Me and the Chairman

"I saw you from your balcony window and you were standing there waving at everybody. It was really great because there was about a billion people there, but when I was waving to you, the way your face was, it was so, the way your face was, it made me feel exactly like we're, it's not that you were just waving to me, but that we were we were waving to each other. It was wonderful. It made me feel happy." --Patti Smith, "Wave" 1979

My living room is done up in Chairman Mao. Before you go inside there's a wall-sized black-and-white machine-woven blanket with his face on it. Inside there are two big posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one showing a Busby-Berkeley-esque line of Chinese athletes behind a perfectly muscled young champion, the other showing a worker, peasant and soldier vowing to defend their border. There's a case full of color statuettes of Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, the Gang of Four, and dancing resistance fighters from a Chinese Red Opera. Across the room is another case full of statuettes of Mao. Mao waving. Mao sitting. Young Mao crossing over the mountains at Anyuan to see the workers. There are busts of Mao made of plastic and plaster and porcelain. There's a Mao telephone (it works!). There's a three-foot tall metal statue of a burly Mao with his hands clasped behind his back. There's a tin wall-hanging of that young Mao with a caption in flowing Tibetan script; there's a beat-up tin picture of Mao in a heavy winter coat standing on the beach. There's a silk wall hanging of Mao in a bathrobe. There's a porcelain plaque of Mao and his one-time heir with the face of the man next to him scratched out. There's a mirror that flips to reveal what looks like Chinese soldiers in drag: garishly made-up performers from another Red Opera. In my closet I have a box full of little red books in Chinese, in English, in Arabic; some of the red-vinyl covers shiny and new some dog-earred and written though, pages clipped or folded down. I have another box full of Mao pins made of plastic and metal and porcelain and bamboo. Mao's face; Mao waving, most shiny red like bicycle reflectors.

Now I know that Mao Zedong was not a nice man. While he lead the revolution in China -- some say brilliantly, some say otherwise -- turning it from a corrupt, disunified and victimized country to a world-class nation, that now, years after his passing rivals the United States for global economic dominance, he did these things wielding not only righteousness but brutality. As he famously said, "a revolution is not a tea party, it is an act of violence." Mao's long march to unquestioned power in China meant not only defeating his enemies on the right but his enemies on the left. In post-revolutionary episodes like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, millions of innocent people suffered or lost their lives at the hands of poor economic policies, anti-intellectualism, and a mass militarized totalitarian hysteria that would have made George Orwell blanche and pale.

So, you ask, is my living room some kind of shrine to a mass murderer? What the hell is wrong with me? Are these my politics, some kind of bizarre post-modernist Maoism? If my friends are too polite, or perhaps too dumbstruck and intimidated, to ask these questions, they're certainly fair ones.

Here's the thing: most people I know, and actually not just Christians, have a cross on their wall. Or a little shrine full of saints and Jesus pictures. From the time the Roman Empire converted to the state religion of Christianity in the fourth century CE until now, how many people have been killed in the name of this cross? The crusades, the Spanish inquisition, the so-called burning times, the hundred years war, the forty years war, the seven years war, the centuries of European colonialism, the conquest and conversion of the great native empires of the Americas and Africa, the conquest and extermination of the nomadic peoples of the Americas and Australia. The symbol invoked by the brutal forces behind the millions of lives taken in these conflicts was that cross. Does that mean all these devout people with crosses on their wall are celebrating centuries of mass murder? My answer to this question and to the questions asked of me are a firm no.

Let me say right off that Mao is not my religion; not somebody I worship. I don't kiss a Mao portrait by the door as I exit, and I don't read quotations from the Red Book as I kneel in reverence before a red-dressed altar. Mao has nothing literal to do with God. But at the same time, I find these images, as well as the stylized propaganda images from the the Chinese cultural revolution oddly inspiring.

It's clear that there was a massive machine behind the Mao personality cult. It suited the Chinese Communist Party to build a virtual religion around Mao. Like the cult built around Stalin by the Soviets or the cult built around Kim Il Sung in North Korea, this went way beyond admiration of one man's achievements or ideas. Mao was transformed into not just a leader, but a kind of god. Let us divorce, for a moment, the cynical motivations behind this machine: let's set aside the mass manipulation, the brainwashing, the rewriting of history, the whitewashing of brutality and misleadership, the insistence that this one cultural standard should crowd out all the others, by force if need be.

Most of the propaganda images of Mao can be divided up into a few archetypal poses. From a few dozen official photographs, a kind of religious iconography is developed and repeated in endless variation and pattern. There's the young Mao looking like Jesus, crossing the mountains to see the class struggle for the first time. There's the resolute young adult Mao, dressed as a resistance fighter, planning ahead for victory from the caves of Yenan. There's man of the people Mao. There's Mao the writer of poetry. There's swimmer Mao wearing his bathrobe (I kid you not) showing he's still got it together in old age. The image I focus on is waving Mao. With this wave Mao transcends all concepts of religious and secular authority: Mao is not the distant stern authority figure, he is the inspiring hero, reflecting and acknowledging with his wave the source of his authority and inspiration. He's not a sequestered ruler, he's that guy who's as happy to see you as you are to see him.

See, here's the thing: the aspiration for people to be free in a political sense comes from the very same place as the aspiration for people to find fulfillment and meaning through spirituality and religion. My contention after a lifetime of activism and non-activism, of a career filled with alternating creativity and stifled resignation, after spiritual exploration that took me to a God-believing place I never thought I would have ended up, is that the fight for a better world is nothing unless it embraces the spiritual needs and aspirations of people who are hungry for hope and meaning; hungry for that sense of awesome wonder and human connection that can be found, among other places, in shared religious experience.

It's so easy to be bitter and angry at politics: There's a lot to be bitter and angry about. But I think one of the reasons our President Obama won the way he did is because he struck a spiritual nerve for that better world. And now that we're all reminded of how the real world actually works the rude awakening is proving to be fearsome.

Some people look at the idealized, cartoonish pictures of Jesus and all they see is a projection of hateful, intolerant bigots desperate to hang on to fragile privilege and hypocritical morality and an impossibly naive vision of reality. Some people look at the idealized, cartoonish pictures of Mao and all they see is a record of tyranny and repression and an impossibly dishonest vision of reality. In truth I can't say that all those things aren't really there.

While my avowedly eccentric taste runs more to iconic Maoist images than Christian ones, knowing everything I know about the harsh backstory reality of all them, they still make me all warm and fuzzy inside. I look at the pictures of Mao waving back at us, or the pictures of determinedly united women and men in Chinese posters, and I pull a sense of hope out of those pictures; a sense of aspirational possibility.

I'm not a Christian because as much as I believe in God the revelations of the Bible and its adherence to Abrahamic tradition just doesn't quite do it for me. That said I own more than one Bible and there are parts of it I love a lot, and I treasure the meaning this book held for so many of my ancestors. I'm not a Maoist because as much as I believe in the power of human beings to win their own liberation and change human destiny for the better, I don't think militarized Leninism is a winning strategy. That said my collection of Maoist icons is one I deeply treasure.

One of my favorite pieces of Mao memorabilia is a small laminated card. It's got that ubiquitous forward-looking Mao headshot that Warhol used; and dangling from it are red silk tassels. Oddly enough it's completely post-Mao; it dates from the 1990s long after the cultural revolution was repudiated by modern Chinese leaders. It was explained to me that this was a charm for a taxi-cab: because Mao had so fearsomely vanquished his enemies, he could now be channelled as a protective spirit for your car. Never having had a car I haven't had the opportunity to find out if it works. But this is kind of my point: art is a power for good. The symbolism of Mao--like the symbolism of Jesus, and despite all of the complicated backstory of both--is for me a reminder that people can change their world; that they can band together in determination; that no matter how desperate times seems to become, there is a spiritual underpinning that offers us hope for a better world.

Anti-American Art: February Is Black History Month

"Strongly support the righteous struggle of black Americans! Oppose racial discrimination!" Chairman Mao made a number of direct statements regarding the unfolding civil rights struggle in the early 1960s: "The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people," said Mao in 1963. That said, it's clear that the Chinese saw the African-American struggle in the context of armed third-world resistance to imperialism: the furious farm-implement wielding revolutionary mob in the background of this mid-1960s Chinese poster is a pretty amusing misinterpretation of reality. Still, as much as the Chinese propagandists relished global anti-Americanism, this was about as close as they ever came to offering a directly subversive message to Americans themselves.

BB guns into plowshares

I found this picture of my father, center, with his older adoptive siblings at their father's in 1940. I'm pretty sure it's the only time he was ever photographed with a gun. Earlier I speculated that playing with violent toys doesn't predict how people will grow up. In my essay on opposing enlisting in the military, I noted that my father was a conscientious objector to the draft.... Then I found this picture which kind of proves my point. Though I don't actually know if these are BB guns or air rifles or what. That's Phillip on the left, my father Peter in the center, and Gretchen on the right. My father would have been visiting his father, since my grandparents divorced long before this, splitting custody of the kids.

Anti-American Art: Pushed Into the Sea

Snagged from the excellent Chineseposters.net, this panoramic Chinese poster seems to need no slogans to explain its gory message: the heroic armies of the Democratic Republic of Korea and the Chinese People's Volunteers push the US Army into the sea, downing bombers, destroying tanks, and inflicting high casualties on the routed GIs. It's a shockingly detailed piece of comic-book-like propaganda, down to the rosy red glow of the victors' cheeks and the sickly palor of the defeated Americans. From the early 1950s.

Anti-American Art: Paper Tigers

"Exterminate the invaders! All reactionaries are paper tigers!" I'm thinking that's Soviet Leader Brezhnev, with reddened nose and heavy eyebrows, joining the equally red-nosed US soldier, as the object of this cartoonishly heroic Chinese soldier's bayonetted attention, in this Chinese poster dating from the early 1970s. Especially after a brief military confrontation with Russia along the remote Usuri River, Chinese propaganda rhetoric began to equate its two superpower enemies.

Of tea parties and things left unsaid

Do you know how racist white people who know better talk about black people? It's almost pathetic to listen to: when they get to the word "black" they pause; their eyes dart blankly left and right. The word itself is uttered in an embarrassed spit of a whisper; the eyes flashing anger and resentment before the sentence is resumed in a normal speaking tone. It's kind of like how straight people who hate gay people, or maybe just don't know any, say the word "homosexual," drawing out those first two syllables with clearer enunciation than they have ever used in their lives to make it a full almost sing-song "HOE MOE sexshuall."

I can't speak for what happens in the South, but in the Northeast and Midwest where I have spent my life, racist white people generally know better than to use the word "ni**er." I've certainly heard it spoken, but usually by the young and angry. Everybody knows the taboo of this word, and if racist white people wish they could use this powerful word they understand, at the very least, that it also has the power to get them into trouble.

Which brings us to the so-called Tea Party movement, which recently held its for-profit convention featuring keynote speaker Sarah Palin. Ariana Huffington keeps saying that the teabaggers represent the canary in a coal mine: that their rebelliousness against Washington's love affair with Wall Street is indicative of a tide of mass American anger. Similarly liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich makes a sad and condemning portrayal of the relationship between politicians and Wall Street in his recent column; Rich talks about the teaparty being populist pawns for demagogues like Palin but seems somehow sympathetic to the concerns of the teaparty ranks. I usually like what these two have to say (reserving judgment, for the moment, on the institutions both of them represent). They've both pointed out that on the one hand the teabaggers criticize government spending and criticize government involvement in healthcare, they have no actual plan because they're deeply caught in contradiction. Let us not forget the infamous "get your government hands off my medicare" protest sign: how many of the baby-boomer teabaggers are now dependent on government hand-outs as they decry government spending?

But I think Rich, Huffington, and the tide of media conventional wisdom are fundamentally missing the mark in their portrayal of the so-called tea party movement. The financial populism of this "movement" is contradictory and without actionable platform because it is actually not really their main agenda. This so-called movement, which somehow materialized out of thin air seconds after the president's inauguration -- having previously had no truck with financial corruption and massive spending under Bush -- is using its financial argument to cover up its real priorities, which everybody knows and which everybody knows are not acceptable in polite society. And that is the deeply offensive and wounding notion to these resentful white people that their president is African-American and that the black, latin, and gay hordes have taken their beloved country away. The tea party's public profile makes no sense because it is a cover for their deeply entrenched racism and bigotry.

While teabaggers may be stupid at times (Who can forget signs like "Get a brain! Morans!" or "Obama! Half breed muslin!"), they're not stupid enough to use the word that they're really all thinking. These resentful white people are not afraid of what they're thinking, they're afraid of getting caught using words that they know are forbidden.

When they call Obama a socialist, a communist, a Hitler, a Muslim, an Indonesian, a Kenyan, they mean he's an outsider, they mean he's not entitled to be President, they mean he's a ni**er. The teabaggers may have a lunatic fringe who believes bizarre conspiracies about who Obama actually is, but they also have a mainstream that tolerates that lunatic fringe. It is the lunatic fringe that is the canary in that coal mine: seeing how far their right-wing argument can be pushed before it is pushed back against.

The teabaggers believe that our economic crisis was brought about by the collusion of Wall Street (Jews) and ACORN (ni**ers) giving mortgages to lazy welfare recipients who then failed, of course, to pay their bills. They don't have a problem with government spending, they have a problem with WHO the government might be spending money on. It's like how the right-wing was interested neither in Africa nor in AIDS until they realized they could get the government to spend millions of dollars on Christian churches spreading Christian-based abstinence advocacy in Africa (and in the US) and call it humanitarian AIDS relief.

The teabaggers think hate crimes legislation and marriage equality are plots to take something away from them. It's actually pretty shocking to read how outraged many fundamentalist religious leaders have been over hate crimes legislation and proposed local anti-bullying rules. They cannot believe their right to demonize gay people, to incite anti-gay hatred, might be taken away from them.


And this is really the problem: the media and political establishment ignore the foundational reality of the teabaggers at their own risk. It's interesting to talk about where the teabaggers come from in terms of our current economic crisis. Fox News and some very well-financed right-wing organizations have created astroturf that is apparently convincing even liberal commentators that it's actually grassroots. But what is grassroots here is the very American nerve of racism and resentment that the teabaggers share, beneath the skin of their somehow acceptably populist fervor.

But it's time to call a spade a spade. The Tea Party movement is a lynch mob in waiting. This is the core of nativist American fascism. Just because they're not running around in white sheets and using the word "ni**er" doesn't mean they're not thinking it. Watch teabaggers interviewed about what they believe. Their faces goes through those same darting contortions as they reach for words they know they can get away with.

This is not a populist movement; it's a racist one. This mad hatter's tea party is prelude to real trouble. Prettify it at your own risk.

Now that's what I call music

FULL SCREEN
The Sounds of VTech / Angel Feat. Dwele

Orchestral hip-hop from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson channelling David Axelrod (the musician not the politician). That, as they say, is the shit.

27, El Corazon

I love this completely unsentimental card from the Mexican Loteria deck: The Heart. It seems fitting for Valentine's Day. It's sort of the gritty truth about love: it's not always that fanciful, symmetrical and ever so hygienic valentine shape. Sometimes it's a messy hunk of meat and it bleeds when pierced.

I've been single for more of my life than not; but having spent the last five years in a relationship I'm reminded how different my life is now. One's priorities and needs and values change completely, at least for me (well, middle-age probably has plenty to do with that also). I didn't feel incomplete when single, it's not like that. But I tell you, love really doesn't suck. Thanks Jesse.

Echoes of a Past Life - Pro Choice Is Pro-Life

Abortion is the cultural wedge issue that does not die. Somehow it has even managed to become one of the issues so far derailing meaningful healthcare reform as conservative lawmakers seek to prevent women from having abortions on the government's tab. I feel very strongly that abortion is, indeed, a woman's right to choose. One of the most worthy charitable organizations is the heroic Planned Parenthood, and I recommend you join me in donating to their work.

Below is a piece I wrote in for Our Pagan Times, the newsletter of New Moon New York, an open Pagan circle, back in 1992. At the time I was editor of this group's newsletter, and as editor I was eager to make the newsletter more than just a networking tool but a forum for discussion. I don't remember exactly what provoked this particular article, but I believe I was surprised to find out that not all the Pagans I met were pro-choice. The piece concludes with citations from a number of sources respected by NeoPagans; all still quite interesting to me. Yes, that's my Pagan pseudonym. Sigh.

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Pro-Choice Is Pro-Life
by Moonchild
from Our Pagan Times, Vol. 2 No. 4, April 9992 (1992)

This year may be a crucial one for women's right to abortion. Abortion was legalized in the United States by the Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v Wade. Now, due largely to the mobilization of Christian fundamentalists, that decision is closer than ever to possible repeal.

How do we as Pagans approach this question? Is there a contradiction between supporting abortion and our recognition that all life is sacred to the Goddess? Is this a subject to be discussed as though we have something to apologize for?

It is my belief that Pagans must support abortion rights, and do what we can to defend and extend Roe v Wade. I believe this not only because the separation of Church and State that Roe v Wade promotes helps our own freedom of religious expression, and not only because it allows women -- and not the state -- to determine the affairs of their own bodies, but because we, as proponents of the sacredness of life, and recognizing the interconnectedness of all life, should accept the termination of pregnancy as a completely natural, moral and acceptable choice for a woman to make.

Certainly abortion is less than perfect. It can be a dangerous, often dehumanizing medical procedure. It is too often a substitute for education and a symptom of blatant irresponsibility. That abortion has become a major method of birth control says volumes about the sorry state of human consciousness about our own relationship to the future of our planet and species. But all that said, it is a method for maintaining life's balance.

Abortion and infanticide (which, despite having witnessed some truly terrible "terrible twos," I do not endorse!) are natural phenomena among other species. We must confront our own "animalness" to accept that, just like animals eating their own young when their food supply becomes incapable of sustaining their survival, we can turn to abortion when the prospects of nurturing a meaningful life for a child are poor.

Indeed we need not feel a contradiction in our "life-affirming" path and a defense of abortion rights.

To contribute to an understanding of this question I conclude with quotes from several important Pagan statements on abortion:

"In a world already bursting with too many bodies, forcing a woman to bear a child under adverse circumstances shows a violent disregard for the sanctity of life and disrespect for the Goddess, women and the environment. True 'right to life' concerns the quality of existence, before and after birth, as well as the health of the overall web of life, already stressed by human over population." (from the Church of All Worlds Encyclical on Reproductive Rights, reproduced in Green Egg 1991)

"But where does it say that every little soul that manages to land in a fertilized egg is entitled to occupancy? Abortion is the prerogative of the Dark Mother; she aborts us monthly; it is called menses. The shadow of motherhood is abortion, which is also our responsibility, making the choice of life and death as much a part of the Goddess as her life-giving good nature. The Fates take into consideration woman's choice when they decide how and when we come into this life. What good is it to be born if you never have an opportunity to thrive, only to suffer?" (from "The Grandmother of Time," by Zsuzsanna E. Budapest, 1989)

"[All religions have a sacrificial nature.] The priests of Christianity..have unvaryingly sacrificed the mother rather than the child.... Artemis, while inspiring respect for animal and vegetative life, permits the hunt, provided we respect the rules and rituals that justify the human in nourishing himself by the sacrifice of animal life. The same reasoning applies to a fetus in most religions pertaining to the Mother Goddess, because it seems self-evident that she who has the power of giving life should also have the power of giving death.... [Regarding an unwanted pregnancy] if one values the integrity of life, one must sacrifice the fetus already marked by the rejection and hostility of those who should receive it with love." (from "Pagan Meditations" by Ginette Paris, 1986)

"The opposite of life is not death, but to become a mechanism. Women forced against their wills or instincts to give birth like breeding machines in the name of 'the sacred fetus,' is a travesty of life... 'Sacred beings' do not pass through breeding machines.... If the mother is not a sacred, autonomous being, then the fetus is neither sacred nor autonomous. If the mother is a sacred, autonomous being, then she makes her own choices about what she brings, or does not bring, to birth. Sacred, holy life is not born from machinery.... We must extricate ourselves from the machinery, which is not truly either life or death, but the absence and the travesty of both." (from "The Great Mother" by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, 1987)

Anti-American Art: No Nukes

In tribute to yesterday's Apocalyptic post, here's a Chinese poster from the 1950s, exhorting an end to nuclear weapons. The steely-jawed Chinese and Soviet women resolutely brandish a banner urging "Peace!" in Russian and Chinese (those are flags in Polish and German in the background). Though not mentioning the US by name, it's pretty clear who is being portrayed as the nuclear menace to peace. I guess the Chinese didn't get nukes til the 1960s and maybe the Soviets hadn't fessed up to having them yet? Anyway by the 1970s the Chinese and Soviets were pointing those missiles at each other.

Apocalypse Then

I just read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." I started it on a subway ride home, and didn't put it down until I finished it. It's pretty bleak post-apocalyptic fiction: though what has happened to make the world so empty and awful is never explained in the short novel, its portrayal of ecological disaster and roving bands of starving cannibals was compelling and horrifying. I haven't seen the movie yet.

But I was reminded how much I used to be obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction. As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s and into my young adulthood I used to read every piece of it I could find.

The cold war was certainly the background to the first half of my life: I remember Reagan's chilling "we begin bombing in five minutes" joke. It just wasn't hard to imagine the missiles and the bombers being sent on their way, and it just wasn't hard to imagine what would happen when they were.

I don't remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1961, but my parents assured me that they had bags packed at the door waiting for the sirens to go off. We no longer had "duck and cover" exercises in my youth, but the air raid siren used to go off every week in Chicago as a test...I think it was Tuesday or Thursday at 10 am? Maybe 4pm. Anyway it was like clockwork.

The Rest Must Die, Red Alert, and Alas, Babylon are prime examples of one sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction: the you are there at the minute it all ends subgenre. Fail Safe and War Day are others. The Rest Must Die is a hoot: it's about New Yorkers trapped in the subways when the nuclear war happens. I remember hilariously dated scene where, in the face of imminent doom, one woman rips open her dress and cries, "aren't there any REAL men left?"

Then there's the "what do we do now" subgenre. Books like Earth Abides, Malevil or Stephen King's more supernatural The Stand are good examples. It seems like the more optimistic of these books tend to man-made disease apocalypses more than the nuclear kind, assuming it's only most of the people who go away. Books like On The Beach don't allow much in the way of silver lining.

The third subgenre is the back-to-the-stone-age epics. I love this cover to Andre Norton's Daybreak 2250 AD. But there's also A Canticle for Liebowitz, Clifford Simak's City, and the Davy series by Edgar Pangborn, which I have lately dusted off to re-read. These are the books where we are literally bombed back to the stone age and society rebuilds: usually slowly and badly.

I wonder if younger people are still haunted by these dark man-made end-times fantasies. It's not impossible to imagine a nuclear exchange between the US or Russia or China, but it sure seems more distant. And even nuclear armed terrorists, well that's a scary thought but it's not quite apocalypse. Disease or ecological catastrophe on the other hand: maybe the whole global warming thing is just the newest twist in mankind's fantasy of its own oblivion?

Anyway, only two years til 2012. Good times ahead!

Why I love the Angry Arab

"I have never chewed qat. But I was thinking: if I had a choice of chewing qat with Thomas Friedman, or chewing my shoes by myself, I would go with the shoe, any day."
--Angry Arab News Service, Feb 10, 2010 referencing the wealthy narcissist and NYT columnist Friedman's recent visit to Yemen

Anti-American Art: Arms NOT Too Short to Box with the USAF

A 1960s Chinese poster expresses solidarity with the Vietnamese people focusing on anti-aircraft defenses. There's something both visceral and cartoonish about the furiously righteous gunner and the flaming, falling planes against the smoky red sky.

Revolution in the Revolution: Nicaragua 1986

When I went to Nicaragua in 1986 Ronald Reagan and his ilk were trying to portray the ruling Sandinistas as the Soviet Union's latest new world dupes. I knew that the FSLN was a natural ally of Cuba's Communist leadership, and I came to find out that Nicaragua was developing economic ties to the socialist bloc to replace the ones severed by the US after the FLSN overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. But the FSLN was not a traditional Communist Party. Not only did it have a long history of factionalism between Marxist and non-Marxist factions, there was actually a whole spectrum of traditional Communist groups completely outside the Sandinista Front. This political spectrum was clearly evident in all the graffiti about town, but the activists behind this graffiti could also be found.

The photo above shows a militant of the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN) preparing for the left's rival May Day rally that year in Managua. The event was much smaller than the official FSLN celebration of this universal socialist holiday, but it brought together hundreds of activists from many of Nicaragua's left-wing parties. I wound up meeting and later interviewing several of them. I found the role of left-wing parties in a left-wing state fascinating, and wanted to find out how they related to Nicaragua's new role as a member of the socialist world while dealing with some of the repressive and undemocratic tendencies of the FSLN itself.

The following is my transcript of the comments of Roberto Guzman Vazquez of the PSN, who I interviewed on 22 July 1986. These were never published anywhere; and while this largely falls in the category of water under the bridge, I found his comments and the story of the Nicaraguan left in general fascinating. I don't remember if I interviewed him in Spanish or English; in any case any error of transcription here is mine.

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"In Nicaragua today ten political parties exist. These ten parties are so many each of the left, right and center. Our party maintains a position of critical support to the revolutionary process. We're neither a part of the FSLN nor the confrontational opposition...We are, however, against those policies that are against the human liberties of citizens. We protest the lack of trade union freedom...

"But we are a party that supports the FSLN in three important policies: the mixed economy, non-alignment, and political pluralism.

"In 1981 at the time of the last congress of the PSN, we defined a politic of alliance in several aspects. In this epic, the necessity of creating a democratic patriotic front; raising the banner of patriotism. On the other hand, as a question of principle, the unity of the Nicaraguan left....Thus through 1983 and '84, the FSLN, PPSC, PSN and PCdeN [Communist Party--ish] were allied in this FPR. With the elections the FPR disappeared. Now we're planning a Democratic and Anti-Imperialist Front...The problems of our country are so big, complex and difficult that our major preoccupation is the creation of unity. It's a problem of all Nicaraguans, not left or right. Forming a Front is a way out for all of us -- against the aggression, for economic growth and peace; national unity. A family living together.

"The MAP [Popular Action Movement, the Maoists--ish] has its own peculiar place in Nicaragua. To us it apears that they don't support the democratic conquests of the Revolution. We must, however, unite all Nicaraguans in the process of solving our problems. In the first place we must deal with the problems of the nation, not the problems of one class. Socialism is not the immediate solution to these problems.

"Certainly our activities have been curbed. Some elements in the FSLN want to attack our work. In the first place we get difficulties in our trade union work. The other principal form is that we have no access to materials for issuing a newspaper. We've gone six months without issuing one. To get materials for printing we need dollars, and we have no access to them. We're petitioning, but printing is very expensive. And there is censorship. There is censorship of our point of view, and the free development of thought. But we don't have anyone in prison. In march two trade union leaders were arested, but only for 15 days.

"We maintain an independent position. After the Front, we're the second force on the left. We have ten to fifteen thousand supporters in the trade unions. We've maintained a flexible position. We try to initiate cooperation on the left. See the unity statement that was in El Nuevo Diario recently.

We don't have relations with the socialist world. With the Triumph of the Revolution, the Front monopolized formal relations. We're an independent Marxist-Leninist party. But it is a struggle to maintain this independence. Nobody gives us money. And we're an open party: we don't believe that socialists are the only spokespeople of truth."

Anti-American Art: Pass the Apples

A singer entertains lonely soldiers far from home; they're crammed into a log cabin dressed for full winter; it's clearly cold as hell outside. A poster of the kids back home hangs on the wall, bringing fond memories. Comraderie and bonhomerie are the words of the hour. Let's pass around a bowl of apples for the troops....wait, that's not a bowl. Yes, these are the "Chinese People's Volunteers" and they're wintering in Korea. Click on the image to see that "bowl" a little closer. A Chinese poster from the early 1950s, in a softer-edged, more Soviet-style of socialist realism than later Cultural Revolution works.

Don't Ask - Don't Tell? No. Don't Enlist!

This week, following President Obama's lead, the US Senate held hearings about repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law that congress enacted under President Clinton. DADT, as it's called, was originally meant to reform anti-gay policies in the military, but in the end became license for a witch-hunt in the armed services resulting in the discharge of thousands of lesbian and gay servicemembers.

It was pretty amazing to hear figures like Admiral Mullen call for the extending of this civil right to lesbians and gays. Even General Colin Powell has now come out for its repeal, and he was instrumental in the passage of the law in the first place. Typically, Republican dinosaurs like John McCain and a host of social conservatives have defended the law, some like war criminal Oliver North with outlandish claims.

It should go without saying that discriminatory laws like DADT should be repealed. That's basic equal rights. But for me, the real question is why would any self-respecting lesbian or gay man want to join the armed forces? Why would anybody want to join the armed forces?

I'm not stupid. I understand that the military is a job with benefits in an era when jobs with benefits are scarce. I wish I had a job with benefits myself. I understand that many people join the military out of a desire to contribute to society, to defend the nation against attack, to defend their families against future danger. I get these things. But I think that the good will that leads some people to join the military is misplaced; the military, by its very nature, bends that good will to its own ends.

I question those who want military careers; and I question those in the gay community who make this civil right greater priority than others our communities also lacks. I question making DADT-repeal higher priority than solving other issues facing us -- as Americans with our trainwreck economy and nightmarish healthcare system. It's one thing to say that DADT repeal might be possible given the turn of the top brass' opinions, or to suggest that government should be able to reform more than one societal crisis at a time, but as for my values, DADT reform ranks very very low.

My father, Peter Horst, was drafted in the 1950s. The Korean war was over; he was not threatened with shipment to some futile overseas war. He refused his draft notice saying that military service was incompatible with his religious beliefs, religious beliefs based on "love" being the highest human calling. When asked what religion he belonged to, he replied that these were his own personal beliefs. A long law suit ensued, which, I believe, went all the way to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. District Court fot Michigan, in acquitting Peter Horst
of the charge of refusal to accept induction into the armed forces, interpreted the statutory definition of religious training and belief to mean "any belief, orthodox, or unorthodox." The court also held that Congress did not intend "that a registrant's claim of exemption—must carry with it any concept of fear of religious sanctions, such as punishment after death or excommunication from the church ..." The court ruled that the appeal board had misinterpreted the meaning of religious training and belief in denying the defendant a CO. classification because his description of the Supreme Being as "God's Love" raised doubts in the minds of the appeal board members that the defendant's claim was based upon belief in a Supreme Being as envisaged by the draft law."

His conscientious objection back in 1957, and his commitment to choosing alternative service (which he did with the American Friends Service Committee in Mexico; my birthplace) makes refusal of military service something I consider a family legacy. I, myself, was luckily born a small handful of years shy of being subjected to the draft for Vietnam.

Vietnam was, however, the backdrop of my childhood. I remember the nightly casualty reports. I remember the footage on nightly TV. I remember the peace marches. And if you think Iraq or Afghanistan is a war, with relatively few American casualties and the civilian victims of American weapons largely kept off camera, Vietnam was a WAR writ large in the media. Blood and death were everywhere in print and TV; and the casualty figures from that war make today's conflicts pale by comparison. As I've written elsewhere in this blog, the best thing about the Vietnam War is the way it ended, with the route of the US forces who didn't belong there in the first place.


Times have changed and the draft is gone. Ironically, being gay -- or claiming to being gay -- was one of the time-honored ways for getting out of being used as involuntary cannon-fodder. Now people join the military more or less voluntarily; economic crises and coercive video-game military recruiting efforts notwithstanding.

But what does it really mean to join the armed forces? The military is the brute force of American foreign policy overseas.
It is the instrument through which the United States forces its will upon the other nations of the world. Its defensive capabilities are secondary to its offensive capabilities: witness the US response to 9/11. All those brave men and women who signed up to defend the US from attack by terrorists were then cynically used as instruments in the utterly unprovoked aggression that was the US attack on Iraq.

Much has been made over the dozens of gay Arabic-trained linguists discharged from Pentagon service. One could look at this as stupidity on the part of the government that could use more Arabic speakers. But I look at this from a different perspective: the utter corruption of wanting to sell one's knowledge of Arabic to the subversion of Arab nations and the subjugation of Arab peoples to the will of US foreign policy; policy which despite some of President Obama's more pacific and diplomatic statements remains fundamentally aggressive.

I recognize there is a cultural gulf here. I know people who are veterans; I know others who are in the reserve. I'm not saying these are bad people. But what I'm trying to say here is that just as we gay people have fought for a transformation in our relationship to society as a whole, so all Americans need to fight for a transformation of American consciousness as a whole.

The big lie here is that military service is a job. That killing people on the orders of a giant machine is a job. That having a "job" like that absolves one of the personal responsibility of holding life-affirming values. American soldiers are brainwashed to crush their own sense of self in subordination to the needs of that armed machine; to enable them to do horrible things to (foreign) people on demand without staining their consciences. This might be sound military thinking, I don't know. But what I do know is that such sound military thinking is antithetical to my values. The lives of Americans in the military are sacrificed daily on an obscene imperialist altar. The troops -- regular people like you and me -- are trained to take the right and duty to decide who among the regular people in front of them -- only a little less like you and me -- might be killed. It doesn't have to be this way.

National service shouldn't be channelled into the military-industrial complex. People who want to defend the ones they love shouldn't be taught to abandon their own moral compasses; shouldn't be made to behave like trained attack dogs.

Why is the military leading relief efforts in earthquake-struck Haiti? Why are people who signed up to guard the US against attack being shipped off to invade other nations? When the US sends its drone aircrafts to spy on and assassinate people across the globe, what right does the US have to execute people -- suspected terrorists or no -- without benefit of judge or jury? If you're the one being attacked, how is sitting in an office building and being attacked by murderous hijackers wielding a jet plane any different than sitting in a shack in Pakistan and being attacked out of the blue by a lethally armed model airplane? Our shared humanity should be our moral compass, and we shouldn't have to set that aside when we want to give something back to our country.

No matter how many gay people are allowed to eventually join the military, it will never be an army of lovers. It's just not its nature. So Ask! Tell! But don't enlist!

(A note on the art: the top picture of soldiers wearing makeup is from the Revolutionary Beijing Opera "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" of Chinese Cultural Revolution fame; the picture of the soldier in a dress is of course Corporal Klinger of the M*A*S*H TV show).

Anti-American Art: Babykillers

This exceptionally gruesome example of the genre dates from the Korean War. General Douglas MacArthur is shown stabbing a Korean mother and her baby with a bloody knife, while an American plane bombs the city behind them. In this era of relative friendship between the US and the China, it's worth remembering that the Korean war of 1950-53 was pretty much a war between our two countries, Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee notwithstanding. Having grown up with the caricatures of evil Chinese communists in old war movies, it's pretty interesting to see that the "other" side was spinning its own tale as well. This is a 1950s Chinese poster I found on the net.

Hope Springs Eternal

Need a good cry? Watch these kids sing Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide."

The dream of the 132 Roman Soldiers

A post on another blog reminded me of this, my favorite part of many many comic books back in the Sixties. The comparatively sad reality of this vivid illustration can be found here.

I loved violent war toys as a child, though mostly of the historical variety more than GI Joe. (I loved those GI-Joe sized Indians and Vikings though....even if they were disappointingly anatomically incomplete.) Yet I grew up to be a pacifist. Letting urban kids play with realistic toy guns seems a little foolish, given cops with itchy trigger fingers, but maybe there's something good to be learned from playing at war. Maybe it gets it out of your system so that when you're a grownup you know it's not a game.

Anti-American Art: Outnumbered

This 1960s Chinese poster about the Vietnamese resistance to the US reminds me of those old cartoons where one character goes chasing another off screen to the right, and then suddenly runs back to the left with the original chasee now joined by a huge multitude chasing the original pursuer. Note the little American soldier hotly pursued by some pissed off heavily armed Vietnamese. Props to these propagandists of old for the gender balance.

Echoes of a Past Life - Maferefun Obatala

I wrote this short poem for my godfather about the Yoruba deity Obatala in 1996, shortly before I was initiated into the religion of Santeria. I was crowned "Olo Obatala Yeku-Yeku" and given the Yoruba name "Baba Adeleke" (My Father's Crown Triumphs). It sat on my jazz site jazzsupreme.com for years; since that site has sadly disappeared into the ether, I wanted to return it to internet life.

I'm not a very good santero, in that I don't participate in very much of the community's life; but I feel profoundly grateful for the sense of peace and balance that the religion has blessed me with; and I'm awed by the presence of Obatala's timeless wisdom and creative energy in my life.

Obatala

With cathode rays of red, green, blue,
miraculously, technologically,
my computer creates being out of electricity
pulling rays of different nothings into something
steered by fingers, tapping, and minds, whirling
and blood, rushing,
driven by irresistible sparks of hidden origin,

Red, green, blue lights; tiny beams of tamed fire
become one light, white light, brilliant,
all one thing suddenly,
shape and pattern revealed in form and shadow

One thing not another,
someplace else no longer,
now made distinct, crystalline:
One thing, one piece, white cloth.
No seam visible, no beginning, nor end,
like magic.

Like everything. Alive.

The Sound of the Spike

The Spike was a gay bar on Eleventh Avenue by the West Side Highway in New York City. Long closed now to make way for the gentrification of far west Chelsea, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was one of my favorite weekend places. Well, "favorite" is perhaps being kind, but I went there a lot. A lot.

The Spike was a classic "S&M" bar, meaning, in this case "Standing and Modelling." It had an ultra-butch veneer, and for varying periods on Saturday nights one of the bar's two rooms was sometimes cordoned off exclusively for guys wearing black leather he-man drag. Its reputation as a leather bar was a little exaggerated, but every surface was painted black and it was certainly full of maculine guys cultivating a harder look than, say, the guys who went to Uncle Charlie's. It was a block south of the old Eagle, a somewhat seedier bar that usually had at least one porn film showing and, depending on the mood of the owners and the legal climate, often had some on-site sexual naughtiness going on.

Starting well after 11pm, as other bars gradually emptied out (and this was after the heydey of the more southerly Village bar scene), the Spike and the Eagle would fill up. Guys would wander back and forth between the two bars, and in warm weather the sidewalks out front were filled with people taking a break from the crowded, charged atmosphere inside. Neither place was particularly large, and at the height of the party about 2 or 3 AM, both places were usually filled to capacity. While these were places you could go with your buddies, these were above all places to go to get laid. There was usually a block-long line of yellow taxis out front waiting to take successful hookups off to "your place or mine."

Both bars usually had live DJs: The DJs at the Eagle spun disco, though there was certainly no dancing going on. The owner of the Spike, Chuck "CT" Thompson was also its main DJ, and his taste was not at all disco. He played mostly rock and rockish pop. He was a African-American guy with a shaved head, built like the proverbial brick shithouse, usually wearing a black leather vest. I don't know if he's still around, but he was a great guy, very friendly. He always recognized me even when the place was super crowded. The Spike had a Sunday afternoon stand-up burger brunch, and with the smaller crowd he was pretty social.

The music he played tended towards songs inviting some kind of cocky fuck-me or suck-my-dick swagger. If I never have the urge to hear a Huey Lewis and the News Song again, the Spike is the responsible party. That being said, the place was pretty reliable as a place to meet guys. When I started going there my um, "social" life definitely improved. Many fond weekends were spent there hanging out with my friend Marc and hunting for fresh meat, er, I mean for available gentlemen. The crowd was bear-friendly and if the kinky leather-bar edge was mostly posturing it meant that everybody knew what you were there for.


Anyway CT started to regularly play this really long super electric guitar jam. It's mostly a long guitar solo, pretty heavy at times, against an unrelenting drumbeat and some noodling synths and a synth bass. Oh it sounds completely dated now; I mean this is gay progressive metal from the late 1980s fer crissakes. But at the time when it came on the soundsystem at the Spike it really seemed to raise the energy of the place. The shrieking guitar seemed to add to an otherworldly air, and all the standing and modelling going on just seemed a little butcher and more focused. Eventually I asked CT what the tune was and it turned out he had recorded it himself. Next time I saw him he gave me an autographed copy of his plainly labelled "Debut EP." The three songs on the "Top Side" including a vocal number that well, let's not say too much about that. But there on "The Bottom Side" was this 14-minute relentless guitar epic called "The Get Away."

Listening to this track now it brings back a lot of memories. In my settled middle-age, five years into a relationship I don't go out to gay bars too often; and never with that "ohmygodIgottagetlaid" hunger and determination of twenty (ouch!) years ago. As dated -- and frankly, outside my general taste -- as it is, it brings back some of that sexually-charged excitement, despite, yes, all the shallowness of that years-ago relentless pursuit of cock.

This post is a special crossposting with my music blog Ile Oxumare. If you want to hear CT's "The Getaway," head over there to find a downloadable link.

Anti-American Art: Swept Away

Here's the cover of a North Vietnamese booklet from the 1960s. I don't have a translation for it; though it's not too hard to guess at its content. It's really a jarringly beautiful photo of a female Vietnamese fighter pulling wreckage from a downed American airplane out of the surf. Such a powerful image with so much implied.

Maoist folk songs

If the idea of instrumental Maoist folk songs from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia floats your freak boat, check out my latest posting on my sister blog Ile Oxumare: "New Song of the Herdsmen: Solos on Traditional Chinese Instruments" from the early 1970s. Among the hit singles, "The People of Yenpien Love Chairman Mao" and "Little Heroes of the Grasslands." Best of all there's a download link.

More Nicaraguan Revolutionary Graffiti

Here are color photos of graffiti from my stay in Nicaragua in 1986. These were shot on slide film with an amazing, now lost, Pentax camera lent to me by my friend David France. All photos are by me.


From Masaya, "Obreros y Campesinos al Poder! Frente Obrero/MAPML" "Workers and Peasants to Power! Workers Front/MAPML" from the Maoist/Hoxhaite Movement for Popular Action Marxist-Leninist and its trade union group. The graffiti defaces other graffiti from the official FSLN women's group AMNLAE.


From Managua, a stencil depicting Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and VI Lenin, with the slogan "Trabajo Disciplina Organizacion Defensa de la Revolucion, "Work, Discipline, Organization (means) Defense of the Revolution." Though unsigned I'm guessing this is from the Communist Party of Nicaragua (PCdeN).


By a railroad track, another stencil from the PCdeN urging support of the Communist candidates in recent elections.


From Masaya, more graffiti left over from the height of the 1978-1979 revolution. "Ante la Guardia Golpista, Insurreccion Sandinista - FSLN GPP, "Before the Reactionary Guard, Sandinista Insurrection." Signed by the "Prolonged People's War" faction of the Sandinista Front, one of the three FSLN factions that united to successfully overthrow the dictator Somoza. The slogan is attacking the armed repression of Somoza's National Guard calling it reactionary (literally "coup-ist") for militarizing the dictatorship, and urging immediate uprising.


The factional struggle writ large: also from Masaya, opposing FSLN factional graffiti also from the 1978-1979 conflict. "Ante la represion militar, la unidad de todo el pueblo. FSLN Proletarica, "Before military repression, the unity of all the people." From the Proletarian faction of the Sandinistas; the implication vis the previous photo, urging political struggle against the dictatorship rather than an armed uprising.

Click on each photo to see it larger; and click on the "graffiti" or "Nicaragua" tag below to see more graffiti from 1986 Nicaragua.

"The Race Card"

This cartoon explains why I loathe this phrase.

Anti-American Art: Higher Math

Another modern North Korean poster: Uncle Sam's decidely effeminate hand whips out the tools of mass destruction, measuring how, exactly, to target Korea with a giant bomb labelled "USA."

Anti-American Art: Among My Souvenirs

Two pages from a full-color 1972 Chinese children's book. It's all in Chinese but it seems to be the story of a Vietnamese boy whose village comes to be occupied by American soldiers. Some of the soldiers get blown up by a mine, and the soldiers torture some of the village residents to try to find out who is responsible. They offer the boy candy and sodapop but he rejects their bribe to the cheers of the village. The pictures don't explain how he comes to be holding the American soldier's helmet as a souvenir. They must have given it to him, right?

Postscript: Miss Gay Matagalpa 2008!

Here's a postscipt to my piece on Nicaragua's gay life in 1986. This is a clip of the "Miss Gay Matagalpa 2008" pageant in Matagalpa, a regional center up in the mountains near Honduras. In 1986 this was a war zone and I was not able to visit there. Apparently, times have changed!

Echoes of a past life: Could it be Satan?

Recently the mayor of Moscow called a planned gay pride march "Satanic" and vowed to stop it. People throwing around the accusation of Satanism has always amused me: it's one of those superstitions that seems imprinted on people of modest faith and fundamentalists alike. Sadly, the accusation ends up causing a great deal of harm as the gullible find a powerful rallying cry to victimize people who might stray from some dominant societal norm.

Here's a piece I wrote (yeah, under a pseudonym) for a New York City pagan newsletter back in 1991. "Our Pagan Times" was the newsletter of New Moon New York, an open circle. I actually edited the monthly newsletter for a year, though this predates that time. New Moon was a great group: it was a good place to meet people at different levels of experience and involvement in Paganism. I learned a lot from those folks. Anyway this short piece has a fairly simplistic conclusion that I would say quite differently today. But the core point that the fundamentalists are displaying extreme hypocrisy is fair enough: it's a safe bet to say more children are abused by crazy fundamentalist parents trying to beat "the devil" out of them than by any so-called actual Satanist. I've done some very slight editing to this piece to fix some poor choices of words; blame any poor choice of ideas on my 1991 self.

Satanic Child Abuse and Intolerance
by Moonchild
from Our Pagan Times, Vol. 1 No. 8, October 1991

A dangerous bunch of fundamentalist Christians have been running around claiming to be "Satanic Cult Survivors." They even held an art show recently in SoHo, and have published a six-page resource entitled "identifying Characteristics of Satanic Cult Survivors." This document consists of long lists of associations that potentially reveal whether one might be a survivor of satanic cults and satanic incest without really remembering actual events. The document is actually hilariously funny, full of side-splitting suggestions such as "Strong reactions to babies' crying [suggests] Memories of hearing babies cry during sacrifices." And "Drink[ing] large quantities of water, soda...gives the impression of washing away the taste of human flesh. Cannibalism is a necessary part of cult rituals...Many survivors become vegetarians."

But this type of ridiculousness and similar efforts on the part of similar folks are not always a laughing matter.

I suppose it should be said here, for the record, yet again, that Witchcraft, Paganism, Wicca, are not Satanism. To be a Satanist, that is, to invert the icons of Christianity, one must first be a Christian. We are not Christians; we are not interested in dualities of good and evil and we are certainly not interested in chanting the Lord's prayer backwards.

Are there Satanists? Sure. They fall into several sometimes overlapping groups. First, there are a handful of creepy individuals fascinated by the dark side of the occult, and fascinated by their own alienation from society. I'm sure you can go to The Magickal Childe [an occult bookstore in NYC--ish] to meet them. But they commit no mass murders, and control no secret strings behind the scenes of society. They choose dark spiritual imagery because it is "forbidden," because it seems to give them power they don't find in reality.

Then there are the heavy metal teens. Pimples, parental alienation, lack of hope for the future, and bad music are enough to drive anyone to Satan! But seriously, they're not serious, and only hurting themselves slightly more than if they took up the J.D. hobbies of the past like smoking in school bathrooms and crashing parties at the gym.

Then there are the mentally unbalanced. This society is a very difficult one to live in. Our big cities, New York especially, are full of too much hostile, negative energy. Insanity and madness are rampant here: they are a product of our self-destructive society. I suspect most of those who think they are the survivors of Satanic cult abuse fall into this category. They've been badly hurt -- by living in an alienating society, and maybe even occasionally by actual incest and abuse -- and need some healing. They have found what appears to them as healing in the delusions of the biggest group of Satanists of all, and the most dangerous.

That group is Christian fundamentalists themselves.

We, as Pagans, know it is possible to manifest reality through focused energy raising and visualization. Now, the fundamentalists have raised tremendous energy and constantly visualize the this image of an evil god called Satan and his vengeful "good" god Jehovah. What are they manifesting?

The increasing racial violence, the threat to abortion rights, the violence against lesbians and gays, the violence to the environment. The rolling back of the social revolution of the '60s and '70s. These are the manifestations of Christian fundamentalism. These hateful, intolerant bigots are, through their religious practices, manifesting the evil that they cleaim to be crusading against. And mind you, they turn around and claim that we Pagans are the same as Satanists.

Goddess bless, we know the world as a diferent place than they do. We have a lot of healing to do.

The savagery of white people

Apropos of the opinion of current American pundits on Haiti and the dark destiny these enlightened thinkers suggest it has brought on itself, I found this short book review from the New York Times of a mere 100 years ago:

"While the negro of our Southern States has been exploited almost ad nauseum in story and in song, his brother of the West Indian Islands awaits an interpreter. In 'The Story of Quamin' Mrs. May Harvey Drummond essays this office, furnishing an interesting explanatory preface to the nine tales which make up her volume. There is internal evidence that she is accurate in the presentation of her subject, but she lacks the art that made Uncle Remus take instant and strong hold even upon those to whom his race is a sealed book....the closing paragraph of her preface furnishes, however, food for thought: 'As a rule, the Jamaican negroes are much better behaved than their brethren in the United States, and outrages such as lynching and burning at the stake are unheard of in Jamaica for the reason that the crimes leading to these methods of punshment never occur in the British West Indies: in fact the negroes of these islands know that the British law recgnizes no difference between the Gorvernor himself and the humblest black man, and this knowledge makes them not only law-abiding citizens, but loyal subjects of the British Crown." (September 3, 1911)

So David Brooks is in grand tradition in his twisted racist logic.

21, La Mano

I love the Mexican "Loteria" cards. It's kind of a bingo game played with cards that look like a simplified modern tarot deck. The images are archetypically powerful to me. Funny to imagine a bingo game where the winner wins cosmic fortune. I wonder what it would be like to play poker with tarot cards?

Which side are you on?

Blogger Transracial crucifies the current misleaders of the gay community in a scathing essay in the aftermath of the Republican senate win in Massachusetts:

"That Brown won should have come of little surprise to these LGBT “leaders” or their devoted fan base. After all, Spaulding, Queerty, Mixner and Co. practically cheer-led the former Cosmo-hunk to this critical triumph. Having officially turned on their president, these netrooters have conceded the greater good for their own shortsighted image-inflating. Well aware of the monumental consequences of a Republican win, Gay-stream media nevertheless continued their Dem-dissing and Obama-bashing with little concern for its election-day implications....The sobering truth is that the real enemies of LGBT Americans is actually their useless leadership — if they may be called that. Their uselessness is as vast as it is dangerous: Devoid of any real and realistic political platform. Corrupted by an unfortunate (and unprecedented) conflation of technology and ideology. Desperate in their embrace of short-term allies with little concern for long-term benefit (Cindy McCain, Ted Olsen — come on!). Unrepentantly racist and race-bating on the White side; complicit, silent and homo Tom-like on the Black. Steeped in anger whilst mired by impotence. And shamelessly borrowing from earlier civil rights movements with zero respect or understanding of what they were truly about."

The whole essay is thought-provoking, especially as we confront a revitalized right wing. This is not, ultimately, about Obama, it's about the war between progress and reaction in this country: the outcome of which is far from foretold. While I have pretty serious disagreements with much of this guy's blog, I give him credit for this challenging critique.

How to peel a squirrel

From Irma Rombauer's original "Joy of Cooking" cookbook. "Gray squirrels are the preferred ones; red squirrels are small and quite gamey in flavor. There are, proverbially, many ways to skin a squirrel, but some hunters claim the following one is the quickest and cleanest. It needs a sharp knife...Season the gravy with walnut catsup and serve with polenta."

"We send doctors, not soldiers!" --Fidel Castro

Clarity from Fidel Castro about humanitarian relief in Haiti:

"Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks...Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world...Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad...In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops...Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, who takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion...We send doctors, not soldiers!"

Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2010

I don't know their names but I know what happened to them

I visited Berlin in 1994, where I took these photos. In a picturesque suburb is the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, operated by the Nazis from the 1930s until its liberation shortly before the war's end in 1945. Sachsenhausen was a small camp: It held high-profile political prisoners like German Communist leader Ernest Thallmann and other members of the opposition, as well as random other people criminalized by the Nazi regime, including many many gay people. There were many executions there, and deaths by starvation, overwork and cruelty; the majority of inmates there were murdered by a forced evacuation out of the camp in advance of the approaching Soviet Red Army. Which is to say unlike the camps further east, it was not really an extermination factory, per se, just an unspeakably monstrous cog in the machine of Nazi repression.


"Killed and Silenced, the homosexual victims of Nazi persecution" reads this memorial plaque.


It was a beautiful late autumn day when I went there: the air was damp and thick with the smell of rotting leaves and woodsmoke. The once electrified barbed-wire fences still standing testament and giving a lie to a chilly, tranquil suburban afternoon.

It's good to see such places where awful things happened. The evil of these places is not announced like Mt. Doom in "The Lord of the Rings": Sachsenhausen is not surrounded by lava pits, flames and flying monsters but by the same mundane residential neighborhood that surrounded it only 65 years ago when some very bad regular people were in charge and some other regular people looked the other way.

I know this is all very Godwin's law of me, but it behooves us to ponder how these terrible things happened before. The freedom and relative legal equality enjoyed by gay people today in Europe and America owes a debt to those pink-triangle-wearing heroes who suffered under the Nazis. The teabagger lynch mobs in today's America who puff themselves up in defense of "traditional marriage" and in opposition to the extension of certain civil rights to gay citizens are reaching into the same arsenal of hatreds as those who have been defeated before. Let us resolve to defeat them again before they're telling us once more that "Work makes you free."

A little bit of (un)friendly advice

From the Chinese magazine "Evergreen" August 1965.

"The [Korean and Vietnamese people] have proved the fact that the U.S. is merely a paper tiger, mighty in appearance but feeble in reality, and which bullies the weak and fears the strong. Such a paper tiger can certainly be defeated.... We must hate, despise and look down upon U.S. imperialim still further."