Nostalgia

A friend has accused me of being too nostalgic lately. Looking for art to scan for this blog I ran across this idyllic photo of me romping in the surf with my grandma in California in the mid-1960s. So I guess I must plead guilty!

Grandma was Dorothy Scott Horst Holden; she was married to my grandfather for only a few years in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and then remarried in the 1980s. She passed on in the early 1990s.

The Savagery of White People, continued

Last month's post on apocalyptic fiction got me interested in re-reading some of these chestnuts. I got to "Alas Babylon," Pat Frank's 1959 novel of a (pre-Disneyworld) central Floridian community surviving a US-Soviet nuclear conflict. Frank seems to think of himself as a bit of a liberal, including the family of the African-American help in the core story of neighboring households banding together to survive. Then there's this pre-attack exchange between neighbors:

Bill locked his hands behind his back. "I can't guarantee it, of course...[Mr. Offenhaus] says the only real danger we face is being overrun by people swarming out of Orlando and Tampa. He doesn't even think there's much chance of that. Fort Repose isn't on any main highway. But he does say we'll have to watch out for the dinges. Keep 'em under control."
"Please, Bill!" Lavinia said. "Say darkies!"
"Darkies, hell! The dinges are liable to panic and start looting. Oh, the local niggers, like Daisy, our cook and Missouri, the cleaning woman, may be all right. Mr. Offenhaus was talking about the migrant labor, orange pickers and so forth....Mr. Offenhaus strikes me as a pretty solid businessman."

So there you have it, a world where "darkies" is the polite word. I say blow it all to hell. Finishing this book I really wished a nuke had landed square on them and cut the novel short then and there.

Anti-American Art: Armed Arm in Armed Arm

This Chinese poster, ca. early 1960s, calls for the "Eradication" of US imperialism from all the countries it has attacked, bullied or invaded. In an uncharacteristically expressionistic style this poster returns to the favorite theme of international unity. Growing out of the Bandung Conference of 1955, Chinese foreign policy tried to suggest that international non-alignment was akin to anti-imperialism, leading to some unsavory international alliances between Chinese communists and local nationalists. Anyway Chinese propaganda on the theme did a valiant job of portraying multi-national, pan-gender, multi-class crowds of righteous revolutionaries. The crowds are usually full or archetypically distinct subjects: not just guerrillas and armed workers but, on far left, a determined older black woman in a pink housedress and on right, a younger white woman in a blue dress.

Claudia Acuña Sings Victor Jara

One of my favorite recent albums is Chilean jazz singer Claudia Acuña's album of jazzed up South American standards "En Este Momento." She sings a number of songs by the late lamented Victor Jara, among others, including "Cigarrito," a version of which is embedded above. She also sings "Te Recuerdo Amanda" by Jara; both songs are heartbreaking.

Here's Victor Jara's original:



Jara, of course, was the revolutionary Chilean singer brutally murdered by Pinochet, Nixon and Kissinger in 1973.

Anti-American Art: Uncle Sam Comes to a Bad End

"US Forces, Get Out of South Korea!" shouts this Chinese poster ca. early 1960s. Priceless here is the red-nosed caricature of Uncle Sam strung up from a pole. Poor poor Uncle Sam. This poster is probably referencing the April 1960 Revolution in South Korea, which overthrew the corrupt pro-US president Syngman Rhee; briefly establishing a democracy before the pro-US military overthrew the republic the following year. The North Koreans were quick to suggest that that uprising in South Korea was a call for reunification under communist rule; not at all actually clear. This is another one from Chineseposters.net.

Echoes of a Past Life - Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

I wrote this little blur of Pagan poetry for the occasion of Stonewall 25, the 1994 celebration of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots; the beginning of gay pride. It appeared unsigned on a Queer Pagans flyer. (The photo is by me: a detail of a tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, Czech Republic).

-----

We weren't then who we are now, nor then, did we know who we would come to be.
Imagining, once, we almost dreamed, and then forgot, the possibility of becoming who tomorrow we must discover in our bathroom mirrors,
and then, pretending, seeing no longer visions of unfolding design,
nor dust now remolded into plastic imitation,
but forging anew, like steel from iron,
like earthy coal from unaffordable diamonds,
like a ride on the subway from a pillow-tossed morning dream,
the stain on our hands, the dirt under our fingernails,
all proving gloriously our miraculous aliveness, and the inevitable perfection of Her world,
and the spiral that appears before our feet, like a precipice, yes,
but like a memory too,
and so we dance together, now, us,
in this place, here, who we are,
feeling each other's warm moving blood through thin membranes of palm and seeing all as it should be,
perfect and infinite.
No, not yesterday, today, now, the way to tomorrow unfolding as we walk.

Anti-American Art: Rock, Paper, Scissors?

"Revisionists are paper tigers," the subject of an extended quote from Mao on this brightly colored cultural revolution era Chinese poster from 1968. You don't have to read Chinese to get his point: Viet-Cong revolutionaries are shown amidst the wreckage of US air craft; African and Latin American revolutionaries are shown amidst other metallic detritus of war. The message is clearly that just because the odds look bad doesn't mean the victors of a conflict are foretold. By "revisionists" Mao probably meant the Soviets: he's basically saying if the South Vietnamese can fight off a US attack, so the Chinese can fight off a Russian one.

And now a few words of advice for Hamid Karzai, US puppet ruler in Afghanistan

Ngo Dinh Diem

not to mention

Syngman Rhee
Nguyen Van Thieu
Anastasio Somoza
Ferdinand Marcos
Park Chung-Hee

or perhaps

Mohammed Daoud Khan
Nur Mohammed Taraki
Hafizullah Amin
Babrak Karmal
Najibullah

that is all.

Anti-American Art: Tiny Tiny Enemies

Today a special double feature. Look closer at these 1950s Chinese health posters (click to enlarge). In the top poster, a resolute mother is determined to defend her children....from a US bomb full of disease-bearing bugs. In the second, vaccination is urged as protection from the creepy Westerner who fills up a bomb with disease-laden mosquitos, flies and rats. When it comes to paranoia about germ warfare, I'm not one to say never. Given the reputed intentional distribution of smallpox-ridden blankets to Native Americans by United States settlers, germ warfare before the term was even invented, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that cold war scientists cooked up ways to distribute contagion to the "Reds." On the other hand, paranoia is quite a tool for keeping people on your own side. I wonder what the truth was behind these posters.

I found these scans on the amazing CultureGems gallery site.

Echoes of a Past Life - Holes & Poles

The argument by right-wing fundamentalists -- and some not so right-wing ones -- that marriage should be the exclusive provenance of heterosexuals because of the fruitful nature of the one man + one woman pairing reminded me of this polemic I wrote back in my Pagan days. Pagans, I suppose that means Wiccans particularly, celebrate the holiday of Beltane on May Day with a enjoyably pastoral frolic in an open field: a tall pole, fastened with long colored ribbons, is implanted in the ground. Participants are lined up boy-girl-boy-girl in a circle around the pole, and holding the ends of the ribbons dance around it in a circular, weaving pattern, winding the ribbons down the length of the pole in an interlocking lattice and raising a whole lot of energy. It's enjoyable but insufferably metaphoric for the literal minded, and it becomes one of those unbearably Freudian exercises that my queer Pagan friends were always trying to figure out how to reclaim in a less overtly heterosexual manner.

It turns out that even though Paganism may seem like a left-of-center religion, that's not always the case. But as straight Pagans might find divine validation in this celebration of heterosexual union just as straight Christians find divine validation in Adam and Eve, the untidy presence of Adam and Steve seems to crash the party and suddenly the metaphor isn't so perfect. The response of the intolerant is to insist that everybody fall in line and end the discussion, casting out and condemning the parts of the equation that don't fit; hopefully the response of the rest of us is to check our assumptions and expand our understanding of the complexity of the human experience.

In retrospect I'm left asking a fundamental question about my argument: is fertility only the product of difference? I'm not sure I've gone far enough here in questioning that dualistic assumption. Anyway, here's the original article. It's another piece from Our Pagan Times, the newsletter of New York's open Pagan circle New Moon, and that's my sorry pseudonym.

-----

Holes, Poles & The God/dess
by Moonchild
from Our Pagan Times, Vol. 2 No 6 (#16), June 9992 [1992]

Last month in OPT, Beth Goldstein's article "Beltane and You: An Engendered Approach," examined and defended one form of traditional approach to celebrating Beltane with a May pole. In addressing the problem that this ritual might entail for non-heterosexual participants, the article posited that sex is one thing, beautiful in its diverse possibilities, and fertility--reproduction--is another, beautiful in its unique heterosexuality. In essence, that the heterosexual imagery of such a Wiccan maypole shouldn't prevent those who are not heterosexual from fully participating in and appreciating the meaning of such a ritual done in the "traditional" manner.

It is my opinion--and I recognize this is an opinion not held by all homosexuals--that the maypole ritual as practiced by much of the Wiccan community is a limiting view of sexuality and fertility; and that the Freudian excesses of such a maypole ritual are not only potentially heterosexist but deforming to the understanding of a profound cosmic truth.

I am an exclusively homosexual man. Although in part this has to do with what I like to do in bed, it far more has something to do with who I am. What makes me different from straight people is not only--repeat not only--that I like to rub genitals and mucous membranes in different combination than straight people, but a profound interpretation of my place in the cosmic picture. Simply put, the Goddess didn't breath this life into me to enable me to make babies. Sure, my sperm could presumably help make babies as well as any man's, and certainly there are many gay people who do parent children. But if we accept that the Goddess is immanent in all life, and that the key to The Mystery is within us, and my life is not about reproduction of babies, where does that leave me, and my kind, on Beltane? Certainly not celebrating someone else's potentials.

Beth's article defines the realm of sexuality as "Heterosexuality Homosexuality, Bisexuality, Autoeroticism and Psychodrama," and the realm of fertility and reproduction as the Sacred Fucking-for-Pregnancy of Male and Female. Yet for me, homosexuality is not merely a question of what one likes to do (or not do) with penises and vaginas, and certainly not the equivalent of masturbation or psychodrama (phone sex?). Perhaps most important of all, it is certainly not a choice, though the decision to express it may well be one. It is, rather, a life-shaping force.

Beth says that regardless of sexuality men and women can and should be able to take "traditional" roles on Beltane with no internal contradictions. I say that these "traditional" roles are, in fact, potentially insulting to lesbians and gays, and the product of a giant pole-in-hole metaphor run amok.

Fertility exists at the point of balance between the Divine Male and Female, between the light and the dark, the earth and the sky, the cosmic force and form. This fertility exists on all realms and planes from the merest physical reproduction to the sweep of the winds and brilliance of lightning to the magical mental spark that creates symphonies. The ability to create is the miraculous interplay of difference. The physical replication of bodies by the interplay of male and female is only one of billion fruits of this fertile possibility. With us, too, lies the ability to turn the inner differences all of us possess--which sometimes manifest as the inner maleness and femaleness--into a fertile dance of explosive power and creativity. What this means is that to choose, as a symbol, the particular miracle of heterosexual reproduction is to make, in effect, a political choice. And to make this choice is to potentially exclude others whose choices are shaped by different realities.

It may be that for certain desired effect such a choice is made. That is not a problem, if the making of that choices is stated. The problem arises when we begin to make that choice for others. Should we decided that Beltane celebrates strictly physical reproduction then our celebration needs to speak to each participant in a way that fills her or him with the Divine. The Freudian pole/hole thing of many modern Wiccans just doesn't work for me.

When we deal with each other as Pagan brothers and sisters in this grand and gorgeously motley brood, it is incumbent upon us to speak clearly of all possibilities. Those of us who are blessed with heterosexuality will find our gifts and use them, and sometimes to the exclusion of homosexuals. The same is true of those of us blessed with homosexuality, or the shades in between. The Goddess blesses us with a divine ability to mold our Pagan religious practices to be true to our own hearts, and this is indeed the duty of us all. But there are times and places to come together and find the common ground, and hopefully that is the space New Moon aspires to.

A snow day in Brooklyn

A foot of snow. More than the "snowmageddon" last time.

You can't keep a good website down: Jazz Supreme Returns!

I'm happy to announce that thanks to the enthusiasm of Kozmigroov ace freeform, Jazzsupreme has a new home. After noticing that Jazz Supreme had gone dark, freeform tracked me down and offered to host the site as part of his collection of Kozmigroov websites. New url: http://www.freeform.org/music/jazzsupreme, but for now same old out-of-date content the web seems to have grown to love. I've given freeform license to update the content as he sees fit; meanwhile it's up for public viewing. I can't thank freeform enough; be sure to check out his other pages for music fans like Kozmigroov Konnection, an index of comic jazz artists and album reviews, and The Guide to Indian Jazz Fusion. I met freeform through the old Kozmigroov mailing list in the 1990s, and he's been great at carrying the torch. Thanks, f! Peace and grooves!

Anti-American Art: Bayonets vs. Nukes

More love from North Korea. Wrapping himself in the flag won't protect this nuke-bearing American soldier from the giant Korean bayonet. As near as I can tell the background pictures show the fate of US trespassers on Korean turf in years past. I'm thinking that's the burning of the ship General Sherman in the 1860s at the top, through the Korean war and various incidents in the 1960s and 70s.

Stop U.S. Threats Against Iran, redux

I've said this before, and I am saddened to have to say it again: Nuclear weapons are evil. So are warplanes, machine guns, artillery, missiles, grenade launchers, mines. But as long as Israel and the United States have nuclear weapons pointed against Iran, as long as American naval and air forces encircle that country, as long as American politicians (yesterday it was Bush and Condi Rice, today it is Obama and Hillary Clinton) threaten Iran, Iran has as much a right to these machines of war as the U.S. does.

I don't like the Iranian government; the Islamic Revolution hijacked and derailed the real revolution against the Shah back in 1979. But dealing with the Iranian government is the work of the Iranian people. I don't like nuclear power, either; but until irrational capitalism with its profit motive gives way to more rational systems that can explore safer technologies like solar power, Iran has as much right to nuclear power as anyone else.

The saber ratting against Iran needs to stop. And the media need to be reminded that it's not Iran starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it's Iran responding defensively to the one that the Israelis have long already begun.

War Is Peace? Doubleplusungood!

A fascinating quote from Robert Gates, the Bush Secretary of Defense held over into the Obama administration. Gates was speaking to NATO officials, and his reference is in part to the recent fall of the Dutch government over troops in Afghanistan:

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”

Apparently completely unironically the New York Times headlined this story "Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace." If only more "large swaths" of the public would be averse to military force then perhaps Mr. Gates could begin his obviously long-awaited retirement.

Peace, the absence of war; what a concept!

Anti-American Art: People vs. Jets

Here's another sheet of Libyan stamps marking an anniversary of the 1986 American air raid on Tripoli. In this one, Leader Qaddafi himself seems to be engaged in personal combat with the attacking F-16 jets. The illustrator of these stamps designed many, many Libyan stamps in the 1980s and 1990s in this same action comic-book style depicting scenes from Libya's truly heroic resistance to Italian colonialism in the early twentieth century as well as more propagandistic stamps extolling Qaddafi's leadership.

Do Ask - Don't Kill

My friend David tipped me to this blog article with an awesome photo from San Francisco: "I wish our queer organizations worked to end war instead of for my right to be out while I kill or am killed in one...It may be a civil right to be in the military but it's a human right to be free from illegal wars." Awesome sentiment. Thanks to "Democracy Sometimes" for this photo.

Check out my own opinion on DADT repeal here.

How Sandinistas Remembered Their Martyrs

The struggle against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was long and bloody. The FSLN itself -- the Sandinista Front for National Liberation -- was formed in the early 1960s by a number of young Nicaraguans from varying backgrounds. Only one of the original founders survived to see the revolution's success in 1979. Nicaragua is not a huge country, and when I stayed there for the summer of 1986, it was clear that a kind of intimacy remained with all those who had fallen at the hands of the dictatorship's US-backed military. There were lots of wall murals and posters memorializing the FSLN's martyrs, and even small monuments marking the spot where some hero or heroine had fallen. Here's another batch of photos I took, showing some of these memorials. Click the label "photography" below for more of my Nicaragua photos. Click on the photos themselves to see them larger.


Rigoberto Lopez Perez was the assassin of Anastasio Somoza (father of the dictator the FSLN finally overthrew) in the 1950s. He was a poet and composer, and shot the dictator after infiltrating a party; he was killed in the attack. This wall stencil in Managua reads, "Con el heroismo de Rigoberto, Seguimos en Frente con el Frente" or "With the heroism of Rigoberto, We Stay Ahead with the Front"


This Managua mural marks the "Heroes and Martyrs of the William Diaz Neighborhood" especially Carlos Calero: "Companero Carlos Calero Presente Presente": "Comrade Carlos Calero Still Present."


The Nicaraguan revolution captured the imagination of young people in the 1970s: many of those who were gunned down by the forces of Somoza were teens. I don't know the name of this young girl heroine, whose small shrine was tucked into a Managua street corner.


A billboard set up for the anniversary of the revolution celebrations reads "Nicaragua Victoriosa: Ni Se Rinde, Ni Se Vende" "Victorious Nicaragua: Neither For Sale or Surrender." It shows Rigoberto Lopez and FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca sandwiching Sandinista namesake Augusto Cesar Sandino, the revolutionary who tried to drive out US forces in the early 1930s.


This mural in Granada honors fallen FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca Amador. Fonseca was the main theoretician of the FSLN, and was killed in the guerrilla phase of the revolution in 1976. The mural reads, "We're trying not to simply change the men in power, but to change the system; for the defeat the exploiting classes and the victory of the exploited classes."

Malcolm X, 1925-1965

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz, better known as Malcolm X, was assassinated 45 years ago today. It's never been conclusively proved who was behind his assassination, whether the government, criminals, or the Muslim faction led by Louis Farrakhan. The world lost a great leader that day; a man of uncompromising principles, and devotion to freedom and justice. Malcolm X's message was never what the white liberal allies of the civil rights movement of the 1960s wanted to hear. He stressed self-defense, and the need for African-Americans to do the right thing for themselves. He vigorously opposed the hypocrisy of US foreign policy in the decolonizing third world. Toward the end of his life he set aside some of his negative views of white people in favor of a spiritually unifying vision inspired by his pilgrimage to Mecca without ever compromising his condemnation of the institutionalized racism so fundamental to American society. Here's an excerpt from his speech of Feb 14, 1965, the week before he was murdered.

Now, the press, behind something like that, they call us racist and people who are "violent in reverse." This is how they psycho you. They make you think that if you try to stop the Klan from lynching you, you're practicing "violence in reverse." Pick up on this, I hear a lot of you all parrot what the [white] man says. You say, "I don't want to be a Ku Klux Klan in reverse." Well, you - heh! -- if a criminal comes around your house with his gun, brother, just because he's got a gun and he's robbing your house, brother, and he's a robber, it doesn't make you a robber because you grab your gun and run him out. No, see, the man is using some tricky logic on you. And he has absolutely got a Ku Klux Klan outfit that goes through the country frightening black people. Now, I say it is time for black people to put together the type of action, the unity, that is necessary to pull the sheet off of them so they won't be frightening black people any longer. That's all. And when we say this, the press calls us "racist in reverse."

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.