24 September 06
Soul Of A Nation
This past week the Senate debated whether to redefine torture as something other than the gentle practices of waterboarding and inducing hypothermia. The fact that we’re having a political debate about torture, that such actions are just not universally condemned by everyone, right and left, is truly astonishing. Something has shifted in this country over a generation or so, a shift that goes far deeper than electoral politics, a shift of spirit and soul.
Spirit and soul. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between these two notions in a way I think is illuminating:
Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury—to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior…Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa...The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
– James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, 1975.
We retreat to little things. Sketching. Gardening. But these are things that create soul, as the Romantics well understood.
24 May 06
A Way of Being in the World
I co-taught a class yesterday on Culturally Inclusive and Non-violent Language as part of the Diversity Awareness Series here at UC Davis (and also the Communications Series).
It’s the third time Karen and I have taught this together, and every time we get a new surprise. It’s very powerful to have a group of people brainstorm a huge list of expressions that are loaded in some way but that are such a part of everyday speech we rarely question them or even, in some cases, know what they meant originally (a good example here is “rule of thumb,” which refers to the girth of a stick with which it used to be permissible to beat one’s wife—if it was thicker than a thumb, presumably a man’s, it was illegal).
To raise our awareness of how our speech affects others and transforms the world is one of the things addressed in a post by Rana over at Frogs and Ravens. She draws the distinction between Political and political. It’s a good post. Please read it.
6 May 06
Torture "Lite"?
Last night we went to hear Amy Goodman of Democracy Now host a panel on Guantánamo. Her guests were Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; James Yee, a muslim former army chaplain who was arrested for espionage after serving at Guantanamo and later released; and Alfred McCoy, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From McCoy we learned that far from being an aberration, the Abu Ghraib photos show that the methods of torture that have been perfected by the United States since 1951 are still being routinely used in the interrogation of prisoners. They consist of three kinds: sensory deprivation (hence the hooding scenes); self-inflicted pain (such as a prisoner being forced to hold his or her arms out for days at a time, crucifixion-style); and exploiting cultural or personal phobias (in the case of muslim prisoners, using dogs, using women for sexual humiliation, and desecrating the Koran would all fall into this category).
Psychological torture has been shown to be by far the hardest to treat. John McCain has said repeatedly he would much rather have been beaten than have to face the mock executions that characterized his time as a POW in Vietnam. It’s also the hardest to prove because it leaves no physical traces.
There have been no new prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2004. Where, then, are they being taken? To secret CIA “black sites” around the world, outside the jurisdiction of any U.S. court, away from cameras and journalists and protesters and politicians.
This isn’t just a Bush-Cheney thing. A treaty signed by Clinton essentially excludes mental torture from the activities the U.S. commits itself to avoiding when questioning prisoners. Howard Dean, president of the Democratic National Congress, admitted there was no “position” by the Democratic Party on Guantánamo or on torture.
I felt so sick about this I couldn’t write about it last night. I still feel sick about it. I knew we had been lied to, of course. But I had no idea that this had been such a routine part of U.S. policy for over 50 years.
I feel sick.
1 May 06
Blog Against Disablism Day
Thanks to Diary of a Goldfish for hosting this.
I had a lot of ideas for what to say for this post… to talk about what it was like suddenly to have an injury that required me to navigate the world on crutches, the instant appreciation for the path that is taken not just for two or three months but a lifetime of a lot of people. About how with this same injury, if I had been born in the sixteenth century, it would have become my own lot for a lifetime.
I wanted to talk about my friend Donna who insists that disabled students, if supported, face the same likelihood of success or failure as other students based on their socioeconomic backgrounds. Their disability is not their limiting factor: it’s our ignorance and stupidity.
I wanted to talk about the first time I ever saw a man ski with only one arm. It was in Spain. He was obviously not Spanish. It was a strong contrast to the message of the signs on the metro reserving seats “para mutilados de guerra.” (Not for anyone with a disability, just one acquired on the winning or losing side of a civil war.)
I wanted to enter into a conversation with Jenny and my own relatives who have worked so hard on this issue.
I’m at the end of a day that began yesterday for Jenny and other antipodeans; most bloggers have already said their bit on this. What can I add?
This, I think: owning up to our own disablism is even more unlikely than owning up to our racism, because it’s so plausibly in all our futures. So I’m thankful for everyone who works on this: to stop discriminatory policies, to advocate for equal access to buildings and public transport services, to design better and more ingenious gadgets that seem trivial until you realize that for someone, it can make the difference between browsing the web—this blog, for instance—or having to ask someone to do it for you.
26 April 06
Blog Against Disablism Day: May 1
Thanks to Chris of Creek Running North for the link to this event. Please join in if you feel so inclined…
I was just at a Code Pink meeting; one of the things we discussed was the fact that a lot of disability attorneys are pushing hard for Debold voter technology for the vision impaired. Natalie says she feels a bit like a traitor to the disabled community in standing up against voter fraud for ALL citizens.
Rock and a hard place: this is why this is an important issue, and why there are no easy answers…
20 March 06
Three Years On
We attended a peace vigil yesterday in Davis marking the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
I have felt increasingly helpless over the course of these years. We were not able to stop the madness before it started; getting out now seems impossible. So many people dead; so many hatreds kindled; so many missing limbs. It’s overwhelming. Hope seems distant, a dream. The thing with bedraggled feathers, shot through, torn.
Yet:
Fadhil Al-Kazily, an Iraqi-born American who lives here in Davis, just last week lost his 81-year-old uncle in Mosul. His uncle was driving to pick up his wife. He was shot in his car by American soldiers.
Onstage with Fadhil was Laurie Loving, a lifetime peace activist whose son enlisted despite her attempts to dissuade him and who is now stationed in Mosul. Her horror is that her son might have been—could easily have been—the one who shot Fadhil’s uncle.
Joining them was Pat Sheehan, father of Casey Sheehan and former husband of Cindy. On St. Patrick’s Day, he said, was when the 1st Cavalry was due to come home. Not Casey. I can’t expect you to keep him in your hearts, he said, but please keep him in your minds. Do not forget. Don’t stop.
They all held hands onstage and said how the administration would like them all to hate each other. No, they said. We will not let that happen. Ever.
Fadhil stressed that occupying troops must leave NOW if there’s any hope of fixing this, and that the only way that could happen was if we all continued to work hard for peace.
May peace become our priority, not an afterthought. May it be something we work for instead of expect to happen on its own. May we not fall to despair. May we reach across divides and work together.
18 February 06
Rumsfeld's Song
I woke up in a fury about Rumsfeld’s strategic communications speech this morning. Better to do art than to seethe, say I, especially if you’re deficient in zen skills. I am submitting this for Illustration Friday’s theme of the week, which is song when I scan this tomorrow on a large-format scanner. Click on the thumbnail for a legible version. This piece is dedicated to all those people who have suffered or died at the hands of this administration’s “communication.”
12 December 05
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
There are more prisoners on death row in California—specifically, in San Quentin, just down the freeway from here—than in any other state. Tookie Williams is scheduled to be executed in three-and-a-half hours, Schwarzenegger having rejected his appeal for clemency.
Granting clemency wouldn’t have meant overturning Williams’ verdict, or letting him go free, or anything like that: it would simply have sent him to a different prison to serve out a life sentence.
Apart from the terrible chance that this man may not have committed the crimes of which he’s accused—and remember, he wasn’t accused of co-founding the Crips, he was accused of murdering four people—I just have to wonder what good executing him will do. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t make anybody safer. It has cost the California taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars to have kept him for 25 years in a maximum security prison designed to hold one-third of its current capacity. The average length of time a death-row inmate has to wait for a lawyer is fifteen years. AVERAGE. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like.
I despair of this, of a culture that can read of this upcoming execution over cornflakes and think nothing of it. It’s a bad night.
4 December 05
Many superb posts in response to Blog Against Racism Day. If you haven’t had a chance to blog about this yet, it’s not too late.
Here’s the most helpful thing I’ve found so far, by Ampersand in Alas (A Blog):
2 December 05
Blog Against Racism Day
... was yesterday, but it wasn’t my turn to blog.
Thanks to Chris Clarke of Creek Running North for getting us going on this. I haven’t had a chance to read the 100 or so blog posts linked to on his entry and comments so far; I hope this is not merely duplicating what twenty other people have already said, but if it is, it means it’s a common experience.
Through an accident of history my skin is white. (Well, okay, pink.) People who share my skin color have a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and power. This is partly an accident of history and partly of our own making. In the United States, being white means having privilege that is CONTINGENT on others not having it. Not having had it historically, not having it now. The rise of this economic superpower would simply not have been possible without slavery.
This is not to say that there are not an awful lot of white people here who are poor and miserable and who will die this winter from cold and malnutrition and a lot of other things that shouldn’t exist in a land with this many resources, but on the whole, being white in the United States means having privilege. Unearned. Unbought. Unperceived.
So: Being white means I can drive a car and not be worried that I’ll be pulled over just because of the color of my skin. I can go in a store and not worry that I’ll be arousing suspicions of security guards. I can apply for a mortgage and be sure that the only thing that might get in my way would be an apparent inability to pay it (though with the housing craziness of the past few years that wouldn’t be much of a barrier either). Being white means I can go where I want and if I get lost I can ask a cop to help without fear. I can do a thousand things I and people who look like me take for granted, every day.
White privilege means I can say things like “anyone can make it in this country” and “why don’t you want to come and live in my nice, white, neighborhood, so we can have a little more diversity” and be completely oblivious to the fact that for people who are not white, just getting out of bed in the morning is a huge ordeal. Dealing with us. With our white world. White privilege is about having the right to continue to be clueless, because after all it’s no skin off our nose.
White privilege is about not noticing that even when well-intentioned, our efforts to help people of other races are patronizing and will not lead to change.
White privilege is about expecting our brothers and sisters of color to explain to us, one more time, the millionth time, why they don’t want our pity or our affirmative action programs or our welfare or our charity. They just want to be treated like people. And the most we can do, the most and the least we can do, is have this conversation.
Not with them. They are sick to death of it, are tired of our good intentions that always somehow leave them where they were. No, with other people who look like us.
Thanks, Chris.
Postscript, Saturday, December 3: It’s not the most we can do, it’s just the least. The most we can do is give up our unearned privilege. We can also speak up when we see a racial slight, a racial injustice, hear a racial joke in a cab. We can demand that our employers treat everyone fairly, even if it’s really hard and costs them money, money that might otherwise make its way into pay raises for us. We can demand a real level playing field, not a cosmetic one.
Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way, has said that the way to level the playing field here in the U.S. would be to have 100% inheritance tax.
Now THAT would be giving up some of our privilege. Not all, but it would be a good start…