Wednesday, October 19, 2011

A CHOICE OF DISASTERS


As I see it in my cracked and filthy crystal ball, there are two possible disasters looming on the horizon in November 2012.  The first disaster would be if Barack Obama loses the election, and Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, or some other regressive occupies the White House.  The second disaster would be if Barack Obama wins the election.  After nearly three years, I no longer delude myself that Obama is a liberal.  (That some on the right are so delusional as to think him a socialist is downright laughable.)  He has ignored us and insulted us—let no one forget Rahm Ehmanuel’s description of progressives as “fucking retarded.”  You can only treat your base with contempt if you know that you don’t need them, and since most Democrats aren’t all that progressive, he’s right.  I am also doubtful that he can be “educated” into pushing a progressive agenda.  His new reputation for “fighting” for progressive causes is wholly inadequate—much too little, much too late.  He may have had some (very few) words of sympathy for the #Occupiers, but his policies remain, at best, Republican Lite (health care reform that favors private insurance monopolies, deficit reduction tailored to Republican wishes, pipelines, ongoing wars, vetoing Palestinian recognition at the United Nations--you name it, he’s doing it), and at worst, exacerbations of Bush’s excesses (targeted assassinations of American citizens, stepped-up stings of supposed would-be terrorists).  It is almost as if Dubya had been given that perpetual Presidency that Kevin and I worried might be coming way back in the dark days after 9/11.  So while I am certain we’ll be worse off under President Romney or Perry or Cain, I am equally certain we will be no better off with Four More Years.

            The problem is, as I and many others have pointed out, there is No. Fucking. Progressive. Party.  There is a conservative party, known as Democrats, and a reactionary party, known as Republicans.  And there is, for all intents and purposes, a reactionary’s reactionary party, called the Tea Party.  A true leftist voice is almost entirely impossible to hear in the United States government in any capacity.  (Okay, there’s good ol’ Bernie Sanders ... and if she gets into the Senate, there’ll be Elizabeth Warren—she’s pretty left-leaning, isn’t she?)  My heart’s wholly with the #Occupiers, but even if their movement picks up steam and numbers and media attention (and at this point it seems that is happening), it is by no means assured that they’ll have any influence on the Democrats or anyone else running for office.  The money power just isn’t there, and without money, you can’t buy power.  It really is as blunt as that.  The Teabaggers are funded by the likes of Dick Armey and the Koch Brothers, and no wonder, since they’re anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-social welfare—the 1% fucking love the stupid Teabaggers!  They’re perfect examples of what Stalin called “useful idiots.”   And the way things are going, they’ll probably get their guy, whoever he (or she—Michelle Bachmann’s not out of the running yet) turns out to be, into the White House, since they’ll be able to buy the election—or rig it, whichever tactic proves necessary.  After all, the real Golden Rule is “whoever has the gold makes the rules” ... which pretty well sums up Citizens United.

            I really hope something BIG happens as a result of #Occupy Wall Street.  We need it.  I will save my own prescription for a future society for another time.  I’m feeling too pessimistic to go on with it right now.  And so I’ll conclude on an upbeat note, courtesy of a clever and uplifting sign carried by one of the #Occupiers, which I saw in a photo online the other day:

THE BEGINNING IS NEAR

            Maybe—just maybe—the guy who came up with that sign has a better crystal ball than mine.  Damn, I hope so.

--Joshua Hendrickson

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

HELL YEAH!


HELL YEAH! is what I hope will turn out to be a semi-regular feature on this blog, where I have the opportunity to highlight something positive in the world.  Today, I want to bring two recent positive developments to light.

The first is the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, which began on September 17th and is still going strong despite police oppression and media blackouts.  This is the kind of protest which may well have a snowball effect—rare enough these days—and if it does, that may lead to something like a possibility for positive change.  I don’t expect the Wall Street crowd to give a shit what a bunch of anti-corporate kids say.  Nor do I expect their bought-and-sold lackeys in the government to give a shit, either.  As for the cops, I imagine they do give a shit—it probably twists their guts to see so little respect for authority.  The media is paid not to give a shit about this kind of protest movement, as opposed to those sponsored by the right-wing Tea Party, which is the kind of protest corporations love.  But I wonder if, in this time of jobless recession, shredded social safety nets and tightened wallets for damn near everyone who’s not filthy rich, this is the kind of protest that the majority just might give a shit about.  If we can spread the word about Occupy Wall Street, it just might take off.  So I’m glad some of us do care.  It could be an inspiration to the rest of us.

The second positive development is a request by Ralph Nader and others to find and field six candidates for President on the left.  They’re not meant to actually challenge Obama in a primary—small chance of that happening—but to create a venue for debates that will poke and prod and maybe even shame the President into tacking to the left.  I’m not convinced that this strategy will work even if the debates take place.  Obama seems pretty solidly conservative-centrist-right to me, even if he doesn’t to every Republican who calls him a Socialist (on what grounds, I’d like to know!).  But there may be some room for change in the guy—he’s smart, after all, and his (in)famous predilection for practical politics may work in our favor if we can convince him that the left is strong enough and numerous enough to deserve to be heard.

These movements and strategies may not accomplish anything, but I have to celebrate the fact that they’re being tried at all.  The audacity of hope, you know.  Funny how even Obama hasn’t made me cynical about hope yet.  So let’s all hope I have cause to write a lot more of these HELL YEAH! posts.  

--Joshua Hendrickson

Sunday, September 18, 2011

DARKNESS FALLS; BUT CAN IT GET UP AGAIN?

NOTE: the following essay was written by Yours Truly nine months ago, in December of 2010, as a research paper for Writing 122. The subject is not political but social, and the hype surrounding the subject has thankfully faded (though it will surely come back when the fourth movie comes out). However, I've decided to publish this here because, in my opinion, the social (that is, the personal) is political, as has been observed by others. Passages by other authors quoted herein are of course their own property and copyright, not mine, and are reprinted here for journalistic purposes.


Teenagers are curious beasts.  In their own vernacular, to say that something “bites” or “sucks” is to paint that thing in negative colors.  By this logic, a vampire, a creature that both bites and sucks, ought to be roundly rejected by their demographic.  Yet the Hottie Du Jour of the moment is a vampire, one Edward Cullen of the popular TWILIGHT saga by Stephenie Meyer.  This is not as contradictory as it sounds, for Edward is a curious beast of a vampire. He is famous for abstaining from both biting and sucking, having sworn off human blood.  In fact, Edward is famous for abstaining, period.  Although his human girlfriend, Bella Swan, is hot to jump his sexy hundred-year-old bones, Edward insists on waiting until they’re wed before deflowering her.

Yes, Edward is the very model of a modern teenage vampire:  vegetarian, Victorian, and virginal.  And that is what is wrong with him:  although it was during the Victorian period that vampires became a part of popular culture, they were a rebellion against that culture’s mores, not a reflection of them.  Worse, since vampirism is a supernatural metaphor for the dangers of sex, a virginal vegetarian is no real vampire at all, just a sexually-repressed hunk with fangs.  Edward is an anomaly, and is recognized as such by other popular purveyors of bloodsucking.  Alan Ball, the creator of the HBO series TRUE BLOOD, says of TWILIGHT, "The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous.  To me, vampires are sex. I don't get a vampire story about abstinence. I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed."

I confess I have not read TWILIGHT, nor will I.  Several thousand pages of romantic fiction aimed at teenage girls is not my cup of blood.  But as a writer of fantasy fiction, as well as a proponent of sexual liberation and a devotee of gothic philosophy,  TWILIGHT is of great concern to me, for its popularity threatens to influence present and future generations, corrupting how they view not just sexuality but the dark side of the human imagination itself.

It is possible that few others share that latter concern of mine, for the dark side of the human imagination is not exactly a subject foremost in the society’s collective mind (although I would argue that it should be, for the sake of our collective well-being).  However, it is certain that many critics are concerned with how TWILIGHT influences youth in the realm of sexual identity.  These critics—nearly all women, and pro-feminist—have identified disturbing trends in TWILIGHT’s characters and storyline, and expressed varying degrees of concern over how these might be welcomed by an immature and undiscerning audience.

Edward is seen by these critics as having the qualities of a gentleman, as the description above illustrates, and if it ended there they might be happy with his characterization.  There is nothing inherently wrong with abstinence as a choice, however overrated it might be by the religious right, and abstinence from murder is downright laudable.  But Edward, who became a vampire during the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, is a moral product of a distinctly misogynist historical era.  Although he has been undead all through the feminist revolutions of the twentieth century, he apparently has never heard of the Suffragette movement, picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan or heard Helen Reddy sing “I Am Woman”; he remains rooted in the world of his pre-vampire youth, with its presumption of masculine superiority and feminine frailty.  These roots bear fruits of abuse, over-protective behavior, and insensitivity.  In a penetrating essay for the Spring/Summer 2010 edition of Studies in the Novel, “Twilight Is Not Good For Maidens,” Anna Silver writes,

When he rescues (Bella), Edward uses language that is more patrimonial than romantic, though clearly, Meyer blurs the two discourses. For example, after rescuing Bella from a group of would-be rapists, he tells her to "prattle about something unimportant until I calm down" (Twilight 169) and then takes her to a restaurant, where he orders her to eat and drink, his voice "low, but full of authority" (Twilight 166). In response to his commands, Bella "sipped at [her] soda obediently" (Twilight 169). Meyer's diction--"prattle," "obediently"-- clearly connotes a power dynamic in which Edward makes important decisions and Bella, though often grumbling and pouting, almost inevitably submits.

Girls, he only looks seventeen.  He’s really your woman-hating great-grandfather.

These are only the traits visible on the surface; dig under Edward’s pallid skin, and much worse is revealed:  “Edward is a controlling dick, a fact that becomes abundantly clear in the leaked pages of Meyer’s first draft of Midnight Sun, a retelling of Twilight from Edward’s perspective,” writes Christine Seifert in her article “Bite Me! (Or Don’t).” “In those pages, available on Meyer’s website, Edward imagines what it would be like to kill Bella. ‘I would not kill her cruelly,’ he thinks to himself. Ever the gentleman, Edward. His icy calculation of how best to kill Bella is horrifying.”

Seifert nails the whole tone of TWILIGHT with the wickedly apt label “abstinence porn.”  In it, the tension of an intense but unconsummated longing is drawn out over three novels, an endless blending of fire and ice that may start out steamy but which, like regular porn, is always in danger of degenerating to a lukewarm puddle.  It is as reactionary as ordinary porn; worse, it is every bit as sexist:  “When it comes to a woman’s virtue, sex, identity, or her existence itself, it’s all in the man’s hands. To be the object of desire, in abstinence porn is not really so far from being the object of desire in actual porn.”

Puritanical prurience is not just an oxymoron; it’s moronic.

However, it just might be what a confused pubescent girl with a head full of both romantic dreams and sexual terror is looking for.  A 2010 study by  Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, and Melissa A. Click of the University of Missouri surveyed more than 600 teen female fans.“We were shocked by the interest in and praise for Twilight's message of abstinence. We thought surely teens would find this message irrelevant and puritanical, especially against the backdrop of the hypersexualized American media landscape in which teen characters typically engage in hookups and other sexually permissive activities.”

Quite the opposite: again and again, the young fans praised TWILIGHT’S message and lauded its characters.  This may not be so surprising.  On the one hand, abstinence-only sex education is all many of these young students have encountered during the last decade of Republican-controlled government.  Also, while they are well aware that their culture is “hypersexualized,” children often find it appealing to rebel against whatever is mainstream … or appears to be.  That this is a reactionary, regressive step backwards rather than a genuinely progressive rebellion that will help to free up human mores is of no concern to them.  They are not looking toward their future; rather, they are focused intensely upon the present.

Unfortunately, these girls may well be absorbing a much more insidious message along with the admonition to keep yourself chaste until marriage:  they may be inclined to adulate or even to mimic the heroine of the TWILIGHT saga.  It’s one thing to yearn for a handsome, dangerous lover like Edward; such yearnings are a dime a dozen in the heart of a teenage girl.  It’s another entirely to yearn to be the kind of girl Edward wants.

Bella, put simply, is a cipher, with few of the traits to be found even in a one-dimensional or “flat” character; she exists to love and be loved—or rescued, or patronized, or impregnated.  She is essentially blank, and it is hard to understand how she ends up appealing to anyone at all, whether her vampire lover, the werewolf boy with a crush on her, the circle of friends she manages to keep even though she ignores them, or the readers of her story.  This is one matter where all the critics agree.  Anna Silver notes that Meyer’s treatment of Bella “ignores individualism in favor of affiliation.”  Jan Czech sums up the feminist judgment that Bella “is submissive to Edward; willing to give up everything, friends and family and life as she knows it, to be with him forever.”  Kim Werker goes further, calling her “a hysterical, confused and confusing character … a doormat … (with) the most impenetrable low self esteem of any teen character I can remember ever encountering ... I ended up hating her as much as I ended up hating Anna Karenina. That’s a lot of loathing.”

There are reasons why Bella is the non-person she is.  Blame the author, first and foremost:  Stephenie Meyer is a conservative Mormon, pursuing a pro-abstinence and pro-motherhood agenda in her fiction, and Bella, by Meyer’s design, is nothing until she is married and a mother.  By her own admission, Meyer has never watched an R-rated movie, which does make one wonder what drew her to the subject of vampirism in the first place.  Such conservatism and repression of the imagination may be laudable to some as personal philosophy, but it is hardly the best recipe for an artist seeking to create fully-realized fiction … as opposed to someone seeking to propagandize to a naïve audience.

But a great deal of the blame must go to the culture at large, and not entirely to the obviously right-wing element therein.  In an article for Caterwaul Quarterly, “The Twilight of Feminism,” Layla Forrest-White explains how the so-called second wave of feminism itself unwittingly helped to create its own backlash:

Instead of rights, the second wave concerned itself with choice … this is illustrated nowhere better than in the rhetoric surrounding the last vestige of popular feminism: abortion.  The ‘feminist’ side of this debate is presented as ‘pro-choice,’ whereas the opposition tags itself ‘pro-life.’ But both forms of rhetorical legerdemain obfuscate the true issue, which must concern how and why women are getting pregnant. Once feminism took this path of choice rather than rights and became synonymous with the sexual liberation movement, choice, as it were, devolved into one choice, and that choice became whether or not to have sex. It is as much the failure of feminism as it is the strength of patriarchy to note that the two options are an equal boon to men. Bound by sheets or walls, a woman is equally beneficial to men in bed or in the home.  The sad legacy of feminism at this moment is that it has not done away with Rebecca West’s doormat/prostitute dichotomy, it has only introduced the illusion of a choice between the two.

Imprisoned by its own linguistics and concerns, feminism has paved its own path to a phenomenon like TWILIGHT, and has possibly even bolstered the saga’s enormous popularity, for it is entirely likely that a young, naïve audience, knowing little of feminism apart from the common wisdom that it has “triumphed,” may interpret the story as a defense of feminist ideas.  In other words, they may take Bella for an ideal of a “strong woman” because that is what they have been led to expect in modern literature.  They may not even have the illusion of a choice.

Time Magazine judged Stephenie Meyer one of the most influential persons of 2008.  One can only hope that her influence is not lasting, and will fade with time, like the popularity of her novels surely will.

On a final note, Meyer’s PG-13 worldview has had its negative influence on the dark side of the human imagination as well—or at least on the public perception of it.  To the world at large, the image of Goth today is the image of Meyer’s romantic duo:  old-fashioned, cheesy, and, above all, safe for today’s youth.  Goth is a TWILIGHT Halloween costume, not the honest embrace of the darkness of the twilight of the human soul.  Vegetarian vampires and tame werewolves are bad enough, but wimpy women are much worse, for the Gothic movement has always been defined by its strong feminist presence.  Real Goth girls do not swoon, do not submit; sex is their weapon as much as it is men’s.  They are death-defiers, not damsels in distress.

Darkness, under the influence of Meyer, may have taken a fall, but the genuine core of Goth will, I trust, prove resistant to the sway of Edward’s hypnotic gaze and never convert to bland Belladom.  Meyer’s viewpoint is ultimately the antithesis of Goth.  It is a fearful retreat into a regressive, paternalized, God-dominated world of safety and security.  It is not, as Goth is, an acknowledgment of the indifference of the universe to human affairs—an acknowledgment that we are truly free.  That is what Goth is all about:  freedom.  For Edward, Bella, and their creator, this wisdom is unpalatable poison.  It is well summed up in a single lyric by Robert Smith, singer and songwriter for The Cure.  It is the first line from “One Hundred Years,” the first song on the classic 1982 record PORNOGRAPHY.  It is also, in this author’s considered opinion, the first great Gothic truth:

It doesn’t matter if we all die.

PAVING THE ROAD TO HELL

NOTE: the following essay was written by Yours Truly almost a year ago, in October of 2010, as a research paper for Writing 122. It was subsequently published in the Rogue Community College student newspaper, The Byline. The subject is out of date and therefore out of the headlines, but the sentiments expressed within seem to me no less timely today.


“Islam is EVIL and everyone who aids and abets Islam is EVIL. Practicing Muslims are EVIL. … The only thing Muslims have ever accomplished is establishing Islam as a VICIOUS WORLDWIDE CRIMINAL SYNDICATE to enslave 22% of the world's population against their cumulative will.”  (Egghead, 8/15&16/2010)  “why should america give our enemies inside privledges ,obama is way wrong to think a mousqe would make new yorkers love the islamic people more or somehow move us forward in tolerance by accepting them as being innocent religious folk wwho just want to worship thier false GOD! there is no allah> there was a mohomad as leader of islamic prophecy however he is reall y dead and is not going to return to rule as is our LORD YESHUA-JESUS THE CHRIST.”  (Gunn, 8/16/2010)
These comments, taken verbatim from Pamela Geller’s popular right-wing blog Atlasshrugs, are not unusual examples of what passes for discourse on the internet today.  Search any current hot-button topic, and one can easily find as much choice hatred as one can stomach.  Prejudice exists everywhere, in all human beings, and vitriol is not limited to one side of the political aisle.  Nor is Islamophobia new to America.  But in recent months, the tenor of the bigotry has changed, and its temperature has increased.  What makes this intensification of hatred new and unusual is its irony, in that its inspiration is founded not in a new attack but an attempt to heal old wounds.
Over the years since the original attacks on September 11th, 2001, there have been numerous calls, chiefly from conservative pundits, for moderate voices in Islam to speak up against the radicals in their faith.  Although many such voices have answered those calls, the mainstream media, which by its nature focuses more intently on the negative than on the positive, has muted those moderate responses even as it cried aloud that no one was answering.  It may be that honest moderate voices were never in fact welcome, for now, when a clear answer has been put forth and augmented with action, what comes back in response is not acceptance and gratitude but rejection and accusations of malice.
The answer and action in question are the proposed Park 51 Islamic Center in New York, NY.  This project, which was greenlighted by the city in August, 2010, will be built on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory, and will sport an auditorium seating 500, a swimming pool, a library, and a small mosque.  The project’s director, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Kuwaiti-born naturalized American citizen, is an Imam in the moderate, mystical branch of Islam known as Sufism.  His stated intention in building the center is to provide “a platform … to strengthen the voice of the moderates … it’s my duty as an American Muslim to stand between you, the American non-Muslim, and the radicals who are trying to kill you.”  (Michaud, 2010)
This would seem a straightforward response to the call for moderate Islam.  Yet both Rauf and his proposed center are under attack.  Rauf himself has been deemed “Radical Rauf” by blogger Pamela Geller (2010), and other conservative pundits have reflexively taken to referring to him as a radical, although there appears to be no evidence linking Rauf to any extremist Muslims or organizations.  (The claim for Rauf’s supposed radicalism is based on comments made by Rauf in 2006 pointing out that Islamic terrorism is in part a response to the terrorism historically practiced by the United States; this observation has been made by many commentators on the left, and is considered treasonous by certain conservatives.)  It would seem that, in the eyes of some on the right, any Muslim who claims to be moderate but who has not allied him or herself with American conservatism (such as former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali) is automatically a liberal, therefore a “radical.”
While the personal attacks on Imam Rauf are limited to the farthest fringe of the right wing, Rauf’s proposed center itself has also come under attack on a broader scale, chiefly for three of its aspects:  its location, its name, and its purpose.  While the center’s purpose would seem clear—to serve as a means of creating interfaith dialogue and strengthening relations between moderate Islam and mainstream American society—there are those who believe that any mosque, no matter its intentions, must be a nefarious thing.  Nonie Darwish, the president of Former Muslims United, has said, “A mosque is not just a place for worship.  It’s a place where war was started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur.  It’s a place where ammunition was stored.”  (Goodstein, 2010)  Darwish’s claims appear to be based upon history, and in that context may well be true—but it is difficult to see how they might apply to an American Islamic Center run by a Sufi Imam.  Also, there are at present approximately 1,900 mosques already existing in the United States, of which apparently 0% serve as al-Qaeda armories.
Park 51 was originally named the Cordoba Center.  “Cordoba” is a commonplace name in Islamic culture, a reference to the Spanish city which in medieval times was the capital of the Islamic empire’s outpost in Europe.  In those days, the height of Islam’s triumph, Cordoba was an egalitarian center of civilization, noted for its nigh-unique tolerance of Christians and Jews.  However, some people consider it a reference to Islamic conquest, and in deference to those criticisms, Imam Rauf changed the name.  It was a small concession, but it demonstrates Rauf’s sensitivity to his critics, and his desire to build bridges rather than burn them.
Unfortunately, the bridge-burners’ greatest criticism of Park 51 concerns its very location, and it is here that their concerns are the most legitimately heartfelt—and, ultimately, unfounded.  Park 51’s site is located two blocks from the World Trade Center, which has earned the Islamic Center the inaccurate moniker “the Ground Zero Mosque.”  Apparently this location is not happenstance but part and parcel of Imam Rauf’s overarching plan for peace:  according to Rauf, building Park 51 near the WTC is “the right thing to do … America needs it and the Muslim world needs it … if 9/11 happens there again, I want to be the first to die.”  (Michaud, 2010)  Rauf’s intentions, however noble, do not seem to stir the 51% of Americans who oppose Park 51 (PewResearch, 2010).  Their emotions are inflamed by the mere proximity of an Islamic Center to the place where nearly 3000 Americans died at the hands of radical Islamists.  This is the reason most often cited for opposing to the center:  it is thought insensitive, inappropriate, and inconsiderate of the victims of 9/11 to build the center so near to Ground Zero.  As Josalyn C. wrote in the comments section at Atlasshrugs, “Yes, they have rights to practice that ‘religion’ and they have rights to build it there but it's indecent and shameful that they even considered doing something like this.”  (Josalyn C., 8/15/2010)
Although this emotion is understandable, it is not universal.  Donna Marsh O’Connor lost her daughter Vanessa, who was pregnant at the time, to the terrorist attacks.  Yet O’Connor, who is a member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, has not joined the chorus of voices raised in offense at the thought of an Islamic Center close to the place where her daughter was killed.  After her coalition endorsed Park 51, O’Connor said, “We're a family who is forever changed, certainly forever scarred, but we're not the victims of 9/11. Our daughter was the victim of 9/11 and we don't want to see our nation fold.”  She acknowledged the hurt emotions inspired by the center’s location, but insisted, “we don’t change fundamentally what our nation is about because it will hurt people … this is what America has always been—a place where people come to escape religious persecution.”  (Bellantoni, 2010)
Which, of course, is the point that those who oppose the center seem to miss.  Even if Josalyn C. is right in calling Imam Rauf “indecent and shameful”—and in spite of his intention to heal the wounds caused by extremists, his choice of location may well legitimately inspire such a reaction—her feelings, honest and valid as they may be, do not matter.  The First Amendment to the United States Constitution promotes freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression; it does not, and cannot, guarantee a right not to be offended, not to have your feelings hurt.  It rightly insists that the plans of Imam Rauf and the words of “Egghead” have an equal right to coexist in America, even if the latter are hateful, ignorant, and divisive, and even if the former is peaceful-minded, well-intentioned … and divisive.
Although the Constitution holds the upper ground, laws and rights may ultimately be weaker than hurt feelings.  It may be that there is a large contingent of the right wing in this country that does not want to be healed of the wounds caused by 9/11.  They call for “moderate Islam” to speak up, but may not actually wish to hear those words, and indeed may only hear them as threats in disguise.  They may (or may not) give lip service to freedom of religion, but in the end they may actively promote fundamentalist Christianity in direct opposition to what they see as an Islamist threat.  The efforts of an Imam Rauf cannot be taken at face value by this contingent; they can only be seen as Jihad brought to our shores.
President Obama, in comments made on August 13, 2010, said unequivocally, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”  (Jackson, 2010)  However, the very next day, the President equivocated:  “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about.”  (Jackson, 2010)
Although most interpretations of those statements judge the President to be waffling, I think it a subtle warning:  Barack Obama is smart enough to know that the “wisdom” here is not a reflection on Imam Rauf’s intentions, but rather on the consequences of building a “mosque” (for that is how its enemies will forever see it, with all of its foreign, negative connotations) so near to Ground Zero.  For it is not difficult, in today’s charged political climate, to imagine some person, their emotions riled and their thoughts deranged by the poisonous idea that “Islam is EVIL,” committing mass murder within or even destroying the “Ground Zero Mosque” in the name of their “LORD YESHUA-JESUS THE CHRIST.”  Imam Rauf’s wish, in the case of 9/11, to “be the first to die” may well come true … but the terrorists who murder him may well not be Islamists.
Everyone knows that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  It is noble and generous of Imam Rauf to want to heal wounds, to protect America from Muslim extremists.  But who will protect Imam Rauf from America?
--Joshua Hendrickson

Sunday, September 11, 2011

IX/XI@X


It didn’t come out of a clear blue sky.

Oh, I know what the weather was like on that Tuesday in New York (or at least I know what the video footage showed—I’ve never been to New York, except for a couple of layovers at JFK).  But every time I hear that line used as a metaphor for the unpredictable nature of the attacks of September 11, 2001, I am reminded of how the ignorance of the American public is conflated with innocence by a self-congratulating, blindly patriotic mainstream media.

I don’t mean that I or anyone else specifically predicted the exact nature and timing of the attacks (although the evidence suggests that our intelligence-gathering organizations could have done so ... or perhaps did, and kept it a secret from most of us).  But on the day of, as I watched the endlessly repeated footage on the giant television in the foyer at the movie theater in Eugene, Oregon, where I then worked, I remember thinking (and probably saying aloud) that I had been expecting something just like this for years.  I also thought that anyone who didn’t expect this simply wasn’t paying attention—or worse, believed that America was an innocent victim.

That’s not to say that the victims of 9/11 deserved to die, or that the policemen and firemen of New York, and the passengers of United 93, weren’t courageous heroes, or that the attacks weren’t horrendous crimes.  I do mean to say that a symbol of global capitalism, though not the human beings working there, was an understandable if not legitimate target.  Also, judged by the standards of war, both the Pentagon and the people working there were a legitimate target.  (In any case, however, the weapons used—passenger jets filled with innocent passengers—were not legitimate means.)  In short, the United States, considered in the abstract, had it coming.  If that is harsh, well, the record shows that America’s foreign policy over the years since World War II has been harsh.  We’ve made a lot of enemies, and while some of that may have been justified, most of it wasn’t.  I don’t think America’s been involved in a “necessary” war since World War II, which is the only time our country—and the world—has faced an existential threat.  But our jut-jawed gunslinging strut has enraged those people whom it hasn’t cowed or seduced.  It has also emboldened the really dangerous regimes—North Korea comes to mind—to engage in shoving matches with us, which threatens the whole world.  9/11 could have been a wakeup call to reexamine our foreign policy.  Under George W. Bush, however, that was never going to happen—in fact, the attacks were used as an excuse to retrench our old attitudes.  That much of the future, I did successfully predict as I watched the towers fall again and again on that giant tv set—and I know I said that out loud.

Barack Obama inherited Bush’s mess, and if he hasn’t exactly redefined our foreign policy in the way I’d like—and in some ways has made it worse—he has modified the attitude a little and introduced some changes in strategy that are certainly welcome after Bush’s go-it-alone approach proved so disastrous.  But still, the mess remains a mess, and the appalling authoritarian government it created (or perhaps only enhanced) continues to erode our civil liberties and make the world an inviting place for terrorists and extremists of all creeds.  The present political system isn’t going to clean up the mess—it’s too useful to the Republicans, and the Democrats are too beholden to the status quo to challenge it.

9/11 had an impact on everyone, even if the common wisdom that it “changed everything” is hyperbole.  It changed my life in that I met my wife-to-be and mother-of-our-daughter-to-be at an anti-war rally on the first anniversary of 9/11.  It also reinforced my atheism, not only because of the fundamentalist Islamists who perpetrated the act, but because of the response of the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed America’s godlessness for the attacks.  On the day of the attacks I did not cry; the impact of it had me angry and pessimistic and afraid—not of more terrorism, but of our country’s response to it, a fear that was more than justified, as it turned out.  It wasn’t until almost two years had passed before I saw video footage of the first plane striking the WTC; I hadn’t even known such footage existed, and I wasn’t expecting it—the sight of it literally brought me to my feet in shock.  That same day, on the same program, I saw, for my first time, the footage of people jumping from the towers.  That brought tears to my eyes; it brought home the horror of that day, making what had been an abstraction a vivid reality.

I am not a 9/11 “Truther.”  I sympathize with the Truthers’ suspicions and with some of their theories, but too many of their speculations are extremely far-fetched.  I definitely think a more thorough investigation is in order, but have no hopes that such will ever come.  And I have no sympathy with those who flat-out deny the mere possibility that certain elements in our government knew the attacks were coming, welcomed them, and were ready to exploit them.  It seems to me that this is exactly what happened.  My only “evidence” for this is the unseemly haste with which the so-called Patriot Act was composed and approved:  obviously this was ready and waiting in the wings for its opportunity.  Did Dubya himself know?  I doubt it—“plausible deniability” applies, and after all every report suggests he was not interested in terrorism before 9/11, and afterward was interested only in linking it to his obsession with Saddam Hussein.  But the Neocons were definitely eager for their “new Pearl Harbor.”  It’s hard for me to believe that there wasn’t some sort of American complicity and involvement at some level—and not one that required a vast conspiracy, either.  Those who deny the possibility of this are just kidding themselves about the ruthlessness of the powerful, kidding themselves that Americans are somehow immune to that kind of evil.

So no, I don’t agree with the Truthers, at least not with their more outrageous claims.  And I have nothing but sympathy for the families and friends of the victims of 9/11.  But as a nation, considered as one in the global scheme (which is the only honest way to consider America—I’ll have no truck with those who believe in American exceptionalism), we really have to admit that we got what was coming to us.  The perpetrators were criminals; but American behavior abroad has also often been criminal.  As in a gang war between murderous thugs, this drive-by-shooting killed innocent bystanders.  Those who say that it is morally worse to target civilians have a point, but nothing excuses careless collateral damage—and I am not convinced that the innocent victims of American violence were not frequently targeted.  States are terrorists, too.  In some ways, they’re worse—it was reprehensible but not cowardly for those Muslim men to kill themselves, but it is both reprehensible and cowardly for a man to operate a predator drone from the safety of great distance.  The saying that a terrorist is a man who has a bomb but not an air force holds true, I’m afraid.  Death is death, wherever it comes from.  Al Qaeda deserves to be hunted down, and although I didn’t celebrate Osama bin Laden’s death, I didn’t shed a tear for the son of a bitch, either.  Neither did I celebrate the Seals who assassinated him, or shed a tear for them when some of them died in combat later.  I cannot ever consider professional murderers to be “the best of the best.”  Not on my planet, they’re not, no matter what “side” they’re on, or what motives they have, or how nice a family they go home to after they’ve washed the blood from their hands.

Ten years ... it’s hard to believe it.  One fourth of my lifetime ago, this happened.  And since then?  The Patriot Act.  Mindless jingoism.  Salt in the wound.  Afghanistan, still going on.  Iraq, still going on.  Torture (and it damned well better be called that—no fucking Orwellian doublespeak like “enhanced interrogation” will be allowed in a humane world).  Unwarranted wiretapping, unconscionable sting operations, greater crackdowns on dissent.  Not to mention deregulation, economic destruction, and the promise of more to come from our Tea Party friends.  The end is not in sight.  And why should it be?  The regressives have got what they wanted all along—perpetual wars for perpetual power.  They are on top, no matter who’s in the White House.  And they will be for the foreseeable future.

Why?  Thom Yorke of Radiohead said it best, in the best political song of the last decade, 2+2=5 from the album HAIL TO THE THIEF:

It’s the Devil’s way now
There is no way out
You can scream you can shout
It is too late now
Because
YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION


Whenever I hear those lines, I begin to weep, for I think of my daughter and the future, or lack of one, that she faces.  She’s autistic.  She may never be able to pay attention.  In her case, this may prove to be a blessing.  But the vast majority of those who are capable of paying attention yet deliberately hit the Ignore button when America’s dark side rears up before them—they are not blessed.  And because of them, none of us are.  In the end, it didn’t matter that some of us were and are paying attention.  It wasn’t enough to prevent the illusion of an unprovoked attack coming out of a clear blue sky.

Today, I am not going to remember 9/11 (at least not any more than I have to).  I’m going to imagine the next one, and hope that when it comes, a few more of us will understand the reasons why, and do something about them.
--Joshua Hendrickson

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Merge Left Today!

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I could quote the entire poem by William Butler Yeats, for all twenty-two lines of THE SECOND COMING still apply to our world, nearly ninety-three years after they were first penned. But those thirteen words seem particularly apt in our time, and they have been during my entire life.

I was born in 1970, a few months before the National Guard murdered four students at Kent State, an event which I believe marks the end of an era when the best possessed both conviction and passionate intensity. There are other notorious events which qualify--you know them; you may even have been there; take your pick--but whenever I see the iconic photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over Jeffrey Miller's corpse, I see the death of hope expressed in her young, anguished face.

I've been politically aware since 1980, when I was ten years old. That was the year I read that classic fable of Machiavellian-realism-for-children, George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. That was also the year of Ronald Reagan's election, a man I despised right from the get-go. I can't credit my parents: Mom was a Republican and Dad was a Democrat, but neither of them were particularly interested in politics, and the subject scarcely ever came up. I no more grew up in a vacuum than anyone else, but I honestly believe I came by my political convictions on my own. Although I have been politically aware for those thirty years, I have never been truly politically active; my energies, then as now, have been chiefly devoted to writing fiction. But the draw of polemic has grown stronger over the years, and I can no longer deny it. I may not be able to change the world, but I damned well am going to say something about it.

During my forty-one years and change on this planet, there have been exactly three Democrats in the White House--which means that the Presidency has been merely conservative, as opposed to blatantly reactionary, for only fifteen of those forty-one years. This has been disheartening, to say the least. Especially since none of them has much risen above the level of conservative. The first of those Democrats, Jimmy Carter, at least made some sincere efforts to improve our national energy policy, but made the critical error of telling Americans what they didn't want to hear; the best that can be said for Carter is that he is by far the best and most useful ex-President we've ever had. Bill Clinton had charm and intelligence (although I at first found him to be smarmy, and he never really grew out of it), and I have to credit him for trying to introduce national health care reform, but he quickly caved in to the Right. It was Clinton as much as Reagan and Bush Sr. who set us down the road we're on--something for which the Republicans, of course, thanked him by impeaching him for utterly meaningless if squalid twaddle. And now Barack Obama, who is the most disappointing President of my lifetime, is shooting his progressive base in the foot and smearing cream pies in our faces. He's done some good, and after eight horrible years of Bush Jr., Obama's manner and intellect are more than a breath of fresh air--he's a whole oxygen tank. But he's still a conservative, a corporatist, and a failure by any reasonable liberal standard. He's also the negative inspiration for the dread Tea Party, which again proves that Republicans can never accept a gift without spitting on the giver.

The Tea Party is what finally inspired me to start blogging about politics. They are "the worst," and they are definitely "full of passionate intensity." I would love to see the Left--call us liberals, or progressives, or socialists, or whatever--build up a head of steam comparable to the one hissing out of the rightwing Teapot these days. Maybe that is a tall order--anger and fiery righteousness seem to be conservative (i.e. reactionary) qualities, while the left is known for its embrace of peace and love and tolerance, not to mention liberal guilt. Well, I am not much of one for guilt, and while I wholly embrace peace and love and tolerance, I also feel pretty damned angry at what the regressive Right has done to this country in my lifetime, especially in the last decade or so. And as for fiery righteousness, what good is a belief without conviction? You'd better believe the Right has it, and in spades. The Left needs it, if we are ever going to get ahead.

That is what this blog is about (from my perspective, anyway--my co-blogger and best friend, Kevin Mergel, will have his own say about what he wants to achieve here). The Left has to get fired up. We are fighting for the future--hell, we're fighting for there to be a future, given that the Right is full of climate change deniers and fundamentalists eager to duke it out once and for all with all the unbelievers and let God pick His chosen people out of the cinders. We may not win this fight. The Right is ruthless, and the Left is not, and in war, those without scruples tend to ride roughshod over those who worry about consequences. We can't change that without changing who we are--the disastrous experiments in totalitarian communism proved that much--but without a more aggressive strategy, we will be doomed to lose.

Some say we've lost already. I think this is close to the truth. The Right has, to a large extent, won the economic and political wars in America. On the other hand, the Left has, to the same (if not even larger) extent, already won the culture wars. Of course, the Right desperately wants to win the culture war, too--and they won't stop trying, because it's the easiest way to energize their political base. By the same token, we progressives must try to win the economic and political war, rather than letting ourselves become co-opted by the Wall Street ethos and the lure of the rightward tug in Washington.

It certainly won't be easy. It's often said that many (though not all) conservatives tend toward a herd mentality, while Will Rogers' quip about not belonging to any organized political party because he was a Democrat, still holds true today. Diversity means each one of us progressives has an agenda all our own, and it is difficult to bring them all together. Like herding cats, they say. Okay. I say, let's try to organize--we've known for decades that this is the best strategy, the route to success. Come together, right now. In addition to my personal rants, I hope to include links to organizations, websites, and movements in an effort to facilitate this convergence of progressive people into a force to be reckoned with. We might even do best to take some of the strategies of the Tea Party to heart--whatever may be said of their goals, they have mostly succeeded in bringing the Republican Party around to their way of thinking. If we work together, we may be able to do the same thing to the Democrats, or to a viable Progressive Party.

There's a lot of smoke on the horizon, and it's hard to see what our destination may be--or if there is one. But we're on the road, and at this point, it may be impossible to slow down. There are potholes and wrecks, oil slicks and road rage in the Right lane. The middle of the road is for yellow stripes and roadkill. But the left lane could be smooth cruising, if we but work to make it so.

Merge Left Today!

--Joshua Hendrickson