Tea Party Rally turns into Fascist Hate Fest

This horrifying clip has been making the rounds of virtually all the blogs I read. I can't let it go by without sharing it here as well. The video is from the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and it documents a California rally "organized by anti-Muslim bigots to protest a February fundraising event held by an American Muslim relief group for relief work and charity in the U.S." The video excerpts speeches by local elected politicians, as well as the crowd heckling attendees to the benefit. Attendees who include lots of women and children. Among the organizers of the hate rally were local teabagger, uh "Tea Party," groups, no doubt focusing only on issues of economy and small government (snark!). In it one can see elected officials proudly fantasizing about murdering some of their constituents.

This is some of the ugliest video I've seen. And unlike the numerous videos of stupid people and/or rightwing people and/or racist people and/or some combination of the above that have been making the rounds over the past two or three years, this doesn't show teabaggers wandering about in a teabagger environment. This shows the unbridled racist anger and hatred of teabaggers when they get a chance to actually interact with the objects of their disaffection. It's viscerally disturbing.

To those who say the Teabaggers are not a fascist movement, I present this as evidence. Be afraid, be very afraid.

What Feminism Looks Like

Yes, I posted a similar PSA from Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions just a couple days ago. I'm putting this one up not to beat the drum again about Palestine, but because of what this video says about women. In a brief minute it forces the viewer to confront one's prejudices about what feminism looks like. In my post about enforced standards of beauty on the Jersey shore ("American Burqa") I tried to chop away a bit at the superficial notion that American culture is synonymous with female empowerment. This video is the perfect companion, chipping away at the notion that female empowerment has to come with cultural transgression.

There are many women prominent in American politics, and they're not limited to one side of the issues. At some point all these women get judged on the basis of their physical appearance. How much energy is wasted discussing the appearance or clothing of Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton? Or of Maggie Gallagher, spokesperson of the anti-gay hate group "National Organization for [sic] Marriage"? Or even of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? Palin and Bachmann are outspoken women (with revolting politics) who project a certain strength and independence; but are they feminists?

Show a picture of a Middle-Eastern woman in some kind of religiously modest clothing and an assumption is immediately made -- by Americans, anyway -- that she is submissive, oppressed, docile, controlled by men. And yet compare hijab-clad women in the protests in Palestine or Egypt with Sarah Palin. Who's more feminist? Who's more involved in fighting for human dignity, justice and liberation?

It's not about appearances; it's about substance and values and program.

Spring Is Coming

I got up one morning about twenty years ago to find my neighborhood covered in fog. In a moment of inspiration I grabbed my camera and walked a few blocks to Prospect Park, where I took this photo. Like this week, I remember it being unseasonably warm. Winter was still hanging on, with Spring yet to arrive and certainly no buds on the trees to herald the change of seasons. The fog was magic, rolling through the hills and valleys of the park. Prospect Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the same brilliant mind who created the better-known Central Park; but in Brooklyn he created a series of illusory landscapes designed to evoke the lost wilderness. Prospect Park is filled with vales and abrupt changes of scenery that reveal cleverly hidden lakes and groves. While the park is not surrounded by highrises like Central Park is, it's just as much an oasis in an utterly urban landscape. I remember how that fog bolstered the otherworldly illusion of it all. Tomorrow it's supposed to go back down to below freezing, but the jig is up. Winter's clutching at brittle naked branches. Time's up!

"Because Separate Has Never Meant Equal"

Watch this powerful PSA from Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. PQBDS have also issued a excellent statement about BDS that also addresses how Israel's liberal laws on homosexuality shouldn't discourage lesbian and gay activists from taking a stand for solidarity with the Palestinian people. An excerpt:

"We believe that, as Queer communities, we must pay close attention to any grave human rights violations on our way to support the LGBTQ struggle, especially in a context where the country in question that oppresses, discriminates, and implements an apartheid system. We should question the ethics and the values of Queer organizations or groups that voice fervent support for and participate in an apartheid state’s institutions. Human rights should not be compartmentalized, and the human rights of a certain group should not be more important than others’. We, as Palestinian queers, cannot ignore the struggle and the rights of the Palestinian people. To us, the two struggles go side by side.

For 62 years, the Israeli occupation and expanding apartheid system has denied the Palestinian people their basic human rights. Palestinians in the West Bank have been living under a brutal military occupation manifested by illegal Israeli colonies, checkpoints, and a system of walls, barriers and roads accessible solely to Israeli settlers. Palestinians living inside Israel are continuously facing discriminatory policies. There are currently over 25 laws which specifically target them as non-Jewish and reduce them to second class citizens of Israel. Palestinians in the Diaspora and in UN administered refugee camps are by default denied their UN-sanctioned right to return to their lands. Finally, over 1.8 million Palestinian in the Gaza Strip are living in an open air prison under an illegal siege, described by many prominent international experts as “slow genocide.” Israeli oppression, racism, and discrimination does not distinguish between Queer Palestinians and Heterosexual Palestinians."

Read the whole statement here.

American Intervention Won't Help Libyan People

The conflict in Libya is entering a dangerous phase. I read an ominous article in the New York Times entitled "U.S. Readies Military Options on Libya." It's not only about the new tough talk from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about the repression Qaddafi is threatening to unleash against the popular protests sweeping the country but about how American warships are steaming toward the Mediterranean nation. While the article suggested that military intervention isn't soon likely, such strategies as enforcing a "no-fly zone" over Iraq--oops make that Libya-- is being considered.

Just yesterday the American government was singing Qaddafi's praises, calling him a valuable ally in their "war on terror." All sorts of American politicians including neocons had been investing considerable political capital in rehabilitating Qaddafi's image after his change in international alignment in the last decade. And now Clinton says "It's time for Qaddafi to go."

What complete hypocrisy. Compare Qaddafi's current repression against the protest movement to Israel's repression against Gaza, especially its brutal war of two years ago. The U.S. cheered Israel on. It is not the violence that concerns the U.S. government, not the potential loss of innocent life, it is the arrangement of power. The U.S. has been arming these repressive governments for years: perhaps that's where the problem lies in the first place.

The Libyan people are taking their future into the own hands. We've seen what happens when the U.S. actively intervenes: a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis might offer their opinion of that option. And the last thing the Libyan people need is to trade in their current dictator for a U.S. puppet. Libya is not an American playground. The Middle East is not an American playground. It's the meddling that helped create the problems in the first place. Beware!

Mondoweiss has an excellent roundup of news from Libya. Strongly recommended!

Update: Check out this photo from The Angry Arab News Service:

"No Foreign Intervention -- Libyan People Can Manage It Alone." be sure to check out the accompanying article on liberals who want to commence the invading.

Oscar Night

Apparently it's Oscar night. What I want to know is why there is not also Bert & Ernie night. Or Miss Piggy night. I think it's unfair that only Oscar the Grouch gets his own red-carpet celebration.

Actually I'm a hair too old for Sesame Street. But I'm not too old (or young) to remember Emily Litella. So, "Never mind!"

Here's the sad truth. I don't go to movies much. Sure I enjoy being entertained, I enjoy the escapism of movies -- who doesn't? -- but it's so damned expensive. I realize of all the movies up for Oscars this year I've seen exactly three. And one of them was last night on video (The Social Network) and another a couple weeks ago (Inception) and a third a couple weeks before that (The Kids Are All Right). I remember extraordinary details about history and music. But I just don't care about actors and actresses. My boyfriend can attest that I am forever asking, "Who's that?" about any actor in any movie. I guess I think it's weird to watch the same people over and over again pretend to be other people. Some of them are talented, sure; some of them are even hot. But I can never help but feel that if Americans paid as much attention to what's happening in the world as they do to Hollywood gossip, we wouldn't be in such a mess. Hey wait, so who's Oscar the Grouch now?

Update: If you're coming for the Oscar picture, I hope you'll stay for the other content here. This blog is about my perspective on life in the U.S. but it's also about the necessity of fighting for real freedom and social justice around the world and here at home.

A Hero of the War

This is one of my favorite anti-war songs. It's "A Hero of the War" by expat American/UK pop star Scott Walker, ca. 1969. All those wars we witness, we read about: they're fought by regular people, some by choice some by compulsion, who should all be doing something else.

This song starts out so upbeat; by the time you realize what it's about it has become darkly sardonic. The lyrics:

"He's a hero of the war
All the neighborhood is talkin' 'bout your son
Mrs. Reiley get his medals
Hand them 'round to everyone
Show his gun to all the children in the street
It's too bad he can't shake hands or move his feet

He's a hero of the war
You can see his picture in the local news
Mrs. Reiley seems the girl next door is nowhere to be found
Once you couldn't keep that boy from hangin' 'round
Never mind dear, you're with your mum once more

He's a hero of the war
Like his dad he gave his life the war before
It was tragic how you almost died of pain when he was born
With no husband there beside you through it all
Ring the bell if you get hungry or you fall

You're a hero of the war
Why those teardrops on your cheek? it's so absurd
Feelin' empty it's the emptiness of heroes like your son
And what made him leave his mother for a gun
Driven forward driven back and nothing more

He's a hero of the war"

I read Secretary of Defense Gates just gave a speech at West Point in which he expressed doubt that the U.S. should repeat its Iraqi and Afghan adventures. Better luck next time, right? The mind boggles. Bring the troops home now.

Right-wing Porn Magnate Gets Humanitarian Activists Kicked Out of Gay Community Center

Siegebusters is a local New York City lesbian and gay Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions group in solidarity with the Palestinians and building opposition to the Apartheid blockade of Gaza. It's been meeting at New York City's LGBT Community Center, and was planning an upcoming event for Israeli Apartheid Week. The people behind Siegebusters are not random disinterested parties, but well-known activists in the lesbian and gay community.

Israeli-American gay porn magnate and conservative activist Michael Lucas has just succeeded in getting Siegebusters booted out of the gay community center by falsely equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Siegebusters have mounted an online petition campaign, "Save New York’s LGBT Center! Don’t Let Wealthy Bigots Shut Down Free Speech." I urge Cahokian readers who support basic fairness to sign this petition. Disgustingly equating defenders of Palestinian rights with hate groups, Lucas said, "If the LGBT Center wants to host a fundraising and awareness party for anti-semites, they might as well go all the way and host a tea dance for Fred Phelps." The petition protesting Lucas's campaign to shut down discussion and democracy says in part, "If activists allow this decision to stand, the Center will go from being a liberated space of democracy and free speech to yet another occupied, homogenized venue where wealthy and powerful voices can squelch all the rest. Lucas’s accusation that the March 5 event and groups organizing to build it are “anti-Semitic” is not simply an odious lie, it is an attempt to manipulate hatred of anti-Semitism to draw attention away from the ongoing Israeli crimes of dispossession, systematic racism, collective punishment and wholesale warfare on a population guilty of nothing other than their own existence. An international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel has global support, including diverse voices from queer theory icon Judith Butler and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Auschwitz survivor and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network spokesman Hajo Mayer."

Details on Israeli Apartheid Week events can be found here.


Lucas's efforts are part of the international propaganda campaign known as "pinkwashing," using Israeli's liberal laws on homosexuality to buy support from the lesbian and gay community at the expense of the Palestinian people. Pinkwashing is usually accompanied by disgusting racist fear mongering about Muslim and Arab countries. Needless to say, when Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza in recent years, they didn't bother to ask any of the thousands of innocent people they killed whether they were gay first. Israel's liberal laws for its gay citizens are irrelevant when the Israeli state is built on a foundation of racism, and when its Arab citizens are given second-class rights and the residents of the occupied territories are denied rights altogether.

There's a great account of the recent speaking tour of Palestinian Queer Activists at the Al Qaws website of lesbian/gay/queer Palestinians. (The New York event was filled to capacity and I was unable to get in). Maggie Sager reports, "Queer Palestinians, like Afghan and Iraqi women, have consistently found their discourse co-opted by neo-conservative hawks and progressives alike in order to justify war and occupation under the assumption that such actions will ‘liberate’ the oppressed. It is this cynical manipulation that the forum’s speakers work to disparage. Claiming their own voices and movement, queer Palestinian activists are clamoring to be heard and wish for their American brothers and sisters to spread their message. So what is it they have to say? The clearest message resounding from all three speakers was that if one actually cares about LGBT rights within Palestine, one should be working to end the occupation. That Israel has cultivated a vibrant and open gay enclave is laudable, yet such accomplishments do not give the ‘Jewish State’ a free pass to violate human rights, including the rights of the gay Palestinians they allegedly care for. As Haneen dryly explained, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami echoed the same sentiment, jibing that “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”


(The photos on this post are from last year's Gay Pride Parade in Istanbul, Turkey, in June. See a whole portfolio of these photos at Radikal.com. Thanks to Joe.My.God. for making me aware of them.)

Sympathy for Barbarians

Defeated (temporarily?), the Roman legionaries are stripped of their armor and humiliated: they are marched naked past the sacred grove. The heads of their generals are displayed on spikes; the children are mocking the once proud legion, their pride a contrast to the defeated soldiers. The women wail and cry out over the men who didn't return from the field of battle, and sing the praises of those who did.

In truth I'm not exactly sure what this is a picture of. I downloaded it years ago and haven't been able to retrace my steps. I'm guessing it's a classic 18th- or 19th-century engraving of a "barbarian" victory over Rome in Germania or Gaul, and probably a victory that was short-lived. But I find it fascinating because it's such a romantic view of a scene that seemingly stands the usual historical narrative on its head: the invincible Romans are being mocked and the savage barbarians are jubilant. It is said both that the victors get to write history, and that he who laughs last laughs best, but I wonder about how that is interpreted.

We are taught about the glories of Rome, about the civilization, albeit at the point of a sword, that it spread throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. To be sure the Roman Empire, decadent as it may have been, has had a lasting influence on our culture, our civilization. But that's not the complete story. Because ultimately, after centuries of glory, as all empires do, the Romans fell. If you, like me, trace the blood of your ancestors across the Atlantic to Europe, that last generations of effete Roman nobility, those ones they are not our ancestors: those were the people thrown to the flames, their children dashed to the paving stones or thrown under the hooves of the advancing barbarian horde. The people who survived were the peasants watching from the field as the villas burned, or the ones eking out a life in the wild hills and forests.

As near as I can ascertain, my ancestors weren't kings or queens or lords or princesses, they were just people. But they did make it into the history books: read as the frightened nobles shriek "the barbarians are at the gates!" That's us they're talking about. My people. Now I'm not suggesting running through the streets with torches and pitchforks, or looting prep schools and throwing aristocratic children into fires or arbitrarily smashing the good things about our civilization. Living in a yurt doesn't look fun or practical to me. I'm just suggesting a little change in perspective.

In this age of politicians trying desperately to make sure they and their friends get to hang on to the money, to the power, to the right to control other people and take things away from them, it's worth remembering the lessons of the past. Empires fall. We barbarians win, in the end, every time.

Wave of Revolution Spreads to Libya

The stunning wave of popular protest in the Middle East continues. The latest reports suggest that the 40+ year dictatorship of Muammar El Qaddafi is about to fall. Cities like Benghazi in the east of the country are rumored to be under the control of a popular uprising; Libyan diplomats worldwide are renouncing Qaddafi; and Qaddafi's military is apparently splitting under his orders to repress the uprising with live fire and bombs. The BBC radio today claimed two Libyan jet fighters defected to Malta rather than follow their orders to fire on protesters. Hundreds of people are rumored to have been killed.

Economists are raising concern about Libya's stability, because despite Libya's one-time anti-imperialist posturing it is today a key oil supplier to Europe. The economies of former colonial powers Italy and the U.K. are intertwined with Libya's. See the always insightful Lenin's Tomb ("A Regime in Mortal Freefall") for the story of how Libya "came in from the cold" and traded in its leftwing posturing in return for better relations (lots of money) with the West. (Cahokian readers can see plenty of evidence of Libya's strained relationship with the U.S. in my "Anti-American Art" series in stamps which document the US bombing raid on Libya in 1986). European countries are freaking out at the events in Libya, worried that the flow of oil will be replaced by a flow of asylum seekers. Europe has always preferred docility in its southern neighbors.

Qaddafi came to power in a 1969 military coup that overthrew a Kingdom that had been set up in a process of decolonization following World War II. He assumed first the mantle of Arab nationalism and later Pan-Africanism. He developed a self-serving faux egalitarian ideology that accused political parties of being anti-democratic. So of course they were banned. Not officially the ruler of the country, he is the Great Man and Brother Leader, who guides the "people's authority" that has titular role of what he calls "The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya." But his messianic ideology of mass autonomy is all for show, window dressing on a hard-fisted military dictatorship. He has of late championed African unity, and making the United Nations more representative, both of which seem completely self-serving.

In the Libyan story there's a cautionary tale for leftists. In the 1970s Qaddafi tried to use his oil wealth to buy supporters. Among various adventures supporting revolutionaries, he bankrolled the English Workers Revolutionary Party of Gerry Healey, a hitherto Trotskyist Party, which soon began to promote the Green Book, the impenetrable bible of Qaddafi's ideological pretension. (The WRP was notable at the time as home to actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave; Vanessa Redgrave's heroic defense of the Palestine Liberation Organization is sadly tainted by the corrupt relationship of her faction to this faux revolutionary dictator). Ultimately the WRP was accused of spying on Libyan (and Iraqi) dissidents in England and sending reports back to Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein. I actually remember back in the late 1970s when I was active on the left how the American supporters of the WRP, called the Workers League, started acting like complete kooks. At the same time they had a major slander campaign that the leadership of the also-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party were actually police spies and Russian agents, so the addition of Qaddafi's Green Book to their literature tables just seemed like icing on a bizarre cake.

There's an excellent blog post by David Osler that warns against taking the self-professed anti-imperialism of otherwise questionable figures too seriously: "There is one obvious moral in all this for revolutionary socialists; if you align yourself with people like this, you are reneging on the basic understanding that the emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class itself, not of any old hoodlum who espouses populism of Islamic colouration. And no matter how much money you get for it, it isn’t worth it."

Qaddafi is the last of the old-school left-talking military rulers in the Middle East. Hopefully he hasn't completely poisoned the well of hope that real, democratic socialism represents.

(Scan of 2010 Libyan stamp showing Qaddafi and his "people's assembly" from "Updates and Stamp News from the Middle East" blog.)

Malcolm X on Violence and Hypocrisy

Today is the 46th anniversary of the assassination of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X. A brilliant orator, he was killed in a moment of transition. He had left the Black Muslim movement of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and was honing his vision of the struggle for freedom. In his speches he had an amazing way of, pardon the expression, cutting through the bullshit. The world he spoke to back in the 1960s was a very different place, but it's hard to read one of his speeches and not to come away with some insight that remains completely relevant. This excerpt seems relevant to the wave of popular discontent in the Middle East and the false equivalency often made between state violence and popular resistance. While the wave of popular discontent in our own Middle West isn't quite at the same level, it's important food for thought.

"I'm not in a society that practices brotherhood. I'm in a society that might preach it on Sunday, but they don't practice it on no day -- on any day. And so, since I could see that America itself is a society where there is no brotherhood and that this society is controlled primarily by racists and segregationists -- and it is -- who are in Washington, D.C., in positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba, or in any other place on this earth where they're trying to exploit and oppress. This is a society whose government doesn't hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over the world.

To wit, right now what's going on in and around Saigon and Hanoi and in the Congo and elsewhere. They are violent when their interests are at stake. But all of that violence that they display at the international level, when you and I want just a little bit of freedom, we're supposed to be nonviolent. They're violent. They're violent in Korea, they're violent in Germany, they're violent in the South Pacific, they're violent in Cuba, they're violent wherever they go. But when it comes time for you and me to protect ourselves against lynchings, they tell us to be nonviolent.

That's a shame. Because we get tricked into being nonviolent, and when somebody stands up and talks like I just did, they say, "Why, he's advocating violence!" Isn't that what they say? Every time you pick up your newspaper, you see where one of these things has written into it that I'm advocating violence. I have never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizens' Council, and many other forms, we should defend ourselves. And when I say that we should defend ourselves against the violence of others, they use their press skillfully to make the world think that I'm calling on violence, period. I wouldn't call on anybody to be violent without a cause. " --Malcolm X, 14 February 1965, a week before he died.

Anti-American Art: Pride

I designed these two graphics back in 2003 shortly after the American invasion of Iraq. I regret not trying to circulate them more widely. In New York City there were a series of absolutely astounding huge demonstrations to protest Bush's plans for war. Coworkers who I would never have described as political enthusiastically attended. Of course the war happened anyway. It seems so long ago and yet, it's not really over, is it.


Bush at the time claimed to be seeding "democracy" into the Middle East. While the results are not in from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, nor the nascent struggles sweeping the Middle East, one wonders how many thousands of innocent people would still be alive if he had let the inevitable happen and let the people take what is rightfully theirs in their own due time, as seems to be happening now.

How does that old song go? "When will they ever learn..."

(This is an ongoing series of Anti-American propaganda art. Check out previous entries here)

Obama Greenlights Israeli Apartheid

Disgusting. The United States has vetoed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, settlements that are already considered illegal by international law. Knowing it would be embarrassing, the US first tried to get the vote off the table. Hilariously, as the US vote concretely aided, protected and defended Israeli settlements, President Obama's hand-picked UN representative Susan Rice said the vote should not be "seen as an endorsement of Israel's settlement policies, which the Obama administration has repeatedly denounced." She commented that the draft resolution submitted, however, has the risk of "hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage parties to stay out of negotiations." In other words, don't pay attention to what we're actually doing, pay attention to our pretty words. There are no negotiations; in fact there are no legitimate negotiators. The Palestine papers have shown the leadership of the Palestine Authority to be engaged in an elaborate three-way embrace with right-wing Israeli leaders and US politicians bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby to force the Palestinian people to accept a neutered Bantustan-like microstate instead of their actual national rights. No matter; the PA leadership stands to be pushed out of power along with so many other undemocratic "moderate" governments in the wave of revolution sweeping the Middle East.

Back in the 1980s, the United States and its ally Israel were notoriously the last nations to cling to South Africa's white-racist Apartheid regime. Ronald Reagan goes down in history believing the heroic Nelson Mandela belonged in jail. Disturbingly, Obama now joins Reagan in utter moral bankruptcy. No matter how much he says he supports the right of the Palestinian people to their own state, his government's actions now show a commitment only to the brute force of Israeli neocolonialism and racism. Israel's policies to the Palestinians in the West Bank are identical in every meaningful way to the policies of the former racist South Africa. And Israel will end up in the same dustbin of history.

Obama's foreign policy is showing itself to be an endless wellspring of hypocrisy. (The only silver lining perhaps is that President McCain or President Palin would surely have us nuking Tehran and Cairo by now.) Check out the bitterly hilarious compilation on the Zunguzungu blog of all the times in the past two months of popular uprisings and government repression that Obama snd Secretary of State Clinton have called for "restraint." Meanwhile the flow of arms to Israel and repressive Arab regimes is endless. And watch the US government forcefully shout its support of popular protests in (US enemy and quasi-democratic) Iran while urging calm in (home to US military base and authoritarian Kingdom) Bahrain. Again and again the US government is equating the defensive militancy of the people out in the streets with the repressive violence of dictatorial states.

And does the Obama administration seriously think nobody's watching them? Here's a blistering statement from Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, just denied a visit to the U.S., to the Mondoweiss site: "Ms. Clinton can sing the tunes of freedom all she wants when watching the news of Arab popular revolts from Morocco to Bahrain, but she is not fooling any average-intelligence person in the Arab world. US policy, especially after the veto cast yesterday against the most benign UN Security Council resolution, simply reiterating universal, long-held facts that Israel's colonial settlements are illegal and thwart just peace, is being exposed to the new generation of restive, fearless, freedom-aspiring Arab youth as the main cause of their oppression, of buttressing and protecting the tyrants that have denied them all freedoms for decades. It has long been exposed, too, as the key partner of Israel in its occupation, colonialism and apartheid. Without US largess, Israel's multi-tiered system of racist and colonial oppression cannot possibly survive. Freedom, from the US establishment's perspective, amounts to the "liberty" to bow to their hegemony and accepting their multinationals' pillage of the world as fate. We shall continue to speak truth to power no matter what the consequences. We shall continue to struggle for nothing less than full freedom, full justice, full self determination, and full emancipation from US imperial hegemony."

Spring is coming.

(Photo above shows a Palestinian protest in Hebron. Hebron is a city on the occupied West Bank with an overwhelming Arab majority, yet to "protect" the privileges of a small settlement of ultra-rightwing Israelis a large chunk of the town is fenced off and forbidden to Palestinians.)

Up on the Roof -- in the 1940s

These two heartbreaking photos are from the late 1940s: that's my mom and her middle brother Quentin and her mother above (and my mother and Quentin below) on the roof of their Brooklyn apartment building. They lived around East New York. While there were some aunts and uncles with money, my mother's family was as poor as they come. She was born in 1932; her father died from gas gangrene in 1942. Her mother, my grandmother, died of cancer in 1949 or so, probably within a year or two of this photo.

Around that time Quentin, shown here, joined the army to stay out of trouble and was eventually shipped off to Korea. As you can see here he was a cocky young hottie, and my mother says he was pretty much a juvenile delinquent. I'm not sure who took these photos. Their older brother Hubert, my uncle (who, like my mom, is still alive) had joined the army in the last year of WW2: it could have been him unless he was still off in occupied Europe. Uncle Quentin retired from the army in the 1960s and became a college art professor. He's been gone for over a decade.

My grandmother above and my mother below look so overwhelmingly burdened and stressed out. It seems atypical for family snapshots, though grandma Olivia (called Dot, I believe) doesn't seem to be smiling in hardly any of the photos of her I've seen. My mother's father's family was all Irish; Olivia's mother's family were German Jews who (although they had come to the U.S. long before Hitler) were passing as gentiles.



The stories my mother tells of growing up poor in the 1930s and 1940s are something else. But I'm certain that my own worldview and social consciousness comes straight from what my mom learned in those hard hard times.

Tahrir Square... Wisconsin

This inspiring footage is from a protest in Wisconsin's state capital of Madison, where the efforts of a new teabagger governor and Republican legislature to quite literally roll back all the gains of the labor movement have met amazing and inspiring resistance. The teabaggers are showing their true nature again and again. Their fake campaign against "big government" is just a coverup for social conservatism and old-fashioned anti-working class pro-big business policies. It's hard not to notice the similarities to Egypt. And Tunisia. And now Bahrain and Yemen and Libya. Is the class struggle returning?

Some great details and analysis over at Lenin's Tomb.

Coming to America

Above is a clipping from a ship's registry showing my paternal grandfather's family arriving at Ellis Island in 1902. My father's father is little "Joh. Georg" born in 1895. The ship sailed from Hamburg, Germany, but their original point of departure is shown as the village of Norka, in Russia. They were "Volga Germans" trading in one adopted country for another. A couple years ago I wrote two installments of a fictionalized version of their departure from Russia, still on the blog here. The funny thing is that until I retrieved this document from the excellent and amazing Ellis Island registry set up with the aid of the Mormon Church, my little offshoot of the family had no idea that Hamburg was not the point of my family's origin: my grandfather was as tight-lipped to his estranged son as my own father proved to be to this estranged son. When I discovered this document I managed to contact distant Horst cousins who knew the whole story and even gave me a photo (I'll put it up later) of my great-grandparents. There's an entire subculture out there of descendants of Volga Germans and they even organize occasional tours back to the motherland, even though courtesy of Stalin and Hitler very very few people of German ancestry remain in the villages of the Volga region. They keep track of which Russian villages each family came from, though there's scant information on where these families originated from in Germany back in the 17th-century. It turns out a huge part of the wave of German immigrants to the U.S. in the turn to the 20th-century were actually from Russia, with no less than Lawrence Welk counted among the famed American progeny.

My great-grandparents settled in Denver, but my grandfather lived most of his adult life in Michigan, which is where he met my grandmother Dorothy Scott, who I've posted many pictures of. I'm not sure I actually have a photo of my grandfather: I will have to look.

(I found this scan on my old computer: my veteran PC just passed away -- it's all my fault for taunting it just a few short posts ago. Never, never tempt fate! This is from a fairly clunky old mac. We'll see how it goes until a brand-new replacement computer materializes.)

American Burqa: a Night Out on the Jersey Shore

There is a place where women are forced to dress all alike. It's a kind of uniform of submission: all women are forced to wear this uniform or be shunned, whether they are young and shapely or middle-aged and chubby. Black is the preferred color, though this is not rigidly enforced. What's going on inside a woman's head, her own vision of who she is and what she thinks and what she wants is irrelevent: individuality and freedom of thought is suppressed and propaganda carefully herds women to a standard of sameness. If you think I'm talking about the Middle East you're wrong. I'm talking about Friday night on the Jersey Shore; Atlantic City to be precise. Perhaps I need to get out more, though: I'm thinking it is possible that the horror I witnessed is common throughout suburban heterosexual nightlife. Perhaps in news coverage of the Egyptian revolution you have witnessed the clucking tongues of baiting neocon pundits worrying about whether Islamist activists will somehow hijack the revolution and force Egyptian women into forced modesty. Well here's what I've realized: the concern of American culture for the fate of women in predominately Muslim countries is nothing but a big-fat crocodile tear, because American women, especially young ones, have already been sent down a path of objectification and posed hypersexuality every bit as dehumanizing as what some claim has happened to women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.


There's something fascinating about Atlantic City. The combination of wishful thinking and seediness is honed to a fine edge. The casinos are full of people and yet they're not doing great financially, just as most people spending time there -- me included -- are calculating the enjoyment of the place not in massive gambling winnings but in whether the time was worth the price. We spent a night there this past February weekend. The worst of the winter seems to have passed for now and the indoor social life of the casinos seemed to be jumping. Atlantic City isn't the setting for the MTV "reality" show The Jersey Shore, but it's in close proximity to that show's location, not only physically, but spiritually.

We arrived on a Friday night, just as the crowds seemed to shift from elderly retired people to young adults out to party. As I and my companions sat down for a late dinner we realized that practically every woman we saw was dressed identically: in uncomfortably high heels, and shockingly tight shoulderless cocktail dresses coming down a barely calculable measure below the crotch. These dresses were all about ass threatening to burst out of tight confinement. We began to play a tasteless game we called "hooker or slut." Of course there was simply no way to tell. These women had been completely absorbed into the aesthetic of prostitution.

As we walked around the casino it became almost absurd. Small groups of identically dressed women only occasionally in the escort of calculatingly-casually dressed young men moved about through the halls from bar to gambling room to club. I never saw one try to sit down, I can't imagine what would have happened to their dresses if they tried. At some point I looked at three women leaning over a counter: all had identical hair and makeup as well, the same cut, the same strange-looking false sunstreaks dyed into identical patterns. I realized that while most of these women were young and fit with curves that successfully filled out their tight little dresses, I was also seeing older women or women without such studied bodies who couldn't quite pull off the look but were doing their best to try. Sleeves and leggings accessorized those who feared the exposure of a little flab or wrinkle.

Now granted as a gay man I don't spend a lot of time staring at women. But I don't think my horror at what I saw was driven by prudery or disdain for female sexuality. In the uniformity of what I saw there was something so forced and un-sexy about the professed sexiness of the uniform. All of these women might as well have had signs pinned to their waists saying "you can almost see my vagina." Their outfits pulled attention away from their faces and turned them into automatons of base male gratification.


So when the media shows excessively veiled Muslim women in its condescending or fearful tone, I now have to ask: do you want women to be free to express their individuality? Their sexuality? Or are you just complaining that you can't ogle the flesh of these women? Is the issue the right of these women to live their lives in the way they choose? Or is the complaint that these women might have secret inner lives that are not available to your observation?

I think if I was a woman and a Muslim I would not choose the extreme forms of Muslim hijab like the burqa or abaya. And I do understand that in our harsh world, excessive hijab can be a form of oppression. And I think if I was a young woman looking for love, or for fun, on a night out on the town in a New Jersey beach town, I would not choose to make myself uncomfortable and identical to all my friends. But the choice is not really between covering up and dressing like a prostitute. This is a false choice: a false choice that the women of the Jersey Shore are apparently unable to see.

I was reminded of my visit last summer to an Orisha ceremony and to two jazz concerts in Brooklyn, all of which I described on this blog. At the Santeria ceremony, attended by people of every imaginable race and ethnic mix, the women radiated beauty and strength and individuality and even sexiness. Gay and straight women alike projected a spiritual centeredness and pride. Hair was worn naturally, sometimes very short or in locks. Clothes were not flashy, but neither were they shapeless potato sacks. Some wore African-inspired finery but everyone projected her own being. At the jazz concerts, the overwhelmingly African-American crowd ran the gamut from young to old. There was certainly flashiness there, but the fashion was consciousness and self-empowerment. If there was flirtation it was chosen, rather than a blatant neon sign of objectification and neediness.


It is not the lack of modesty that concerns me, nor the display of sexuality. It's something else. Oh I hear a voice in my head that sounds like the mean old man telling those darn kids to get off his lawn in some early 1960s youth culture flick. But I don't think what I was seeing was youth rebellion; on the contrary, I think it was the fruit of some kind of media hypnotism. To me it looks empty and false.

I miss feminism: when women were empowered to make choices for themselves, to be freethinkers, to be unabashedly sex-positive. Those tight little cocktail dresses strike me as the Burqas of our age: prisons of subjugation and objectification. I've read Middle-Eastern feminists criticize the abaya and the burqa because a woman must spend so much time hanging on to her clothes she couldn't possibly work at a physical job and must therefore change her orientation to the home. And so it is with crotch=length dresses: how can one even think if all one is doing is ensuring something won't pop out?

Bad television like "The Jersey Shore" is good for a laugh. But I'm starting to think it's not so funny. What happens when life starts to imitate this terrible, demeaning "art"?

(Atlantic City booty photos by me. Sorry for using your butts to make a point, ladies.)

Valentine's Day Sentimentality

So I went looking for a good story to tell for St. Valentine's Day and came up empty-handed. It turns out that the Catholic Church barely remembers who St. Valentine actually was; and it's not even really one of those ripped-off Pagan holidays. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s we spoke in hushed tones about the gangland "St. Valentine's Day Massacre." I remember a wax-museum tableau that haunted me, and a frightening movie I've finally seen as an adult (that turns out to be uber crappy), but that pales in comparison to today's Mexican mafia killings or random campus shootings by the mentally disturbed. Besides murder is a downer. Blogfriend Annie wrote about the pleasures of passing around Valentine's cards as children, so that's been done. My adorable boyfriend didn't like the picture I took of him this weekend in Atlantic City, so that's not going up here. So here's a picture of my cat, Henry. When my boyfriend is not over he takes up pretty much the same amount of space in the bed. And he's often trying to sleep on my mousehand when I'm at the computer (Henry, that is). So, finally, I'm lucky in love. Thanks Henry. You too Jesse. I'm grateful to both of you. Happy Valentine's Day!

Meanwhile....

That's the boardwalk at Atlantic City where I spent an evening and crisp winter day unintentionally gathering material for a new blogpost. There's nothing quite like watching a bit of the now at least partially successful Egyptian revolution on a hotel TV set. More on what I learned in Atlantic City later, but meanwhile here's a brief paragraph from the Lenin's Tomb blog about Obama's latest speech on the events unfolding in Egypt:

"Obama is speechifying in his classically elevated, sonorous fashion. He should shut up. He has nothing to say. He spent weeks first backing Mubarak, then the torturer Suleiman. He thought his man, Suleiman, had been put in charge last night. It never once crossed his mind that he would stop aid to the regime, even stop sending the bullets and tear gas that have been used against protesters. The US has been handed its arse by the Egyptian people, the vanguard of global democracy, and should at this point be feigning humility." As much as I can enjoy a good Obama speech, I think Lenin's Tomb's Richard Seymour has, sadly, nailed this one.

Egyptian Revolution on the Brink

"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." -- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Millions of people have been out in the streets of Egypt for over two weeks. Despite the daily predictions of the western media that the revolution is about to run out of steam, each day brings demonstrations bigger than the day before. According to eyewitnesses, the streets have become a huge festival of mass democracy. And yet the American-backed dictator Mubarak clings intransigently to power.

American diplomats are trying desperately to straddle both sides of the fence. On the one hand Obama claims to support democracy. On the other hand his diplomat sent to negotiate with Mubarak, Frank Wisner, turns out to work for companies with contracts with the Egyptian military and secret police: he's virtually an employee of Mubarak. After negotiations Wisner said, "Mubarak must stay in office in order to steer those changes through... This is an ideal moment for him to show the way forward." Obama proceeded to distance Wisner's position, and has been lining up behind new Vice President Omar Suleiman, head of the notorious Egyptian secret police. While Obama postures about the will of the Egyptian people, clearly he's concerned about letting things get out of control...of the American government and its Israeli allies.

So on the one side Mubarak and his massive security operation and control of the state. On the other the masses of Egyptian people of many classes and religions. In the middle is the Egyptian Army. The west seems to be desperate to find a leader it can impose on the revolution to make things nice.

And now the game has changed. Enter the Egyptian working class. I think it is no accident that today's dramatic events -- the rumor that Mubarak was stepping down, the rumor of a military seizure of power, and ultimately Mubarak's renewed intransigence -- are a direct response to the waking giant which has announced a series of political strikes. Because it is the Egyptian working class, with its hands on the gears of the Egyptian economy that has the power to push this revolution through to its righteous end. More than the rule of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood the rulers of Egypt and their sponsors in Washington and elsewhere fear the power of the conscious and self-aware majority of the Egyptian people, unbeholden to the corrupt arrangements that perpertuate the rule of the dictator and his henchmen. They are terrified by what the unchecked success of the Egyptian revolution might mean for the other despotic rulers in the region. And they are freaking out about what this might mean for the struggle of the Palestinian people held in check by sellouts and betrayals. And the working people of Egypt have the power to break the stalemate; to split the army; to prevent the revolution being derailed by a new, replacement dictator at the helm of the same old same old.

The contrasts are now starker than ever. It's all out in the open. The U.S. must cut the strings to its puppet. The Egyptian people can see that the Americans are trying to attach those puppet strings to someone else and are rightly outraged. What the U.S. can do to help is pull its support from the Egyptian security apparatus and military.

The working class is about to speak. They can bring victory to the revolution. The days ahead are more dangerous than ever, but the prize is there waiting. The following statement was issued by a group of Egyptian revolutionary socialists a fes short days before the current strikes were announced:

"Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution

The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.

The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian Workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!" -- Revolutionary Socialism Egypt (English translation from Lenin's Tomb.)

Many analysts predict that a massacre is brewing. There is certainly a real confrontation on the way. Who knows what's going to happen: I sure don't. But I'm inspired, and hopeful.

(According to the Angry Arab news service, the Arabic sign above reads "Down with Omar Suleiman, the Man of Israel.")