COMMENTARY

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cocaine

Cocaine. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration photograph.

A Blogage Plane

POWDER TO THE PEOPLE? YES.

by Jack Freeman

Although I am not advocating the use of hard drugs, the legalization of Opium, Cocaine and Heroin along with Marijuana is a good idea. 1. It will save lives. 2. From a cultural stand point, it will, I think, help save and restore the health and integrity of society which should be progressive and positive, rather than negative and digressive. And we will not be living in the past. 3. Fewer Covert Wars and Drug Wars would be fought by governments, private armies or militias. One reason for my writing this statement is because of the negative influence I saw the new Drug climate had on the art scene in San Francisco in the 1960 and 70s when the laws were enforced in a public way. The 60s were a chaotic transition from Post WWII.  The 70s was when a the New World Order began. It had many reactions. One was Drugs another was going back… a kind of neurosis.

First, medically, Drug addiction can result in poor health and death. As the writer Tom Wolfe said after researching “The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test” in San Francisco, that the Black Plague had returned in some Hippie patients who dropped out and refused to be vaccinated. Second, socially, in the local Art Scene, there was a kind of atrophy of personality that crept in from use or the new Drug cultural influence.  Conversations became empty.  Nothing technical was discussed, at least on a traditional level, just words like “far out” or “that’s a gas, man”.  And, the dress was down.  Art students became divided between drug users and non users. So, painters, “daubers”, drank wine and the Hard Edge and Funk artists smoked grass, basically. Jokes were not funny. People were remarking that America had lost its sense of humor. That was not lost on Charles Schulz who said on TV that the comics were not funny any more.  It was a national epidemic that is still around. And, for what ever complex reasons, by the 1970s, people were becoming divorced from nature and them selves. This resulted in the Cyborg cult movies. If drugs had been legal, this would not have happened because use would have not been iconoclastic or recklessly recreational, in my opinion.

For some there was a special drug, Acid that fueled an art movement, Acid Rock music and the visual arts, too. That is one thing, but I have read that experiments with acid on unsuspecting people were done by COINTELPRO. Acid was slipped into cocktails at a party at 200 Chestnut st to see if mind control was possible. One lady jumped out of a window. Another person went to SF General. COINTELPRO was the organization that collected names of the Berkeley Free Speech demonstrators. This still goes on. In a 500 page report, 1,500 incidents have been listed over a 10 month period. Drug Laws facilitate arrests and reporting of names at demonstrations.

My argument about the negative side of Drug Laws is that they make enforcing racial profiling too easy and exclusive. It is like the haves and the have nots. We are all ethnic. When arrests have to be made, they should be made when someone has committed a violent act or where or there is a victim of some kind. The way it appears is that people are being arrested for being different therefore they are wrong in what they do.

Today the negative influence of Drug Trafficking and use in society has become worse than it was 50 years ago. It is insidious. Taking drugs is not a rebellion forward, for example. We live in the past as Tom Wolfe has suggested. Leadership should lead. It was not being strong enough after WWII to stop the trafficking that Drugs got a foot hold and now 60 years later we are in a backward mode like a hermit crab.

We are back in time which is not far to go in one sense, since it is all around us. But, if you are at the apex of modern civilization, it is a long way back. It is retarded. Maybe this is one reason for the rebirth of folk music.

If you ever wondered what happened to the Middle Ages, and thought it ended before the Italian Renaissance, you would be wrong.

–Jack Freeman

Further Reading:

Art Review: A Blogage Plane by Jack Freeman 7/17/09

SONIA SOTOMAYOR

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soniasotomayor

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 1972 yearbook photograph from Cardinal Spellman High in North Bronx, New York.

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY BECAUSE … SOMEONE MIGHT HEAR YOU!

by Diana Cristales

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” These were the words spoken by former appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Intrigued by the amount of press Sotomayor and her statement had attracted, I decided that I wanted to gain a better understand of what she really meant by those words. So, a couple of YouTube videos and online articles later I found the original text to which this statement belonged. The entire speech can be found in the text of the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture in 2001, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, a symposium issue entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

My first impression was that these words, within the context of the entire speech, were intended to serve as an acknowledgement that there is value in cultural understanding, representation and activism, for people of all cultures, in regard to law. My second thought was, ”she shouldn’t have said that out loud.”

That made me think about a social behavior that is not only common, but expected. We don’t always say what we mean in front of just anyone. Either, because we are afraid to say what we think, or perhaps because it is bad social etiquette.

The truth is that, wives don’t always say what they really think to their husbands in the same way that they do to their best friends, especially about sex. Employees do not usually speak as openly with their bosses as they do with their co-workers. Teens do not share as much about their most intimate thoughts with their parents as they do with bff’s. And a person of color is not always going to share their cultural perspective with people outside of their immediate social circle. How do I know? I know because I am a person of color. I will even go as far to say that some white people will only say certain things in front of other white people. How do I know? Because my ex husband was white and that’s what he told me.

Does that surprise you? Well when I found that out, it surprised me too! He told me the truth….not all white people like Latin people and even if they won’t tell you that themselves….they tell one another. I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had with Latino’s where they vent their frustrations about how they are treated or about how they perceive other cultures. They would never say these things to a person outside of their culture because it’s just not polite.

So what is really the problem with Sonia Sotomayor’s words? That she actually said what she was thinking out loud. She said it and it was recorded and now…it can be used to define her beliefs as a Latina woman and as a judge. She spoke to the public in way that is best reserved for private conversations. Not having been a public figure to the extent that she is now, she allowed herself to be candid “in public”. Sotomayor felt comfortable expressing her concerns with this specific group in a way that was relevant to that group and now the world has access to those same words without having heard the entire speech.

The real questions that can be derived from her words are: Can one person with a diverse cultural background make better decisions that a person without a more homogeneous cultural background? Is one culture more objective than the other? Do all decisions require objectivity in order to be the right decision or do other factors need to be taken into account? Perhaps what she was saying is that a person with a limited understanding of other cultures is at a disadvantage.

Isn’t it possible that a group of people who have shared similar experiences, come from a similar tier of society, and have a similar educational background would make decisions based on shared values. Is it possible to be completely objective given our cultural histories? Now what about our educational background? If we are privy to the same information, wouldn’t we then develop a somewhat common idea of what is right and wrong?

To be quite honest I didn’t like what she said when I first read it. I didn’t like the way it sounded, but after reading more about where and when she said it, I feel that she acknowledged, what she considered, her social responsibility for a part of the population that is not always represented or valued.

Did those words give us an insight into the way she thinks and what she believes? Yes they did, for that time. However, it has been eight years after she spoke those words and I’m sure she is that much wiser.

As to her ability to serve as a judge in the highest court…… I for one would like to be culturally represented in a country where I have spent all but four years of my life. I would like to see a wise Latina woman make an impact in the life of people she serves. I am excited that she is looking at the things that might have been overlooked. We deserve people in government who are willing to speak their truth, even when we do not agree or understand. At their best, lawyers and judges should serve as stewards of the law who have the integrity and insight to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.

It is August 6, 2009 and the Senate has approved Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The rest is herstory, I mean history.

–Diana Cristales

Further Reading:

In So Many Words: The over-intellectualization of art, culture and politics by Diana Cristales, 7/20/09

WITNESS IN PALESTINE

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book_cover

THE OLIVE HARVEST

by Anna Baltzer

My first week in Palestine has been spent in the trees. Every morning, I wake up at sunrise to walk with farmers to their olive groves, where we climb the ancient trees and fill our shirts with olives, taking occasional breaks to sip fresh sage tea and admire the scenery. It is fall, the time of the olive harvest, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive trees burst with ripe purple olives, to be plucked and marinated or pressed for fresh olive oil.

For many generations, local Palestinian farmers have depended on the fall harvest as a major source of income to support their families. However, many farmers now say they are afraid to approach their trees alone. They have been traumatized by repeated harassment from soldiers and armed settlers from Israel, who for decades have been patrolling Palestinian land to ensure the protection and expansion of Jewish-only settlements.

Settlements are towns or communities built by Israel exclusively for Jews on internationally recognized Palestinian land. Israeli settlements are in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own population to the occupied territory, in this case the West Bank, the Gaza Strip,[1] and East Jerusalem. In many languages, like French, the general word for “settlement” is the same as the word for “colony.” But in English and Hebrew, a more benign word is used: people living in Israeli settlements are referred to as “settlers,” not “colonizers.”

In spite of international law, Israel not only condones the illegal settlements, but actively supports their establishment and growth. For example, the Israeli government subsidizes housing, water, electricity, transportation, and many other services for settlers. By declaring settlements “national priority areas,” the illegal colonies are entitled to 65% more grants than local councils in Israel, and financial assistance to lease land at rates well below the actual value.[2] Israel also offers tax breaks, business incentives, free schooling, and mortgage grants up to 95% in the settlements[3] to attract new Jewish citizens to become part of the occupying presence. The larger the Israeli population in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, the stronger Israel’s claim to that land becomes.

On an Israeli road outside of Ariel settlement near our house, a Hebrew billboard announces to passersby, “Now is the time to move to Ariel. Join our community, and you will receive 100,000 New Israeli Shekels.” That’s more than US$20,000. Advertisements like this appeal not to well-off Israelis, but rather to poorer Israelis, like young families, recent immigrants, or Israelis of color. These might be people who couldn’t care less about the political or religious significance of the land itself. Maybe they are simply looking for a higher standard of living for themselves and their families.[4] In fact, most Israeli settlers move to the Palestinian Territories not because they think “This land is ours and nobody else’s,” but because in one way or another, their government is paying them to do so (with American tax-dollars).

A minority of settlers choose to live in the Palestinian Territories primarily for political or religious reasons. Many of these “ideological”—as opposed to “economic”—settlers frequently threaten or attack Palestinian farmers and families, because they believe the Palestinians are occupying land promised to the Jewish people by God. Due to the increasing danger of settler attacks, many farmers have started requesting accompaniment from Israeli peace groups and international organizations. The hope is that violent settlers or soldiers might exercise restraint in the presence of Israelis or internationals, either out of shame or because we might document the violence and transmit the news to Western media sources, where stories of Israeli settler or soldier violence often go untold.

One organization providing international accompaniment to Palestinian farmers is the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS), where I am volunteering for the next 2 months. IWPS is a grassroots peace organization dedicated to documenting and nonviolently intervening in human rights abuses in the West Bank, and supporting Palestinian and Israeli nonviolent resistance to the Occupation. We are based in Haris, a small village in the West Bank’s rural Salfit region. When farmers from the neighboring village of Deir Istiya contacted us recently to request accompaniment, three IWPS women (myself included) and five Israeli activists volunteered to go.

Although the Deir Istiya farmers’ groves are not far from their homes, it was a long walk because Palestinians are not permitted to use the main road connecting their village with their land. That main road is a settler highway, built to connect nearby settlements with one another and with Israel proper. Most roads in the Occupied Territories are segregated, with older, sometimes dirt roads for Palestinians, and modern highways of up to four lanes for Israelis. The latter are built over demolished homes and olive groves of local Palestinian villages, but the road signs often give no indication of past or present Palestinian communities. Signs point the way to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and nearby Israeli settlements. The ones we passed on the way to Deir Istiya’s olive groves were printed in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, but the Arabic had been blacked out with spray-paint, we assumed by ideological settlers.

Our first days of harvesting with the farmers and Israeli activists were peaceful. I marveled at the technique of separating olives from leaves: everything is poured out of buckets from a high place, and the wind carries away the light leaves while the olives, heavy with oil, fall into a pile together. The atmosphere was pleasant, sorting olives, drinking tea, and chatting in the shade of the silvery trees. The Palestinians did their best in Hebrew and the Israelis and I tried to speak a little Arabic.

Today was less serene. As we moved west with the harvest, we came closer to the bulldozers plowing through Deir Istiya’s groves. The bulldozers are leveling olive groves for the expansion of nearby Revava settlement. My friends from Deir Istiya fear their land will be next. While we were harvesting, a Revava settler with an M16 semiautomatic weapon approached us and asked the Palestinians for their identification papers. The farmers obliged. The other three IWPS women and I approached the settler to observe him, trying to be conspicuous but not threatening. We knew the settler had no right to ask the farmer for his ID—it is a Palestinian grove—but our policy is not to take the lead, rather to support Palestinians in their tactics as long as they are nonviolent. The farmer asked us to stay back, and we did. The farmer knew it was easier and safer to comply rather than refuse and risk facing violence from settlers or soldiers.

After the settler left, I volunteered to keep an eye out for settlers or soldiers, and also to keep watch over the farmers’ donkeys. (I had heard of recent cases of settlers stealing donkeys.) Half an hour later, three armed soldiers approached us and one asked if we had seen anyone around. We told him we’d seen a man with a gun. Alarmed, the soldier asked us to describe the man. We described the settler we had just seen and he relaxed visibly: “Just a Jew? Oh, his gun is necessary—he has to defend himself.”

The soldiers asked how long we would be there and we said until sunset. When they were gone, we discussed the encounter and agreed that in the future we would translate questions into Arabic instead of answering them ourselves, even if the questions were simple. Our purpose is not to speak or fight for Palestinians, but to support their right both to be on their land and to resist the forces occupying it.

It was a long walk home after harvesting. In addition to taking a long detour around the settler road, we had to cart all of the olives from that day in one trip because there have apparently been recent incidents of settlers stealing olives in the area. When we arrived at our house in Haris, we learned that a farmer from a nearby village had been taken away by soldiers while he was picking olives with his family and three international volunteers who were accompanying them. Fortunately, several groups were notified and took action. Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), an Israeli peace organization that fights human rights violations in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the Jewish tradition of Tikkun olam, or social action, is already working on getting the farmer released. CNN reporters who happened to be in the neighborhood at the time will probably have a story, too. We are optimistic because of the international media coverage and sympathetic Israeli presence, and some of us will go to the village tomorrow to help finish the harvest that was interrupted.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who has been documenting human rights abuses and supporting nonviolent direct action in the West Bank with the Int’l Women’s Peace Service.

This piece was first published on Anna Baltzer’s website: AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com on 11/18/03.

http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2003/11/olive-harvest.html

[1]

When this book went to press, Israeli settlers had been evacuated from the Gaza Strip, although the territory remained under Israeli military siege. For a post-evacuation update and analysis, see “Sewage Tsunami & Strangulation in Gaza (p. ***—ALSO SPIEL OR CONCLUSION?).

[2]

Patrick Müller, “Occupation in Hebron,” Alternative Information Center: AIC (2004), p. 29.

[3]

Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs: PASSIA (2007 Diary), p. 313.

[4]

The situation bears a striking resemblance to the US military, which fills its enlisted ranks with underprivileged young men, often black or Latino, who fight not necessarily because they believe in the cause, but because they need the money and education that the army offers to them.

US vs. SOCIETY?

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lady

ASK LADY ESQ.

Relationship advice from a divorce attorney.

Dear Lady Esq.,

What do you do when your core values clash with “society’s”? When your friends, family and everyone you meet needs to place you in a box upon which they can label you so they can “figure” you out? When you love someone so much you have done everything you want to to prove it, but no one believes you because you didn’t do the things that everyone else does because they’re “supposed to.”

These are the values I’m speaking of: Love is sufficient, makes no demands, and is not dependent upon anyone’s approval but those who are in love.

Why then must I be subjected to everyone “knowing” that my love is not real because I’m not “married”? Why then must I be subjected to everyone “knowing” that I don’t love my child because she’s not “baptized”? Why must the support of my family be conditioned upon such things? Why must the “state” (the stupidest most destructive idea ever conceived of and inexplicably supported by man) be a party to my love for a woman? Why must the “church” (tied for the title of the stupidest most destructive idea ever conceived of and inexplicably supported by man) be a party to my love for my child?

Why must the love of another for me be conditioned upon the support of state and church? Why can’t they love me unconditionally like I do my beloved and our child? Why can’t they lend a hand when we need it like I did when I had the abundance to do so — without insisting upon me having their values?

Are my beloved and my child not worthy of love because we don’t support nor require the support of state and church?

Why can’t everyone just be satisfied that they support or require the support of state and church AND leave everyone else alone who doesn’t?

– Against the Grain


Dear Against the Grain,

Ah yes, the us vs. society dilemma. Personally, I grapple with this one on the following level: I am not sure I believe in the institution of marriage. I think most people go into it for religious or romantic reasons, not fathoming in the slightest that it is in actuality a business partnership. Additionally, I believe that marriage changes a relationship. Sometimes for the better, but often a sense of ownership is instilled. Men feel emasculated. Women feel entitled. The whole dynamic shifts. And on top of all of that it is an institution that creates a false sense of security. Marriage is no guarantee your partner won’t leave you. It just means it’s going to be a longer and more costly break-up.

So, with that vision of marriage in my mind, why would I want to get married? Societal and cultural brainwashing. Since I was a little girl I’ve dreamed of the white dress, the veil, the flowers and cake. And as a grown woman what do I really want? The ring. Because my whole life my society and culture have been telling me that one day I’d grow up to be that princess in the white dress, that if my man really loved me he’d give me a big shiny diamond.

All understanding of societal and cultural brainwashing fully considered, when it comes to marriage, I want that ring. I want that party. I want to get married. Not because I want the institution, but because I stand no chance after 29 years of societal and cultural brainwashing of not wanting those things.

So, I try to navigate my way through a world of falsehoods that are created by others. And I think about what I really want. OK, I really want the ring. I do. Why? Because it means someone wants to marry me! I’m not quite as concerned with actually getting married as I am with knowing that someone wants to marry me. So I’m willing to start with the ring and navigate from there. I’m alright with the idea of a perpetual engagement. I’ll have the ring, people will see it sparkle and know that someone has asked me to marry him. That, in and of itself, might be enough for me.

And if it’s not? Well then, I have a plethora of alternatives available to me. I could actually get married (mostly for the tax benefits) but enter into a rock-solid prenup that is essentially a means to a hassle-free divorce. A prenup that enables both of us to walk away from the marriage without having to give each other anything, a prenup that treats our divorce like any other non-marital break-up.

There’s also the option of a commitment ceremony. A handfasting. Jumping the broom. An outdoor barefoot party under the chopa, overseen by a lesbian rabbi, with no legal ramifications attached.

Basically, I am open to exploring the possibilities of a partnership with my partner, and I’m willing to think outside the box. In fact, I’m fairly terrified of the box. The box was created by religion, church, and state (and federal government) to encourage marriage and help keep families together. But with a 50% divorce rate, clearly there is something wrong with the institution as implemented. And with the state having independent control over child support issues irrespective of marital status (at least in California), it seems to me the basic reasons behind marriage are now irrelevant, and we should start a revolution of a “to each his own” mentality surrounding the entire institution!

I don’t have any children, so I have not personally had to deal with the religious and societal pressure to baptize a child. And, being Jewish, for me the problem would come up in the form of a bris. Oh, how my son would love to know that one day a bunch of family members and friends sat around and ate and drank and preyed and celebrated while he had his foreskin removed in front of them! My, but religion can be quite silly.

No, I have not had to grapple with that problem, but I grapple with a similar one: I am not sure I ever want to have children. I am approaching 30 and there is no tick of a biological clock for me. I love my urban life, my ability to take lengthy trips abroad, the thought of giving up on America altogether and relocating to another country. I love my freedom, and I see children as a direct obstacle to maintaining that freedom. Now, many in my society and culture see this as selfish. If it is selfish, then let me be selfish!

I much prefer the thought of having children only if and when I know that I have lived all the life I can live and that I am ready to completely give up my life for the life of another. Because that is what parenthood is. You love someone so much you give up your life for theirs. From nine months of pregnancy to diaper changing and months of sleepless nights to baby-proofing your house and constantly keeping an eye on your toddler to being a chauffeur for extra curricular activities to constantly worrying about and probably fighting with your troublesome teenager to figuring out how to pay for college followed by a wedding – there is not an act from conception to death (of you or your child) where your life is not given over to your child.

I applaud those who do it. I love being an aunt. But parenthood, now, and perhaps forever, is not for me. I’m perfectly happy with that decision. It is my culture and society that are not. It is my religion that is not. It is the outside forces of church and state, culture and society, that look down on me for this “selfish” decision.

At the end of the day, my friend, we cannot change the discerning eyes of the forces that be. We cannot change the way government functions or religion behaves, other than in small ways. We cannot stop them from judging us or from trying to set parameters for us. We can only trust that we are living life our way, doing what is best for ourselves and the ones we love.

And this concept does not have to be mutually exclusive of religion. If a person lives by the basic tenets of their religion, by the teachings of their original deity (as opposed to the modern teachings of their organized religion), they can likely live their life in a way that works for them and still be a good Christian/Jew/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Pagan/Wiccan/etc. Because the fundamental teachings of most religions are essentially the same. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Judge not lest ye be judged. Love thy neighbor. Essentially, be good to yourself and those you love, live a kind life, and you will make Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed-whomever happy. And more important than that, you’ll make yourself and the ones you love happy.

So I must disagree with your assessment of religion as being tied for the title of “the stupidest most destructive idea ever conceived of and inexplicably supported by man.” It is not religion, but organized religion, that is the problem. It is not the spiritual words of encouragement and goodness of Jesus that I take issue with, but what the various churches have done with them over the years. Man fucked this one up for everyone. Just like man is fucking up the world for everyone by making it uninhabitable with global warming and chemicals. Mankind, it appears, may just be a parasite on the face of this earth. But it is our own destruction that we are bringing about. The earth will persevere. Volcanoes will erupt, plates will shift, oceans will drain and fill. One day there will be no trace that we were ever here. And religion, church, state, government, society, and culture, will be long forgotten.

In the mean time, each of us must learn to be like ducks and let the water of outside opinion roll off our backs. We must be true to ourselves, live life in the way that we feel is right, adhere to our own core values that work for us, and know that in doing so we are “beating the system.” Church, state, society, culture, and government will go about their business of sticking their noses into other people’s business, likely for the rest of the time that mankind is on this earth. If we are bothered by it, we let them win. If we do what is right for us, regardless of the ideologies and constraints they try to impose upon us, and we don’t give a good goddamn what they think, then we win. And quite frankly, I like to win.

One last note. I do want to say that this “let them do what they want and we’ll do what we want” attitude is not all-encompassing. We still have a duty to try to fight for the things we believe in. We have a duty to vote, from an educated perspective, on the issues that govern us. That way if the vote doesn’t go our way we have the right to bitch about it. We have a duty as human beings to fight for the basic human rights of others. We may not believe in the institution of marriage, but we have a responsibility to fight for the right for same-sex marriages, because just as we get to make our choice not to marry, they should have the right to make their choice as to whether or not they want to marry. We have a global duty to fight for human rights across the planet – to push our local representatives to push our national representatives to push the world to fight for basic human rights for every person in every nation.

As long as we are in the system, regardless of whether or not our being “in” was ever by our choice, we must fight for what we believe in, at the very least for the basic human rights of everyone on the planet.

Other than that, do what is right for you, follow your heart and your personal belief system, and let those without sin cast the first stone.

– Lady Esq.

askLadyEsq.com

ART THEORY

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agnes_martin_1960

Agnes Martin, White Flower, oil on canvas, 1960. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

AGNES MARTIN, WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE QUALITY WITHOUT A NAME

by Felix Macnee

“There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.”1

A simplicity attends the writings of Agnes Martin, Wittgenstein, and Christopher Alexander. Each is concerned with certain types of architecture. Alexander addresses towns and buildings, the physical spaces that make our world; Martin investigates the architecture of form and feeling in art and the nature of inspiration; Wittgenstein pursues the architecture of language and form to arrive at the structure of worlds. And within each discussion is a kernel of each of the other elements. This relationship articulates a triadic system whose vertices are these architectural ideas. If this triad is regarded as an isomorphism of semiotic structure, one notes its tendency to collapse into a dyadic or even monadic system, each term stacked atop the other (this is possible in a non-geometric space). Here then the discussion is not concerned so much with the terms as with the translation, or lines, between the terms. Finally, the supporting ground, the space within which this collapsing triad exists, can be regarded as the “quality without a name.”

“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect — completely removed in fact — even as we ourselves are.”2

Words are about meaning as Agnes Martin’s works are about perfection. Several of Wittgenstein’s propositions address the “aboutness” of words (2.173 specifically addresses the picture, which is itself a type of word):

3.11 — “We use the sensible perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs.

“The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.”

3.12 — “The sign through which we express the thought I call the propositional sign. And the proposition is the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world.”

3.13 — “To the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projection; but not what is projected. …”3

2.173 — “The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of representation) …”4

Distance from perfection, a perfection of meaning, defines “about.” This distance is inevitable and necessary. In fact the concept of meaning itself contains the necessary element of distance. Perfection is such that it can be intellectually understood only by remove. (I make this distinction because there is a type of understanding that is non-intellectual, and not filtered through translation. Every religious text refers to this understanding, though none provides it. We infer its existence just as we infer the existence of consciousness in others.) If perfection were present we would imagine it weren’t. Paradoxically, it is present. But we don’t come to know this simply by stating the fact. Stating the fact removes us from truth, by an increment equivalent to the thickness of the sign circumscribing the experience.

On the other hand, knowing itself, the unframed state of being, is an instantaneous sensation, an internal “quality without a name.” It is the sensation pursued by artists, philosophers, and mystics, et al, and its temporary apprehension (“apprehension” is not the correct word, but there can be no correct word, since it will always slide between its object and the reader, and in so doing, silently, falsely ascribe this same circumstance to the depicted action) is always registered with a sense of giddiness or even loss. Something profoundly impersonal inheres in the great work of art, the great thought, the great belief. This is the root of its difficulty. Good works of art can be personal — but to move beyond them we must move beyond ourselves, our sense of identification with or possession of the work of art. To become the servant of art in this sense marks the advent of true progress. We must constantly leave ourselves behind.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”5

Clearly, by “language” Wittgenstein here means any depictive faculty or system, that which translates being into the known. (The glib use of the word “known” is not meant to assert a delusional belief in some completeness of apprehension; rather it intends to convey only the nominal sense in which things are ordinarily “known.”) The word “world” now comes into question, for we see that its dimension apparently is fluid. Of course this is only true to the extent that a world depends on a language. Wittgenstein seems to make the dependence total — but this is defused by the modifier “my.” As soon as we lose “my” we lose this dependence.

So language is a translator (though it itself must be translated), but what is mysterious is not the often hazy product of translation, but the action of translation itself. It is essentially blind and inferential; it points backward in time through itself to being (even where we conceive of the knowing as instantaneous). This is why a common philosophical view equates being solely and rigorously with the known — in order not to travel backward in time. Another mystery is the form of language itself, how one can truthfully assert its remove from reality, yet equally well assert the creation of universes from linguistic structures. Language is a property of arrangement whose inception follows intent, but whose conception outstrips expectation; its grammar is a physics, and its words are uncracked atoms.

“I once saw a simple fish pond in a Japanese village which was perhaps eternal. A farmer made it for his farm. The pond was a simple rectangle, about 6 feet wide, and 8 feet long; opening off a little irrigation stream. At one end, a bush of flowers hung over the water. At the other end, under the water, was a circle of wood, its top perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water. In the pond there were eight great ancient carp, each maybe 18 inches long, orange, gold, purple, and black: the oldest one had been there eighty years. The eight fish swam, slowly, slowly, in circles — often within the wooden circle. The whole world was in that pond. Every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes. I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon. … It was so true to the nature of the fish, and flowers, and the water, and the farmers, that it had sustained itself for all that time, endlessly repeating, always different. There is no degree of wholeness or reality which can be reached beyond that simple pond.”6

This is the wholeness that comes from inspiration, breathing in the eloquent unknown, that which is the true self and allows the ungovernable aspect of this to articulate itself. It is a listening without category. Francis Bacon describes this sort of material listening in a discussion of his approach to painting:

“It’s an illogical method of making, an illogical way of attempting to make what one hopes will be a logical outcome — in the sense that one hopes one will be able to suddenly make the thing there in a totally illogical way but that it will be totally real …”7

This rejection of logic is really a deference to its container, that which is beyond the parameters of concept. We conceptualize a quality, and in so doing remove and falsify it. But only in our minds.8 It is just as we are able to point to some object, and on a practical level actually refer to that object, not to our sensory perception of it, though this latter, forever incomplete version is all we ever know. Even sensory reference is a function of remove. Life can be seen as a convolution of being. And if this is the case one may legitimately question how or why complexity of this sort arose. It seems as though confusion were invented as a portal to wonder.

Artists have constantly striven for higher degrees of verisimilitude, refining their languages in order to more closely represent a particular truth or set of truths. They have employed objects and methods as various as “abstract” or occult symbolism, as in the religious art of ancient cultures, cubism (where the goal was to simultaneously present as many aspects, or facets, of an object or relationships of objects as was aesthetically possible), the hyper-realism of artists such as Duane Hanson, and the one-to-one relationship of art to object in the use of “readymades.”

Even this last correspondence is not exact, though, as Arthur Danto has argued.9 An ordinary object transformed into art — for example, Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm —is no longer exactly itself: it carries with it an interpretive “artworld,” as Danto puts it, who intellectually nail an aura, halo-like, above it, while ironically lauding the intellectual audacity of the artist’s act of discarding the aura as superfluous. This tip of the hat to Walter Benjamin nearly invalidates him. Fortunately for him, we only need one snow shovel in the museum. No one is arrested or declared a philistine for using any one of the others to shovel snow. “Art for art’s sake” seeks an equivalence with itself that still doesn’t escape the internal distance of reference. For it is both “itself” and “art.” But one needn’t despair. It is enough that we can point to the quality without a name, through whatever means. It is enough to know that its location is inside and outside, to know that the border between these two realms is a shimmering, dimensionless membrane called the mind, and that this too is a facet of perfection.

“Moments of perfection are indescribable but a few things can be said about them. At such times we are suddenly very happy and we wonder why life ever seemed troublesome. In an instant we can see the road ahead free from all difficulties and we think that we will never lose it again. All this and a great deal more in barely a moment, and then it is gone.”10

–Felix Macnee, 1999

Footnotes:

1  The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, pg. ix.

2  Writings, Agnes Martin, Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992, pg. 15.

2   Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge, London & New York, 1995, pg. 45.

4  ibid, pg. 41.

5  Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge, London & New York, 1995, proposition 5.6, pg. 149.

6  The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, pg. 38.

7  The Brutality of Fact, Interviews With Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1990, pg. 105.

8  “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.  When the sage says:  ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.  All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.  But the cares we have to struggle with every day:  that is a different matter.

“Concerning this a man once said:  Why such reluctance?  If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.

“Another said:  I bet that is also a parable.

“The first said:  You have won.

“The second said:  But unfortunately only in parable.

“The first said:  No, in reality:  in parable you have lost.”

—Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories and Parables, Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1983, pg. 459, “On Parables.”

9  see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, A Philosophy of Art, Arthur C. Danto, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981.

10  Writings, Agnes Martin, Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992, pg. 68.

GUEST EDITORIAL

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

50Anderson_Auction

Farmers crowd around the auctioneer at a foreclosure sale in Nebraska, intimidating potential bidders so they can buy the farm for a low price. Farms bought at such “penny auctions” were returned to their owners.

PEOPLE POWER PUSHED THE NEW DEAL

Roosevelt didn’t come up with all those progressive programs on his own.

by Sarah Anderson

During the Great Depression, my grandfather ran a butter creamery in rural Minnesota. Growing up, I heard how a group of farmers stormed in one day and threatened to burn the place down if he didn’t stop production. I had no idea who those farmers were or why they had done that—it was just a colorful story.

Now I know that they were with the Farmers’ Holiday Association, a protest movement that flourished in the Midwest in 1932 and 1933. They were best known for organizing “penny auctions,” where hundreds of farmers would show up at a foreclosure sale, intimidate potential bidders, buy the farm themselves for a pittance, and return it to the original owner.

The action in my grandfather’s creamery was part of a withholding strike. By choking off delivery and processing of food, the Farmers’ Holiday Association aimed to boost pressure for legislation to ensure that farmers would make a reasonable profit for their goods. Prices were so low that farmers were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel or leaving it in the field.

The Farmers’ Holiday Association never got the legislation it wanted, but its direct actions lit a fire under politicians. Several governors and then Congress passed moratoriums on farm foreclosures. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, telling advisors that he feared an “agrarian revolution,” rushed through reforms that helped millions of farmers stay on their land. These new policies regulated how much land was planted or kept in reserve. Although it was eventually replaced by the massive subsidies that today favor large agribusiness and encourage overproduction, Roosevelt’s original program supported some of the most prosperous and stable decades for U.S. farmers.

This is just one example of how strong grassroots organizing during the last severe U.S. economic crisis was key in pushing some of that era’s most important progressive reforms. Social Security is another such case.

The Depression had been particularly tough on the elderly, millions of whom lost their pensions in the stock crash and had few options for employment. Roosevelt, however, felt the nation was not ready for a costly and logistically challenging pension program.

Then a retired California doctor named Francis E. Townsend wrote to the editor of his local paper, proposing a pension system that would also stimulate the economy by offering $200 per month to every citizen over 60, on the condition that they spend the entire amount within 30 days. The idea spread like wildfire. Thousands of Townsend Clubs around the country wrote millions of letters to the President and Congress demanding the pension system Townsend suggested.

Roosevelt, reportedly concerned that Townsend might join with populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long to challenge him in the 1936 election, eventually changed his position. Although he rejected the details of the Townsend Plan, Roosevelt pushed through legislation in 1935 that created Social Security, still one of the country’s most important anti-poverty programs.

Seventy-five years later, these stories offer important lessons for a country again mired in economic crisis. Neither the Farmers’ Holiday Association nor the Townsend Clubs got exactly what they wanted. But their bold demands and action moved the policy debate much further than it would have gone had these social movements not existed.

Like President Barack Obama, Roosevelt was an extremely popular leader, particularly among the disadvantaged who saw him as their champion. But it wasn’t enough to have a generally good guy in the White House. Likewise today, our chances of achieving real change have more to do with the power of social movements than with the occupant of the Oval Office. Obama has opened some doors of opportunity, but to go beyond economic recovery to a more just and sustainable economy, we’ll need to follow in the footsteps of Depression-era activists and organize around bold ideas.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This piece was originally published by Yes!, June 5, 2009.

http://www.futurenet.org/yes/yes/issues/the-new-economy/people-power-pushed-the-new-deal

VINCENT VAN GOGH

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the_painter_on_the_road_to_tarascon

The Painter on the Road to Tarascon by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

THE PAINTER ON THE ROAD TO TARASCON

by Matt Gonzalez

Laden with his brushes and props, one is struck by the spring in his step, his single-minded purpose. Yet anticipation hovers over the Provencal landscape, for one cannot help but guess what subject the painter will capture later this day. Straw hat firmly on his head, blazing sunlight cascading over the path… One can get thirsty looking at this painting.

But the thick, seemingly wet paint, masks an unexpected truth: The painting does not exist. For though the artist painted it, only technology, the very thing that today spoils the once calm rural landscape depicted, allows us to still view the painting. The original was lost during WW II, believed destroyed when Allied forces bombed Magdeburg, setting fire to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum where it was housed.

Striding along a row of trees the painter is alone, but for the presence of his shadow that figures prominently in the lower right foreground of the canvas. His bold walking companion could easily pass for a bullfighter, but now runs alongside and only barely keeps up with his friend to whom he’s tethered.

Wearing a broad-brimmed yellow hat and carrying a camp stool and easel strapped to his back, rolled canvas also, and walking cane in his left hand… the painter on the road to Tarascon cuts the very image of the plein-air painter…off to find his ground, to peer at the world from. Painted in July 1888, it prefigures so much for Vincent van Gogh. Within a month Paul Gauguin will join him in Arles. By the end of the year he will suffer his first seizure, and within two years he will both sell his first painting in Brussels, and fatally shoot himself in the chest at Auvers-sur-Oise. Dead at the age of thirty-seven.

This rural thoroughfare then, running north from Arles to Tarascon, is his last peace before so much turmoil envelopes and overtakes him. But that is later… I believe the painter on the road to Tarascon to be content.

–Matt Gonzalez


I DREAMT OF MY FATHER LAST NIGHT

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reeltoreelprojector

I DREAMT OF MY FATHER LAST NIGHT

by Eve Toliman

I dreamt of my father last night.  He looked handsome driving the car; calm and steady.  I was young.  He was 42.  In a small, crackly voice, I thanked him for not killing himself.  I had to say it twice.  The first time, he didn’t understand and turned to me so he could hear.  I saw his unlined face, hair swept back as it always was, looking down at me as I sat in the passenger seat.  I thanked him for not killing himself.  I told him how much it meant to me and I knew it had been hard for him.

Then I woke up in the dark and I knew it wasn’t true.  He was still dead.  Most of my life, my father has been a ghost.

I have a handful of memories: riding on the back of his bike in Central Park; waiting on the stone stoop of our building for him to come up the stairs from the subway; peeking through the glass doors to the room where he painted, forbidden to us after I used his brushes and left them scattered and soiled.  I remember his paint-stained hands, reaching for them to hold mine.

I have imagined sometimes that my older selves visited my child self and that they kept her from dying after he did — that they soothed her into living.  But last night it occurred to me — then why didn’t they visit him and save him too?

I rationalized that his death opened worlds for me, that his ghost self showed me things a living father couldn’t — but when I feel like this I don’t believe any of it.  They’re just stories from a sad child’s brain.

The movie of my life is shown on an old reel-to-reel projector that breaks down at this spot, over and over.  My father is 42, the frames slow, skipping through multiple, similar images of his face turning toward me, hair swept back.  I am little, watching, waiting.

When I slept again, I dreamt of people in boxes and bags.  Other people held them captive for their own good; in cramped, dark spaces, arms and legs pushed up against their bodies.  They told me to sit on a box to keep the man from getting out.  When I sat down, the box felt live and hot.  My stomach hurt.

I dreamt that my father’s drawings, luminescent pastels of torsos and faces, were cracking.  I showed them to my son whose hands look like his grandfather’s.  I wanted him to see before they were all gone.  Then I sprinkled water on the dry chalk to see if that would keep the pictures from flaking off and crumbling.  The creamy pastel turned to grit.  A sandpaper face re-adhered to the vellum.  It was harsh, bleached and skewed, missing a piece of the eye, but still there.

Shortly after 9/11, I dreamt of taking a ferry across a muddy-brown canal.  There were no people in my dream just this destination.  I lost a sandal on the way, so I arrived barefoot, the strap of my other white sandal looped through my fingers.  The ferry dropped me at a concrete embankment.  I walked up the steps and entered a cool dark building.  I walked through the underground corridors and emerged in a gray daylight with round dirt hills stretching as far as I could see.  I walked for a long time through these endless, dead hills before I woke up.

After that I dreamt of a shiny, coal-black man with long wavy blond hair and piercing blue eyes.  He was naked, his phallus like obsidian, hanging to his knees.  Old men watched lazily from rickety, folding chairs as he walked, strong and upright, into a clear green sea bordered by three volcanoes, one live.

Through time, these kinds of dreams overtook me. I slowly slipped into the blackness that had chased me for years.  I slid into the void.  Since then I recognize a bit of death in everything.  These gaps feel like friends and I have grown to love emptiness.  I come home to nothing and feel peace.

But how to make my peace here, among the living and their ghosts?  This world that we have made together, it confounds me.  I want to give people beautiful, happy things that make them feel beautiful and happy too, not stories from a sad child’s brain.

Uneasiness follows me all day after I dream of my father.  Shame.  A sense of failure and doom.  I am caught in a box, my arms and legs pushed up against me, no room to move.

I have been trapped like this before.  I stop resisting.  I steep in the shame and failure.  Without mental defenses, there is a lot of space.  I explore the edges, lightly touching everything, searching for its quality.  The feelings spread thin and dissipate.  Physical sensations heighten, cold air on my face, the sound of paper, the sole of my foot on uneven ground.  The borders of my body become crisp as the borders of my mind and heart dissolve.

There is an article in the morning newspaper about the Indian cotton farmers.  Thousands of these farmers are killing themselves every year.  I cannot understand this number, it is too big for me to hold.  But I understand the expression of the woman in the news photo as she holds up a picture of her dead husband.  And I understand the unerasable feeling when something wrong can’t be made right.  Genetically modified cotton seeds promise great yields and look like a way out of poverty.  But these patented seeds and the many special conditions they require all cost a lot of money.  It’s a desperate gamble.  One missing piece, an unexpected turn of events and the poor farmer is plunged into debt so deep that suicide looks reasonable by comparison.

In a way my father was undone by a costly gamble too.  He was an artist.  But there was a glitch.  His feelings overwhelmed him.  The doctors offered what they had.  One new medication after another, each correcting the last, as his personality deteriorated and his desperation mounted.  The names of new drugs floated around our house like dust.  By age eight, I knew more pharmaceutical brand names than cereals.  His feeling capacity, the thing he needed most to do his job, was plunged so deep in debt that with the last of it he destroyed the threat of further damage.

To care invites discomfort.  It complicates things.  ‘They’ become ‘us’.  We are in it together, tangled and messy.  I didn’t know what to do for my father.  I don’t know what to do for the Indian farmers.  I don’t know how to make our world more humane.  But I wish I did.  I find a measure of peace in the void so that I can rest uneasy here among the living and our ghosts.

Today I will send cash to my friend who runs the food program.  I will hug my children and make us lunch.  I will take a walk.  I will try to be a little kinder than I know how to be.  And I will watch.  And I will wait.

Maybe my older selves are still looking for my father and maybe they will save him.  It’s just not done yet.

Or maybe his older selves found us both and as they eased him into peace they held me here in this uneasy place of care, visiting me in dreams and gaps.

–Eve Toliman

Further Reading:

Prodding Baudelaire by Eve Toliman, 7/28/09

Beneath the Damage and Apology by Eve Toliman, 7/24//09


WHEN JOHNNY COMES LIMPING HOME

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wounded-soldierIraq

Wounded American soldier being evacuated from a combat zone in Iraq.

WHEN JOHNNY COMES LIMPING HOME

Just as our Vietnam Vets reach retirement age, our nation is creating a whole new generation of ravaged war veterans

by Horatio Guernica

“If we had the Internet back in the ’60s, the Vietnam War would have been over in a matter of weeks,” a grey-haired peace activist once exuberantly told me as we marched through San Francisco in the early dot-com era of 1991, protesting another President Bush and another war on Iraq.

At that moment, I believed him. But here we are, 18 years later, firmly entrenched in the Internet era, and six years into another senseless and fraudulent war in Iraq (and nearly eight years in Afghanistan) with no end in sight, online or elsewhere.

July 2009 was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in the history of America’s war in Afghanistan, reported NPR last week. (But the “best month” in Iraq, according to the Pentagon – only seven dead – surely an empty ‘victory’ when the total U.S. death toll for Iraq is over 4,000.)

Forty-three American soldiers died in Afghanistan last month. This brings the total to 749 in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (Afghanistan) and 4316 dead U.S. soldiers in  “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (Iraq), according to the Washington Post’s “Faces of the Fallen”, for a total of 5,065 U.S. soldiers killed in both wars as of July 31, 2009.

(The number of dead Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians, however, is another matter — over 100,000.)

None of these numbers include the war wounded. Thousands more American soldiers are coming home maimed or scarred, some with brain injuries from which they will never recover.

So here we are with a new president, from another political party, and both wars are still flailing on, under the radar it would now seem, from our A.D.D media and equally distracted viewers. Late-night satirist Stephen Colbert recently took his show to Iraq to make this very point. He shaved his head in solidarity with the troops (and for a laugh, no doubt). All gimmickry aside, Colbert’s point was well-taken: We as a nation seem to have all but forgotten that we are at war.

Equally troubling and under-accounted for is the fact that even when the soldiers come home, the wars will not be over for them – or us.

As Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes reported in their 2008 book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict,” an enormous cost of the Iraq war alone lays before us—financial, emotional and physical. “…war is about men and women brutally killing and maiming other men and women. The costs live on long after the last shot has been fired.”

In the Toronto Star in March 2008, Stiglitz highlighted the health care costs of the thousands of injured soldiers:

“The administration has tried to keep the war’s costs from the American public. Veterans groups have used the Freedom of Information Act to discover the total number of injured – 15 times the number of fatalities.

Already, 52,000 returning veterans have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.S. government will need to provide disability compensation to an estimated 40 per cent of the 1.65 million troops that have already been deployed.

And, of course, the bleeding will continue as long as the war continues, with the health-care and disability bill amounting to more than $600 billion (in present-value terms).”

It’s agonizingly ironic that just as our nation’s Vietnam Vets are reaching retirement age, we are creating a whole new generation of war vets in this country, many with eyes ablaze or glazed, unable to ever connect with normalcy again.

These veterans are bringing home with them broken bodies and broken psyches from having been forced to serve multiple tours of duty in poorly justified and often very bloody battles. Some may have survived brain-rattling explosions thanks to the modern wonders of protective armor, but will suffer pain or brain damage for the rest of their lives.

And some are coming home and turning their nightmares into other people’s nightmares.

In a two-part article in the Colorado Springs Gazette this past week (July 26 and 28, 2009), reporter Dave Phillips recounts the costs of war to one unit of soldiers who have committed a disproportionate number of violent crimes once they returned home. Writes Phillips in “Casualties of War; part I: The hell of war comes home:”

“Soldiers from other units at Fort Carson have committed crimes after deployments — military bookings at the El Paso County jail have tripled since the start of the Iraq war — but no other unit has a record as deadly as the soldiers of the 4th Brigade. The vast majority of the brigade’s soldiers have not committed crimes, but the number who have is far above the population at large. In a one-year period from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, the murder rate for the 500 Lethal Warriors was 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.

The battalion is overwhelmingly made up of young men, who, demographically, have the highest murder rate in the United States, but the brigade still has a murder rate 20 times that of young males as a whole.

The killings are only the headline-grabbing tip of a much broader pyramid of crime. Since 2005, the brigade’s returning soldiers have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.”

Phillips goes on to cite author Eric T. Dean, who makes a number of insightful—and disturbing—observations about the toll and consequences of war on surviving soldiers:

“Eric Dean, an author in Connecticut who specializes in war’s psychological toll, reviewed records from the Civil War for his 1997 book, “Shook Over Hell,” and found the same surge of crime and suicide that Fort Carson has seen.

“They have been in every war,” he said. “They never readjusted. They ended up living alone, drinking too much.”

They were “the lost generation” of World War I. They are the veterans of Vietnam who disproportionately populate homeless shelters and prisons today.

The psychological casualties may be particularly heavy in Iraq, he said.

“In the Civil War, if you experienced really traumatic fighting, chances are you didn’t make it,” he said. “Today, you can be blown up multiple times and go right back into the fight.”

In Vietnam, most draftees did one yearlong tour. Since the start of the Iraq war, some soldiers have been deployed three times for 12 to 15 months each.

When a soldier faces constant threat of attack, studies suggest, the brain is flooded with adrenaline, dopamine and other performance-enhancing chemicals that the body naturally produces in a fight-or-flight response. Over time, the brain can crave these stimulants, like a junkie for his fix.

When the stimulant of combat is taken away, soldiers often have trouble sleeping, said Sister Kateri Koverman, a social worker who has counseled people in war zones for almost 40 years. They can feel irritable, numb and paranoid, she said. They can sink into depression.

And they can search for another substance to replace the rush of war.”

For peace activists of my generation, one big difference in our approach has been our attitude toward the soldiers. From the beginning, the millions of us who took to the streets to protest George Bush, Jr.’s  invasion—some as early as September 2002 before the ‘preemptive’ war began—did not criticize the soldiers. That was one lesson we learned from Vietnam. The soldiers may be shooting the guns and taking the hits, but they are not calling the shots. So to every war supporter who accused us dissenters of disloyalty to the troops, we replied with signs that said: “Support our troops–bring them home!”

We have been supporting the troops since before they were even sent to war. It was the Bush/Cheney administration and the hapless Democratic leaders who have kept them there.

Since reclaiming Congress in the fall of 2006, the Democrats have capitulated time and again, approving never-ending funding, removing provisions that mandated a timeline for troop withdrawal, all despite the declarations in 2006 that they would end the Iraq war, with Nancy Pelosi at the speaker’s gavel. But impeachment—the only real way to hold the Bush administration accountable for this travesty—was “off the table,” declared Pelosi. Even though the vast majority of Americans had long turned against the war, Congress let Bush and Cheney exit out the back door of the White House with no penalty for their actions.

Inexplicably too afraid to impeach a criminal president with a 28 percent approval rating when they had the chance, the Democrats must now finally show real leadership with one of their own in the White House.

But it remains unclear if the Obama administration will ever seek accountability for its predecessor’s actions.

It’s also uncertain when our latest government will finally bring the troops home. But when it does, for these beleaguered soldiers and for our society as a whole as it attempts to reabsorb them, the war in many ways will have just begun.

Horatio Guernica is the pen name of a West Coast Writer.

Further Reading:

Heckuva Job, Arne by Horatio Guernica, 7/22/09

GUEST EDITORIAL

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

obama_cambio

Presidential candidate Barack Obama made to look like revered Mexican president Benito Juarez (1806-1872) in this Spanish-language “change” poster by the Date Farmers, 2008.

OBAMA IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT MORE EFFICIENT THAN BUSH’S

by Nativo Vigil Lopez

Protests against President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies are beginning to sweep the country. In some areas the protests are directed at Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the instrument of the enforcement policy execution, and in other areas President Obama is clearly the target. Some activists have argued that the main criticism and advocacy for a moratorium of such enforcement should be directed at Napolitano, the cabinet member responsible for defining the policy and taking it operational. Others argue that Obama is ultimately responsible for the policy and has in his hands the executive discretion to immediately put a stop to such rampant enforcement. The growing and pressing demand is for an ENFORCEMENT MORATORIUM until fair and humane immigration reform is enacted.

No other presidential administration since 1986 has enforced employer sanctions through the named I-9 audits of personnel files of employers as broadly and efficiently as has the Obama administration. The system of employment verification, short-named eVerify, which allows employers to verify the legal status of their employees against federal government databases, has taken on a new vigorous life under Obama. The fall-out of such enforcement has been massive terminations of long and short-term immigrant workers from their employment during the worst economic down-turn in the country since the 1930s. In one company alone, American Apparel, the largest clothing manufacturing firm in the U.S. with over 10,000 employees, an estimated 1,800 workers are listed for termination. The multiplier factor of Latino family size results in a devastating economic impact on close to 10,000 lives in the Los Angeles region.

Some have exclaimed that the efficiency of these “desk-top” ICE raids and deportations under this administration mirrors the efficiency with which candidate Obama ran his presidential campaign. These raids are more pervasive, sweeping, pernicious, and devastating iin terms of the numbers of individuals impacted than anything executed under President George Bush.

To the degree that the Obama administration declares that it is a crime to work, and pursues and persecutes those workers who are employed in millions of companies throughout America – making incredible economic contributions by their labor and paying the corresponding taxes – than the policy of this president is one of criminalizing immigrant workers and treating them as nothing less than common criminals. This is anathema to all that candidate Obama promised on the campaign trail, which now clearly contradicts the actions of President Obama. Which Obama is to be believed?

Nativo Vigil Lopez is the President of the Mexican American Political Association.

This piece was first disseminated as part of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) newsletter, 8/1/09.

See also:Obama loses immigration allies by Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, July 30, 2009.