, Steve, who has a vast, new, contemporary art collection, and I had been talking about the many modern masters whom Bill knew in Paris as a youth…he probably knew Braque who designed camouflage for the French Army in WWI, trying hide things, huge things, from being blown up. Shrapnel. Sculpt a 3D peace collage! Been done. Peace Brother! Amazing what forms art can take.

From the War Room to the Dining Room to the Gallery Office to A New Order in the World of Art: Textures, shapes and primary colors like you have never seen them. I am glad I went to the gallery to see for myself because Bill cuts through his paint to make shapes. At times he raked and scratched instruments through semi-dried paint to reveal strange sub-surface images peaking through that would become more surreal after bring juxtaposed somewhere in a new format: pre-painted & cut up. Then, perhaps, reworked again? Perhaps. Scat-shapes. Imagine the pieces scattered all over his studio, resolved and not, then looking for something… yes!  Let your hand select it…or your eye pick it out. Yes!  Scrap. No! Shapes. Yes! Then cut and paste again, and…

I imaging there are several stages Bill goes through in arriving at something new to look at. First paint, then cut, then arrange and glue and arrange and glue again….1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, 3…. Or destroy, then search, then find. These collages are not Synthetic or Analytic…they are Emotional non-isms. They just are.

Collage means glue in French and decollage is lift off, ie, planes of any kind.  In all steps and stages, cutting and arranging, collaging and decollaging there is a search, the search on another level, a process… Bill’s way of working, like a state of being something….they are fresh starts, looking for a new way, trying to get at something as sort of vehicular,  as if that will find something different or just very fine like searching for a new power in the primary color that will carry over. He did. Since the pieces are relatively small, 15” x 12” or so, they are intense. And personal. Even in the brochure there is a power fresh and vigorous, bold and raw that demands to be seen. They may surpass in terms of energy of color the measured Orphism of Sonya and Robert Delaunay.

When you look at the work, there are wonderful and strange things…sort of abstract fantasies. Parallel, wormy, groovy black and white squiggly lines…Free forms of primary colors. Grays just happen…not many measured… it would be inconsistent way to work. Whole colors want to float almost like block 3D letters. But, cookie cutter art this ain’t. And one would not expect it. There are sideswipes, brush marks, butter paint quality, surprise shapes whose negative sides move into the body of the main shape or into the format outside, sort of head on collisions..violent and calm some where else…Random fits in a meandering flow of independent, interlocking shapes…Weird textures, wild color.

I know Bill to be a scholar, classical musician, linguist and painter. It is no surprise then that tradition of Western Art comes through and with authority of experience on the one hand and discovery on the other. He discovered what paint is….indelible since that is what looking at his painted collages is as an experience. The most obvious is the most difficult thing to find. Unforgetable.

Jack Freeman is a painter and percussionist.

ART REVIEW

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Untitled #1, 2008, Acrylic Collage on paper.

Elins/Eagle-Smith Gallery

THEOPHILUS BROWN: RECENT ABSTRACT COLLAGES

by Anthony Torres

Theophilus Brown: Recent Abstract Collages at Elins Eagle-Smith Gallery in San Francisco presents 20 acrylic-on-paper collages that represent a new direction for Theophilus Brown, an artist always interested in the figure, who has been associated with Bay Area figuration and the exploration of the dialectical relationship between of abstraction and figuration since the 1950s.

In the Recent Abstract Collages, done over the last four years, we see the results of a self-reflexive practice of selecting, re-claiming, and manipulating painterly residues left from previous excursions and experiments in studio — peeled acrylic paint shards from his palette — that Theophilus Brown deploys as a strategy for engaging non-figurative aesthetic concerns associated with American abstraction.

Here, the acrylic-on-paper constructions are formed from a process of cutting, moving, and manipulating the painted materials — used as base components of the collages — that reveal Brown’s artistic virtuosity through the juxtaposition of lines, shapes, and a continuum of colors, which range from bright primaries to stark contrasts of black and white, and earth tones, integrated and bound by incised lines embedded in the paint surfaces, to reveal the painted colors underneath.

In many of the collages, the painterly gestural “actions” are evidenced all over the picture plane, in others, it appears in the applied shards of paint. In many cases the shapes, area borders and lines are formed by the edges of the cut over-laid painted paper, while in others by the incised lines in the paint. In all cases, he utilizes these pictorial elements to create dynamism through the pictorial structure, composition, and the placement of the colors in the work.

Despite the dense fusion of these varied components, there seems to be identifiable “types” of work within collages in the exhibition, characterized by painterly gestural abstraction, by geometric architectonic structures, and those that emphasize a fractured pictorial surface construction.

Within these varied works, there are nonetheless unifying qualities, such as balanced symmetry, a sense harmonious discordance that speaks to the rhythmic ebbs and flows in the work that are bound by associated compositional counterpoints.

If this body of work may be thought of as partaking of a constellation of modernist ideas based in Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist disruptions anchored in formal strategies that problematized Western painterly representations centered in illusions of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface, they do so by revealing that formal techniques are capable being co-opted, disavowed, and subsumed through technical appropriation in the service of addressing a fundamentally different sets of issues.  Here Brown translates the formal vocabularies of collage in the service of non-objective abstract sensibilities.

Through a self-reflexive practice of selecting, re-claiming, and manipulating painterly residues leftover from addressing formal challenges and experiments in studio, Brown re-deploys and thus re-signifies these remnants as a strategy to engage non-figurative aesthetic concerns associated with American abstraction.

While the significance of Theophilus Brown, who recently turned 90 years old, is usually anchored in the past through his associations with artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko and his close friendships with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, whom he says had a strong influence on his work, as well as Brown’s integral participation in the development of San Francisco Bay Area Figurative art, what is crucial in reflecting on what unifies his diverse bodies of work is recognizing his ongoing formal concern with integrating volumes and shapes, balancing illumination and compositional structures across different media, content, and genres, and his ability to manipulate the tools and materials at his disposal, to (re)presenting his varied subjects in pictorial space, through knowledge and lessons learned over years of artistic practice, which in the collages function as a form of visual allegory for individual artistic subjectivity, and a greatness wholly infused and implicated in living and making art.

Anthony Torres is an independent art critic and curator who has taught at Ohio State and UC Santa Cruz.

THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

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THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

by Okla Elliott

It has been said that poetry feeds no one, and no doubt, I have felt occasionally that reading or writing literature is merely an indulgence, one many people cannot afford. But that’s a rather limited view of how literature, the presses that publish it, and its practitioners function in the world.

In many ways, literature offers an opportunity to be political completely outside the electoral arena, something the people of this country (which has a two-party duopoly currently in place) sorely need.

Who can read a novel like The Quiet American (Graham Greene) and not rethink the Vietnam Conflict in human terms? Who can read Fox Girl (Nora Okja Keller) and not be heartbroken over how US military bases in South Korea negatively impacted the lives of the people who inhabited the camptowns around them? And, here again, in human/emotional terms, not mere numbers which lose meaning in their abstraction. Gore Vidal’s historical novels help readers to review American history from a different perspective. War memoirs personalize tragedies via the concrete and hellish details, as opposed a government’s abstractions of patriotism, freedom, or liberation which try (quite effectively) to dehumanize what is going on and thereby make it more stomachable.

That is perhaps literature’s greatest strength. It removes the easy cleanness of abstraction and introduces the muck and blood of reality into political thought. I do not mean to suggest that more rigid statistical analysis doesn’t have a very important role in politics; of course it does, as nearly everyone agrees. But literature can bring life to those numbers in a way that can motivate people to act, which our emotions are more likely to do than our intellect in most cases.

Unfortunately, however, too often writers in the United States eschew the political as beneath the dignity of high art. Not only is this a view solely held by our nation (in Europe, Africa, South America, etc, politics and art/literature quite often go hand in hand), but it is also so obviously nonsensical, I don’t see how it gained such ideological traction. Am I to believe that the lives and deaths of my fellow man are beneath the purview of art? Or that war cannot or should not produce insightful novels and poems?

But literary work doesn’t have to be openly political to perform a political or ethical function. When a middle-aged man in upstate New York reads a novel about a young girl in an impoverished Kentucky town, his knowledge of humanity is broadened as are his powers of empathy. And empathy makes us less likely to support policies that harm others.

And it’s not just the work itself that is political. There is a political aspect to the publishing and purchasing of books.

Let’s look at small presses for a moment. The term “small press” is an elusive term, as it includes presses with an all-paid staff and tens of thousands of dollars in grant support, as well as presses run by an all-volunteer staff out of someone’s apartment. But what small presses definitely are not are the huge publishing houses owned by corporations like AT&T that largely crank out books with cute cats on the cover or books that otherwise play to our basest sensibilities. Take, as an example of an excellent small press, Ugly Duckling Presse, which specializes in experimental literature and literature in translation. Experimental literature might have no overt political message, but it seeks to shake things up or offer an alternative view on human experience and thought. And translation is highly political, even when the content of what is translated is not. Every translation is an entry into another culture, an invitation to understand how people live in other parts of the world. By better understanding other cultures, it strikes me that we are more likely to respect them and therefore less likely to want to bomb the shit out of them. And, aside from the occasional blockbuster hit, most translation comes out of university presses or small presses, as well as small literary journals.

To take a cue from this blog’s name, I’ll not be merely descriptive of what literature can and does do; I’ll be prescriptive about what editors, writers, and readers ought to do (or ought to do more of), bringing us to the classic progressive question—what is to be done? First, editors need to solicit more well-crafted political writing, more translations, and more travel literature (whether it be poetry or prose, fiction or non-). Second, more writers need to be producing such work (and here I don’t mean preachy, one-dimensional stuff, but rather complex, well-crafted, multiply indicting work). Third, lovers of literature and writers (or people who hope to be writers) need to support the small press industry with subscriptions to journals and by buying books.  We also need to purchase well-written and politically sophisticated books from the major publishers to teach them in the only terms they understand (i.e., profits) to produce more books like the aforementioned Fox Girl (out from Penguin) and fewer books with cats dressed in cowboy hats or superman capes or whathaveyou.

In closing, I offer a very abbreviated list of books, journals, and presses that might be of interest. If you have any to add, please feel free to do so in the comments section below.

Books

Rising Up and Rising Down (nonfiction), by William T Vollmann; After the Lost War (poetry), by Andrew Hudgins; Disgrace (fiction), by J.M. Coetzee; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (fiction), by Tadeusz Borowski; Salazar Blinks (fiction), by David Slavitt; Cancer Ward (fiction), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Our Lives Are Rivers (poetry) by Mark Smith-Soto; A Gesture Life (fiction), by Chang-Rae Lee; Selected Poems (poetry), by Marina Tsvetaeva; Death and the Maiden (drama), by Ariel Dorfman; Christopher Unborn (fiction), by Carlos Fuentes; and, again, Fox Girl (fiction), by Nora Okja Keller.

Journals

Blue Mesa Review, Circumference, Contrary, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Monthly Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, New York Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Sun.

Presses

Copper Canyon Press, Dzanc Books, Graywolf Press, Monthly Review Press, Press 53, Red Hen Press, Seven Stories Press, and Wave Books—as well as dozens of university presses (e.g., Ohio State, LSU, Northwestern, etc).

“A NEW ERA OF ENGAGEMENT”, BUT FOR WHOM?

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Migrant Child, Central Valley, California, 2008. Photo by Joseph Szymanski.

“A NEW ERA OF ENGAGEMENT”, BUT FOR WHOM?

by Nathan Birnbaum

On February 24, 2009, the Obama Administration took a basic step towards returning our nation to its rightful place in the global arena by re-opening America’s doors to the United Nations.  Timing his announcement with a visit from Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso, President Obama candidly stated that, “In words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun. For we know that America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America.”

This oratory is satisfactory on the surface yet it fails to acknowledge where the United States has fallen behind, even in areas of near universal acceptance.  Nowhere is this disparity more glaring than America’s continued reluctance to ratify the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

With many of its 54 articles taking their substance from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the CRC reaffirms the position that children constitute the most vulnerable members of society.   As a result, this document holds that they must be given special treatment in the face of inadequate social conditions, natural disasters, and armed conflict (to name a few).  None of the rights afforded to children in this convention would strike the average American as unreasonable: don’t we all expect to be free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, nationality, and expressed opinion?  Do we not hope for the highest standards of health and treatment?

Signatories bound by the CRC are required to submit a thorough report on their implementation of the convention’s articles every five years to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who in turn makes recommendations on areas where a country might improve.  While opponents to the CRC’s ratification in the U.S. maintain that such oversight would infringe upon both national and state sovereignty, a quick glance at our country’s sobering child abuse statistics renders such “scare tactics” moot.

According to the latest statistics gathered by The Children’s Bureau, an estimated 1,760 child fatalities in 2007 were attributed to child abuse in the United States.  Response to this abuse continues to be hindered by inaccurate and inconsistent reporting as well as lack of adequate training for law enforcement, which consistently fails to investigate abuse claims thoroughly.

If such statistics weren’t scary enough, a law on the books in Ohio actually condones corporal punishment in all cases unless it “creates a substantial risk of serious physical harm to the child.”  Unfortunately for Ohio’s youth, this “serious physical harm” is defined as death or risk of permanent disfigurement.

To date 193 countries have signed onto the legally-binding CRC, with the United States joining the failed state of Somalia as the only nation not to do so.  This fact in and of itself should be cause for embarrassment.  And given the above examples one would think that a little oversight and guidance, as embraced by the international community, would go a long way.  Yet, nearly 15 years after Madeline Albright signed the CRC on behalf of President Clinton and the United States, American opponents of the convention continue to press their representatives to stall its ratification.

Oppositionalists’ extreme and misguided notions hold that the CRC would infringe upon the parent-child relationship, allow children to bring lawsuits against their own family members, and even…wait for it…join gangs.

Putting aside the ridiculousness of that final claim, it is only fair to right these misconceptions.

The CRC does not constitute an authoritarian directive on the role of parents in a child’s life.  In fact, Article 5 recognizes the primacy of this relationship by clearly stating that, “State Parties shall recognize the responsibilities, rights, and duties of parents.”  Rather than legislate parenting techniques, the CRC is merely concerned with upholding a child’s fundamental rights in the home.

Furthermore, nowhere in the CRC is there any indication that a child can (or should) file a lawsuit against their parents.  As the Campaign for the U.S. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child rightly points out, “Any legal action brought by children against their parents must be based on existing federal or state laws, not on provisions contained in the CRC.”  Under our state and federal laws, this would only become applicable when a parent is found to have grossly abused or neglected their child.

And if our youngest generation is so-inclined to display their violent street smarts, they will find no approval within the text of the Convention.  Instead, they can simply look to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to protect their free speech rights.

This is not a contentious legal, religious, or class-based issue (ratification is supported by hundreds of organizations, individuals, and academic institutions, including American Baptist Churches, the American Bar Association, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Labor Union).  Its passage in 1989 reflected multilateral consensus within the UN, whose founding Charter reaffirms faith in the “basic dignity and worth of the human person.”  Ultimately, international peace and security depends upon a future generation growing up with hospitable living conditions and fair treatment under the law.

Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, recently told a group of Harlem school children that the U.S. is actively discussing “how and when it might be possible to join” the CRC.  But this is a conversation we’ve been having for too long.  It is time for America to declare and solidify its support for children’s rights on the global stage.

Lets see a little audacity Mr. President!

Nathan Birnbaum is a Drama major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

THE LEFT IS THE GUARDIAN OF SLEEP

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

THE LEFT IS THE GUARDIAN OF SLEEP

by Paul Occam

How do we reconcile that in the last century there has been further progress in human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, environment, child labor, basic protections and equal standards – than at any time in history – and yet there is the feeling that there is less and less freedom for more and more people?

It is no longer possible to support a family on a single income. Everyone works. An education costs a lifetime of debt. Under such a mountain of debt, people are coerced to work for the highest bidder rather than the greatest cause. And with a mortgage and family, what does one say when the boss asks you to do something that is perhaps immoral?

In giving people the freedom of buying anything on credit, other freedoms will continue to be taken away. We are sold our own happiness back to us as a receipt for future payments – a bill of unending goods. Alas, if the bookie gives you a loan and you fail to pay – you lose a finger, they break your legs. It is not so different with the bank. The etymology for mortgage after all is – ‘a pledge unto death.’

Despite social gains, the reason there is no sense of progressive individual freedom in the US is because almost none of the popular movements have significantly touched the third rail. Economic power has always been the secret foundation for real individual freedom and the actualization of ideas, including human rights. It is the power to make choices, help others or be independent. Our country was founded on this realization – when the colonists made their stand against taxation without representation.

Successive generations seem to have bought widely circulated false notions of personal freedom or preferred symbolic illusions to the real thing.

The struggles to address basic inequalities, most recently in the 1960’s, began with a sentiment against a “non-representative” government. Serious critiques of society and government reformation in the 1960’s included an economic component which quickly became lost or got cashed in for sexual freedoms – one of the strongest legacies of that era. Although the 1960’s held the promise of Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Great Refusal’ and the consolidated energies of change for a better life, what happened instead was the creation of a significant counterfeit culture. Instead of granting people basic economic freedoms, which would have changed everything, they were given sexual freedoms and equalities, none of which significantly threatens economic hegemony. As Fuerbach pointed out, the hallmark of modern life is to prefer the symbolic to the real. Oppression is quite amendable to being an equal opportunity enterprise. One slave is as good as another.

We can imagine the wizard of such a system throwing a dog a bone. “Fuck anyone you want people, bite the apple in the garden, just don’t touch that knob over there that says Federal Reserve.”

To this day, many of the freedoms people spend most of their time and energy passionately fighting for – have no bearing on changing underlying economic oppressions that affect the vast majority of the population – and every aspect of daily life.

Things stay the same or get worse. This fact is not even talked about. People have more rights today, and even less freedom than their parents.

Even to know something outside the general commerce of ideas and desires is rare – because it is not seen as worthwhile. Controlling the range of “choices” (desires) is the primarily mode of control today. It is simply easier to want what is easily available or what is “special” – or momentarily unavailable – than to imagine what could be. Nobody thinks to order off the menu – when sitting at the diner.

When we imagine what could be…. that is when things seem hard to bear. It is exactly this kind of thinking that is no longer permitted.

Paul Occam is the pen name of a San Francisco writer.