#History by Hillary

In a matter of a few days, Hillary Clinton grossly mischaracterized Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s record on HIV/AIDS, apologized briefly on twitter, and then apologized at greater length, less badly, on Medium.

First, as reported on Truthdig (among other places), she praised the recently deceased former first lady Nancy Reagan and President Reagan for starting “a national conversation” on the deadly AIDS virus:

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s,” Clinton said on MSNBC. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan — in particular Mrs. Reagan — we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that, too, is something I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy. But it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this too.’ ”

Nothing could be further from the truth, reports Zaid Jilani at The Intercept:

Clinton’s telling of HIV/AIDS history doesn’t align with the facts. President Reagan waited seven years to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, even as thousands of Americans died from the disease. Dr. C. Everett Koop, the administration’s surgeon general, said the president dragged his feet on the issue “because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs.” Koop said their position was that AIDS victims were “only getting what they justly deserve.”

In 1985 the Reagans’ friend Rock Hudson, then dying of AIDS, traveled to Paris in a desperate attempt to be treated by a French military doctor. As BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner reported last year, Hudson’s publicist sent a telegram to his Hollywood friends in the White House, begging for help in getting Hudson moved to a French military hospital where the doctor could treat him. Nancy Reagan personally saw and rejected the request.

 

In April 1987, activists unveiled a poster that said “Silence = Death” – a month before Reagan would finally devote a speech to the years-long epidemic. That slogan would become the motto of the group AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP), and according to their website, the slogan was asking “Why is Reagan silent about AIDS?”

Says Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, “Shameful is not even strong enough a word for the record of the Reagan administration on this. 

After an outcry from advocates of people with AIDS and HIV, Clinton apologized for her claims about Nancy Reagan, first on twitter, and then at greater length on Medium, proposing a number of useful responses, including increasing access to drug treatments, expanding Medicaid, and "reforming outdated and stigmatizing HIV criminalization laws." That last is a strange locution, suggesting that there was a time when laws criminalizing HIV were timely, and that all they need is a little reform, not repeal. Clinton did not mention the need for, say, single-payer health care, or Medicare for all--just capping the cost of medications for HIV/AIDS.

Steven Thrasher at The Guardian had an idea about why Clinton would fabricate the claim about Nancy's HIV/AIDS advocacy:

Why, in 2016, did the Democratic frontrunner engage so blithely in the erasure of the people who actually did start the “national conversation” about AIDS? Was it because they were gay men of the in-your-face variety of activism – many of whom died of the virus?

When Clinton said the Reagans led the way on AIDS when “nobody wanted to do anything about it," she was erasing these people from history. People initially got HIV in this country through IV drug use, blood transfusions, and sex. But while the Reagans looked the other way – even when a friend asked for help – it was was queer activists who were loud as hell in New York and San Francisco who forced the nation to face the plague.

Clinton said she could “really appreciate” Nancy Reagan’s “very effective low-key advocacy” that “penetrated the public conscience” on AIDS. But the reality is, the people who really started the conversation were not low-key. They were not polite. They were not quiet in any way. They staged die-ins. They shut down streets. They threw the cremated ashes of their loved ones, already killed by AIDS, over the fence of the White House to demand action. So what was Clinton trying to gain by praising the Reagans in this way in the first place?

[Thrasher fears] that she was engaging in a kind of dog-whistling, using the moment of Nancy Reagan’s death to appeal to voters who nostalgically loved the Reagans and dream of morning in America again. [Perhaps] by invoking a false AIDS history, she was appealing to those who want a simpler time before gays got uppity. Perhaps she wants to peel off some of the white men voting for Sanders in the primary. Perhaps she is trolling for Reagan Democrats who might consider her over Trump in making America great again.

[Thrasher has been] frightened for some time that the crisis of AIDS is not over, especially for black America, and yet it has again largely been erased from our national political consciousness. AIDS, which is projected to infect one in two black gay American men, is almost invisible from the presidential race.

 

This historical revisionism has been taken up on Twitter with the hashtag #HistoryByHillary, although topping truth with sarcasm and hyperbole is not always easy:

I'd write a bunch of #HistoryByHillary jokes but I can't think of anything worse than "The Reagans started the conversation about AIDS." — Ryan Houlihan (@RyanHoulihan)

"Columbus really started the conversation on how to peacefully enter a country and become a productive citizen." #HistoryByHillary --- BrownBlaze (‏@brownblaze)

Ronald Reagan started a national conversation about the plight of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. #HistoryByHillary --(re)becca ツ ( @bexology_)

"As a feminist, I was obliged to bomb those wedding parties in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan." ---Steven Salaita ‏(@stevesalaita)

I would like to thank Henry Kissinger for being a strong advocate for peace around the world. #HistoryByHillary --Viva la causa! (@70torinoman)

#HistoryByHillary: Walmart has always stood for worker's rights. --Max Waller (@maxrafaelwaller)

Some of Clinton's other revisions of the past have also gotten attention with the same hastag, including her omission of Bernie Sanders from the fight for health care reform, and, less prominently if perhaps more importantly, her role in Honduras, where she supported the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya.

As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.” The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011; political repression, the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.

This has lead recently to the assassination of activist Berta Cáceres and the attacks on and detention of the only witness, Gustavo Castro Soto. In an interview two years ago, Cáceres called attention to Clinton's acknowledgement, in her book Hard Choices, of her role in the coup. But Cáceres must have read a hardcover edition of the book, because the relevant section has been deleted from the paperback reissue.

As Noam Chomsky has noted, "Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead."

  [March 14, 2016 Old Mole Variety Hour]

Trump was right? Just call Jane

Some weeks ago, Donald Trump commented that if abortion were illegal, then women who had abortions should be subject to some form of punishment. This is a logical position, insofar as those who violate laws are generally subject to some form of punishment. But Trump was immediately criticized by those holding both pro-choice and anti-abortion positions, and he soon recanted, saying instead that the doctor or other practitioner providing the abortion is the one who should be punished, not the no-longer-pregnant woman, who is, Trump said, "a victim."

One might suspect that anti-choice conservatives take the position that doctors performing abortions, rather than those receiving abortions, should be punished, for purely pragmatic reasons. Perhaps the threat of punishment might be more likely to have a deterrent effect for practitioners. Perhaps punishing a woman recovering from a medical procedure might seem too harsh a position to win over those who are politically uncertain.

But as Corey Robin points out in Jacobin, more is involved in that position. A political scholar who has studied conservativism, Robin has argued that “conservatism is the theoretical voice of ... animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.”

It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves. . . . Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.
Though certainly hostile to women’s agency, Trump’s [initial] position recognizes it. He’s saying women make the choice to get an abortion, abortion is a crime, so do with women who get an abortion what we do with anyone who commits a crime: hold them accountable, punish them. If the goal is simply to constrain the agency of the subordinate class, the simplest thing to do is to punish the disobedient so that she doesn’t act disobediently again. But in doing so, you implicitly recognize her agency, particularly if your punishment is tied to a set of laws and rules you expect her to learn. . . .
Trump’s detractors in the GOP refuse to recognize women’s agency. It’s the abortionist’s fault, they say! Hold the doctor accountable, not the poor unsuspecting women, who’s just an innocent victim of the doctor’s evil ways. . . .
If the goal is not simply to constrain the agency of the subordinate class, but to deny it altogether, the far better move is not to hold the disobedient accountable but instead to blame her disobedience on some external force: Satan, the serpent, the doctor. She then becomes a vessel, the implement of another’s will (preferably a man’s will), which is precisely what so many in the conservative movement want women to be.

On the other hand, since denial does not work--since women are not what the conservative movement wants us to be, since women keep acting like autonomous agents with wills of our own--women are, in fact, punished for terminating or attempting to terminate pregnancies in the US.

As Jodi Jacobson points out in a piece on R E wire,

The anti-choice movement seeks to punish women through a web of entrapment that, spun just a little bit at a time, harms women in ways that are less noticeable to the rest of us because they don’t make headlines until women start ending up in jail.

First, anti-choice legislators pass laws to mandate medically unnecessary waiting periods, driving up the costs of abortion care and insulting the intelligence of women who don’t need to be told to wait to figure out how to deal with their own realities. Then, they pass laws to require clinics to mimic ambulatory surgical centers, though abortion is among the safest procedures a person can obtain and there is no reason not to do them in a clinic. This forces many clinics to close because providers can’t recoup the costs of medically unnecessary building renovations, and in turn it leaves women in large swaths of a state without access to care. Then, having cut off many avenues to legal safe abortion care, lawmakers pass laws to make medication abortion inaccessible, again on medically unnecessary grounds. They also pass laws mandating that only doctors can perform abortions, even though nurses and nurse practitioners are perfectly capable of being trained to perform early abortions safely and effectively, as well as to administer medication abortion. Finally, they pass laws making self-induced abortion a crime. Put these together and the anti-choice movement has made a safe, legal abortion virtually impossible to obtain. So when, in desperation, women go to any length to end an unintended pregnancy, legislators punish them further by making them criminals and putting them into jail.

In Georgia, Kenlissia Jones was arrested in 2015 for allegedly using misoprostol to self-induce her abortion. Jones was originally facing two charges: “malice murder” and “possession of a dangerous drug” (i.e. the misoprostol). The murder charge against Jones was dropped, but she still faces punishment for the drug charge. . . . in Tennessee, Anna Yocca was charged with attempted murder for a failed self-induced abortion attempt with a coat hanger. Prosecutors later dropped the attempted murder charge but said they would still pursue criminal charges against Yocca, likely for aggravated assault.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 38 states now have feticide or “fetal homicide” laws on the books, and in 23 of these states, these laws can be applied at any stage of pregnancy. While these laws were not originally created with the intent of criminalizing pregnant women for actions they took during their own pregnancy, they are now widely used to do just that. . . .

There is Bei Bei Shuai, who was charged with murder and attempted feticide for attempting suicide while pregnant. Shuai sat in jail for 435 days until she was released on bail (where she remained under surveillance by an electronic ankle monitor). In August 2013, nearly two and a half years after her prosecution began, she accepted a plea deal to the misdemeanor charge of “criminal recklessness.” There is Purvi Patel, who was charged with neglect of a dependent and feticide after having a pregnancy loss that the state deemed was a self-induced abortion. She is currently serving a 41-year sentence while her case is on appeal.

In short, "The laws and policies pushed by the [anti-choice] movement and the politicians it supports punish women both explicitly and implicitly." But it's worth recalling, too, that women's intractable assertions of agency have yielded positive, collective action, as well.

One notable example from the days before Roe v Wade is the Jane collective, which you can learn more about this week by watching the film Jane: An Abortion Service at the Clinton Street Theatre tomorrow, Tuesday April 12 at 7pm.

Jane was a Chicago-based women's health group that performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training. In the film, Jane members describe finding feminism and clients describe finding Jane, and the film uses both archival footage and recreations as well as interviews to depict how the repression of the early sixties and social movements of the late sixties influenced members of the group. Both vital knowledge and meditation on the process of empowerment, Jane: An Abortion Service showcases the importance of preserving women's knowledge in the face of revisionist history.

It is sponsored by Backline and the Clinton Street Theatre, and will be followed by a discussion with writer and activist Judith Arcana, who was a Jane, is interviewed in the film, and has written, among other wonderful works, a fabulous collection of poetry called What If Your Mother.

[Old Mole Variety Hour, April 11, 2016]

#mybodymyhome (iii) at the new inquiry

by Keguro Macharia

Octavia Butler’s Survivor (1979) is an orphan novel.  It inhabits the world of the Patternist series, which started with Patternmaster (1976), and was followed by the prequels Mind of My Mind (1977), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984), a world that starts with the immortal Doro and Anyanwu and concludes with an ongoing, genocidal battle between their descendants—the telepathic patternists—and humans modified by an alien microbe—the clayarks. Survivor offers a different vision, a possibility that some left this earth-bound battle to travel to another world.

The protagonist, Alanna Verrick, is a bi-racial orphan, black and Asian, who chooses, at the end of the novel, to leave/live with aliens, “abandoning” her fellow humans.

Choosing is always strange in Butler—I’ll explore this at greater length in a subsequent post. The choice to survive in Butler’s works—“survival” is a key term for Butler and Audre Lorde—refuses a too-U.S. framing of agency as liberation from embedding. 

The choice to survive requires facing the ethics of complicity. Butler’s works are resolutely anti-sentimental (is that the right term?). Lives end. Tough choices are made. Protagonists are never permitted to be unreservedly lovable or even likable.

Sanctuary is never utopia. Merely another moment of survival. That “merely” is needed, because Butler always reminds us that survival is precarious—even the near-immortal can—and do—die.
More than any other novelist I know, Butler emphasizes that the ethical choice always tears and fractures: truthtelling is breaking hard against things.

A promissory note from a gorgeous voice, who is still teaching me how to listen:

Thiefing sugar has never been easy—sharp cane stalk can cut cane cutters

Zulie

Zulie reviewed

Zulie in print (look inside!)

Zulie cinema (mousie)

Zulie cinema (the sequel: moth) 

Zulie brings home prey : actual dead bird



 

Charcot, Augustine

Charcot, a lesson: a hysteric (Marie "Blanche" Wittman) demonstrates fainting:

from “Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière” (Jean Martin Charcot,1878) (Augustine)

review of a book about Charcot:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-medical-muses-hysteria-in-nineteenth-century-paris-by-asti-hustvedt.html?_r=0
 

the lyricism of oppression: against beasts of the southern wild

Two critical views from Jayna Browne and Christina Sharpe at Social Text

http://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-i/

How does a little black girl child orphaned and abandoned become a vision for climate resistance for so many people who watched the film?  It is precisely this kind of misprision, this not feeling or seeing, that subtends  an event like the death of Glenda Moore's sons during Hurricane Sandy.  Riffing on Invisible Man, optic white does not see your plight. 

http://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-ii/

This isn't the first case of black children being depicted as insensitive to pain, or of black suffering and survival being used to symbolize American democracy….The film romanticizes their abject poverty….This is no maroon society, nor is it like any community of generationally poor people in the US or the global south I have ever seen. Instead the film recapitulates the continuing currency of black suffering, and acts as a kind of "crisis porn," showing how black pain is erotically charged.

bell hooks: http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html

Sadly, all the vibrancy in this film is generated by a crude pornography of violence. At the center of this spectacle is the continuous physical and emotional violation of the body and being of a small six year old black girl called Hushpuppy …. Subject to both romanticization as a modern primitive and eroticization, her plight is presented as comically farcical.  Some audiences laugh as Hushpuppy, when enraged at the antics of her disappearing alcoholic oftentimes abusive wild man dad Wink, burns her shanty house. … Hushpuppy has a resilient spirit. She is indeed a miniature version of the ‘strong black female matriarch,’ racist and sexist representations have depicted from slavery on into the present day. Like the unrealistic racist/sexist stereotypical images of grown black women in the recent blockbuster film The Help … Hushpuppy is a survivor. From the onset of the film, she is depicted as a wild child, so at home in the natural wild of the Gulf of Mexico bayou world

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2012/12/the-cast-against-beasts-of-the-southern-wild

Screenwriter Lucy Alibar originally wrote Beasts of the Southern Wild as a play called Juicy and Delicious, which was about an 11-year-old white boy and his father in southern Georgia, where she grew up. In adapting it to a 6-year-old black girl in the Louisiana swamps, Queens-bred director Benh Zeitlin turns it into a maudlin exercise in cultural tourism

the reviewer for Forbes liked it, which is a bad sign

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/03/10/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-review-an-american-fairy-tale/#6b4437183ac5

http://thefeministwire.com/2013/02/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-an-affective-review/

Beasts of the Southern Wild . . . . seemed to devolve into a kind of poverty porn . . . . with noble intentions attempting to redefine the spaces in which poor, rural communities exist in an American framework, but in my opinion, just keeping those same communities positioned as the strange, freaky, idiosyncratic Other. What’s worse here is that Beasts of the Southern Wild plays out as a kind of poverty porn put into black face, with no actual mention of blackness or race as a presence.

thinking wars

Thinking, the creation of meaning, the internal pact we make with words that they will be moments of human sincerity, the reconstitution of near-historical texts attesting to intellectual lineages—all of these stand in the face of the Orwellian speech of generals, press secretaries, and government leaders obsessed with ensuring their class positions.

--Joan Nestle, "Wars and Thinking." Journal of Women's History 15.3 (Autumn 2003): 49-57.