Vibrate Higher

So much has happened in the world since my last post: massive geopolitical shifts in North Africa and the Middle East; US militarization continues to drag on; ‘natural’ disasters are changing the landscape before our eyes; Amy Winehouse passed away; and of course, Beyonce is pregnant.

How could I not write about these things?

To be honest, I haven’t been moved to say much publicly at all, but I’ve feverishly been writing in my journal. Much of what I’ve written has been about my own spiritual development and growth. Given the nature of what I was writing, I assumed out of hand that it was not for public consumption. Yet, as I flew back to San Francisco from St. Louis a few weeks ago, I felt compelled to begin sharing some of my insights.

The first of these insights – or at least the first thing I plan to share – isn’t in my journal at all, but occurred to me this evening after watching a film called Mooz-lem. I wasn’t expecting much, since the title of the film is so wack, but I was pleasantly surprised and moved to tears by the end. Without spoiling it for everyone, I’ll just say this: the film encourages us to grapple with, or at least confront, the ideologies and beliefs we hold so tenaciously.

As the film demonstrated the impact of our ideological stubbornness and bigotry, I noticed the pervasiveness of suffering. I couldn’t stop thinking about how everyone is suffering. I began to watch my mind catalouging all the egregious acts of violence that are (and sometimes are not) reported in the  mainstream and alternative media. My mind bounced from the violence visited upon agrarian folk all over the global south by IMF/World Bank-like policies that render farming an impossible career. I thought of the young boys who lose their childhoods to the nightmare of being a child soldier. I thought of the young girls the world over (but particularly in the global south) who are disproportionately affected by poverty and few educational opportunities. I thought of all the lives lost to AIDS, famine, war, incarceration, benign neglect and state sponsored violence. I saw the faces of the students I work with across North America who suffer from all manner of low self-esteem, co-dependency and substance abuse. The more I allowed my mind to follow the pain, the more pain I saw.

Then I arrived at the beginning of a thought that went like this: “The world is so full of pain and suffering! Life sucks!” But before I could fully entertain this idea, my dog, Lylah, rested her head on my leg and looked up at me with the most loving expression, as if to say, “you know that’s not true.” And she is right. While we cannot deny the ubiquity of suffering, it would be inaccurate to deduce that Life sucks as a result.

Sometimes it takes a minute for me to remember that there is a distinction between Life As Such, and these short lives we humans live. The “life situations,” as Eckhart Tolle calls them, in which we find ourselves, certainly spring from, but by no means exhaust the totality of, Life. Life is so much greater, so much more resilient and graceful than our finite human lives. The good news is that we always have access to this Amazing Grace, this magnificent register of limitless Life. We can always seek to vibrate higher; that is, seek to have a higher understanding of who, and what we are. Our daily laundry list of earthly troubles has the tendency to occlude our view, leading us to think that Life itself is bad, rather than the way we are choosing to live it. We are in a mess of our own making – a mess that actually has little to do with Life As Such.

This insight is a call to tremendous responsibility that is also deeply empowering. Essentially, we are crafting our realities and we can elect to live in a different, preferably more loving and gentle world. We are in choice!

Life is the constant, how we choose to live is the variable.

In the words of that amazing mystic, Andre Benjamin:
“Every boy and girl, woman to man/ When you feel you’ve done about the best you can/Mothaf*ck the wagon/Come and join the band/Vibrate higher.”

Tags: current events, love, spirituality

Robocop: Policing in the Digital Age

Ever since the Mesherle verdict I’ve been thinking about policing in economically depressed communities of color. Here I am, a few months later in Detroit, a city that has been ab-used by the single-minded objectives of neoliberal economic policies, and all I see are cops in unmarked cars seeming to stake out every corner as far as the eye can see.

It seems they are everywhere, always surveilling, watching, waiting for something to go down. As I drove around trying to find my friend’s place in downtown Detroit, I was reminded of a blog I started shortly after Oakland went up in flames for the second time. Even though this blog is unfinished, I thought I’d publish it anyway. Here goes:

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I think I was 8 when I saw Robocop, the Paul Verhoeven film about the robotic future of law enforcement in a destitute Detroit. As an eighties kid, I remember a lot of  dystopic sci-fi visions of the future, androids and cyborgs terraforming on far away planets and ‘original’ humans directing resource extraction on mars and the moon. Well, we’re nine years away from 2019 and Los Angeles hasn’t quite turned into the L.A. we saw in Blade Runner, but there are interesting things happening up in the Bay that move us closer yet to full-on robotic and digitized policing.

(For the record, I’m suspecting that ‘drone-cops’ are probably not a far off idea, given that drones are such popular tools of international policing, er, warfare for the US Government. Moreover, as the US Military continues to “train” and “mentor” local police departments, we’ll continue see the ongoing militarization of community policing. I know drones are “unmanned aerial vehicles,” but who’s to say that “unmanned terrestrial law enforcement agents,” controlled remotely by cops in a huge gaming room aren’t on the horizon?)

If you’ve been following my posts, then  you know I’ve been thinking about justice, prisons and policing a lot lately. Overall, I’ve been suggesting that dysfunctional social conditions and the prison industrial complex are the problem, rather than this convenient and amorphous figure we call “crime.” Crime, in my view, is an effect, not a root cause. Nevertheless, public attention remains focused on this symptom and all attempts to keep “everyone” safe from “criminals” are directed at smothering, removing or otherwise relieving us of the symptom.  In the process of serving and protecting “the people” we are told that there may be some collateral damage – cops make mistakes too, right? An innocent person locked up, wrongfully murdered or subjected to excessive force; it’s all a part of the process, or so the logic goes. Yet, where I come from, the likelihood of being collateral damage is high, so since 1992 we’ve been vigilant about recording cops and thanks to improving video technology we’ve managed to catch some pretty egregious instances of police brutality on video.

Justice, Prisons & Mehserle, Revisited

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives….
We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’…Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals’ and ‘evildoers’ are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore, functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. …It relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and increasingly, global capitalism.
-Angela Y. Davis,  Are Prisons Obsolete?

What happens when the “criminal” isn’t your stereotypical “Latino or black guy,” but instead is an agent of the state? For some, sending a cop who’s convicted of murder (in whatever degree) off to prison is Justice par excellence. The “pig” is finally getting a taste of his own medicine, or so the thinking goes. But Angela Y. Davis’ insights above have me wondering what kind of ideological work the Prison is doing when the “pig” is sent to the pen.

If, as Davis notes, “the Prison functions ideologically…to relive us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues” that are indeed the conditions of possibility for a Grant/Mehserle tragedy to take place, then what are we missing when we call for Mehserle’s imprisonment? Have we missed the forest for the trees? Has our persistent experience of police brutality and mass incarceration reduced our sense of what Justice might consist of to a single conviction? And why do we believe that the Policing/Criminal Justice System/Prison Industrial Complex is now all of a sudden capable of providing viable solutions to our problems?

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for communities that are disproportionately policed, incarcerated and terrorized by state violence to call for the incarceration of Johannes Mehserle. My question has less to do with whether or not I believe he is guilty of murdering Oscar Grant. Surely, if there were no elaborate categorical system meant to differentiate between degrees of murder, we’d all still have to concede that he shot a prone, unarmed young man in the back. As such, we’d expect that some form of accountability, and responsibility be taken for his (video recorded) actions. So, my question has more to do with what accountability and responsibility (read: Justice) might look like when we seriously consider – or even recognize – the paradox at the heart of our demand that Mehserle be locked up.

The paradox goes something like this: by locking up Mehserle for up to 14 years we are legitimizing a system that typically and disproportionately incarcerates us. However, if we don’t demand Mehserle’s imprisonment, then we send the message that it is okay for agents of the state to kill people of color, poor people, queer people, and undocumented people with impunity. Furthermore, if we punish Mehserle only, when and how do we raise the issue of all the other agents of the state, from the FBI and their domestic counter-insurgency campaign to local police forces, who continue to terrorize, detain, and murder our loved ones and allies?

Are we, that is, those of us who truly want justice for Oscar Grant, for Sean Bell, for Abner Louima, for Amadou Diallo, for those murdered by the police and racist civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and for countless others,  fetishizing the Prison to our own detriment?

My sense is that this may indeed be the case, such that our overemphasis on incarceration both sustains an industry-institution that captures us daily, while we do little to address the systemic sources of our vulnerability to state violence, state repression and incarceration. I mean, think about it: the Prison Industrial Complex generates nice profits for corporations while draining social wealth, thereby reproducing the conditions that set up a direct line from the playpen to the penitentiary. I don’t believe this is hyperbole. California is a case in point.

My state has the most prisons in the country and, logically the most prisoners. As of today, July 16, 2010, we also have no approved state budget. We have ongoing cuts to social services; deep cuts that disproportionately affect the elderly, the sick, the poor, and communities of color. We have one of the worst public education systems in the country, coupled with a university system that has raised fees consistently since 2001 while cutting academic programs (disproportionately in the Humanities and Social Sciences), and faculty and staff salaries. We have a Governor who refuses to levy taxes on oil extraction even though California is the fourth largest market for oil extraction in the country – taxes which many argue would effectively make up the fiscal shortfall. And all of this is happening while we watch gubernatorial hopeful, former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, spend upwards of 71 million dollars OF HER OWN MONEY on her campaign so she can turn around and do the same thing. These are just some of the interlocking social conditions that impoverish our communities, destroy ecosystems, ravage mental health, trigger substance abuse, dismember families, and obliterate genuine and fulfilling opportunities for millions of young people.

I began with Davis’ epigraph because I believe it is as relevant for those of us who come from targeted communities as it is for people who are in positions of privilege such that they can gaze at the ‘criminals’ from afar. If any substantive form of Justice is to be experienced by any of us, we must look at the paradox above very closely and begin to demand for systemic change, rather than one-off convictions. We must eliminate, uproot and transform the conditions of possibility for state violence, rather than punish individual cops when they slip up and get “caught” for the violence they routinely visit on our communities.

After the Rebellion

Everyone was looking for “the riots.” Before anything happened, before the first window was smashed, before the first garbage can was set afire, everyone was looking for “the riots.” Police from all over Northern California arrived in Downtown Oakland looking for “the riots.” Every local media outlet warned of the impending “riots,” pushing the public fear button and fanning the flames of mass anxiety. Even the people who went to gather in Oscar Grant’s memory and voice their disapproval of the low-level conviction of Johannes Mehserle looked around for “the riots” they were ostensibly there to incite. But, last night there were no riots in Oakland.

There was a rebellion.

My sense is that when we combine anxious, power-tripping cops with a justifiably enraged, saddened and frustrated community it is a matter of time before something goes down. I know how police talk to people, or better, talk at people, when we’ve assembled to express our grievances. I’ve been on the other side of that baton more than a few times. Theoretically, it is our right to assemble, just as much as it is our right to speak our minds. Yet, the parameters within which we must do so, while under enormous duress, strikes me as soul crushing and meant to shut us up, dishearten us and regulate us into submission. I’m reminded of Louis Althusser’s take on how ideology works to manage and regulate populations. He described institutions as being the primary means through which such regulation occurred, and when institutions failed (or needed shoring up), he said force was always exerted to eliminate resistance, dissent and rebellion. This is what the police call “maintaining order,” an order which would have the dispossessed, forgotten, and disregarded, disappeared as well so “citizens” don’t have to hear the moans and groans of those who keep this system going by functioning as the foundation upon which this unjust system is built.

No person is meant to live on the bottom of another person’s shoe. Every life counts. Each of us is just as valuable as the next simply by virtue of Being. This is a spiritual truth and birthright that the social order may work to ignore, but people know better. And it is from this knowing that rebellions surge. We must see last night’s events in Oakland in this light.

Yes, the people rebelled. And while I do not support violence, or believe it is a sustainable way to move toward effective change, I nevertheless understand how accumulated disappointment, frustration, anger, feelings of powerlessness and sadness erupt into a shitstorm so dissociated from its own effects that people burn down their own neighborhoods. And, even though I argue for a return to Love wherein we, the oppressed, strive to see the humanity in our oppressors and thereby effect a transformation for all of us, moments like this push me to the edge of my own capacity to see the Divine in others. It is hard to Love someone when they have their foot on your neck, or when their baton is cracking the side of your head open. The extreme difficulty of Loving and channeling anger into something constructive should be obvious to everyone, and yet I still believe it is the one thing we must keep trying to do.

I write this from a space of profound sadness, and an awareness that what we are facing as a human community is our own disconnection from our hearts, and from ourselves. Please take this seriously. It’s not neo-hippy, self-help, mumbo-jumbo. It’s the Truth. When we are unable to see others as people who have feelings, who cry, who laugh, who get startled when something falls in the dark, we are revealing that we are not in touch at all. Genuine reconciliation, and peace requires people on both sides of the war line to begin seeing with more compassion. As I hold space for the anguish in my community today, I also challenge us to begin working this difficult edge of Love.

What Justice?: Oscar Grant & Johannes Mehserle

People demand justice outside Mehserle trail

I’ve been conspicuously quiet about this trail. In fact, I haven’t written a word about it since last January (see We Are All Oscar Grant), just after the riots in Oakland. Since then, public sentiment – at least in the ‘public sphere’ in which I find myself – has remained convinced that justice for Oscar Grant equals incarceration for Johannes Mehserle. Yet, I am not as convinced by the easy math powering the concept of retributive justice. Overall, I’m just not sure this equation is the best formula for justice. My ongoing uncertainty began to beg the question, what exactly is justice in a context such as this?

I’ve only said this aloud once or twice and in each case it hasn’t been a popular statement to make, nor have my questions provoked any real consideration. The people around me usually ask some combination of the following: Don’t you know how horribly racist policing in the United States is? Don’t you know that cops are never held accountable for the violence and terror they exact on communities of color everyday? Didn’t you see the videos? Oscar Grant was on his belly with his hands behind his back for Pete’s sake!

Yes. Yes, I know all of these things.

I also know that it is downright brutal to intend to tase a person who has suffered head injuries and is prone, but nevermind that for a moment.

So, given all of the above, how could I not agree that the most logical outcome is for Mehserle to sit in prison for several years on the taxpayer’s dime?

Well, for starters, I am not convinced that locking anyone up is the best solution to social problems. And, while some may remind me that they don’t believe it is the “best” option either, those who tug at my arm will also let me know that “it is the system we’ve set up.” In other words, we’ve established a social norm that we are having a hard time thinking outside of. Moreover, we’ve established that norm based upon a very specific notion of what constitutes justice, where retribution and vengeance relative to the act(s) in question takes precedent over remedying or removing the conditions of possibility for the act in the first place. (As a side note, I should mention that the ideas of ‘correction’ and ‘repentance’ upon which penitentiaries were originally developed are clearly no longer applicable. In fact, whether they succeeded at correcting or instigating penitence in the 19th century is a question as well, but that’s beyond the scope of what I want to say here.)

What I’m getting at is this: if Johannes Mehserle is incarcerated on any of the possible charges the jury is now deliberating over, will his incarceration prevent another young black man from being shot and killed by law enforcement agents of any stripe? Will that reduce the amount of police brutality and racial profiling in our neighborhoods? Will that provide greater educational and career options for all young people who end up tracked into low paying jobs, or mediocre careers that they hate? Will it change the way policing agencies view communities of color? Will his incarceration help Oscar Grant’s daughter? Or Oscar Grant’s mother? And what of the pain coursing through Mehserle’s family right now? Are we to believe that their pain is justified because he pulled the trigger on what he claims he thought was his taser?

Overcrowded Prison - California State Prison, Los Angeles

And why should we all agree to keep paying for people to be in prison when we know how horrendous “correction facilities” are? Which isn’t to say we should privatize prisons so tax payers are not responsible for them anymore. That is most certainly not my point. The corporatization and privatization of punishment is already underway and is super-profitable. The emergence of the Prison Industrial Complex under global capitalism reinforces a knee-jerk ‘lock-em-up’ logic because it brings in the big bucks, while disproportionately capturing and disappearing people of color. The irony here is that calling for Mehserle’s incarceration actually supports an entire industry-institution that has more Grant-like characters in its corridors than Mehserle-like folks. Where is the justice in that?

It seems to me that one of the key problems on both sides of this situation – Grant’s death and Mehserle’s impending incarceration – is that we, Americans, suffer from an acute case of life-devaluation. We are in the habit of throwing people away, either by murder, or by putting them away for the rest of their physical lives so they become the living dead. In plain English, I’m saying we have learned to not give a shit about Life. And this is a shared problem, not just one that Mehserle has, or that police officers have, or that “gang-bangers” and “thugs” have. This problem is everywhere evident: from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to the xenophobic violence in Arizona, to the commercial trafficking of women and girls, to the shameful number of children and adults who are incarcerated.

So what would Justice look like if we deeply valued Life? Perhaps justice would show up in the way wealth, resources and opportunity are distributed throughout the social body. Perhaps justice would show up in our understanding that all Life is interconnected and interdependent. Perhaps justice would mean digging up root causes rather than constantly tending to symptoms. Perhaps justice would look like creating an environment where someone like Johannes Mehserle might feel safe enough to tell his story, no matter how racist and f*cked up people thought it sounded. And I’ll pause here because this is important. How can we ever begin to undo the underlying issues that lead to Oscar Grant’s death if Mehserle can’t get help? He was shamed into silence, and then shamed into producing a ‘reasonable’ or likely story. My assumption here is that people who do “bad” things are still people and should be offered some way to heal the pain they’ve caused, while also healing the pain they undoubtedly feel. For the record, I should say that I am aware that some of the motivation for his defense probably has nothing to do with shame, and is rooted in his desire to stay out of prison. So, with that potential outcome looming large, we are yet again, unable to move any closer to substantive, restorative justice.

As I try to wrap this up, I am noticing that I do not have any answers, or a concrete plan for moving forward. I simply have questions that complicate the basic equation we’re asked to support, where one life lost has to equal another life lost. In my heart I feel something must be done to redress the loss of life. But I do not believe that “something” is taking another life. The solutions are deeper, more protracted, and in a range of places all at once. Our task should be seeing to it that the possibility of a second Oscar Grant/Johannes Mehserle tragedy is no longer a possibility.

Retribution is about adding to the body count.

Justice is about Love and Balance.

Cultural Solutions for Political Problems

In my activist work, I have gravitated toward organizations that intervene in our contemporary crises at the level of culture. Unlike politically oriented organizations that lobby legislators, and seek to influence public policy, the organizations with which I work tap individual and collective consciousness through programs that introduce “new” ideas, “new” behaviors, and “new” forms of sociality. I should note that I use scare quotes around new because our work isn’t literally new, in the sense of creating programs, relationships or behaviors that have never existed on the world stage. Rather, what we have come up with is new insofar as it departs from the status quo and resurrects subjugated knowledges and ways of being that were intentionally suppressed by the existing power structure over the past several centuries. In this way, the term ‘renaissance’ may be more fitting.

The difference between our work and that of our colleagues is not one of ultimate objective. It seems to me that we all want to bring about a better world, a world that is more equitable, loving, joyful and regenerative. Yet, when we seek to redress contemporary conditions through transactional politics, we do so within the existing cultural norms, and we do so for an immediate issue that may not touch generations to come. In other words, we may alleviate a present danger for a specific group of people, but we may not create a lasting structure or set of habits that prevent such dangers from resurging years, decades or centuries later. Furthermore, by acting within the existing political culture, we validate its sense of legitimacy, its norms and its underlying ideologies. This, to me, seems shortsighted even as it has the power to help some people in the moment.

When we understand that mainstream North American political culture depends upon a set of ideas, shared ideologies, shared assumptions, and a shared language around rights, obligations, duties, and so on, we see that changing the impact of legislative and juridical outcomes requires us to change the way people think about a whole range issues. For example, we are now bearing witness to an egregious violation of a vital resource: Water. As oil continues to surge into the Gulf of Mexico and marine life dies, fishermen lose work, executives run for cover and politicians wrangle over whom to blame, we are still operating under several spurious assumptions.

1. We continue to believe that “humans” (by which I mean the ‘human’ of liberal humanism) have a  “right” to own natural resources, partition waterways, and claim them for competing collectives, while doing so at the expense of the environment.
2. We continue to believe that we, humans, are separate from the environment in which we find ourselves and therefore can instrumentalize the objects, resources and materials around us. (This is also true of how we see each other.)
3. We continue to believe that we can penalize corporations through the existing political system even though corporate wealth has irreparably compromised the impartiality of political representatives.
4. We continue to believe that profits are more valuable than people and the natural environment.

Given the basic assumptions that guide how clean-up, reparations and penalization will occur, the likelihood of another BP disaster is ever present. Simply imposing financial penalties, firing high and mid-level executives and placing a short-term moratorium on off-shore drilling is not a thorough solution. It’s a superficial solution to a deep-seated problem. Another great example is playing itself out in Arizona.

While I honor and respect the courage it takes to stand arm in arm in front of hostile police forces and civilians as one protests the criminalization of Latin-American immigrants, I am also quite aware that challenging racist legislation does not uproot the potential for racist legislation to appear in our state capitals. Addressing the immediate political impact of racist legislation helps those of us who are hurt by such legislation today. But, what of the days to come? If we do not address the underlying ideas of who is allowed within the border, or indeed the very idea of a ‘border’ itself, then we find ourselves dealing with xenophobia and racism again a few years down the road. In all fairness, this is not a critique of progressives and lefties who utilize the existing political infrastructure as a means of redressing sociopolitical injuries. This communiqué is written in the spirit of furthering our work and making it more effective over the long haul.

So, what is to be done? How can we effect lasting changes that are both remunerative and progressive? In other words, how can we transform our world in a way that rights historical wrongs and the daily experiences of those injuries while crafting a way of being that is regenerative and lasts for generations to come? It seems to me that two things are in order, both of which fall under the umbrella of culture in my mind. Changing our minds seems to be the first answer to our problems. That is, shifting and redefining our master categories of thought and supporting those changes by creating institutions that enable our new way of thinking to reverberate through the socio-cultural fabric of our communities. But more than this, I believe spiritual transformation is required, and indeed may be a prerequisite for the deep epistemic shift I feel is needed.

By ‘spiritual transformation’ I do not mean a return to a specific theology, but rather a re-enchantment of the world whereby we re-cognize that we do not have lives, but rather, that Life has us. We must remember that our subjective experience of being in the world is not greater than the Isness of the universe as such. Whereas all living things come in and out of existence through the cycle of birth and death, as far as we can tell Being itself never ceases to Be. In this way, the human ego might be right-sized again, and resituated alongside other life forms in the community of life on Earth, rather than situated in a position of domination over other things. A spiritual shift would remind us that we humans belong to the Earth, and not the other way around. And that the Earth is in, and is a part of, a mysterious cosmic entity of which we know very little. Thus, the spiritual transformation I have in mind reaches into human psychology, transforming our conceptual system and healing the underlying belief in separation that is ravaging our world today.

From this humbled and reconnected space, we might rethink how we define what it means to be human. We would be in a position to reimagine our relationship to the trees, the water, and other animals. Overall, I’m suggesting that we would be in a position to change our minds about who and what we are, a change that has enormous implications for how we might be with each other and the kind of normative behavior that would follow from this cultural-ethical revolution. Furthermore, in rethinking who we are and what our relationships could look like, it follows that the exercise of power would shift and from here we would see a different kind of political culture sprout from the new seeds of our transformed consciousness.

Through the NonProfit Door

A  friend who works on Organizing Upgrade’s Fast Forum, which is an awesome online ‘plenary on the go’ where some of the movement’s sharpest minds chime in on pressing topics, asked me to co-author a short article on the limitations of the nonprofit structure for radical social change. So, along with Common Fire co-founder Kavitha Rao, I wrote a piece about how and why The Common Fire Foundation uses a nonprofit entity to work on radical community building projects. Below is what we came up with.

Common Fire and the NonProfit Structure: A Bridge to Tomorrow

Common Fire is a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation. It supports the creation of intentional communities that are geared toward the transformation of society, from the inside out and the ground up. We seek to build a world that is more loving, joyful, just and sustainable, one community at a time.

Common Fire West - The Bay Area Community

Like many of our colleagues working toward a more just and sustainable world, we too recognize, not only the shortcomings of the nonprofit structure as a long-term solution to the troubles of our time, but we also believe that the current social, environmental and cultural crises we now face cannot be remedied at the same level of thought that produced said crises. Given this, we are committed to personal transformation, nonviolent communication as the basis of sustainable relationships and alliances, and cooperative communities organized around resource sharing and consensus based decision-making. These features are the cornerstone of our work in the area of intentional community building; features that we envision will eventually supplant the “individual” of (neo)liberalism and its attendant “rights,” as well as capitalist notions of individual property ownership over land, food, and other vital resources.

At the same time, we are quite clear that community building at this scale – multi-acre cohousing facilities with organic farmland, retreat centers and other buildings – requires considerable amounts of funding and still occurs within the existing legal, economic and political cultures we seek to transform. So, we use the nonprofit structure to negotiate the dominant culture. For us, the non-profit is a tool we harness toward an end that was not originally intended for it: radical social change. Our board is comprised of people who hold the vision of the organization and who actively expand the capacity of Common Fire to carry out its mission. Thus, unlike traditional BODs, which tend to be comprised of big donors, lawyers and the like, our board is full of innovative change-makers.

In our hands, the non-profit structure enables us to support grassroots groups as they organize themselves into shared housing and cooperative economic communities that put the transformative values above into practice. Through the non-profit structure, we are able to provide community groups with training opportunities in areas like nonviolent communication, grassroots fundraising, sustainable building practices, and permaculture. The non-profit entity also enables us to provide concrete support like bank accounts and legal resources to the communities with which we partner. Most importantly, the non-profit helps us secure financing for land acquisition, which is a feat that would be fairly difficult for the groups we are currently partnered with in New York and California, where their individual economic realities keep them rooted in their current class position. In community people are able to experience relief from the economic and social burdens of living as nuclear families and single people. Our ultimate goal is to shift the underlying culture by creating communities that model what future societies can look like.

For more information about Common Fire, and how you might participate in our work, visit our website and watch our video.

Tags: Common Fire, community building, nonprofits, politics, radical social change

Food Justice In West Oakland

One of a Kind: The Mandela Foods Cooperative

local organic veggies

I was so excited that I called three friends and my mother as I walked through the new Mandela Foods Cooperative on 7th Street in West Oakland. I had been eyeing the developing grocery store for months during my daily commute to San Francisco. After work I would peer into the windows and watch the co-op workers fill up bulk item containers and place gloriously bright yellow bell peppers in produce baskets. I felt like a kid in front of a toy store: I could not wait for the store to open so I could enjoy locally grown, pesticide-free produce everyday without spending most of my paycheck, or having to travel to another neighborhood, or having to wait until Saturday morning to visit a farmer’s market. Then, one afternoon in early June, I de-boarded the train to find a couple of people shopping in the co-op. I picked up a hand-basket and cruised through the store, grabbing organic strawberries, raspberries, apricots, bananas, red cabbage, kale, collard greens, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, free-range organic eggs, and apple juice. Imagine my delight when I carried all of my goodies out of the door for less than twenty-five bucks.

While the Mandela Foods Cooperative is certainly one of a kind in West Oakland, it is also accompanied by a handful of community gardens, urban homesteading programs, and backyard farms developed by West Oaklanders to counteract food insecurity in the neighborhood. Before the Mandela Foods Cooperative opened, one could travel from the northwest tip of West Oakland to the “lower bottoms,” and find plenty of convenience stores, even a few fast food restaurants, but not one full-service grocery store. Some legislators and academics use the term “food deserts” to describe areas like West Oakland, by which they mean predominately low-income neighborhoods with little to no access to healthy, affordable and “culturally appropriate” food in the immediate area. According to a study commissioned by the USDA meant to discover the extent of such “food deserts” in the U.S., minimal access to food translates into a higher likelihood of chronic hunger and greater incidences of diet-related illnesses. While these conclusions are important to state, the study’s popularization of the term, and under-investigation of its sources, threatens to obscure some of the bigger issues at stake.

For people living and working in West Oakland the term “food deserts” only names a symptom, or effect of the systemic social inequities that make it difficult to find healthy food. Brahm Ahmadi, Executive Director of the West Oakland community-based organization Peoples Grocery, argues that the term “food apartheid” or “food injustice” better describes the situation confronting people in poor urban areas. In an exchange with other food activists, Ahmadi maintained that “the term food desert has emerged as a safe and neutral way to avoid rocking the boat with an analysis of inequity, racism and oppression…. No one in our neighborhood has heard of, or uses, the term food desert,” he notes, “but folks do talk about racism, [and] exclusion all the time…. We may live in food deserts, but we live under food apartheid.” The distinction is an important one that pivots on the latter term’s ability to surface the structural and systemic inequities that give rise to “food deserts” – a distinction enabling us to formulate better solutions to the problem of food insecurity, economic disparities, and diet-related illnesses in poor communities.

The Mandela Foods Cooperative really understands the distinction to which Ahmadi refers. The Co-op is part of a multifaceted food and economic security effort mounted by the Mandela Marketplace, a West Oakland based “community leadership incubator that provides civic engagement, economic and entrepreneurial opportunity to low-income residents and minority farmers.” According to Dennis Terry, who has worked on the development of the Co-op for three years, “the co-op is seen as part of a larger effort to develop food security in Oakland, provide income opportunities, and provide nutrition education to Oaklanders.” This integrated approach is meant to reinvigorate local food cultures and the transmission of knowledge about whole foods cultivation and preparation, develop greater self-sufficiency in the community, and support local economic circuits.

Moreover, this three-prong approach tackles some of the root causes of food injustice thereby marking a qualitative shift in how the problem of food insecurity is addressed. By moving away from a owner/worker business model to a cooperative business model, Mandela Marketplace addresses issues of worker’s rights and most notably, the right to democratically determine one’s working conditions and wages. Through their nutrition education classes, which will begin once the market completes the construction of its onsite kitchen, the Co-op provides practical ways for West Oaklanders to take control of their health by learning how proper nutrition can prevent a range of chronic illnesses. It is a low-tech, “do-it-yourself” approach to healthcare in the midst of a healthcare reform debate that consistently fails to connect the dots (at least at the policy level) between real food and healthy people. Finally, the Co-op sources their produce from small to medium sized local farms within a 120-mile radius from Oakland. Consumers can learn about these farms from well-placed informational placards in the store as they shop. It is a gesture that reminds consumers of the reciprocal relationship between food growers and food eaters: the farms support our wellbeing, and we support the health of small farms.

In all of this, what may be one of the most important things about the Co-op is that, as Dennis Terry told me, “it’s the kind of store West Oaklanders want. People can walk to the Co-op” and it is open everyday. In short, it is a neighborhood market that has really taken into consideration what matters to the community it serves. It is a one of a kind food retailer in Oakland: run by the people, for the people.

Tags: food deserts, food insecurity, food justice, mandela cooperative, Oakland, west oakland, worker's coops

Ego-A-Go-Go

“Self-liberate even the antidote, or, Do not hang on to anything – even the realization that there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Avalokiteshvara, The Bodhisattva of Compassion

Learn to let go. This is one of the most concise instructions for living and dying in Buddhist teachings. I’ll explain why by way of a story about a pig.

I recently saw a performance by The Dance Brigade in San Francisco. The show, The Great Liberation Upon Hearing, is a dramatization of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The show began with one simple, but somewhat alarming, question: “Did you kill the pig, and why?” (The question itself wasn’t so alarming, but the pig carcass a few feet away from my seat sure was.)

The performance explored how killing the pig, with varying motives and intentions, could lead to the accumulation of merit or the lack thereof, also known as good and bad karma. In the instances in which killing the pig was done as a selfless act – say to feed a starving village – one accumulated good merit. Yet, when one killed the pig to satisfy one’s own self-serving ends, one did not accumulate merit. It is conceivable that killing the pig for a starving village could still be a deeply self-serving act if the intention behind feeding the village was to gain recognition, rather than purely helping others. While some good comes of it, it doesn’t generate good merit. This leads me to my next point.

"Pig head businessman counts US dollar" by Kutay Tanir

The desire to gain recognition (among others) is an ego driven desire. It is a desire to amplify ego, to make one’s sense of self bigger, more robust and more potent. Ego-amplification depends upon a conception of oneself as independent and separate from others (indeed, separate from everything in the universe), such that one’s primary concern is to indulge one’s self-interests, and appease one’s desires without much regard for how self-satiation impacts the larger environment in which one lives, and from which one gains life. We can call this ego-clinging.

Ego-clinging is the fertile ground from which identities sprout. Identities are rigid little boogers that have the force of substantialist grammar behind them. Substantialist grammar is grounded in, well, fantasies of substance. It is way of speaking about the phenomenal world that yields an illusion of fully present and finite objects with impermeable boundaries between them. One thing cannot be another thing, right? A bird cannot also be a cat. Water cannot also be a tree. And most of all, I cannot be you, right?

Well, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe our perception is a bit off, restricted as it is by the physical limits of the human eye. Maybe one thing can be in two places at the same time. (Or, so says quantum physics about matter at the subatomic level.) Perhaps there is nothing existing(?!) That is, no-thing, or no individual thing in existence, but everything existing in everything else to varying degrees?

If so, then, might s/he who kills the pig with the intention of ego-gratification also be the pig who dies?

I’m not sure. But I do know that the idea of no-thing existing is the basic proposition of Buddhist theories of interdependence. It proposes re-imagining the phenomenal world in “both/and” terms, rather than in binaries. The idea of interdependence encourages us to see, for example, the interconnectedness of water, sunlight and plantlife, such that we can say, the water is the tree, for without precipitation and the process of photosynthesis, seeds cannot grow into trees. And, without food, which contains other elements in it, we cannot exist, so we inter-are with cabbage, apples, chickens, pigs, quinoa, wheat, and so on. Being is seen as interrelated. Being ceases to be singular and we speak in terms of inter-being, in terms of humans being part of an ecosystem not of our own making.

If we take the proposition of interdependence seriously, then ego-clinging turns out to be a disavowal of the vast network of relationships between “things”: between people, sentient beings, various forms of inanimate matter, and ultimately the universe that holds us. In this repudiation of connection, one clings to oneself despite the ongoing fact of connectivity. According to the Dharma, clinging, or attachment, is the source of suffering. For instance, one clings to good feelings and pushes away painful ones. Yet, no feeling lasts forever. So, as the phenomenon of impermanence swaps out one feeling for another, we experience suffering because we yearn for something that can no longer be, at least not in the present moment.

"Hand of person grips chain" by Michael Hitoshi

Or, consider how much suffering we are currently experiencing because we insist on clinging to an economic system that is failing precisely because it is grounded in the ego-based fiction of self-interests that are seen as separate from the interests of others. This is a double-whammy, where attachment is at work on two levels.

First, we are clinging to the individual subject at the heart of (neo)liberal economic and social theory. If we think in terms of interdependence, or ecosystems, then the individual cannot be the primary unit of society because society is comprised of various networks. Thus, the networks are primary, not the nodes.

Second, we are clinging to the economic system built around this individual subject and “his” hoarding activities. “Financial Bailout” is a tactic that reveals an attachment to a system that is deteriorating under the force of its own effects. Rather than figure out how to craft a better system that reflects the shared and collective process of wealth generation, our elected officials move in the opposite direction.

But this is not unusual. We tend to turn away from pain rather than sit with it. Allowing the economy to fully collapse so another system can emerge from its ashes would be absolute pandemonium. Lots of people would suffer terribly from various forms of deprivation. And that kind of potential chaos, insecurity and contingency triggers attachment to things that are not in themselves solid, like this notion of “our way of life.”

What does all of this have to do with self-liberating the antidote? The antidote is the realization that there is nothing solid to hold on to, not one’s ego, nor the teachings themselves. I’ve learned that letting go of my attachment to the various identities I crafted for myself over the years opened me up to changes that were coming into my life whether I wanted them or not. Practicing non-attachment helped me meet change with less resistance. In short, I suffer less. For such an insight to be useful in the context above, we’d have to experience a broad-based transformation in social consciousness whereby we’d be less attached to ego, the idea of individuality, and all that comes with living in an ego-centric world. But that’s a big let go, especially for those of us who aren’t even aware of our egocentrism. Maybe we better start by thinking about why we killed the pig.

Tags: Buddha, Buddhism, ego-clinging, interconnectedness, letting go, love, philosophy, pigs, relationships, religion, spirituality

Paradise Lost: Social Unrest in Guadeloupe & Martinique

Social Unrest in Guadeloupe, AFP images

My partner missed a call on Sunday from a dear friend of hers who lives in Guadeloupe, one of the Francophone islands southeast of Puerto Rico. Her friend left a voicemail describing the heightening political-economic crisis on the island, which we later learned was also happening in Martinique, another Francophone island south of Dominica. Folks on both islands have staged a general strike for the past four weeks protesting the rising cost of living, which outstrips the meager wages they are paid, and to denounce the ongoing racial stratification of wealth and resources between black Guadeloupians/Martiniquans, and the 1% of the population that controls the wealth, businesses and resources on the islands.

While there is nonstop media coverage of “the worst economic crisis” since the Great Depression from the perspective of people in the global north, it is rare that we hear about the impact of this economic meltdown on those situated on the margins of global capitalism. For instance, many news sources covered the social unrest in France proper, where somewhere between 1 million and 2.5 million people protested the deteriorating state of French infrastructure on January 29. Yet, little was said about the concurrent protests going on in the French territories, which are, by any sane account, infinitely worse off than people living in the industrialized center.

Martiniquans listen to Union leaders negotiate lower grocery prices. Fort-de-France, Martinique, Feb 10 2009

Life on the island is one of dependence: 80% of Guadeloupe’s food is imported, making the island deeply vulnerable to price fluctuations in the global market. When the French economy flutters, stutters, and then takes a nose dive, the French islands go along with it. Such is the nature of neocolonial entanglement.

But, one might ask, if neocolonial populations are so marginal to the global economy, why does France continue to hold on to the territories at all? What’s in it for them? Why not let the remaining territories go the way of Haiti, (but without the bloody revolution) if they are marginal and insignificant?

Good question.

The first thing I’d say is that unlike our colloquial use of the word, “marginal,” in this context it doesn’t quite equal insignificance – more on this below. Secondly, there’s good reason for France to be in the (neo)colonial racket. Traditionally, colonies had two important functions: first, early colonies were overflowing with slave laborers, whose descendants became low wage laborers working the land to extract raw materials and crops that were exported to European countries. Secondly, the colonies provided much needed markets for the circulation of the processed and manufactured goods produced in the metropole from the raw materials harvested in the colony.

Sugar cane cultivators in Guadeloupe

So, the circular economic logic goes like this: the cost of production is kept low because labor and land are exploited. The profit margin is ridiculously high because the manufactured goods are sold in a consumer market that is virtually closed to other products, particularly products grown locally. Despite the “end of colonialism” such political-economic relations persist between France and its “territories” because it is economically advantageous for France. (Nevermind all that “civilizing mission” crap. The crass money incentive is clear to everyone by now.)  Given that colonial administration of the land meant the land was parceled out to French companies, little land was available for the cultivation of crops grown by black Guadeloupians, and meant to circulate in local markets. This continues to be the case. As such, the development of a market for local, fresh, hopefully non-GMO, whole foods that would nourish our friend and her family far better than any of the processed foods could, is highly unlikely without a radical redistribution of land and wealth on the island as well as the safeguarding of farmer’s rights, wages and the integrity of their seeds in the face of monster companies like Monsanto. (There’s a hyperlink there in case you want to know who/what Monsanto is.)

(By the way, the issue of sustainable farming also has implications for the preservation of local biodiversity, which impacts climate change. Furthermore, it has implications for the reduction of food-related chronic illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension, which are often outcomes of a diet high in processed foods and low in whole foods. Thus, in this ostensibly isolated issue of worker’s rights, we see environmental and health issues unfold as well. This is yet another lesson in the basic interconnectedness of our shared problems.)

So, returning to my use of the word “marginal,” I hope it is clear that Afro-diasporic peoples in the West, be they in Anglophone nations like my own, or Francophone territories like our friend, are not marginal to global-capitalism as such. Quite the contrary is true. Without the exploitation of low, or no-wage, black laborers, and the expropriation of Caribbean lands, its agriculture, and other natural resources, capitalism as we know it in the West would not exist. So in this sense, our friend and the people on her island are absolutely central to global capitalism. Yet, they are marginal insofar as they do not reap the benefits of the system. They work daily, typically under union loathing French business-owners, and are paid measly wages in return; wages that are insufficiently calibrated toward meeting the exorbitant costs of living in the contemporary world.

The idea of economic sovereignty, that is, cultivating local economies in Martinique and Guadeloupe that actually sustain the people living on the islands, and in the region more broadly, would send a big “Fuck You” message to the French government. France would be cut out of the equation, thereby losing a market for their goods, which would adversely impact its national economy. Seems like a good reason for the French to hold on to their territories, right? (I’m assuming it is the market incentive and the nasty habit of racist paternalism that renders relinquishing the territories unthinkable.)

Haitians wade through a flooded town in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, September 2008

Going the route of Haiti, that is, seeking independence from France, would require an enormous regional alliance between other Caribbean islands, Latin American countries, and friendly countries in the global north (if such a thing exists). We should remember that Haiti was the first black republic in the West, and continues to be one of a kind. Historical hindsight allows us to see that such an anomaly was not taken lightly, as the United States and Britain did everything they could, from the early nineteenth century onward, to cripple the new republic and effectively cut it off from the global economy. (Cuba’s situation is another example.) The longstanding effects of internaitonal isolation, foreign infiltration, weapons trafficking, and internal political instability has rendered Haiti the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and led to unspeakable human suffering. We need only look to the food crisis in 2008 and the impact of Hurricane Ike to get a glimpse of Haiti’s struggle.

I typically try to tie up my posts with some insight into the possibility of cultivating loving-kindness and compassion in the face of such suffering. But today, I’m so in the pain that it’s difficult to say something hopeful. I pray that our friends in Guadeloupe fight for their right to exist and flourish, just as much as I pray, think, and argue for a way out of the international juggernaut of suffering wrought by our current way of life. By now it is painfully clear that the social order brought into being by the expansion of European capitalism into all areas of the world is woefully unsustainable. As I have said elsewhere, bailing out this system is not the answer. It may be a temporary pain reliever akin to popping an Advil for a headache born of dehydration, but the painkiller won’t hydrate the areas of the body that need water the most.

*UPDATE

As of February 19, the French government has conceded to demands that they increase wages 200 euros a month. See the BBC article, “France Meets Guadeloupe Demands” for a few more details.

Tags: bailout, Caribbean, climate change, economic crisis, economics, food crisis, France, genetically modified food, globalization, GMO, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Monsanto, neocolonialism, politics, race, sovereignty, sustainable farming

GAZA

In the Spring of ’99 I enrolled in a course called Prophecy and Social Criticism at my alma mater, Bowdoin College. Halfway through the class we read Michael Walzer’s book, Exodus and Revolution, which explored the political and ethical implications of the Exodus story.

I remember sitting in my friend Celine’s room with Walzer’s book in hand, and dropping it on the floor when the significance of his words really sunk in. Forgive my inability to directly quote the book, but the gist of Walzer’s argument went thus: Upon entering the land of milk and honey, God’s chosen people found others already occupying their gifted land. Although these people were the indigenous inhabitants of the land, the Hebrews were free to occupy Canaan because the Canaanites were outside the Hebrews’ sphere of moral concern.*

Canaan after the Conquest

WHAT?

This didn’t make any sense. Why would it be okay for one group of people to take another group of people’s land just because their God said it was okay, I wondered?  That’s like me telling the girl in the dorm room next to mine that I had a revelation about her car last night, and God said he was bequeathing it to me, so she should handover the keys. Of course, she’d look at me like I’d lost my mind and do no such thing. What, then, might be the outcome ? Right, conflict, war, and bloodshed.

(Ever thought about what mass PTSD looks like? Think Native Americans post-European invasion. Think Africans in the Western Hemisphere from the 17th century on. Think Congolese in the age of Leopold. Think Jews sequestered to the Warsaw ghetto in the age of Hitler. Think the Japanese in the wake of Hiroshima. Think the Vietnamese under clouds of agent orange. Think Sunnis and Shiites the moment operation “Shock and Awe” got underway.)

I was soon informed that groups who anchored their truth claims, their moral certitude and ethical norms in differing authority figures, particularly differing transcendental authority figures, stood at an impasse that only force could bridge. One version of the truth would force the other version of truth “underground,” as it were. The imposition of one group’s will on the other was the basic recipe for war.

I am reminded of this as I read the New York Times today, as I surf through Al Jazeera online and bounce around the BBC website. What’s happening in Gaza today may not be identical to the occupation detailed in the Old Testament, but it surely shares in the logic of that old story. What troubles me now, however, is the way in which Israel’s justifications for what is all but genocide in name, can gain traction in the public sphere. What kind of psychic space must we all be in to read last year’s “warning” by Israel’s deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, without mass outrage being our response? Vilnai told us:

“Palestinians risked…’bringing an even bigger Shoah’ (the Hebrew word for Holocaust) upon themselves if they did not stop firing Qassam rockets into Israel….” [emphasis mine.]

There are many things wrong with this statement, not the least of which is Vilnai’s back door, or accidental, admission that Israel’s actions amount to a Holocaust, but to think that such a lopsided, underfunded, and ill-equipped defense against said Holocaust would be openly regarded as Palestinians “bringing an even bigger Shoah upon themselves” is outrageous. Seriously. Such a statement is delivered as if Israel cannot chose to respond differently; as if exerting more force is the only option.

C'mon, this can't be legal...

As I read more reports of Israel’s use of white phosphorous as an “obscurant” in  the densely populated urban area of the Gaza Strip, I  can feel my frustration and sense of helplessness rise up from my belly and circle around my heart. What are we to do, those of us who are committed to peace, compassion and avoiding adding another drop of suffering to this world? It is easy to feel compassion for those who suffer such indignities, but how are we to muster compassion and forgiveness for their killers?

Unlike Walzer’s notion of someone being outside of our sphere of moral concern, and therefore not worthy of our time, love, compassion or care, we must begin to move towards an ethic that leaves no one out and wrestles with the difficulty of building relationships within the interstices of disagreement and on the edges of discrepant world views. Surely, the tie that binds Israel and Palestine is a shared history of suffering, both at the hands of others and each other. A shared commitment to reducing the level of suffering and violence ought to be our goal, rather than the (false) “security” of one group at the cost of the other group’s sanity, genuine security, and ability to flourish in peace.

Notes

*In all fairness, Walzer isn’t the only one to make such a claim, or attempt to explain the situation in these terms. For a critique of this kind of reasoning see the work of the late Edward Said, in particular, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,” in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988): 161–78.

Tags: Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bowdoin College, Canaan, chemical warfare, Colonialism, compassion, Edward Said, ethics, Exodus, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Michael Walzer, morality, PTSD, War, White Phosphorous

“Enjoy Your Symptom!”

It is essential to remember that only the mind can create, and that correction belongs at the thought level…. Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.
- A Course in Miracles

The New Yorker's Commemorative Inauguration Cover, Jan 2009

My coworker handed me a copy of this week’s issue of the New Yorker yesterday. I wasn’t paying attention when she passed off the magazine so my reaction to the cover was a bit belated. As I ripped open the magazine’s plastic covering, and my eyes adjusted to the image, I was simultaneously dumbfounded and relieved. Dumbfounded because, on one level, I couldn’t believe Mr. Friedman and the New Yorker editorial board thought it was a good idea to refigure George Washington as Barack Obama, or, to convert Barack Obama into George Washington. But at the same time, I was relieved because I could believe – and shouldn’t have been surprised – that the folks at the New Yorker would release such an image to visually signify how our political present heralds a new beginning.

Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up and it’s a relief that I don’t have to, otherwise my entire analysis of our contemporary malaise would seem like a figment of my imagination. The cover image, this “commemorative” picture that you can order online and keep for posterity, is a symptom of a deeply rooted problem that must be corrected at the level of thought, at the level of the episteme, not at the level of the regime.

Alas, the break is always a repetition.

I won’t rehearse the full argument here, check out Firefighting on MLK Day and All in the Family 1, 2 and 3, for that, but suffice it to say that “New America” is only new to the extent that it has fully duped itself into believing inclusionary politics is tantamount to radical social change, rather than superficial rearrangement of the chess pieces. Such delusion is also symptomatic of the root illness. Speaking of symptoms, let me explain my title.

Our friend, Slavoj Zizek, possibly one of the most influential thinkers of our time, wrote a book by the same title in the 1990s. Zizek’s book concerns itself with Lacanian psychoanalysis and popular culture, or the ways in which some of Lacan’s central motifs can assist in the analysis of popular culture. In its strictest sense, the “symptom” is understood as an embodied, corporeal metaphor for a repressed desire. That which is deeply yearned for, but cannot be consciously entertained due to some powerful social interdiction, pops back up in a new form, either as a compulsive behavior or physical ailment. Following Zizek’s shift from the analyst/analysand context to the domain of popular culture, we can read certain cultural objects as symptoms betraying a repressed collective desire.

For clarity’s sake, I should say I am intentionally weaving together two connotations of the word/concept “symptom” into one, where I mean to suggest that the symptoms in question (primarily the image of Obama-Washington above, and secondarily the delusion of Progress) are both indicative of a repressed desire and a systemic imbalance, in the physiological sense.*

First, the repressed desire. It seems to me that the image betrays a yearning for more of the Same, by which I mean more of the same structural arrangements that Washington helped establish. Sure, Washington represents a break with English rule, but such a break was itself a repetition if we consider that the overarching theory of what it meant to be human didn’t change, a theory that had embedded in it both the presumption of capitalist exchange as the only logical mode of social organization and a notion of race that supersedes the race-as-phenotype model.* Yet, desiring white supremacy, desiring heteropatriarchal family structures, US global dominance and the continued peonage of workers are desires that rarely find their way into language. Rather, what we hear is “Change!” This is what must be said in the face of a social interdiction rendering identity-based discrimination not only passé, but straight-up uncool, thus racism turns into multiculturalism, patriarchy turns into liberal feminism, and heterosexism turns into gay pride and queer weddings.

But, the systemic imbalance persists, such that all of the above “social transformations” are themselves symptoms of said imbalance. What, you ask, is out of whack? Well, two things at two different registers. First, the very idea that one world view could possibly get it right, that is, get the description of reality right, is, quite simply, egocentric, delusional, and well, wrong. The multiplicity of human explanatory systems suggests that all are partial, imperfect knowledges with which we may weave a fuller, better picture. Nevertheless, Eurocentric thought universalized its local knowledge into global knowledge via colonization and enslavement. This error is an error at the epistemic level, at the level of knowledge, at the level of thought. Second, the practice of including previously “excluded” populations into the existing power structure mistakes this practical correction as a gesture capable of curing the real problem, that is, the error at the level of thought.

Thus, the New Yorker cover is perfect for its moment, but not for the reasons it thinks. The cover blends the old with the new in an attempt (I’m assuming) to suggest that Obama’s presidency marks a definitive break with the intolerable America Bush II made. But in so doing, it reveals that the break is actually a return to the Same, perhaps a kindler, gentler, more responsible Same, but the Same no less.

The image is symptomatic then, precisely because it signifies a repressed desire not to release the delusional ailment that the Euro-American worldview is The Correct Worldview. But, no one seems to notice, let alone care, that this is the sickness. So, by all means, enjoy your symptom!

Notes

*In Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Healing, symptoms are seen as indicators of a fundamental imbalance or block in the life force, Chi or Prana, depending on the tradition. Rather than treat or repress symptoms and then declare the patient healed, these healing traditions seek to address the root issue which is the imbalance or block itself.

*See the notes for Firefighting on MLK Day for a more detailed explanation of the idea of Race as a theory of what it means to be human.

Tags: george washington, Inauguration, Multiculturalism, new america, new yorker, Obama, repetition, slavoj zizek

Firefighting on MLK Day

1. King’s Prescience

We lost Dr. King in Tennessee. He was in Memphis to lead a protest on behalf of sanitation workers who suffered from unconscionably poor working conditions and equally disturbing wages. Many MLK academic historians note the significant emphasis King began to place on economic justice in the years before his untimely death. However, few popular accounts of King’s contributions include this important detail about his life and work. The effect of this elision is that the general public receives a watered-down picture of MLK; one that is routinely harnessed to the liberal multicultural politics that helped elect Barack Obama, and now aids the misleading notion that “we” have “overcome” our collective ailments.

In his reflections on working toward peace, actor and peace activist Harry Belafonte recounted a conversation he had with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly before King was assassinated. King told Belafonte he was disturbed by a realization he had about the long, hard fight for integration: “We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win,” King said. “But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”*

Belafonte was “taken aback,” by King’s admission and visible discontent. The project of integration did not, King argued, fully address the need to remedy the injustice of economic exploitation – an injustice intrinsic to capitalism and dispersed across racial and ethnic groups. “I’m afraid that even as we integrate,” King said, “we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.”

Though Belafonte agrees with King’s insight, though we face the greatest economic crisis in recent history, and though we continue to witness social unrest and egregious acts of violence against the poor, the disenfranchised, the stateless, and the homeless, Belafonte remains optimistic about the possibility of change.

He writes: “Deep in my soul, I know there are more Rosa Parks, more Dr. Kings, and more Ella Bakers ready to emerge. Perhaps we are the firefighters who can save the burning house. Martin would have embraced such a thought.”

2. On Inauguration Eve

Belafonte’s optimism and belief in the possibility of change is similar to, but not identical with, the brand of hope and change articulated by the Obama team. Contrary to popular opinion, the election of Barack Obama does not fully realize Dr. King’s dream. Though we bear witness to a most miraculous event tomorrow, when considering the “change” Obama’s election signifies, we’d all do well to see it as a symptomatic shift, rather than an eradication of the root illness Dr. King sought to address by the end of his career.

Here’s why:

Obama’s presidency can, and should, be regarded as the apotheosis of integration/multicultural politics in the United States. And for the majority of Americans, reaching this multicultural consensus is a very good thing.** Yet, we must be aware that adding more people of color and women to positions of power, both in the U.S. and abroad, does not rewrite the foundational assumptions and beliefs informing the global socio-political and institutional matrix that determines the quality of our lives. Even with a bright and dashing new president before us, it is fair to say that the house is still on fire.

Yes, tomorrow’s inauguration of the first African-American president certainly marks a shift in U.S. racial politics, but it does not mark the end, nor does it herald a substantive change, in the way racism is entangled with capitalist exploitation. Racism, which, I should add, is a deeply gendered affair, continues to aid capitalism in the creation of exploitable labor groups and usurpable, instrumentalized land.***

While I suspect Obama knows the house is still on fire, I’m less convinced that his method of dealing with the flaming house (which should be seen as the entire world, not just the U.S.) will move us in the direction of taming the blaze. To be frank, integration doesn’t change the world if it means we now have a black guy injecting massive amounts of capital into a gendered and racialized economic system instead of a white guy. Such a response to the implosion of an ethically vacuous (think Madoff, Dreier, Enron, et al.) and systemically unfair mode of organizing and distributing resources deals with symptoms, not root causes. It allows us to hobble on a bit longer on an ultimately unsustainable path. They’ve change the players instead of the game.

Consider this: one of the distinctive characteristics of our economic system is its demand that we all “compete” on the market to secure and accumulate the most basic of human needs. (I’m resisting the urge to address the absurdity of individual ownership as such, i.e.: private property.) Now, one might say that competition is the province of sellers, not consumers like you and I, but Marx reminds us that the consumer/worker is also for sale, perhaps now more so than ever. Each day we sell our labor in exchange for cash and “benefits,” benefits that are better understood as withheld birthrights erroneously routed through the workplace. As company after company lays off more and more workers (my job just sent 6 home last week) the buyers of labor can drive down wages because we are all competing for work. Meanwhile, Washington prepares for phase three of its “bailout” plan in order to keep this system running, so some of us may return to the market for further exploitation at a later date – should we last that long.

The competition-accumulation dyad is simply a bad combination that brings out the worst in people while actively devaluing the qualities we ought to be cultivating: mutuality, compassion, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and patience, in short, LOVE. In my first blog post, “Say When,” I had this to say about capitalist ideology:

As I sail through my entrepreneurship for dummies class, I’m learning that improving my bottom line is the goal, with a dash of social responsibility thrown in for good measure. But, I can’t help thinking we might wanna adjust the profit-accumulation model that leads businesses to desire ever-expanding coffers. Can we learn to have a wealth accumulation cap? You know, like when a friend pours you a glass of wine and says, “tell me when,” and you wait, watch the glass fill up with your favorite vino, all the while knowing that filling up to the brim is in bad form because others wanna taste too, so at the half way mark you say, “when!” Can we learn to say “when” before buying that second house, before buying that third car, before the mind-boggling vacation in the Maldives Islands? Can we learn to associate bling-bling excess with “bad form”? Surely it’s in bad taste to dine out for 200 bucks while others massage a grumbling belly and the family down the street is kicked out of their foreclosed on house, right?

As we celebrate the alleged demise of racism, capitalist ideology continues to propose an “individual” who is independent of everyone with whom he or she interacts. Such individuals are thought to have discreet and substantial identities that are mutually exclusive, rather than interdependent and contingent upon the actions of others. This conceptual paradigm lands us in the arena of individual rights, rather than collective responsibility, such that one can argue that their “right” to liberty enables them to accumulate capital irrespective of the human and environmental cost of such accumulation. (It’s a free country, right? WTF?) It is such a worldview that enables the “It’s not personal, it’s just business” saying to make any damn sense. Collective responsibility on the other hand, recognizes that what I do here has implications not only for other people near and far, but also for the unborn millions in generations to come. Yet, this idea of the self-interested, individuated human sits at the core (as in it’s one of the roots) of the contemporary global economic system/crisis everyone is struggling to save/solve. Only when we begin to see the interconnectedness between self and other, when we see that “my interest” is ultimately the same as “your interest,” will we begin to move toward collective responsibility, toward the liberating power of love, and indeed toward putting out the fire ravaging our home.

3. We, the Firefighters of Planet Earth

I say all of this not to detract or denigrate Obama’s brilliance or the blessed journey that is his life. Rather I make, what I suspect is a somewhat unpopular argument, in the spirit of King’s great insight about the nature of our contemporary illness, and to point out where the easy line drawn between King and Obama actually breaks down. It seems to me that paying homage to Dr. King necessitates maintaining fidelity to his legacy. The kind of quick and dirty historiography for which popular culture is notorious offers us a version of King that serves the interests of the status quo, and lends itself well to the celebration of Obama’s presidency. This is all fine and good if you don’t mind living among embers and billowing smoke that often erupts into scorching flames. If however, you prefer a less volatile life, then we ought to insist upon popularizing the version of Dr. King who was a peaceful radical, implicitly calling forth the firefighters of the next generation.

Notes

*Many thanks to my friend Bea for passing on the Belafonte passage. We truly are “we” – there is no I, no Self. The insights articulated in this blog are impossible without the input of others. If you’re interested in reading the rest of Belafonte’s notes, you can find them here: http://www.scu.edu/ethics/architects-of-peace/Belafonte/essay.html

**I find it difficult to communicate both the relief I feel over the decreasing occurrence of egregious  and monstrous acts of racially motivated violence, and the impatience I feel with broad based acceptance of the idea that multiculturalism in the U.S. solves the problem of race. Yes, we rarely see folks hanging from trees these days, but systemic and institutionalized violence persist in, perhaps, more atrocious ways: rampant poverty and mass negligence, deliberate under-education, incarceration, etc.

***By “racism” I refer to the bigotry, physical and epistemic violence accompanying the hierarchical distribution of the idea of “racial difference.” When I say “racism is a deeply gendered affair,” I mean that the metaphorics of racial difference map “gender differences” onto the idea of race. It would take too long to explain how this works, but it is very important for understanding why we’re not in the era of radical change. This blog requires an understanding of “racial difference” as a historical idea, rather than an objective Truth. My theory of race draws upon the work of philosopher Sylvia Wynter and Marxist historian Cedric Robinson, among others, and it theorizes Race as a bio-economic idea of human being, which was the idea of difference subtending the expansion of European monarchies-cum-nation-states in the early modern period. As a bio-economic theory of what it means to be human, racial thinking by the nineteenth century conceived of the Human as a pan-optic, evolving organism in various phases of evolution. The most evolved human was presumed to be capable of seeing its earlier incarnations in “primitive” others (hence, “pan-optic”), and simultaneously responsible for “helping” such groups “develop,” and enter the “modern, civilized” world. And, insofar as the human could reason, the human was imagined to be a self-possessing entity. The discourse of rationality therefore served to draw boundaries around the coveted space of self-possesion, and the “inalienable rights” that came along with ownership of the self. “Primitive accumulation” of capital thus turns on the fabrication of some groups of people as irrational, unable to tend to their own affairs, and so on. Of course, the only normal, rational humans were conveniently, also the authorial subjects of the discourse on human being and racial difference. This model of human being thus operated by a princple of inclusion within the “human family,” while exploiting people according to where one fell along the evolutionary line. Solving racism then, cannot to be solved by way of multiculturalism, which relies upon the “make-believe” racial categories of yore and demands being regarded as a human LIKE the one who initially oppressed and excluded. Rather, our way out of our contemporary morrass comes by decolonizing what it means to be human as such.

Tags: bailout, Barack Obama, Civil Rights, Dreier, economic exploitation, economic fraud, firefighting, Harry Belafonte, love, Madoff, market crash, markets, Martin Luther King, Marxism, neoliberalism, regulation

The Jewel of Awareness

A friend recently asked me why I practice sitting meditation and how I do it. In the process of answering I had an epiphany about the power of awareness.

First, the “how”:

1. Sit comfortably, which typically means cross legged on something comfortable. Maybe get a little pillow for your bottom.

2. Breath in slowly, allow the action of breathing in to settle in your body, then breathe out slowly.

3. With averted eyes, continue to focus on breathing in and out.

4. Allow your eyes to come to a close, comfortably.

5. Stay with your breath. Follow its rhythm.

6. When your mind wanders, simply notice the thought, and then come back to the breath. Make no judgment about the wandering mind.

Now, the “why”:

As I recounted my practice I noticed, perhaps for the first time, why I continue to meditate. Of course, meditation practice is part of Buddhist practice generally, and often this would be my answer when someone asked me why I meditate. However, such a generic answer didn’t really explain the value of meditation, or why it’s an integral part of Buddhist practice.

As I spoke with my friend I realized that in the moment when I notice my mind wandering I have touched the jewel of awareness. It is by being aware of my wandering mind that I am able to bring myself back to the breath, rather than remaining caught up in the thoughts carrying me away. The long term benefit is that I water the seed of mindfulness in me, and as a result I am more mindful in my daily life when I am not sitting. Through meditation I become more aware of my thoughts, and my habitual ways of responding to painful situations. By seeing these responses and thoughts, I can begin to disidentify from them: I am not my thoughts, nor am I my reactions. That is, I do not have to craft an identity out of my feelings, thoughts and reactions that keep me locked into thinking, feeling and reacting in the same way for perpetuity. From the space of awareness I am free to make a different choice, liberated to feel, think and respond differently.

In short, I am free to grow.

Tags: awareness, Buddhism, divinity, meditation, sitting

Reclaiming the Divine

It’s relatively unpopular to openly discuss one’s spiritual or religious beliefs these days; lest one be read as socially conservative, and out of sync with the repressive potential of some religious paradigms. Yet, I am convinced that reclaiming our shared divine inheritance has the potential to transform our lives, and power direly needed social change. At the most basic level, reclaiming the Divine in all of us requires drawing a clear distinction between exclusionary religions that are egocentric, and a spiritual model that is rooted in the principles of interconnectedness and no-self.

The former traditions, the most obvious being the Abrahamic religions, are hotbeds of conflict precisely because they have come to disavow the Divine power and goodness that is intrinsic to all beings and things in the universe. They form static identities with hard boundaries that compel the rest of us to reckon with the material effects of our imposed outsider status: We are the “Children of God,” the chosen few, and you are not. The source of their certitude, the veracity of their claim, is anchored in a transcendental figure with whom only they are acquainted, and from whom only they receive revelation. This is a convenient turn of events indeed. Others are thus made to live in the shadow of such an exclusive relationship.

By withholding Divinity, by claiming that some are “chosen” and others are damned, such traditions disavow the reality of the interconnectedness of all beings with Divine Being, and the inter-being of earthly beings with each other. If we can agree that Being as such is the Source, if we can agree that all that is comes from, and is infused with, the divine creativity of the Source, then no special relationship to the Source can really be claimed. Well, choseness can be claimed, and surely it is, but it cannot be proved to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

What we can be sure of is that we are all here, we all are, and must find a way to live together. Thinking “we” rather “me,” seeing “you” in “me,” moves against our atomistic existence and the Western insistence upon the rights bearing individual. We move toward a notion of collectivity, toward a notion of responsibility for others and for the environment in which we live. We inter-are with the earth, and with each other. Our ability to flourish is contingent upon the happiness and flourishing of all that lives in and around us. For example, to the extent that the earth lives, so do we. This should be obvious: without food we cannot live. If we ruin the environment that enables food to grow we perish along with it. I have no illusions about the arrogant pretensions of some to create synthetic food-stuffs (read: processed food) meant to replace the divine nutrients that sustain us. However, incidences of various cancers, immune diseases, arthritis, kidney disease and other ailments continue to be linked to synthetic foods and the chemicals used to bolster meat production and preserve vegetables and fruit. In short, the “replacements” and additives are killing life rather than sustaining it. (GMOs are equally problematic, but I’d digress to much if I got into it now.)

The spiritual model I have in mind does not propose a God that is anthropomorphic or separate from you and I. Quite the contrary. The “God” I have in mind (if it can be called that) is dispersed energetic light radiating through all things as all things, sowing the seed of Divinity in each of us as its Being exceeds our own. In reclaiming the Divine we re-member, that is, put back together, our awareness of the Divine inside of us.

Such remembrance has had enormous implications for how I move through the world, how I relate to other sentient beings, and how I engage with the natural environment. I no longer feel so separate and alienated from everything around me, and as such, I no longer regard human being as a form of being meant to instrumentalize everything to my own ends. My impulse is to think connection, integration, affinity, and cooperation. As a spiritual practice, my reclamation of the Divine is a living-belief system: it is alive, active, mutable and an open-ended way of being in my daily life. Being open to my own potential to touch the Divine in me has transformed my life from one of intense suffering, addiction, and fear to a life of joy, understanding, peacefulness and courage. I invite you to come along on the path toward the Divine, toward that which is majestic, formless, and noble in you. From our internal, personal transformations we can effect a change much grander, one that may bring a suffering world back to the basic goodness already within itself.

Tags: Buddhism, christianity, forgiveness, god, kindness, love, loving-kindness, one reality, philosophy, relationships, religion, spirituality

“We are all Oscar Grant”

I mourn not only the loss of Oscar Grant’s life,

I mourn the killing of love as it withers under the force of violence swelling up around us;

Violence that is at its core pervasive sadness, pain, suffering and a deep longing to be seen, loved and held as we hold our beloveds.

Yes, we are all Oscar Grant.

Oakland, California – January 6, 2009

It is said that violence begets more violence. As I read news reports of turbulent protests, police officers outfitted in full riot-gear, and a city on the brink of tearing itself apart, I am convinced that the old saying is true. The question I’d like to address here is why violence tends to trigger more of the same and, more importantly, what methods can we use, right now, to replace violence and aggression with love, compassion and understanding.

For those unfamiliar with the events leading to last night’s civil unrest, here’s the short version:

Following a confrontation on BART on January 1st (that’s, Bay Area Rapid Transit, our version of the subway), Oscar Grant and several of his friends were detained by BART police. Handcuffed and on his stomach, Oscar sustained a bullet wound to his back that ricocheted off the concrete and re-entered his torso. It was the second wound that killed him.

Last night, not far away from my loft in West Oakland, protesters took to the streets to voice their anger and outrage over Oscar Grant’s death. Some sat on turnstiles at the Fruitvale BART station where Oscar Grant died, while others marched in the streets. The street protests turned into attacks on police cars, private businesses and private property. The image above is of a car set ablaze in downtown Oakland. After smashing in the window of a small business one protester was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying the owner of the business “…should be glad she just lost her business and not her life.”

The protester’s sentiment, the violence of the protests and the killing itself are all heart breaking. While I too feel Oscar Grant died unjustly, I also believe that the anger and frustration motivating the riotous social unrest that coursed through Oakland originates from the same place as the feelings and thoughts that led Johannes Mehserle to shoot an unarmed man in the back.

Now, I don’t claim to be a mind reader, nor do I claim to know exactly what Johannes Merserle was thinking in the moments leading up to Grant’s death, but I do know that fear, anxiety, resentment, agitation and dissociation lead us to consider ourselves wholly separate from other people. That feeling of separation generates an “us versus them” and a “me versus you” mentality, which disables compassion, kindness and love, all of which cultivate connection and kinship.

It seems to me that the kind of policing we have come to know in the United States is founded on this incorrect view, this sense of fundamental and qualitative difference between police officers and those who are policed. (Never mind the “protect and serve motto.” Police patrols in the U.S. were established to protect property, not people. In fact, the first patrols were slave patrols: men on horseback patrolling the countryside for runaway slaves. The continuity should not be lost on you.) Policing agencies of all sorts (and here I also have military forces in mind) are trained to search out “criminals/enemies” and prevent them from doing “harm” to the larger group. However, histories of racism, political repression and antipathy toward poor people, have created a situation in which policing is infected by these deep-rooted animosities, and leads police to presume they know (consciously or unconsciously) who the criminal/enemies are in advance. Those of us who grew up in, and or, currently live in, heavily surveilled neighborhoods know quite well that we are seen as pariahs, seen as embodied blight, or simply seen as “the problem.” We are not, in short, seen as human beings who feel the same joys and sorrows as those sent to watch over us.

This knowledge has effects.

It breaks hearts, spirits and the will to be anything other than what one is socially expected, or assumed, to be. Of course, this is not true for everyone, but it certainly helps to explain how masses of people, namely, the impoverished and people of color (which is often one and the same), come to tautologically confirm the popular and scholarly analyses of their so called pathological lifestyles. With little genuine love directed at these communities from those who are ostensibly nothing like them, it follows that little love is returned. Consider the confusion young children feel when they are the targets of anti-black racism, or, in another context, anti-Palestinian violence. How are they to process such hatred, such anger and violence when they have done nothing wrong; when they have done nothing besides exist? Consider the suffering one feels when being subjected to homophobic violence. In each case, we have seen that those who suffer from violence often respond in kind: “Well, I hate Israelis; or, I hate white people; or, straight people are homophobic assholes!” Often we think these responses are justified, but it seems to me that another response is possible and necessary.

Another response to systemic hatred and violence is necessary because riotous protests only increase hate and fear-based policing, which in turn triggers more outrage and social unrest. Last night shows us that social unrest is read as mass criminality to be stamped out with tear gas, rubber, then metal bullets, mass incarceration and wholesale repression.

We must all take the anger we feel and transform it into love for those who commit acts of violence. We must reconceive the source of violence so we see it as the outcome of unaddressed pain and suffering, and the outcome of a misconception about the interconnectedness between self and other.  In so doing, we can begin to understand that addressing the root pain is more effective than meeting violence with more violence. Indeed, we can begin to see that the “other” is not so different from ourselves.

We have the ability to do this right now. We can begin to see that what makes us human is far more unifying than the list of things that make us different kinds of humans. We can begin to do this with little things: the person who bumps into you during your commute; the person who cut you off on the highway; the person who was rude to you on the phone. In each case, the person on the other side of your pain is also suffering; suffering from worry (“I’m gonna be late to work!), from anxiety (“If I don’t pick up my kid in the next five minutes the daycare will charge me a $50 late fee.), or from frustration, (“I wish I had a better job.”) All of these feelings are ones we have felt before, perhaps under different circumstances, but they are not wholly foreign. In moments such as these we can be aware of the infraction and wish that the person be free from the suffering that led them to hurt us. Responding with loving-kindness may not stop them from hurting people completely, but it certainly plants the seed. More importantly, it helps you not escalate the immediate situation in which you find yourself.

We must begin to replace violence with love, and a willingness to listen and be open to that which we do not fully understand.The teachers of nonviolence like MLK, Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh, all understood this principle: violence cannot be eliminated by force, it has to be loved out of existence.

This is the lesson we should learn from the unfortunate death of Oscar Grant.

Tags: BART, BART Police, broken limbs, civil unrest, forgiveness, johnnes merserle, kindness, love, Oakland, Oakland Police, Oakland Riots, oscar grant, police brutality, violence

Obama’s Strange Bedfellows

Obama is – ostensibly – a friend of gay folks in the U.S. Yet, gay folks from San Francisco to Burlington, Vermont are wondering what the hell is going on. “How could he,” the lament goes, “choose such a bible-thumping, right-wing hate-monger to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration? Isn’t the Obama Inauguration supposed to mark the beginning of a new era in American politics?”

Well, Obama’s inauguration – and the presence of Rev. Warren – does signal a new beginning, or at least the ascendancy of a kind of liberal multicultural hegemony that is, perhaps, more effective than the kind of liberal multiculturalism characteristic of the Bush Administration.

Here’s why:

Obama is a consensus builder. While he doesn’t shy away from alienating some Americans with very clear policy objectives that often lean left-of-center, he is symbolically invested in uniting the civic sphere through what he calls “disagreeing without being disagreeable.” One way of interpreting that phrase goes like this: Don’t be a jerk to people you don’t agree with, even if you really think their views are poopie and don’t make sense. Underneath our differences, there is something that we all share.” For Obama that “shared something” is our commitment to basic American values, values we all tacitly consent to by virtue of being born here and not going awol once we get the change. (Anyone feel the ex-patriot itch when you were studying abroad?)

Another way of reading Obama’s golden rule relies on the extremely relevant insights of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who bequeathed to us one of the most powerful theoretical tools for understanding our present: hegemony.

As a consensus builder, Obama’s objective is to be the leader of all Americans, not just the blue-few who pounded the pavement for his campaign. That means reaching out to folks he may chide in the privacy of his own home, and inviting them to see themselves as active participants in the public sphere, a place we can call, “The America Obama Built.” Rather than alienate and infuriate the socially conservative block of the electoriate by openly dismissing them, his approach (at least symbolically) includes them, even if such inclusion does not mean he will pursue policy objectives they may find favorable.  To be clear, there is typically some kind of advantage to being a part of the hegemonic block. It seems to me that the advantage in this case is that social conservatives gain a modicum of legitimacy in mainstream politics, which, as we all know, has pretty much eroded and was made a laughing stock thanks to the idiocy of the McPalin campaign.

This, my friends, is how hegemony works. The hegemonic political block is an assemblage. It is based on a principle of association and linkage, or articulation. It rules by inclusion rather than exclusion. It compels people to accept their subordination because it plays to, or maybe plays on, their feelings of relevance and a sense that they are not fully disinvested of influence. Whether or not such perceived relevance and influence plays out at the legislative register is yet to be seen.

While I am certainly not a proponent of Christianity-based politics and all of the myopic, antiquated, and unfriendly ways in which these faith-based claims enter the political arena, I am also not surprised, nor am I outraged by Obama’s move to include Rev. Warren. If my analysis about Obama’s political style is right, then this is just the beginning of a series of strange bedfellows rolling around together into the civic bed.

We lefties would do well to pay attention to legislation, judicial arguments and executive level policy, rather than fussing about these symbolic attempts to bridge ideological divides. Obama will continue to do this. We better make sure he continues to (or starts to) carry out the left-ish policy platform on which he campaigned.

(Ah, and for the Queer Alphabet Soupers – GLBT, etc. – Obama wasn’t very clear on gay marriage from the start. Yes to civil unions; No to gay marriage; States should decide marriage issues; Dignity for all; Ideological cliché, blah, blah, blah. All of this shit means I’m still getting screwed on federal taxes. Thanks, it feels great.)

Oh yeah, I was just reminded by Phil Brontein’s article in the Huffington Post of this disappointing bit political maneuvering: Janet Napolitano running Homeland Security. If you don’t know who she is, ask someone vaguely familiar with immigration issues in Arizona. She’s aweful. Might as well be on CNN with Lou Dobbs. Obama’s selection of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary counteracts the Janet Napolitano pick. The labor folks love it. That is, labor folks with US passports. It seems the only workers worth protecting are those who are “one of us.” Meanwhile, globalization consistently sends capital on a cross-border errand that can’t help but push workers from outside the U.S., toward the U.S.

Tags: Antonio Gramsci, Gay Rights, Hegemony, immigration, Inauguration, Multiculturalism, Obama, politics, Rev. Warren

Hot Coals

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

-Buddha

My mother’s ex-husband has a daughter who is four years older than me. When we were younger, and our parents were married, she spent weekends at our place and would let me hang out with her and her friends. I looked up to them, developed a tiny crush on one of her friends, and generally played the role of the annoying, younger sister.

Meanwhile, her dad was a raging alcoholic who wreaked havoc on my life for seven years. His “episodes” conveniently happened when she was away (she lived with her mother) so she didn’t have the displeasure of seeing her father’s alter-ego, or my mother’s bloodied face.

The trauma was mine to bear alone.

I didn’t realize how much I resented her for missing out on all of this madness until many years later. I remember seeing her in my mid-twenties and wondering why she was talking to me as if nothing happened. I scowled, was short with her, and vowed to never speak to her again. In fact, everyone on her dad’s side of the family with whom I had a connection was summarily eliminated from my life. They were all guilty by association in my mind. They were just as bad as he because they did not intervene to save us, nor did they reprimand him for his bad behavior (as far as I knew). Their silence was complicity; tacit consent to domestic violence and the familial dysfunction that followed in the quietude of our daily lives.

Every now and then I’d receive emails from his daughter. She’d ask me out to dinner, ask about my family, and generally make a good faith effort to reconnect. In each instance I’d read the email then delete it as if it were spam; even the emails with pictures of her son who’s about six or seven years old now.

While reading through a client contract today she IM-ed me via Gmail to ask for a favor. My first response was, “you’ve got to be kidding me.” Then I leaned back in my chair, thought about all the favors, kindness and generosity that recently saved me from serious trouble.

I wondered what would happen if I ignored her request. I wondered what the cost would be to her if I pretended to not see her need. Clearly she needed help, and I was sure she’d ask someone else if she could. But here I was, available, and on the verge of withholding assistance because she failed to save me from trauma she couldn’t have prevented anyway.

Something in me changed when I decided to respond and call her mom to relay a message.

I think I let go.

I let go of the idea that she was responsible for her father’s behavior, and for my safety.

I let go of my habit of punishing her for something she did not do.

I let go of my need to be avenged by others, and my need for resolution in the wrong-doer’s sense of guilt.

I think I let go of the anger that was burning my hand as I waited to hurl it her way.

I recently read a passage in Thich Nhat Hahn’s essay, “The Six Paramitas” that probably planted the seed for the release I realized today. It reads thus:

To suppress our pain is not the teaching of inclusiveness. We have to receive it, embrace it, and transform it. The only way to do this is to make our heart big. We look deeply in order to understand and forgive. Otherwise we will be caught in anger and hatred, and think that we will feel better only after we punish the other person. Revenge is an unwholesome nutriment. The intention to help others is a wholesome nutriment.

And so it is. I feel better in the absence of revenge. I feel better because I’m no longer burning myself as I wait to throw a flame at anyone related to my mother’s ex-husband. As I look deeper into his behavior, it is clear to me that his actions were borne from his suffering. While this is not an excuse for hurting others, it is certainly a source of action that I understand.

My anger did not change the past and it didn’t enrich my present. All anger seems to do is truncate the potential of the future.

Tags: Buddha, coals, domestic violence, forgiveness, love, revenge, spirituality, Thich Nhat Hahn, vengance

All in the Family, 3

After re-reading part one and part two of “All in the Family,” two things were clear to me, 1.) The critique of liberal multiculturalism is less stringent in part two than it is in part one, and 2.) my attempt to articulate the difficultly I have with critiquing the Obamas still isn’t coming across very well.

I’ll begin here:

It is very dangerous to mount a critique of Obama (and it is perhaps even more dangerous to critique Michelle) within a context that remains deeply racist in its anti-black modality, EVEN THOUGH there is a hegemonic shift toward a new kind of racism that accommodates some forms of blackness. For the record, being a black woman in America is hard work. I admire Michelle Obama more than language will allow me to communicate. My intention is not to slam Michelle or Barack as individual people, but to identify a larger set of processes by way of example. In this sense, they are a case study.

The case of the Obamas helps me get at a larger reconfiguration of racial discourse in the United States. This was the point I began to make in part one of this blog, namely, that the inclusion of formerly excluded persons within the boundaries of normative humanity suggests that the battle lines are being redrawn. The crux of the argument here is that the problem of race and the prolem of “woman” (to which we can now add “the problem of homosexuality”), is and always has been, the problem of how Western European thinkers have defined what it means to be human. These are shifting definitions articulated across a series of discursive sites (philosophy, anthropology, economics, political theory, biology, etc.) that eventually settled into a common sense notion of who was fully  human and who was, in evolutionary speak, kinda, sorta, on their way. (It is no conincidence that civil rights language tends toward the metaphorics of journeying. Arguments for inclusion take their cues from social evolutionary discourses.)

If what it means to be human is to be male, white, heteosexual, able-bodied, a bearer of legal rights, and upwardly mobile, and if this definition erases itself as the normative center, then what happens when we demand inclusion is both a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of this definition of human being (over and against other possible ways of being), and tacit acceptance of the forms of sociality and world-making this definition has brought into being.

Considered in this way, simply recognizing brown, black, and female “Others” as suddenly “human,” on the terms that initially constituted their exclusion doesn’t really change the world. It means the normative center adds more to its ranks, but the fundamental terms do not change. This, it seems to me, is the real problem. The fact of exclusion, and the hell it has wrought historically and in our present, is the effect, not the cause. That is to say, being excluded from what appears to be “the good life,” isn’t the cause of our suffering. Rather, the cause of our suffering is how the good life has been defined.

The spirit of my critique is that of a wish; a wish that the world we create for the Malia’s and Sasha’s of tomorrow improves at its core, rather than being diversified on its surface.

Tags: humanism, love, Multiculturalism, Obama, race, the human

Offering to the Döns

“Practice offering to the döns* by welcoming mishaps because they wake you up.”

I always read my monthly horoscope on the first day of the month. On Dec. 1 Susan Miller told me the full moon, which reaches its apex today on the 12th, would occur in my third house: the house of other people’s money. She went on to say that I’d be writing a big, non-negotiable check, and with “Saturn in hard angle to the moon…there will be no way to avoid acknowledging one’s responsibility or alternatively, accepting a loss and moving on.”

And so it is.

Since I bought my car in August of 2006 I developed the unsavory habit of collecting parking tickets. I’d park where it was convenient because I was running late. Or, I’d fail to check the street sweeping day. Or I’d do some combination thereof. When I’d return to my ticketed car I’d place the notice of my parking violation either in my bag, or in my sun visor, or in the glove compartment, and then I’d carry on with my day. I’d tell myself I’d pay when I could.  The underlying rationale was that I simply couldn’t afford to pay the ticket at the time of the violation.

Some time in late August of this year I realized I hadn’t received the DMV notice to renew my car registration. I called the Oakland DMV and found that the change of address I thought I mailed to Sacramento never arrived and the DMV continued to mail important documents to my old address. (In retrospect, I think I printed the change of address form, filled it out, and didn’t do much more.) I also learned that I needed to have my car smogged before it could be registered and that the cost of my registration was almost tripple the usual amount. I knew I couldn’t afford it by the time the registration was due. So I resolved to pay it late, or, when I felt like it. As I was doing with the parking tickets.

On Wednesday, Dec. 10, I deboarded BART at the West Oakland station and headed to my car. As I walked up the street my intuition spoke to me:

“Your car is not there.”

Typically, I both hear my intuition and don’t hear it at the same time. On Wednesday night I heard my intuition loud and clear and I knew unequivocally I would not see my car where I parked it earlier that day.

I walked up and down Union Street twice, looking for a car I knew was already gone. I phoned my partner and asked her to pick me up.

Shortly thereafter I learned my car was impounded for excessive parking violations and for failing to renew my registration. After visiting the DMV and the Oakland Parking Violations office I had a dollar amount to attach to my carelessness: $1,686.

It’s a high price to pay for sleepwalking through life.

Here’s the lesson:

While I’d rather not scramble to find nearly seventeen hundred dollars, I am grateful for the mishap because I don’t believe I would have redirected my behavior on my own.

The violation itself is instructive.

If read allegorically, one can see the violation as a failure to move in accordance with the ongoing flow of the universe. All is change and constant movement. Parking is the opposite. Parking is the mundane act of staying put, and in some instances, being stuck. When one receives a ticket for parking, the universe is suggesting that we either stopped in the wrong place (so get going!) or we’ve overstayed our welcome (so get going!).

I was stuck in a way of being that was out of sync with the principles I purport to practice, most importantly, mindfulness.

It would take less than a minute to think about (i.e.: be mindful of) what I was doing. “I am parking the car. Can I park here? When is street sweeping day? Or, alternately, “Street sweeping happens on Thursday on this block. What is today?”

Had I asked myself these questions, I would have avoided 70% of the tickets.

Then, there’s the second register dissociation: grabbing the ticket off my window shield, telling myself I had no money to pay it, and then pretending it would disappear if I ignored it.

To simply collect the violation/message is to disavow the message. I had several warnings; small nudges to wake up. It took the large mishap to really jolt me awake. In Buddhism giving offerings to the döns means to show gratitude for the event that shocks us out of stasis and propels movement. It’s the spiritual equivalent of a blaring alarm clock with a ribbon wrapped around it.

The mishap is a gift when considered in this way. No matter how painful or uncomfortable the mishap is in the moment, it is ultimately a blessing because it helps us get back into the flow of life.

*A dön is a sudden wake-up call. Everything is going smoothly and suddenly something shocking happens.

Tags: alarm clocks, Buddhism, DMV, dons, getting stuck, Oakland, parking violations, sleepwalking, waking up

All in the Family , 2

2. Change You Can’t Believe In

I was drawn to Barack just as much as the next hopeful, anti-war, down with poverty, eco-chic, anti-Bushite.

But in many ways, I was drawn to Michelle even more.

Her story was my story, just written about fifteen, to twenty years earlier. She was, like me, a child of American slavery. Her folks were from the South Side of Chicago. My folks were from Tennessee. She went from the colorful comfort of an insulated black community to the often toxic quarters of the Northeast’s most prestigious centers of higher learning. Michelle toiled at Princeton, and then Harvard, all the while wondering how much she’d really have to pay, in psychic and emotional currency, to these institutions.

I traveled from Oakland, California to Brunswick, Maine. I could count all the black folks in my graduating class at Bowdoin on my left hand, plus two fingers from my right. It wasn’t until graduate school that I’d encounter this beautiful thing called “women of color,” in academe. But by then, the “damage” had been done and the sense of isolation already imposed. I was no longer “at home” when I went back to East Oakland. And I certainly wasn’t “at home” in the white-male run history, politics and philosophy departments that intrigued me so much. So when I saw Michelle, when I read about Michelle, when I experienced this regal, beautifully brown, compassionate and intelligent black woman who lived in the very interstices I feared would swallow me whole, I thought, yes, she must be my First Lady.

How seductive a reprieve from invisibility can be, no?

Like my friends, all of whom considered themselves so left of the left as to not really be party to American political discourse, I was secretly ambivalent about the Obama campaign but didn’t dare say so in public. I made a quick trip to Borders and bought The Audacity of Hope, just to make sure I was frowning at Obama for all the right reasons. Sure enough, his basic acceptance of American ideology and the essential legitimacy of capitalism were red flags – harbingers of more shitiness to come.

But, he was handsome as hell, with a beautiful smile and a wife I thought I could talk to, and kids I wouldn’t mind babysitting. For the first time my desire for a personal relationship with a political family interrupted the neatness of my political critique. They felt like folks I knew: Michelle and Barack were my aunt and uncle from Chicago, Sasha and Malia my little cousins. Ambivalence was the best I could do. Well, that and a clear rejection of the idiocy and self-righteous mediocrity of the McPalin’s.

With that I stood in a long, jubilant line at the Alameda County Courthouse to cast my ballot for Barack, Michelle, Sasha and Malia a day before the election. I was excited, proud and worried all at once. How would colored folks respond when they began to see that the game Barack was playing didn’t have liberation in the playbook? When would they understand that the middle class for whome he sought relief didn’t include them? And when would we figure out that Dr. King and Barack Obama are not really one and the same? The MLK I admire was anti-war in contrast to Barack’s increasing pro-force position. The MLK I love saw capitalism, and its necessary motor: rampant poverty, as the overarching problem, within which racism was a crucial organizing princple. The Barry O we’ve come to know doesn’t have much of a problem with capitalism as such, he just dislikes golden parachutes and excessive rewards for the wealthy. He gets that racism is a problem at the structural level, but his very presence in Washington is fodder for the multicultural machine.

Much to my dismay, the First Family – our Cliff and Claire Huxtable for the 21st century – is the apotheosis of the new liberal multiculturalism. Where the Bush II Administration left off, fudging the lines of race and gender to such an extent that some believed the glass ceilings were breaking, the forthcoming Obama Administration will complete the job, with glass shards in toe.

But why be dismayed?

Simple: from my perspective getting beyond the proverbial “glass ceiling” means gaining entrance to the coveted “Family of Man,” (qua human) a family heretofore characterized by whiteness, heterosexuality and maleness. The mere presence of people of color and women within that space doesn’t reconfigure what it means to human as such, it simply means more people can be “human” on narrowly conceived terms. Such conditions ought to compel us to ask: “Where’s the Change We’re Supposed to Believe In?”

Tags: black women, Chicago, Diversity, First Family, Harvard, Michelle Obama, MLK, Multiculturalism, Obama, politics, Princeton, race

Epistemology, or How You Know That?

Epistemology is the branch of western philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, or, more precisely, how we come to make knowledge claims. Much of my intellectual career – in and out of academe – has been preoccupied with epistemic questions. Since I was a kid (Or, so the story goes. I have no first hand recollection of many of these examples.) I questioned the truthfulness of the things adults told me. While this was a somewhat endearing and cute trait in a very young child, it began to border on annoying and downright insolence as I got older.

My “how do you know?” tick persisted well into my adolescent years and effectively pushed me out of the church my family attended for over 25 years. Many of my family members still attended Sunday services, but I couldn’t stomach the “because God said so” rationale. (Luckily my mother humored my skepticism and didn’t make me go against my will.) My faith in a Christian God grew thin in proportion to my growing secularity. In retrospect, I was a thirteen year old having a crisis of faith and erred on the side of agnosticism to settle the score. I figured I just couldn’t be sure. It certainly didn’t help to be inundated with the flatfooted positivism and hard empiricism found in the middle school version of the natural and social sciences. If I couldn’t “prove” the existence of God, or my special relationship to the “Children of Israel” (because, as far as my church was concerned, Black folks were just as chosen as Moses, Aaron and their kin), then there was no sense in walking around thinking and acting as if I was really a child of God.

Fast forward four years.

By the end of my senior  year of high school my mother and my step-father were separated. She, my brother, and I moved to a small apartment in San Leandro, and I was gearing up to head back east for college. I was pretty sure I was some kinda queer, but all I had to go on was a few high school crushes and a rich fantasy life. My suspected gayness made me even more suspicious of Christianity. I often heard the colloquial homophobic saying, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” ringing in my ears. Hmmm. None of this made any sense. Why make humans gay if they’re going to be damned?

Now, one could argue that God didn’t make humans gay at all. Gayness, the argument would go, was the effect of either being possessed by evil or electing to act out evil deeds in spite of both, my biological imperative towards heterosexuality, and my moral duty to comply with God’s plan for women. In short, my being gay didn’t have anything to do with God, thanks to the reality of human volition. It was direct evidence of my sinfulness, my alliance with the dark angels, my weakness and collusion with evil.

A logical retort to this argument was often voiced in the religion courses I’d eventually enroll in as an undergraduate. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, how on earth (or heaven for that matter), could there be evil in the world? Ah, yes! The good old theodicy question. I’d wrestle with this one for a while until I realized the answer to the problem of evil could not be sufficiently answered within a Christian framework.

The anti-gay Christians (who, by the way, have come out of the woodwork lately to uphold the righteousness of God via the ballot box in California) would maintain that my gayness was a choice, not a biological predisposition. And, if it was a biological predisposition, it was clearly a flaw or bio-error that must have an antidote scientists just hadn’t discovered yet. However, I was certain my attraction to women wasn’t a choice. How did I know this? Because to chose a difficult, unpopular and despised path simply makes no sense. Why chose to suffer? I would much rather have the love and happiness of my family greet me than their disdain. Being gay was a surefire way to be banished from the clan, or at least openly marginalized if allowed to stay within its ranks. In the face of this very real possibility, I came to terms with my love for women.

How did I know? Because I experienced it daily, and it was a desire, a love, an appreciation I couldn’t deny. It was, and is, real. My reality didn’t square with the Christian narrative, its description of who, and what, I was supposed to be. And, in my heart of hearts, I knew I wasn’t a bad person. I knew I wasn’t running around with a demon festering inside me, compelling me to fall in love with beautiful and smart women. In fact, I grew to understand that the love I experienced between women was so far removed from “evil” that the Christians clearly had it all wrong.

My life as a queer woman delivered the death knell to Christianity in my life. I reasoned thus: the holy book was written by men (yes, men – divine revelation be damned), and as such, reflected the social and cultural mores of their time. It was a biased text, riddled with the ideological and political preoccupations of those who pulled the gospel through a series of translations: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Old English, etc. (I mean really, the damn things says, “King James Version” on the side. If it’s a version, then surely there’s some human tampering involved, no?) What the bible came to represent in my world, particularly after studying the religious history of African Americans, was the textual evidence of the very human desire to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. What I began to see in all the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity), was an effort to explain the persistence of chaos, contingency and danger, as well as the reality of joy.

There was nothing otherworldly about it, as far as I was concerned. We were firmly on the terrain of culture, more specifically, literature masquerading as Religious Truth.

The tragedy here was that I implicated all religions in this brazen meaning-making enterprise and eliminated the possibility that there was something grander than we humans in the universe. Spirit was a fiction, just as much as the Easter Bunny or Santa Clause. My foray into Marxism didn’t help much in this regard either. Suffering was certainly real and could be historicized if you cared enough to contextualize this mess we call the contemporary world. Explaining suffering and injustice by way of a transcendental edict was – in my mind – just cause for a beat down. There was no God out there who said colored folks the world over should be subordinate to white folks. Clearly white folks said that. And there was no God out there who said gay folks shouldn’t be allowed to be happy and openly gay. Clearly straight folks said that. Marxism gave me tools for confronting injustice and the rampant disavowal of basic human worth.

But, eventually, its usefulness wore thin. My intractable tendency toward questioning, seeking, if you will, forced me to confront the limitations of Marxism as well. (It seemed Marxist theory contained the seed of its own revolution! Okay, bad joke.) What I found by my fourth year of graduate school was an emptiness inside me, and a yearning for meaning, purpose and community (or, perhaps, communion) with more than my “comrades” in the struggle. I wanted closeness with the natural world around me: my cat, my plants, the eucalyptus trees beyond my front door. I wanted to feel at home in the world instead of feeling the alienation I theorized. I didn’t want to feel the reification – my own “thingification” – and instrumentality within “the capitalist system.”

I felt vacuous, and ultimately useless. This budding nihilism dangerously meshed with all the pain and fear I felt as a child and I began to play recklessly with my life. Nothing felt good during these years, so I chose to self-medicate. Somewhere in my dissociation I  think I detested my discontent and my desire for a more meaningful and deeply interconnected life because I knew, without “knowing,” that such communion was the real order of the universe. I also knew that the intimacy I craved required work, serious spiritual work and commitment, but I didn’t know what that would or should look like.

However, the “what” and “how” of my journey (what should I do, and how should I do it?) are now the least of my worries. I’ve been told the universe will take care of the details. It was the knowing/not knowing dyad that plagued me for so long and threatened to undo my life. My reliance upon flawed epistemological training was also part of the problem. I didn’t trust that I could know anything intuitively; that I could know something as big as the arc of my life’s work on a hunch, a feeling, a sense.

But this seems to be true for me today: how I come to know things ranges from simple empirical observation to complex intutive recognition. An answer will always follow the questions I ask. My job is to be open to the possibility that the source of the information I seek may be highly unusual or ordinary and mundane.

How I know is no longer the issue. The fact of knowing is now the gift.

Tags: belief, christianity, epistemology, gay, god, lesbians, Marxism, philosophy, religion, spirituality

I’m Pointing At You, But Pointing At Me

One of my lojong cards reads: Don’t talk about injured limbs.

That’s it. Well, that’s it for the ‘slogan’ side. On the commentary side the card instructs us to avoid maligning others, particularly when they’re already down (eh-hem, which would be waiting in ambush), but to generally avoid talking shit about – and to – other people because it’s a jackass thing to do.

The card doesn’t say it’s a jackass thing to do, that’s my opinion. The teachings would say, much more eloquently and without the explicatives, that when we negatively assess others we’re really talking about ourselves.

How so, you ask?

Simple: there’s really only one of us here. If you buy this argument (which you should), then you’ll agree that there’s a bit of me in you and vice versa. Typically what we despise most in our adversaries and loved ones alike, are those parts of ourselves we’d rather not embrace, recognize or work on.

So, as I replay the argument my (ex?) girlfriend and I had on thanksgiving, knowing that she was really talking about herself makes me feel a bit better. She’s pointing the finger at me to get to herself. The same, of course, can be said of me.

This is the major insight. No one gets off the hook. We are both embattled; we’ve been bruised and abused for many years and in many ways. Often, when we feel assaulted (and I’m using the universal ‘we’ here), we are not only responding to the current infraction, but to a host of past hurts that are knowingly or unknowingly, rekindled by our current situation. The response I had to her was both about her and about so many other people. I like to think about this in terms of the palimpsest, or that writing pad we used to play with as kids that was carbon on the bottom with a film on the top. When I’d write or draw on it I could see the image I made, but when I lifted the film the image would disappear. Here’s the important part: though the image disappeared on the surface layer, the inscription itself remained just below the film.* Our lives are just like those pads. Everything makes an impression, even if we can’t see the lines on the surface.

Every now and then something triggers the old impressions, reminds us of something from the past or hurts us in a similar way. There were patterns in my relationship that fell into both of our old grooves, old patterns which were often ways of protecting ourselves against past assaults. The argument we had was just as much about my old hurts and her old hurts, as it was about the new ones we inflicted on each other. What we weren’t attentive to in the moment was that all of the finger pointing kept us from accounting for how our behavior toward each other revealed more about who we are, what we’ve been through, and where we need to grow, than it revealed about the other person. As I pointed out and screamed about her “injured limbs” I was really pointing at my own.

*For all my Freudian friends out there, you’ll remember Freud’s writing about the mystic writing pad. This is exactly what he had in mind.

Tags: broken limbs, finger pointing, forgiveness, freud, girlfriends, god, kindness, love, mirrors, mystic writing pad, one reality, relationships, shit talking

All in the Family, 1

1. Family of Patriots Revisited

I wrote a short essay a few years ago about Vanity Fair’s photographic spread of the Bush Administration during wartime, circa 2002. The administration was pictured on the cover of the magazine – family portrait style: some cabinet members sat, like Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney, while others stood, like G.W. Bush and Colin Powell. The picture was taken in a parlor room, complete with fireplace and a seventeenth century(-esqe) history painting above the mantle. The image conjured the feeling of nineteenth century family portraiture, that staple of bourgeois American culture, but this time with a colorful twist.

Unlike the portraits of yore, wherein a careful viewer could catch glimpses of the “help” flanking the mistress or master of the house, this portrait is a sign of the times, as it were, indexing our multicultural present with Rice and Powell repositioned as serious policy makers in their own right. Vanity Fair’s image heralded the expansion of the “family of man.” It now accommodated, or in civil rights parlance, included, those bastardized children of Men whose very status as human was seriously debated not too long ago. Now, without question the “Black” and “Woman” (and it seemed, that doubly-damned creature: black-women) were folded into the human family and the boundaries of otherness had been redrawn. If “we” were all “human,” then how can we figure that which is other to the human? In the geopolitical context there are no other players besides “humans,” right? We are not negotiating the veracity of global warming claims with Polar Bears, nor are we deciding the future of Amazon forests with its animal inhabitants. If all humans have been “included” in the family of man, who then becomes the enemy-other? And, most importantly, how is that “other” represented visually?

The answer to this question was conveniently circulating in the CIA anti-terrorist unit long before I wrote my little essay. During the period of ideological shift from a “communist threat” to the “terrorist threat,” the CIA created a logo to help visualize its enemy. Its anti-terrorist logo is called “terrorist busters” and as you can guess, takes its iconographic cue from the 1984 blockbuster hit, Ghostbusters. Instead of a ghost at the center of the stylized “no,” there was a spectral human-ish creature without any racial, or ethnic markers. The figure holds a machine gun though, and this prosthetic arm triggers a sense of violent unease that made me feel like the amorphous terrorist was male. While gendering still seemed to be at work, the image definitely attempted to signify an otherness that was wholly unhuman, alien, and spectral. The CIA’s “terrorist-enemy” exists outside the “human family”, and as such, “humans” were under no ethical or moral obligation to engage such a “thing” (person would be the wrong word, no?), within existing international legal frameworks. Hence the very conceivability of the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

What is so brilliant and simultaneously horrible about the CIA anti-terrorist image is the way it insists upon collapsing visual specificity in favor of visual ambiguity and undecidabilty. Whereas 19th/20th century racialization practices relied upon phenotypic differences (color differences, hair texture differences, nose size, lip size and so on) to identify the “other,” contemporary racialization, under the auspices of liberal multiculturalism, can no longer afford to operate on this register. Ambiguity, fungibility and spectral alterity become the locus of other-making. Diffrence is unmoored from the body as such, which enables its articulation to different bodies when it’s politically expedient.

This representational strategy is of the utmost importance if we are to understand how racialization operates in a “post-racial,” multicultural context. Moreover, as Barack Obama’s upcoming presidency is erroneously billed as the end of “race,” understanding that “race” was about the “human” all along will help us see how the “nonhuman” is now where racism makes its mischief. And, if I may spoil the fun a bit more, we’d have to regard the Obama administration as a continuation of US racial politics, US imperialism, and blasted capitalist totalitarianism, not as a marker of a break.

Tags: Bush, CIA, colin powell, Condoleeza, ghost busters, Multiculturalism, race, terrorism, terrorists, vanity fair

Say When

Unfinished and Under-researched Musings on the Economy & Politics

Small businesses seem to be at the heart of economic growth. According to the US census, small businesses outpace large companies in job generation and they employ over 40% of the workforce. Yet, the recent toppling of Wall Street financiers, the tightening credit market, and subsequent political maneuvering meant to “fix” the financial problem, all seem more concerned with returning the money gamblers to their stead, rather than helping small businesses maintain their vitality. Are small businesses supposed to wait until their big brothers are healthy again and are able to can kick down a few dollars? What are small businesses to do in the meantime while growing anemic? Should they shorten their hours and downsize their workforce? Should they seek funding from other sources with outrageously high interest rates?

But, then there’s this question about the credit markets. If the lenders lent too much to too many people and businesses (including those ‘risky’ types like myself), and then compensated themselves for their “altruistic” risk taking, then who should shoulder the blame for the credit collapse, payback defaults and general fiscal catastrophe? Are the borrowers who defaulted on their loans at fault? No one told them to ask for money, right? Or, are the lenders who created onerous terms at fault for hooking “risky” lendees into loan terms that are not favorable in the least? Or, is it a bigger problem of ideological proportions, where desire for wealth, comfort or, in some cases, basic necessities, lead people to seek out funding from institutions with the resources to meet their (er, my) needs? And, what conditions made paying off those loans impossible anyhow? Why were people suddenly unable to meet their mortgage and credit card payments? One way to proceed through this financial, social and cultural quagmire is to disentangle personal debt issues from those of businesses. Granted, businesses are run by people, but the legal and tax identities of people are not the same as those of corporations. (The particulars of business entity formation notwithstanding – we could talk about the pass-trough taxation models of S-corps and sole props, but for brevity’s sake, let’s not.)

Who is this bailout going to help in the immediate future? Let’s not talk trickle-down models. People need cash now. Who has a cash-flow problem? Everyone from Lehman to myself. Should the government favor the big company over the individual person? Would helping the financial sector amount to protecting the national economy while helping me would be social welfare? God forbid we slide into socialism, or worst, blazing red communism! Oh, no! Surely, rampant poverty and unchecked wealth accumulation is better.

And what is the role of the legislator vis a vis the free market anyway? Has not the role of Washington been to regulate capitalism? Or, has government made doing business easier? But easier for whom? Easier for those who deliver goods and services, rather than those who buy? And if so, what’s wrong with that? On it’s face, nothing really. As a service provider, I’d like to work in a market environment that encourages the distribution of my service. Yet, as a consumer, I also want to be protected from predatory lending, and abuses of power and information that enables companies to sell higher volumes of goods. For instance, if I can tell my clients that we use green cleaning products, but there’s no oversight of my industry or individual business operations, such that we could theoretically use whatever the hell we want and simply advertise as green to increase sales, we’d be acting unethically. (Or, better yet, we could buy “green/natural” products from our vendors, but if there is no regulation regarding what gets to count as “green,” then our dependence on the manufacturing sector means we may pass on toxicity to our clients unwittingly.) But as we’ve seen, there is regulation here and there, but not everywhere, and sometimes not where we need it most. It should be the role of legislators to prevent this kind of abuse of the consumer from happening. So why does it happen?

Well, some might say the incompetence and dizzy bureaucracy of Washington that’s too blame. Others may say its the corruption of government officials by lobbying bodies that is at fault. But these are epiphenomenal problems. I say it happens because we are taught to lie prone before the almighty bottom line. As I sail through my entrepreneurship for dummies class, I’m learning that improving my bottom line is the goal, with a dash of social responsibility thrown in for good measure. But keeping the profit coming in is what really matters. So, perhaps we need to adjust the profit-accumulation model that leads people and businesses to desire ever-expanding coffers. Can we learn to have a wealth accumulation cap? You know, like when a friend pours you a glass of wine and says, “tell me when,” and you wait, watch the glass fill up with your favorite vino, all the while knowing that filling up to the brim is in bad form because others wanna taste too, so at the half way mark you say, “when!” Can the wealthy (and upwardly mobile) learn to say “when” before buying that second house, before buying that third car, before the mind-boggling vacation in the Maldives Islands? Can the wealthy learn to associate bling-bling excess with “bad form”? Surely it’s in bad taste to dine out for 200 bucks while Haitians and Zimbabweans starve to death and the family down the block is kicked out of their foreclosed on house, and hurricane survivors try to find a new place to live, right? Or, would asking people to cultivate such “frugality” constitute an assault on their individual freedom? I guess the real question is this: is unbridled, wanton and ongoing accumulation a real right? Should people have the right, under the auspices of individual liberty, to accumulate at the expense of others, at the expense of the common good?

I suppose this is my assumption: that such accumulation does happen at the expense of everyone else, or at least such has been the case for a few centuries now; ever since modern capitalism leaked out of Europe and infested the rest of the world. While there may not be total scarcity of all things on the planet, I surely accumulate all of my junk at the expense of others, because after all, we do live with some finitude, some scarcity, and some things that are not renewable, at least not in our lifetimes.

It seems that our worldview is upside down, inside out, a bit backwards, as it were. Why compete for the things we need, and then hoard the things we get, when we could share, with some deference for equity, and all survive? (Maybe because that model presumes we have some responsibility for the livelihood of others??) But it seems just “surviving” isn’t the objective. At least, not where I live. People want to flourish, but they understand that desire, or at least they see it through commodity lenses. Things are the metric for flourishing, not peace of mind, not the health of the public, not the well being of the planet. Ain’t that awesome! And for those of us who question this thing-based abacus, we sit in this weird interstice, theorizing a different world but being compelled to act in this one. It’s as if our thinking is building a bridge to nowhere. I wonder which politician would vote to fund it…

-unfinished-

Tags: bailout, broke, corporations, economics, politics, race, small business, wine