historical allusions

"This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house thirty people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head." (225)










"There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. . . . 'Day Turner's people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one.'" (238)



















(all from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents)

po lice

The Prologue to Dario Fo’s 1970 play Accidental Death of an Anarchist explains that in late 1969 there were a number of bomb incidents in Italian cities.

Milan police arrested an anarchist and accused him of the crime. At a certain point in his interrogation, the anarchist flew out the window of the police station. Something similar occurred in New York in 1921, when the anarchist Salsedo flew out the window of a police station, around the same time that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a crime never proven against them. From these stories we can conclude that many anarchists are obsessed by the urge to jump out of the window, because they believe they are able to fly.

It is an illusion of theirs that when they're two or three yards from the ground, they merely have to open their arms and move their feet to fly up again. Some observers have suspected that anarchists are able to fly, but they are also so underhanded that they smash themselves to the ground, just to incriminate the police and other state institutions by dying.

The case of the kamikaze anarchists helps explain similar events, such as the asymmetrical warfare of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the recent propensity of American college students to throw themselves repeatedly in front of TASERS. Only time will tell if we are at the beginning of a similar wave of middle-aged women strangling themselves with their handcuffs.

Kristian Williams has argued that the modern

police system was not created in response to spiraling crime rates, but developed as a means of social control by which an emerging dominant class could impose their values on the larger population.

Organized police forces arose specifically when traditional, informal, or community-maintained means of social control broke down. This breakdown was always prompted by a larger social change, often by a change which some part of the community resisted with violence, such as the creation of a state, colonization, or the enslavement of a subject people. In other words, it was at the point where authority was met with resistance that the organized application of force became necessary.

As Naomi Klein has pointed out, the dominance of neoliberalism is not the result of a lack of alternatives but of the violent suppression of alternatives.

But if the recent increased visibility of police brutality is a consequence of expanding corporate power, dismantling or privatizing social and government services, giving away the commons, deregulating and polluting food air water and land, spiraling inequality of income, and all of the other things which may be making previously docile segments of the population more restive--it’s still the case that police violence most particularly targets the racial and economic groups traditionally most subject to it.

Consider, for instance, Susie Day's report in Counterpunch about an incident in which Cops shot yet another Rich White Man

Hours before he was to be married, a wealthy Caucasian man leaving his bachelor party at a country club in East Hampton was shot and killed in a hail of police bullets. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically. Witnesses at the scene expressed shock and outrage, one of the club's patrons voicing the pervasive sentiment: "Why, oh why is it always rich white people who suffer at the hands of bigoted, trigger-happy cops?"

With emotions swirling around this case, and a long history of no criminal indictments for police who kill rich white people, legal experts say it will be difficult to determine if the shootings were justified. "Let's be honest," said district attorney Roger Gray, "As an affluent white male, Mr. Bellwether was part of a minority community. Those people don't trust us. They don't understand that cops confront danger every day and have to react in seconds. And if cops happen to shoot the same minority people from the same minority community again and again, that's a simple mistake--not a systemic pattern of brutality and injustice." Mr. Gray went on to say that reporters and investigators would be barred from questioning the officers, "to give them time to get their story straight."

The investigation into this case will likely prove controversial. At a time of growing social division, any appearance of police carelessness or bias could set off civic unrest. "And when white people get mad, it's really scary," said police commissioner Patrick O'Reyes. "That's why the department has maximized equal-opportunity. With our new, fully-armed multi-ethnic teams, we've got it fixed so nobody can say we're racist--even if we only shoot white people." The commissioner then ordered his multi-ethnic officers to roughly interrogate witnesses and family members of the victims, and ransack their homes for anything incriminating. "It's routine," he added.

Although civil rights leaders concede that social awareness has improved in recent years, some say more progress is needed. "The negative stereotype of the 'well-healed honky' is rampant in this case," proclaimed activist Martha Stewart at a press conference today. "But I think we can get it out with a touch of white vinegar."

On-the-street interviews, however, indicate that this prejudice might be harder to eradicate.

"Face it, prosperous white people own the corporations; they break unions; they're behind environmental degradation; they got us into Iraq--they're nothing but little Eichmanns," declared a professor of Equality and Justice Studies at Red Hook Community College. Victim advocates say this mentality has wormed its way into the police force.

One of the plainclothes officers who had been working undercover at the country club on the night of the shooting spoke on condition of anonymity. He said he thought there might be trouble when he saw several of the revelers wearing their black, navy blue, and beige "gang colors." Noticing hushed voices and some numbers being scratched onto cocktail napkins, the officer suspected that another hostile corporate takeover was being planned. "I couldn't stand to see more people suffer because of lost jobs, lowered salaries, the privatization of our infrastructure," the officer stated. "That's why I joined the police force--I wanted to help."

For more information on the problem and how you can help—and defend yourself and your community against police violence, check the links here:

National Day of Action to Stop Police Brutality, repression and the criminalization of a generation: The October 22nd Coalition ;The IWW. See also Portland Copwatch on Portland Police shootings and deaths in custody through August 2007. See also Prison Planet. The ACLU website offers A Community Action Manual on Fighting Police Abuse.

hard day's night of the living dead

the iron heel

Last year, Penguin Books issued a new edition of Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel.

Probably London’s fullest fictional presentation of his socialist views, it’s a book that Leon Trotsky, some thirty years later, called a “prophetic vision” of “fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology. . . . Jack London foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.” The book has its flaws, as Trotsky acknowledged, though I would include that sense of inevitability as one of them. Still, it’s a compelling depiction of the workings of capitalism.

The middle-class female narrator speaks in the sentimental rhetoric of melodrama, a kind of appeal that has historically proved effective in moving Americans on political issues, most famously in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Avis Everhard focuses her narrative on a working-class hero devoted to the rational appeal to material fact.

When Avis Cunningham meets Ernest Everhard, he tells her that her dress is stained with blood, and then goes on to introduce her to the bleeding workers whose unrecompensed injuries, as well as their more figurative lifeblood, has gone to swell the stock dividends that have paid for Avis’s dress. The injuries are unrecompensed because although workers can sue for damages, the other workers won’t risk their own jobs by honest testimony, reporters know editors won’t publish stories unfriendly to their advertisers and investors, and the judge and the corporate lawyer belong to the same club. The need to feed their children keeps workers bound to the industrial machine by their heart strings, but some are bound so that they are on top of the machine, and the aristocratic class believes that they are in the right.

They believe this despite having no good explanation for the miseries of capitalism. When Ernest challenges a group of oligarchs to defend capitalism’s bad management of a world with both massive productive forces and massive poverty, he gets no satisfactory answer other than the response that will ultimately come in the form of a bullet.

The socialists do first win at the ballot—in the days before widespread purging of voter rolls and electronic voting machines—but they’re framed for a bombing, and the whole socialist congressional delegation arrested. So the revolutionists move underground, spying on the oligarchs as they are spied upon.

The second half of the novel—once Avis Everhard’s political education is complete, her marriage consummated figuratively as well as literally—consists in the story of a failed revolt against the machine, the blood of the workers become literal blood in the streets.

But the fascist dystopia of The Iron Heel is wrapped inside a socialist utopia—the manuscript Avis writes has been published some 700 years after her death, and features a foreword and footnotes written in year 419 of the Brotherhood of Man.

It’s not surprising that it’s called the Brotherhood of Man, since despite the presence of Avis and other women in the ranks of the revolutionaries, the book doesn’t register the possibility of women’s emancipation, nor the possibility that there might be anything other than the class system from which to be liberated.

And as some readers have noted, it’s probably just as well, given London’s record on questions of race, that there’s little about that in the book, though it is strange to think of a socialist revolution in the US that doesn’t have something to do with race.

Those aren’t the only omissions in The Iron Heel. It’s not clear how, in the three hundred years between the events of the novel and overthrow of the oligarchy, the revolutionaries have escaped from the trap of coming to mirror their oppressors. But the long view does provide a kind of hope in the face of defeat.

Moreover, for readers today, the book offers a salutary reminder of the struggles of the past and of how close the possibility of socialist change has sometimes seemed in the US.

As Naomi Klein has recently reminded us, we haven’t lacked for ideas— “universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter.”

Nor have we lacked resources. Last year, “ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. . . . We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net.”

Nor is the problem political will or coordination among political leaders.

In The Iron Heel, the character who most believes that the problem is simple ignorance is a clergyman who is shocked to learn, under Ernest’s tutelage, the extent of the suffering of the poor. But his wealthy congregation is shocked at the turn his sermons have taken, and he ultimately loses his job, his home, and his freedom, when he’s declared insane and committed.

As Klein says, “elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism . . . needed to soften its edges.”

Klein notes of these alternatives to the so-called free market, “They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror. . . . These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly.”

As Frederick Douglass knew, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

On beliefs about Iraqi WMDs

Last week in class someone referred to the US administration’s belief, before the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It may well be true that the administration believed that Iraq posed a threat to the US at that time. However, there were reasons for skepticism about the danger of the Iraqi weapons program even then. Hans Blix, the executive director of the UN inspection commission (UNMOVIC), reported that Iraq was increasingly complying with inspectors, who would need some months further to complete their work. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter also argued that Iraq’s weapons were unlikely to pose a threat.

In addition, the administration would have had more reasons that did the public at large for skepticism about Iraq’s possession of WMDs. Joseph C. Wilson reported, before the war to the administration, as well as after the war to the public, that it was “highly doubtful” that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. The subsequently leaked Downing Street memo has suggested to some that the US administration was not interested in exploring counter-evidence; the statement that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” has been read as indicating that intelligence and facts were being read selectively to achive the desired conclusions.

Anyway, as with the varieties of socialism, things may be more complex than they might seem.

Orwell & socialism

Someone suggested in class that Orwell was strongly opposed to socialism. But it’s worth noting that not everyone reads him that way--including, for at least much of his adult life, Orwell himself.

He fought against the Facists in Spain, and after seeing the Stalinist tactics of the Soviet-supported Republican army against groups like the anarchist & syndicalist militia of the POUM, with which Orwell fought (on the same side, that is, against the Fascist National Front, which had narrowly lost the 1936 election), he became strongly anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian. But he continued to identify as a socialist. (Brief bio here )

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which he reports on the lives of miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he argues that

Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

And as late as 1946 in “Why I Write” he wrote that

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it

(also w/o italics here. I don't have a print text handy, so I don't know which is more reliable).

That was still before writing 1984, so one might argue that his views changed. But many read it as consistent with his earlier positons. So, for instance, Robert Resch in Boundary 2 reads 1984 as both socialist and anti-Stalinist:

Because Orwell’s democratic socialism is explicitly and militantly anti-capitalist, his concept of totalitarianism must be distinguished clearly from that of his cold war appropriators.

According to Paul Foot in Socialist Review

George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist - Stalinism.

More Orwell, of course, at the library.

easy in a police state

In Touch of Evil, Mike Vargas explains that "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Some would say we're on our way.
Some would say we should go farther--like this guy, who thinks Bush should emulate Julius Caesar, nuke Iran, & declare himself president for life. No, really.

Update: The site's been scrubbed, but here's the cache.

on zombies

I’ve been thinking about zombie movies, of which the twenty-first century has seen a resurgence. The zombie movie database lists nearly 1600 films since the year 2000, though that includes shorts, tv shows, and direct to video releases. Still, many of those have been quite successful theatrical features. In 2002, we got 28 Days Later, and this year its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. In 2004, we saw a remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead, as well as the British horror comedy Shaun of the Dead. The next year, 2005, Romero himself directed the fourth in his series, Land of the Dead. What’s more, there are games like Resident Evil (which itself spawned a series of films), and books like Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Zombies, it seems, are everywhere.

So, when I recently saw on the website commondreams.org an article by Olga Bonfiglio titled “Dead Nation Walking,” I naturally thought it must be about zombie movies. But of course the article was instead about capital punishment in the US, and the title a reference to the anti-death penalty work of sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking.

Still, in the midst of life we are in death. Surely the violence of our world has some bearing on the popularity of a genre about the walking, biting dead.

As one can confirm in Bonfiglio’s article and through her sources, most nations have recognized that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent to crime. The US is the only NATO nation that retains the death penalty, and we rank fourth in the world for the number of executions, behind only China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Not only are there significant racial disparities in sentencing, so that people of color are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death, but also many innocent people have been falsely convicted and sentenced to death. Since 1973 over 120 people have been released from death row because of evidence of their innocence.

But the 431 people who have been executed in the US since 2000 don’t necessarily account for the recent interest in the walking dead, since the yearly figures have actually been declining since they peaked in 1999, in part because of the work of activists like Prejean and Bonfiglio.
But we might consider the casualties in Iraq—including the over 600,000 “excess deaths” reported by the Lancet, or perhaps the deaths resulting here from the lack of access to health care. Or those who have died in US custody, or for that matter in the US in police custody

In the midst of life we are in death, indeed, and maybe death is also in us, as well. George Romero’s work, in particular, has tended to stress the blurring of boundaries between zombies and humans, the idea that zombies are us. In Land of the Dead, a human character observes of the zombies, “They’re pretending to be alive,” and another responds, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive?” Similarly, in Shaun of the Dead, some of the initial humor comes from Shaun’s failure to notice that the people around him are zombies, since they don’t seem to be acting all that differently than usual (though, as one character later notes, “they are a little bitey”).

This blurring of boundaries means that zombies figure differently in different films, or sometimes even within a single film. They may be emblems of frustration with routine, as when a character in Shaun of the Dead comments, before the zombie outbreak, “I want to live a little.” They may embody a rebellious underclass, as when they overrun the gated community of wealthy humans in Land of the Dead. They may provide opportunities for human characters to act out unacceptable and unconscious aggressive wishes, as when people are obliged to kill zombified family members. But the deadening effect of life under capitalism has long been a staple of the zombie tradition.

Writing in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, a psychoanalyst with the science-fictional name of Mark Borg suggests that the palliative care culture –which dovetails so nicely with the commodification of treatment, with selling drugs to cure sleeplessness, inattention, depression, anxiety, shyness, and all the ills the human mind is heir to—invites us to become emotional zombies, armored against social connection and empathy. He writes,

Human—that is, emotional—responses to everyday stimuli are increasingly pathologized, and we are increasingly promised the obliteration of all human suffering. Yet at the core of all these human responses to suffering that need remedy is a deep sense of empathy with the struggles associated with simply existing at this time in this society, in a state of perpetual dread over the immense social problems that infect those around us, and that seem (and often are) insurmountable.

The list of potential remedies for our discomfort is long enough to [ . . . remove] us from the emotional experience of painful and anxiety-provoking stimuli. In this state of amputated emotions and self-experience we can become zombie-like, unable to impact or be impacted by our world or by each other. (2)

One recurrent motif in zombie movies is the coming together of human survivor groups, often an affirmation of the human sympathy to which life under capitalism is so antagonistic. In Shaun of the Dead the title character quotes Bertrand Russell’s statement that “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” That film ultimately betrays the words of the pacifist Russell, when the characters are saved by military intervention, but most zombie films are quite critical of militarism and of war.

Heather Hendershot, writing in Flow, notes that there is a long history of non-vampiric walking corpses being used as anti-war symbols, going back to Abel Gance's J'accuse in 1919: “The film ends with the dead of the Great War returning to ask why they have been sacrificed.” More recently, Joe Dante’s 2004 “Homecoming,” part of the television series Masters of Horror, featured dead soldiers from the current conflict returning to vote against the politicians who falsely led them into war.

Meghan Sutherland, writing in Framework, argues that zombie movies offer a “scenario . . . familiar to us in the time of the Patriot Act, it is precisely the bleed or collapse of structural boundaries—between murder and law, power and the body, life and death—that constitutes the survival of sovereign power on the unpredictable terrain of modern politics.”

This certainly sounds like a description of the death penalty, as well as, often enough, the actions of US forces in Iraq, and the actions of US police and prison guards in the US.

Despite the recurrent appearance of zombies, however, there has been a twist in the recent films, in many of which the zombies are not slow and shuffling, but fast and surprisingly agile, as in the remade Dawn of the Dead. Indeed, in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, the source of the problem is described as the “rage virus.” The deadened affect, the lack of emotion registered in earlier zombie films seems now to have given way to return of repressed fury.

And why shouldn’t we be furious? We have been paying attention, and we are outraged.

resident evil

Why is Milla Jovovich in lingerie? I really want to cgi onto her a decent set of clothes. Something with sleeves, and legs. I do like the knee-high black boots, though. Something I know I always think of wearing when I’m lounging around in a strange house after waking up in the shower, bruised and amnesiac.

All those shots of elevators plunging through shafts and trains through tunnels.

Evil corporations, man; they creep me out.

watch out

So, the last time I flew, I couldn't check in through the computer kiosk because, the person behind the counter told me, my name matched that of someone on the watch list. But if my name matched, then how did they decide so easily it wasn't me? (And I had no trouble on the return trip.) And if it was the same name, did the other user of it steal it from me? Because it's not a name you'd think was common. Or was it really my name on the list for some reason (my visiting of leftist websites, perhaps)? None of it makes me feel any safer.

spectacle

"To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary."

(1968: seems to include a lot of nekkid young women)

knocked up

Knocked Up was written and directed by Judd Apatow, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the director of photography was Portland native Eric Edwards. It’s a beautifully shot film, and it’s been getting enthusiastically positive reviews (especially at sites like Reviews for Guys and Movie for Guys).

All that press may have made the storyline familiar, but here it is in brief. Alison (played by Katherine Heigl), has just been promoted from behind the scenes to doing on-air interviews with celebrities. Out dancing with her sister to celebrate, she meets Ben (played by Seth Rogen), who’s out with his stoner slacker roommates. They spend the night together and she’s clearly alarmed in the morning (he asks, did we have sex?). But, as it turns out, she’s pregnant, and with little discussion of her options, she decides to continue the pregnancy and try to develop a real relationship with Ben.

A number of critics have suggested that the emotional center of the film lies with Alison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete, played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The film is more interesting if we understand the Alison and Ben pairing as a kind of projection of the feelings of someone in Paul’s position (or Apatow’s).

At least one critic has suggested that the obvious thing for pretty, successful, upwardly-mobile Alison to do is the terminate the pregnancy and move on.

The problem is not that Knocked Up is “liberal” because it’s about casual sex and having a baby out of wedlock. The problem is that it is horribly conservative about embracing and enjoying an adult version of sexuality that has moved beyond dorm-room-esque groping. One night with some guy you don’t even know does not mean you must tie yourself to him for the rest of your life... unless you think that women must be punished for sex. Oh, but it’s not punishment: you get an adorable baby out of the deal! And you get to “train” a man!

Another observes that

It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.

The pro-natalist position is implicit; we never hear anything about Alison’s possible religious or moral scruples. But we know little about her character. Aside from her job and family, she seems to have no life, no friends, no interests, no psychology.

Clearly the movie is a Guy Fantasy that the gorgeous successful blonde will fall for the crass loser; that's pretty much the central joke. Comments on some blogs have been far more scathing:

first of all, the woman gives up her hope of love and compatibility. face it, it's a trade up for him, a trade down for her. second of all, when the woman's mother suggests she get an abortion, the woman digs her heels in for daughter rebellion. the guy writer obviously can't have a powerful older woman giving the gal advice. third, the woman has no women friends except bitches. Another guy fantasy. And the woman rejects her friends in favor of the guy. Another guy fantasy. Lastly, the guy gets to command the woman's sister to leave the birthing room because she doesn't belong there. Another guy fantasy - telling off the sister. . . . The message is - abandon all your friends and sisters and your mother for the chubby guy. Of course, he gets to keep his friends. Does anyone see how hateful that is?

The World Socialist Web Site notes that the film is very narrowly focused, entirely concerned with individual choices and relationships, and that despite the superficial lewdness, its values are conservative, signs of an "inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life":

At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book....

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

It’s perhaps worth acknowledging that the hedonistic idle life of Ben’s friends and roommates could be understood as a resistance to capitalism and the protestant work ethic, and that may be part of the appeal of those sections of the film, but surely there are better means of resistance.

kitteh sez

from I can has cheezburger

the pain of our inner troops

Earlier this year, the mainstream press discovered that there are problems with veteran’s health care. The scandal of dilapidated buildings and untreated soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center led to a series of firings and resignations. But, as even the commercial press is aware, being a veteran is still no guarantee of access to health care.

Stories reflecting on this fact imply that veterans have an extra claim to medical attention. Perhaps they do, but we should be wary of suggesting that there is anyone who doesn’t have a right to health care.

Let’s review. According to Cesar Chelala, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, “The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no health insurance coverage during 2005, an increase of 1.3 million over the previous year. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. According to the Children’s Health Fund, 9 million children are completely uninsured in the United States, while another 23.7 million - nearly 30 percent of the nation’s children — lack regular access to health care.”

Last month the Commonwealth Fund released an update of their report comparing the health care systems of the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. They found that “the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage.”

Susie Day, who writes for Monthly Review zine, is one of the lucky ones. Last week, she reported on a recent call to her Doctor in a piece titled "U.S. Troops Out of . . . ME":

Hello, Doctor? Thanks for taking my call -- it's an emergency. I've been infected. Well, medically speaking, I guess you'd say I'm not so much infected as occupied. My symptoms? They're hard to describe. A cough, maybe.

Like today, I'm walking down the street. Big, shady trees, leaves bright green . . . twittering birds, everything oxygenated and sparkling. And I see an old gentleman in a baseball cap and suspenders, struggling to heave his grocery-filled shopping cart up the stoop to his apartment. My first thought is to go over and help him lift the cart. Simple enough.

Then I get a scratching in my throat and this weird, fearful sensation. "WHOA," I say to myself. "Instead of being grateful, this guy could take out a .357 Magnum and blow my head off." I notice a blockage; I cough. I think, "[Forget] you, old man, you ingrate, I was only trying to help." I'm now shaking and feverish. I think, "To make sure you don't kill me, you bum, I'm going to run a steak knife into your guts and drive a tank over your pitiful geezer body."

By now, I'm coughing hard. The birds continue to twitter and the leaves are shimmering in the breeze -- while I am picturing myself annihilating this old guy. But that's the price you pay, right -- kill them before they kill you? Just then, I retch; I double over and cough up . . . a tiny American soldier.

I'd call that a symptom, wouldn't you, Doctor? Anyhow, it lands in my hand, all tricked out in little fatigues and a bayonet. I can tell right away it's dead. So I panic . . . and run home and phone you.

I think it's obvious, Doctor: I've become contaminated by U.S. foreign policy. I calculate, according to the last Democratic sellout vote, that I have at least 147,000 U.S. troops stationed in my Persian Gulf, er, body. Plus all their equipment.

How was I infected, you ask? This is embarrassing, Doctor -- I, uh, didn't take precautions. I must have exchanged bodily fluids with a peace activist or something. Some commie pervert who believed that all humans are "created equal." I admit I've jumped to this conclusion once or twice, watching the news -- that the beings who have died by the hundreds of thousands in Iraq are, in fact, human -- that their lives matter as much as yours or mine. Naturally, in America, I couldn't live, knowing this. So in came the troops. That's right, Doctor: the government sent them. To protect me.

Even now, I can feel my inner troops. Drilling, playing cards, writing letters home, making sure I am terrorist-free. They won't tell me if they had anything to do with the siege on Fallujah, or if they hooded detainees for interrogation. They say a lot happens that doesn't make the news. They say they're just doing their job.

Kids, mostly. Came to see the world, feed their families, get a college degree, defend democracy. But they're stuck now and scared. They hate it and, knowing they are hated, they kill. They belong to me. . . .

But here's the thing, Doctor. With all due respect to my troops, I don't want them. Although they do allow me to cope with post-9/11 reality, they won't let me dream of happiness. For example, I'll be thinking of a quiet, sun-filled room, tulips in a vase on the piano, a puppy playing with a fallen petal and -- blam!, a combat boot kicks in the door and stomps everything to death. This is unacceptable, Doctor: I cannot live on a planet where innocence is a constant deterrent to survival.

So I need fast relief. What would you prescribe -- a stomach pump, chemotherapy, exorcism? This isn't some little ailment where you say, "Click on two MoveOn.org petitions and call me in the morning," this is serious. In fact, I suggest a radical troop-ectomy to actually remove our military from Iraq.

Lots of people could assist you in this operation, Doctor; me included. Then, of course, we'd have to get the troops out of the troops. They're occupied, too, you know.

restoring the constitution?

Someone in Washington must have finally taken to heart the bumper sticker that says, “Ok, joke’s over. Bring back the constitution” because there’s now a bill in both houses called the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.”

Its provisions are less ambitious than its title, but it would repeal many parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by, among other things, banning the use of coerced testimony, and restoring the right of detainees to seek a writ of habeas corpus.

The phrase habeas corpus is Latin for “thou (shalt) have the body” –in court, that is. Also called the Great Writ of Liberty, and other things in Latin, a writ of habeas corpus was originally used to require the custodian of a person detained without charges to bring the body of that person before a judge for a determination of whether the person is being held for legal reason, or else should be released from custody.

The Military Commissions Act was passed in response to the Supreme Court decision in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, which last year determined that the Guantanamo military commissions provided for in the PATRIOT ACT are illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.

So, in a twist on checks and balances, when the Supreme Court asserted that the executive administration's initial plans to try detainees using military tribunals were illegal, the legislative branch passed a law declaring it legal: Military Commissions Act of 2006. “In doing so,” as the ACLU puts it, “they cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. They also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture.” There was no mention in the Commissions Act of the Geneva conventions it undermined.

In February of this year, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited provisions of the Military Commissions Act in ruling that Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

But the Hamden decision followed an earlier ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In the Hamdi case, the government contended that it could hold Hamdi, an American citizen, indefinitely without charges, and without the right to stand trial. In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that Hamdi had been denied due process and should receive a meaningful opportunity to contest the facts allegedly underlying his designation as an “enemy combatant.” Faced with the obligation to defend its detention before an objective decisionmaker, the government agreed to release Hamdi.

But as Jennifer Van Bergen puts it in a 2004 article on Counterpunch dot org.

While saying Hamdi had the [habeas corpus] right to challenge his detention, the Court eviscerated that right by the applying a "balancing test" used in civil cases--a test that in fact originated in the context of the deprivation of welfare benefits. Rather than requiring the Government to supply probable cause of criminal activity in order to detain Hamdi, Hamdi has to somehow prove that he isn't what the Government says he is. The Court pointed out that the lower court "apparently believed that the appropriate process would approach the process that accompanies a criminal trial."
Well, yes, a person being held in custody has the right to be charged with a crime or released. But the Court rejected this approach, [though] it is hard to see why the Court would refuse to apply criminal procedural protections to challenges to the detention of persons who have claimed innocence. Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be our standard.

In an essay titled “Guantanamo and the New Legal Order,” in the May 2005 Monthly Review, Jean-Claude Paye writes,

The “war against terrorism” has provided all executive branches of the leading Western governments with a perfect opportunity to make some deep adjustments to society. These changes are so far-reaching that they approach a shedding of the old political regime. We in the West are witnessing a reversal of the role of criminal procedure right across the board. Its usual function—to guarantee fundamental freedoms and cap the powers of police and government—is morphing into the opposite, a suspension of constitutional order. By extending exceptional proceedings to all stages of the criminal process—from inquiry to trial—private life is being invaded and the expression of public freedoms chilled. . . .
These measures are common to all nations, but the United States goes one step further. It has set about reorganizing its penal system by making outright violence an integral part of the legal system. Such action affects foreign nationals accused of terrorism or U.S. citizens labeled as “enemy combatants” by the Pentagon, and whose constitutional guarantee that they would not be deprived of liberty without due process of law has been suspended ….
In the state of emergency the extent of the powers magistrates have at their disposal is a direct result of the suspension of laws limiting their privileges. The extraordinary powers of both the executive and police stem from diminishing the mechanisms that protect fundamental freedoms. The state of emergency is a state without law.

As Paye notes, the move toward centralized rule by executive decree is part of a large-scale political shift. But we can also see an attempted small-scale version of this move in the city of Portland, Oregon. Ballot Measure 26-91 would transform Portland’s committee-style government, giving greater power to the mayor, currently former police chief Tom Potter. And as Dave Mazza reports in the May 2007 Portland Alliance, the charter revision campaign has been financed chiefly by big business.

Ballots have gone out to voters in Portland. The Center for Constitutional Rights has an online resource and action page for restoring habeas corpus, and the ACLU has an online petition that will be delivered to legislators on June 26th, the one year anniversary of the ratification of the Military Commissions Act.

Finally, though, it’s worth remembering that, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us in a 2005 essay in The Progressive,

Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. …
[T]he most important job citizens have […] is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system.

kiss me deadly

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.
For more on femmes fatales and film noir, listen to the Old Mole Variety Hour tomorrow (April 23), or check out these links.



http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/rc1fr10m.htm
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/rr0600/cfrr10b.htm

queer morality

Last month, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members by saying that "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” He apparently did not comment on the morality of, say, invading a country and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of approximately 655,000 individuals.

That evident contradiction, according to which gay love is bad, but killing is good, is addressed by Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in a recent column in Truthdig:

"The radical Christian right . . . has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement’s chain of command. . . .

This hypermasculinity, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their blind obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. The images of Jesus often show him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors. Jesus’ stoic endurance of the brutal whippings in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ presages the brutal, masculine world of this ideology. . . . Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: “Christ was a man with muscles,” he insisted. Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God’s enemies.

The unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. . . . Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination that men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside the home.

This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to [this] rigid [. . .] model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled."

Successful challenges to this movement are unlikely to come through legislative reform alone, any more than an end to racism came though the 1964 civil rights act outlawing racial segregation and discrimination. But legal recognition and rights would certainly be a step in the right direction.

You have a chance to participate in such steps this very evening, Monday April 9, 2007, when the Oregon House Elections, Ethics and Rules Committee holds a public hearing on two gay rights acts: the Oregon Equality Act (SB 2) and the Oregon Family Fairness Act (HB 2007). Hearings will be held at 5:30 PM today in Hearing Room E at the Capitol in Salem.

The House Family Fairness Act would provide for civil unions between same-sex partners. The Senate Equality Act would provide gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people with protection from discrimination in employment, housing, access to public places and other areas.

While antidiscrimination law seems a no brainer (though the exemptions for religious groups raise thorny questions, and have been the subject of much negotiation), civil unions are more complicated.

Bonnie Tinker, writing in this month’s Portland Alliance, asks,

“How can I support a bill that treats same-sex partners as a separate class and asks us to wear the pink triangle of civil unions? On the other hand, how can I oppose a bill that intends to make things better for lesbian and gay families?”

She suggests,

“Go to the hearings on HB 2007 and demonstrate outside, or testify inside from a neutral position that they have given us the wrong choices. We need a choice that offers equality.” And Tinker propses several further actions: those in other sex relationships can refuse special rights and wear “the pink triangle of civil unions” along with queer couples; those in legal marriages can testify to the privileges they receive; on forms that ask for marital status, queers in couples might check the box that says “married”; those in legal marriages might check “single” in order to reject special rights.

Tinker concludes, “Our acceptance of the caste system of legal marriage rights is a reflection of the depth of heterosexist conditioning in society. It is no longer acceptable. As with any oppression, the first step toward changeis to pay attention ot unconscious and unstated privilege. The next step is to negotiate for change. We are now ready for the next step: non-violent direct action to resist the inequality of legal marriage.”

passive voice and other crimes

From today's NYTimes:

Quotation of the Day

"I acknowledge that mistakes were made here."

-ALBERTO R. GONZALES, the attorney general, on the dismissals of federal prosecutors.