So, What Else Is New?

In which I ramble aimlessly among diverse topics.

The picture is a video capture of Nanci Griffith singing Boots of Spanish Leather from Transatlantic Sessions 2. I find the performance achingly beautiful, as marvel once again how a young Bob Dylan could have imagined this song. I guess screen capture is a bit dodgy, well for that matter an awful lot of the videos up at YouTube are dodgy. It's pretty hard to buy either CDs or DVDs of the Transatlantic Sessions here in the USA. CDs and DVDs in the PAL format are available at MusicScotland. I take the cheap way and am grateful to those who've uploaded songs to YouTube. There are lots of videos up, and a good tip to search "Transatlantic Sessions."

I got around to the Nanci Griffth's performance because I was looking at photographs of Obama's pre-inaugural train ride from Philadelphia to Baltimore. I remembered someone remarking they loved train travel because they got to see people's backyards; where they really live. In one of those shots there are a couple of guys standing on the roof of their back porch waving at the train. The silly thought that wandered in was: "I wonder if those guys are black?" Because I couldn't tell I thought of Julie Gold's song From a Distance:

From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
it's the voice of every man.

I especially love how Griffths sings the verse:

From a distance you look like my friend,
even though we are at war.
From a distance I just cannot comprehend
what all this fighting is for.

Cut from The Obama Inaugural Celebration Concert was Bishop Gene Robinson's A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama, but it's worth reading nonetheless. Old commie Pete Seeger singing Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land with a children's choir and Bruce Springsteen. What is so wonderful about the video is how when Seeger shouts out the subversive lyrics:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --

the camera moves to Obama who looks not altogether happy. Who could have predicted Pete Seeger would be a little subversive? Oh well, I'm sure he expected and indeed part of the joy of the concert is exactly that there have always been many streams converging in the American experience. And because this song gets sung everywhere, Mavis Staples can sing Freedom Highway and it resonates across all sorts of boundaries.

funknroll makes some great videos especially highlighting the secret history of women in rock and roll. His video of The Staples Singers 1965 Freedom Highway has images that make a person of my age pinch myself. My dad will be 87 in a few days and it's striking to me that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have celebrated his 80th birthday a few days ago had he not been shot down. Time passes quickly.

Seeger's gleeful look as he points out that one side of the Private Property! sign has got nothing on it and that's ourl land couldn't be more timely. The Nation has a video up called The Commons which is quite swell with clever animation and music. The video also introduced me to On The Commons a very cool Web site.

I believe I mentioned in a earlier post about Robert Patterson's writing about the Boyd Conference as being very worthwhile reading. Just in time for Obama's Inauguration Patterson has an important post There is Hope - But maybe not what you think!. Patterson lays out where we stand and what lays ahead. Peak Oil changes our assumptions, and Patterson presents the case for orderly energy descent.

I think that our best chance is to work full on towards establishing local resiliency - where we shift more control back locally in energy, food and money. Where we link our local efforts to be more resilient to those of others who are doing the same. Where we look also to power of relationships to build a more effective approach to health and to education.

Patterson is concerned that Obama will hew too closely to conventional wisdom. That's probably inevitable. But I do find that Obama is encouraging people to leverage the MyObama Web site to make house parties for local activism. There really is much we can do and the Transition Culture movement all over shows people can do it with good spirits and joy. Wherever we live we have much to do, and Patterson is smart to point out that acting locally in correspondence with others all over is a powerful way to proceed.

Toss Pot Wanker

The image is a T-shirt design available at Fuctup, an online retailer in the UK.

On a thread I was participating the other day concerning Obama House Parties, a commentator queried:

just a thought guys... have you ever considered you might all just be a bunch of middle aged old toss pot wankers who just talk a lot about the "issues"...

Okay deliberately didn't post a link, questions like that are ripe for piling on. One of the responses seemed to take offense at the "old" bit. I suspect that's because he'd never heard "toss pot" directed at him. I hadn't either, so consulted the Urban Dictionary an invaluable online reference site. Hum, it seems "toss pot" essentially means "wanker," so added as an intensifier.

I didn't respond to the comment on the thread. If I would, I suppose it would follow along the lines of: "What's wrong with wanking?" Heavens knows I've seen plenty of similar comments more or less directed at me, so it seems worth my while to come up with some sort of come back. I never seem to manage one. Here's my problem: On one horn I am really jazzed about commons-based peer production. On the other horn, I sure do a lot of talking--writing--and other than that it's hard to point to doing much else.

The Urban Dictionary is a good example of what can be done by peer production. It's remarkably complete and accurate all from the distributed gifts of content from many users of the resource. Consider a single entry for the word jagoff. I strongly associate the word with my locale and its charming local dialect. The definitions note the geographic use of the term, but also suggest alternate entomologies and word histories. One of the subtleties of the term's meaning is not just a jerk, but a mean jerk.

When President Bush visited Pittsburgh on Labor Day 2002, I went to greet him. At the time I thought that with enough public outcry, the nation might avoid another Iraq War. One of the signs I took, with wording specially crafted by a friend read:

Hey Bush
We Scoff
Yinza
Jagoff

After a full afternoon behind a tall fence and police cordon, one of those infamous "Free Speech Zones," it became pretty clear from insults hurled from the other side of the fence that my high hope for avoiding war were rather too lofty. And I wonder now just who was the bigger jagoff that day? Yep, I've still got the sign to prove it.

It's too easy to be a mean jerk on the Internet. Lisa Derrick is cool. I mean I really like what she says on her blog most of the time; I don't really know her. Friday night she did a piece about the One Laptop Per Child. She wrote:

They'd like folks to donate to provide kids everywhere with a computer. Which is real nice, except potable water, food and vaccines are a more pressing concern for kids in under-developed and developing nations.

The "real nice" part got under my skin. I've read and written a lot about the One Laptop Per Child effort over the last couple of years. I think it's a project that deserves more careful attention. So I left a comment, and suggested Derrick was self-righteous. I could search the Urban Dictionary for just the right word to fit my asshatiness, but I'll go with jagoff because it's local.

After my impertinent comment at La Figa--Derrick's blog--I headed over to Daisy's Dead Air, one of my favorite reads. Daisy had just posted Part 1 of a two part post Feminists on High Horses. Two problems with the comment I left there: 1) too long and 2) my asshatitude.

There must have been something wrong with me that night. I've done far worse. The remarkable thing about publishing on the Internet is stuff you put up sticks around, maybe forever. If I ever feel too full of myself I know just were to find evidence of me being a jagoff online--sorry no links. In part 2 Daisy picks up on the subject of people being accountable. I'm so math challenged that "accountable" isn't one of my favorite words, but I agree with what she says. When we're out there online, we're accountable in more ways than people of my age, i.e. people who for most of their lives there was no Internet, tend to anticipate.

There's a lot going on in Daisy's post, but there's a part in it I want to bring up. Daisy is working class. When she was younger she was part of "very rigorous political collective." It turned out that the collective was dominated by rich kids. During one of their meetings she asked: "[W]asn't it impossible for rich kids to have the proper class consciousness?" For that she was thrown out. Going out on a limb here, I'll suggest that Daisy feels some resentment about it. She's quite dispassionate in making the point that it's not so strange really that the children of the rulers of the world would presume to be rulers in every setting they find themselves in.

I don't know if Daisy would call it resentment. Over all, especially Part 1 is a bit scathing. But her language about the double bind that the rich kids' presumptions present is quite cool. Because wealth is a factor in the issue which provoked the post in the first place, it seems to me she's tried to lay out this aspect of the discussion in a calm and rational way. But, you know, it feels really bad to be put down like that and the feelings really matter.

I'm a white middle-aged white guy, even if I consider myself poor, I've got privilege that I take for granted. Over the last few years I've tried to collaborate with a couple of friends in Uganda. This is an important part of my life, but a part I find surprisingly hard to tell about.

This afternoon I was chatting with one of my Ugandan friends online. I'd written an email to him, which after I sent it worried some of my privileged presumption was showing. The good thing is we've been corresponding for years, and have developed strong regard for one another, so I didn't worry too much. What he told me in our conversation really moved me, but it's hard to relate because it's got to the feelings part of the double binds created by unconscious privilege.

He talked about how years ago he worked as an organizer in Kenya. He said people really listened to him there. A big part of the willingness to listen to him came from his being from a different place. Then he talked about hearing tributes to Christina Jordan of Life in Africa and that part of that respect came from something like what he'd experienced in Kenya; she wasn't from there. It's hard to relate a conversation, but the meaning I felt from what he wrote was how discouraging it feels when you are poor and put down over an over in little things everyday. My friend is courageous, but told me he felt fear. The fear comes from being told in so many ways you're no good. And his point was how hard it is to organize among people who feel the same way.

I've read lots of what Christina Jordan has put up online over the years, and participated in online social networks she's participated in too. She has been enormously transparent in all she's done. My friend has heard me mention Christina, but doesn't have the same experience of knowing what she's written over time. I hope he comes to see that the Ugandans who are running Life in Africa are confident and competent. Nevertheless, the point my friend was making about the sort of paralysis poverty causes in people is something not lost on those who've worked long and hard with Life in Africa. Getting over the hurdle of people thinking they have nothing to offer is tough.

Sometimes I despair that my online collaboration with my Ugandan friends has yielded not much. I can't dismiss it because, if nothing else, there are genuine bonds of affection. Still there's precious little tangible to show for it.

I turned 53 on the winter solstice. I think Daisy is younger than I am, but I've seen her use the word "old" to describe herself. I prefer the word "experienced." I know Daisy is experienced. Over the past year of reading her posts, I see she's adept at naming her fears and thereby conquering them. I felt my friend was taking a big step in revealing to me the fear he sometimes feels. We all know about fears, it's part of being human. Unfortunately it's probably also a part of being human to exploit the knowledge that we've all got fears. Some people are masters at it and most of us clumsy and unthinking at one time or another.

All of us can create something good. Every one of us has something important to give. What any one of us has may be small, but taken together it's a large amount.

Too many of us live lives in dire need of the essentials. Buckminster Fuller liked to say we live on Spaceship Earth. We've got to find ways for every person here to have enough while recognizing the confines of our little blue planet. Fuller demonstrated doing more with less in so many different ways. Designing ways to create value, to provide us with what we need, by doing more with less is one way. And it's an approach that fits nicely with a confidence in the creative capacity of everyone. But the most popular way of looking at needs in a limited world, one Spaceship Earth, is to imagine that it's fundamentally a problem of distribution. At least here in the USA the plan follows: making yours so the other are left without. There are so many reasons to think that the zero-sums strategy of taking yours before everyone else gets theirs ultimately leaves everyone the loser, but that's a whole other post.

For the purposes of this post I'll just say the zero sum game feels bad. Of course people feel all sorts of ways, so many ways that our feelings often seem unruly. What makes World Wide Web so engaging is we're reading and writing, both consuming content created by others, and making content of our own available. It's pretty hard not to have feelings or not to let our feelings show. A thick skin helps to negotiate around the world, especially around the online world. Ultimately I suspect a compassionate heart is better. Far from getting in our way, feelings can guide the way. It's better if "we give a fig" as Lisa Derrick suggests.

You remember Lisa Derrick? She's the blogger I accused of acting self righteously in re her opinions about One Laptop Per Child. Did you click any of the links to the Urban Dictionary? Maybe you've been there before, or already know our language is rich in words to ridicule. It seems pretty clear the Internet is speeding up the creation of new words to ridicule others. We're making our feelings known online and perhaps that's not so bad. Maybe the engagement with others can help us develop a more evolved emotional intelligence. Maybe we'll learn that our happiness isn't something we can take from others for ourselves, but rather something we can have only by creating it with others.

Obama World

It's heading into Friday morning here and I'm still a little gobsmacked by Barack Hussein Obama's win.

I shared Tuesday night's television in the company of friends and got home late. I was curious about local tallies and went online--the race I was interested in wasn't called until hours later, at about 4 AM. Clearly going online was a bit obsessive. But when I turned on my computer there was an Instant Message from a friend in Kampala thanking me for voting and leaving the message "Yes we can!." And another friend from Uganda got online and excitedly joined in celebrating the victory. And it all made me very happy.

Something about Obama's win is there's a explicit command directed at me and others:

Stand up and do something useful!

It's not simply statement: "A change is gonna come!" rather it's a challenge: "What change will you make?" The latter is exciting, but requires some lifting.

Yesterday and today I've been reading reactions online. There sure are some smart people out there. I like smart people very much, but find them intimidating. There's some truth to the intimidating part--to make timid--but there's also some truth to a different response to smart people and that's inspiring--to stimulate action. So I've read some great posts, and feel a bit intimidated that I could say anything as good. Still it does seem worthwhile to say I'm inspired by Obama.

By an odd quirk of common usage the adjective "eloquent" when applied to a black person in America is often loaded with a quality of damning by faint praise. The broad brush attack on Obama was built on top of this subtlety: "Oh sure he can talk real pretty, but who really is Barack Obama?" Obama's words have moved me throughout the campaign. Picking out highlights in my mind I thought about the Speech in Philadelphia, A More Perfect Union, but in fact I was hooked on his speeches even earlier. I am reminded right now of blogging about will. i. am.'s Barack Obama music video and a comment left by The 27th Comrade which read in part:

I can't help seeing how nearly Stalinist America is. Kids wake up to recite old speeches, be told they live in the Greatest Country in the World, that their Freedom is better than anything, that they should be Lucky to be Americans ...
Do you spot any difference between that and George Orwell's 1984? Any whatsoever?

I got pointed to a great essay today by Rob McDougall via zunguzungu. McDougall's post is here. McDougall is a Canadian historian who teaches US History to Canadian students. His observations about the election are so smart the essay is worth reading entirely. Something he said put into perspective the songs, poetry and music that's been running through my head the last couple of days. And really it goes to the point The 27th Comrade makes, in a more gentle way:

Being a Canadian living in America, Bercovitch said, was like being Sancho Panza in a nation of Don Quixotes. There was a secret everybody knew but him, a music everybody else but him could hear. Remember, Sancho Panza is Quixote's pragmatic sidekick. Sancho knows that Quixote is delusional and deranged--where Quixote sees dragons, Sancho sees only windmills--but he comes to envy his master's world of enchantment.

I do hear the music and they are American songs. McDougall's observation helps me to understand how sometimes absurd it all must sound to outside ears. I'm very fond of the fact that McDougall tries to help his students make some sense of it:

But I like my students to at least try to hear the music. To imagine themselves Americans for a day. To contemplate the possibility that words like "all men are created equal" might be bigger and more noble and enduring than the flawed men who wrote them. Like George Lucas and the original Star Wars.

McDougall surmises that our American capacity to suspend disbelief is not a bug but a feature.

Anyway, I guess I must be a lost cause. Revoke my Canadian citizenship. Because last night, for a few hours at least, I totally bought the myth. Like Walt Whitman, I heard America singing.

It's been a happy thing to read posts on the election from people outside the USA which say in so many words that they too "heard America singing."

As usual I've blathered on too long already, and I have a final point in mind. Before I go on to that I better mention the picture, an album cover from the 1970's and a song you can listen to at Youtube. I put it up because I thought I was going to riff off another of my favorite posts of the last couple of days by numerian at The Agonist. Instead, I'll just link to that. It's about this peculiar American music we hear too.

The final point is the posts that impressed me today were of the sort that we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. There's a reason bloggers so often link to What Digby says. What Digby says in that piece is if we want President Obama to make effect important change, we'll have to make him do it. We've got to make it work. Chris Clarke makes a similar point in his essay On centrism. Stirling Newberry raises the flag in his post For Equal Marriage. In fact, Digby, Clarke, Newberry and many others have been saying as much for years. But for a person like me, slow and a little lazy, the American music that McDougall spoke about is ringing loud in my ears now.

Along the election trail Barack Obama told the story of an encounter with a council woman in Greenwood, South Carolina named Edith Childs. I've listened to his account several times and if you can view videos you can watch and hear him tell the story here. I don't get tired hearing the story. A big part of it for me is Obama's description of Edith Childs, with her "big hat, looks like she's coming from church." It's a sort of image etched on my brain, so that even while I have no idea what Mrs. Childs looks like, I picture her from that description. Edith Childs it turns out is famous for her chant: "Fired up!" and everybody says Fired Up! then she calls out "Ready to go!" and everybody sings out "Ready to go!" Obama speaks of that encounter and how it moved him:

One voice can change a room, and if it can change a room, it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state then it can change a nation and if it can change a nation it can change a world."

My task, the task for all of us, is to find our voice and use it.

What will happen to all that beauty then?

The picture is taken from a screen capture of a video clip of James Baldwin at YouTube.

There are lots of pejorative terms used by Americans to divide us. A good number of them refer to the people of the Appalachian Mountains. I'm a child of this region. There's quite a bit of nuance and history to some of these terms like: hick, cracker, and redneck. And much of that history involves the Scots-Irish settlement of the southern parts of Appalachia. The various strains of Protestant Christianity born abroad and raised in America are so numerous that the distinctions get blurred in mind. The short version is my heritage is not Scots-Irish, but tangled in a web of common history; enough so that I am called the names.

My sense is that Americans in general are considered stupid by people all over the world. So that Americans have so many ways of calling one another stupid, and that so many stick to me, must mean I'm really, really unsophisticated!

It's a very good thing for people to connect across cultures using the Internet. I have several online friendships with people in Uganda. Mostly we chat using instant messaging. The other day my friend M pointed to an op-ed by Ali Muzuri in Kampala's Daily Monitor, Black Atlantic and a post racial society. M and I talk a lot about politics, and I use M for his name because many of his views aren't particularly popular, or even safe to hold, in Uganda. M is an atheist and humanist. M is also a Baganda and tribalism is something we've talked about over the years. So in our conversation about Mazuri's essay M stated that he felt it important that Africans drive tribalism out of their hearts. My response was that I think that unlikely and am not sure it would be desirable even if possible.

That's the gist of it. How strange a country bumpkin, hick, redneck American like me to be opining on such a topic. But then again, I don't find it strange when M comments about American politics and letters. It's precisely such dangerous and difficult topics that make our dialog important.

After M and I talked I went on to read an essay by Colm Toibin in The New York Review of Books, James Baldwin & Barack Obama. I'm in my fifties so James Baldwin is a famous person to me. I'm not so sure that's true for many younger Americans. I asked M if he knew of Baldwin. He did know the name, and knew that Baldwin was gay, but hadn't read anything by Baldwin. As a Ugandan, it's rather difficult to imagine how M might grasp Baldwin's importance. That said both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. have legacies of great interest to some of my African friends including M. I'll send some links of some of Baldwin's writing to read. I wonder if it's too much water under the bridge by now that Baldwin's words might resonate in M?

Colm Toibin, an Irish intellectual and writer recongnized something essentially American in the similarities between Obama and Baldwin. Toibin ends his essay:

Both men set about establishing their authority by exploring themselves and how they came to make it up as they went along, as much as by exploring the world around them. In Obama's own mixed background and complex heritage he saw America; out of his own success, he saw hope and a new set of values. Out of his own childhood Baldwin produced a number of enduring literary masterpieces and out of his efforts to make sense of his own complex, playful personality and his own unique place in history he produced some of the best essays written in the twentieth century. Reading these essays and Obama's speeches, especially the ones that are high on inspiration and short on policy, one is struck by the connection between them, two men remaking the world against all the odds in their own likeness, not afraid to ask, when faced with the future of America as represented by its children, using Baldwin's wonderful phrase, questions that are alien to most politicians: "What will happen to all that beauty?"

Baldwin's question hung in my mind, especially thinking back to my conversation with M. Sometimes when M and I have talked about clans and the Buganda Kingdom I sense pleasure in his words about them. A happiness that an American would want to hear and learn, also, I think, pleasure in the apprehension of some beauty there. And so I was thinking about M's comment that tribalism needed to be "driven out of our hearts."

Searching online I found a page at HannahArendt.net, The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin. Arendt's letter to Baldwin was prompted by The New Yorker publishing a piece by Baldwin called Letter from a Region of My Mind in November of 1962. In 1963 that essay as well as an essay My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of The Emancipation were published together with an introductory chapter in the book The Fire Next Time.

Arendt took issue with Baldwin's faith that love between people could help America prevent a conflagration rooted in racial injustice and vengeance. Arendt wrote:

What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

Arendt's letter to Baldwin was posted at HannahArendt.net in regards a sentence in a speech given by former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Johannes Rau which Rau attributed to Arendt: "Politics is is the application of love for the world" which had been mentioned in a previous document posted at the site. The letter to Baldwin was to show that the sentence really didn't seem to fit with Arendt's views. M is in his late twenties. Just as I can't expect him to understand the sorts of names other Americans call me, I don't really understand his outsider status in Kampala as a poor kid from the country. But the sting of presumption and name calling I can at least relate to. There's a gap between M and me that for many reasons we both find building a bridge across worthwhile. In the USA there's a gap between generations, I suppose that's true everywhere. For the life of me I don't understand why so many of my generation think the young people today are apathetic. Perhaps one reason my generation thinks so is too many hardly read anything online at all (note the weasel words). As I was writing I got a telephone call from the Obama for President office. I've been there and talked in person to the young woman on the other end of the phone. There's a generation gap, but I could hardly ascribe to her or the other young people in the campaign office apathy. If anything, it's I who's apathetic.

The quotation President Rau attributed to Arendt seemed memorable, so I searched for it. And the search came up blank. The best match came from a blog post by Matt Birkhold, Politics, Love, and a Radical Revolution in Values at the YP4 Blog (that's Young People for). My friend M holds close an idea of cosmopolitanism. In his views I see something akin to Arendt's desire to exclude love and hate from the political sphere. In part this exclusion seems necessary to allow individual freedom in the private sphere. I'm not sure, I'll have to talk with M some more before expounding on what he thinks. But the whole conversation and serendipitous reading does make me look more carefully to see what I think. It's clear to me now that I do earnestly believe that love must be brought to bear upon political problems. Arendt's objection: "In politics, love is a stranger" cautions me to look deeper at my presuppositions.

Colm Toibin sees many similarities between Baldwin and Obama. But he also draws a distinction:

Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don't need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted. Whereas Baldwin longed to disturb the peace, create untidy truths, Obama was slowly becoming a politician.

It seems that Obama's making connection is "a feature not a bug." Many, of course, do see his tendency as a flaw; if not outright hypocrisy, at least opening himself to the accusation of it. Online there's a effort to enlist Bold Progressives to hold an Obama presidency and a Democratic-led Congress to a progressive platform. I'm rather wimpy, and hesitant about signing pledges of any kind. But I see the point. Obama's capacity to make connections is essential, but such connections need the tempering of the those who like Toibin says of Baldwin who are ready to "disturb the peace" and "create untidy truths." Love, if it is to play any part in politics must be true.

Update: changed a confusing sentence.

Red Hand

February 12th is Red Hand Day "an annual commemoration day created to draw attention to the fate of children who are forced to serve as soldiers in wars and armed conflicts. The aim of Red Hand Day is to call for action against this practice, and support for children who suffer from this severe form of child abuse."

For an American of a certain age, February 12th is also Lincoln's Birthday, his 199th birthday. Washington and Lincoln are the two most celebrated American presidents. Both were born in February, so the government a while back decided that holidays needed to be "reformed" so they always happen on Monday--with a few exceptions--so a new holiday, President's Day--was invented. This reform safely removed politics from our veneration of presidents.

In the olden days, we children would sometimes memorize, and almost always heard recited Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on his birthday. Sometimes also older children would read or recite Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address as well.

The Lincoln Memorial is perhaps one of the most recognizable American landmarks. On the walls surrounding Daniel Chester French's sculpture of a seated Lincoln with a pensive expression are the words of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural.

Until the Civil Rights movement most black Americans voted for the Republican Party, because Lincoln was a Republican. That's one reason of course, but also in the industrial North the Republican party was the party of business. Being registered as a Republican was in many cases a prerequisite for a black person's employment. The move from the Republican to Democratic party coincided with the Republican party's move to embrace and expand state sponsored racial discrimination. Kevin Phillips is an author and once political strategist. He popularized what's known as the Republican's Southern Strategy; the old and often imitated political strategy of exacerbating ethnic tensions to polarize the electorate. Phillips is now a critic of the Republicans.

Republicans have spent their power during the last forty years at once disparaging government and vigorously expanding the military as the essential function of government. Lincoln's vision of a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" ..."and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" is inconvenient and somewhat embarrassing to the ruling ethos of the day.

Modern Republican leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, Willard Romeny, Mike Huckabee, all celebrate a submission to "faith" and a return to racist values. That certainly does not imply that Democrats embrace individual freedom, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom, hallmarks of liberal values--hat tip Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. for the list. The evidence for the illiberal constitution of today's Democrats was on display today when 19 Democratic party senators joined without any Republican dissent in passing a surveillance bill.

The political discourse in the USA today is still colored by the War in Vietnam. In 1985 British musician Paul Hardcastle produced a innovative record called 19 (YouTube video) using samples of a television documentary on Post traumatic Stress Disorder. The statement "their average age was nineteen" is repeated throughout the song. Many have sought to declare that statistic a "myth" bumping the age up a couple of years based on casualty statistics. What seems clear from the more than 4,000 confirmed casualties by the U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan and Iraq is their average age is considerably older than 19. These pages are at Military City are worth a visit, lest the statistics blind one to the reality that there are real men and women who make up those numbers.

After the War in Vietnam the U.S. Military went to a professional force abandoning the conscription into the military. In the many arguments for the occupation of Iraq, the casualties are dismissed with: "They knew what they were getting into when they joined up." I suppose the shift to a professional military is an advance, certainly it is a change in the way we conduct war. The Iraq War has also been the impetus for an unprecedented transfer of national treasure to corporations of mercenary fighters. Crossed Crocodiles recently linked to two important papers about armies for hire. This transfer of military to globalized corporations is seems a logical extension of this professionalizing of armed combatants.

Such professionalizing really hasn't entered the public consciousness. It's still quite common to hear people talk about "our boys over there." I don't think it's an accident, or just a turn of phrase. Somehow, still in our minds is the notion that war is a ritual sacrifice of children. The American Civil War was a boys' war. So even with our professional military we still imagine soldiers as boys, just like in the Civil War, even while we condemn the barbarity of the use of children as soldiers. And even as our waring kills non-combatants, a handy way of disguising that among those we kill are children.

Tom Engelhardt wrote a piece about U.S. bombing in an agricultural city in Iraq, Arab Jabour, in January this year. Th U.S. military dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area. Engelhardt entitled his piece, Looking Up: Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour. The German's dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on a Spanish town called Guernica. Pablo Picasso painted perhaps his most famous work to commemorate the savagery of the bombing of Guernica. A tapestry of this famous work hangs at the entrance to the Security Council room at the United Nations, a reminder of the horror of war. Yet as Englehardt points out in Iraq, in Arab Jabour, such bombardment is now routinized, so received bare mention in the press.

I was born in the one hundredth anniversary year of the end of the American Civil War. Just a couple of years after the ceasefire in the Korean War and a few years before the American fighting began in earnest in Vietnam. My boyhood was soaked in war.

Of the hundreds (probably thousands) of racist videos up at YouTube quite a few use the songs of Johnny Rebel. Johnny Rebel has staged a comeback since 9/11. As for his success he says it's all for professional reasons:

"I used to think I was prejudiced. I am not prejudiced," he continues. "If you are prejudiced, you don't like all races. Well, I don't have anything against all races ... They asked me to do it, hell, I did it. I would do anything to make a buck. Hell, I made a few bucks off of it."

From his Web site you can see how a professional makes a buck.

May 1, 2003 president Bush declared "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." Five years later it's not clear why we're occupying Iraq, or even who we're fighting. But we're assured that the "surge" worked so well that troop reductions will be delayed.

Last week Will.I.Am of the Blackeyed Peas put up a video based on a speech by Barak Obama called Yes We Can yesterday a parody using the same idea but with John McCain's speeches called john.he.is. A second effort parodied the Yes We Can video with No, You Can't. A recent comment by rapske50 on the Yes We Can video captures the moral reasoning of Americans for John McCain:

nah man, george bush is fighting terrorists, obama wants to make them friends so they can stab us in the back. fuck obama cos he hates freedom and what it means to be american. I AM PROUD OF MY COUNTRY i dont want it ruined by muslims and wanna be muslims

Frankly, I'm not so sure a president Obama will bring our occupation of Iraq to an end. But I do believe that a president Obama will be called upon to make a case for staying. I can't envision that a president Obama will be comfortable making such an explicitly racist argument for it. And I can't imagine that McCain can make his case without such arguments, oh so carefully coded.

My hands are red, as an American my hands are red.

I deplore the conscription of children into armed combat. Have you seen pictures? Have you seen pictures of children whose lips and ears were cut off with a knife. Left alive as a reminder to other kids. Or drawings made by child soldiers depicting how family members were killed and cooked in pots in front of them? The International Action Network on Small Arms has a great page with links to dozens of organizations working on the issue of child soldiers. Our collective efforts can make a difference.

But I do not see how as an American I can truly make a difference unless the unreasonable immorality of conduct of our military operations is addressed straightforwardly: That the racist ideology which animates our conduct is named and called out. War is hell, and we deceive ourselves to imagine our conduct as virtuous.

Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address was clear about the root cause of the American Civil War:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.

He was also clear that neither side was pure in its intentions:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

We as a nation have yet to come to grips with the cause of the War in Iraq. Like the Civil War it has spiraled in a way we never anticipated, expecting "an easier triumph." McCain promises a war whose end is never in sight. Obama talks of hope. The choice between the two is an easy one: I'll choose hope.

But a resolution to this conflict will not come until we as a people are wiling to confront the cause of this war and to name it. We would do well to remember the words of Lincoln now:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Longing for peace is patriotic.

Black History Month

The ground hog oracle, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow and predicts another six weeks of winter. No surprise, February is a cold month in these northern latitudes. A not so foolish American February tradition is Black History Month. Like everything else that touches race in America the tradition is controversial. The controversy cuts in a number of ways. Perhaps most controversial is that people's history is history at all. For some history means, and will always mean, stories of great men and their battles. Some simply cannot imagine that ordinary people living their lives made history. I like Black History Month because it demonstrates annually that Yes We Can!

Watching the events unfold in Kenya has filled me with sorrow. It's been a help that bloggers have been writing about the events, and that adds to the feeling. When I read a couple of bloggers who I admire and hold in high esteem, fret that they feel like they are "fiddling as Rome burns" sent a twinge of pain up my side. Some of that pain is not for Kenya, but a recognition of my own feelings of impotence to rise to the challenges of the cruelty carried out under my flag.

In my own queer mind "fiddling" reminded me of freedom songs and the confidence that far from being something trivial, these songs of freedom are essential for creating a world we want. So my thought turned to Fanny Lou Hamer a brave and great hero in American history.

There's a very good telling about Hamer's struggle here and the context is worthwhile going there to read. Here I'll copy a snippet from her testimony at a Hearing of the Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights entered into the Congressional Record in 1964. Through the early 1960's Hamer sought to register to vote and to encourage other black people in Mississippi to register as well. For those efforts she and her family suffered vicious reprisals. Here's some of what happened with her arrest for breaking no law:

“A white officer said to me, ‘You are under arrest. Get in the car.’ As I went to get in, he kicked me. In the car, they would ask me questions. When I started to answer, they would curse and tell me to hush, and call me awful names.

“They carried me to the (Montgomery) County jail. Later I heard Miss Ponder’s voice and the sound of kicks. She was screaming awfully. “Then three white men came to my room. A state highway policeman (he had the marking on his sleeve) asked me where I was from. I said, ‘Ruleville.’ He said, ‘We’re goin’ to check that.’ They left out. They came back and he said, ‘You’re damn rightl!’

“They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They had me lay down on my face, and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. It was leather, loaded with something.

“The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted. Then the second Negro began to beat. I have a limp. I had polio when I was about six years old. I was holding my hands behind me to protect my weak side. I began to work (move) my feet. The state highway patrolman ordered the other Negro to sit on my feet.

“My dress pulled up and I tried to smooth it down. One of the policemen walked over and raised my dress as high as he could. They beat me until my body was hard, ‘til I couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this blood clot in my left eye — the sight’s nearly gone, now. And my kidney was injured from the blows they gave me in the back.”

She was left in the cell, bleeding and battered, listening to the screams of Ann Ponder, who was being beaten in another cell, and hearing the white men talk of “plotting to kill us, maybe to throw our bodies in the Big Black River, where nobody would ever find us.”

Her injuries were permanent and disabling, leading to her famous remark: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired" which became her epitaph. Fanny Lou Hamer was unbowed and continued her registration efforts.

Such courage is hard for me to imagine in myself. I wonder how she managed? Not finding links to prove it, but I'm sure I've read how Fanny Lou Hamer on the buses she organized for taking people to courthouses to demand their right to register to vote, she was always the first to initiate singing of freedom songs.

As a white American, so much of what I love about our culture is steeped in Africans in America, and music I love so much. After that severe beating Hamer persisted. At the time in the news "militant" was the word used in the press for people like her, but in fact she was dedicated to non-violence, "uppiddy Negroes" rolled off the lips of white people in the street. The songs she sang encouraged her. Imagine after such a beating that she went on with even more determination! Many of the songs acknowledge suffering, and don't ignore the fear we all feel, but the songs connect people to something larger, to a vision of community and a good world in which to live.

The Black Eyed Peas Obama video draws on freedom songs. The song was inspired by a speech which Barak Obama made after the New Hampshire primary election, and Obama's speech was in turn inspired by the songs which also inspired so many ordinary Americans, and extraordinary Americans like Fanny Lou Hamer. American politics has many nuances and complications, it's easy to get thick into the weeds. That Barak Obama is a politician from Illinois for example is rich with particular historical associations and meanings not quickly explained. Politics are never really pure. But there are ideas in politics which are wholesome and pure, and songs communicate that essential goodness.

No doubt a fiddle can sing, but songs sung with voices are easily shared. For my Kenyan friends inside and outside Kenya feeling they are fiddling while Kenya burns, lifting up your voice to sing is not trivial. Let us hear your songs, allow those of us who may, join with you in song. Pete Seeger remarked that songs are sneaky; they can cross borders. Together people of good will all over the world can claim history and make a better beginning. We care about Kenyans who are suffering now, because the struggle a good world is for all of us. Freedom songs encouraged Fanny Lou Hamer and they can inspire us with courage too.