disunion: when they say states' rights, you say slavery

I spent a fair amount of Reading Week reading, but not a word of it was for school. I did not achieve my goal of getting caught up to the current post of Disunion, but I did start at the beginning and make it through early January.

But it doesn't matter how far I got, because now I am totally hooked. I can't believe I got myself into another long-term reading commitment, with at least two years of overlap between the Pepys Diary and Disunion! But it's too late to turn back now. I am absolutely loving Disunion. If you enjoy reading and thinking about history, you can't do much better than this.

Did you know there was almost a state called Franklin? Did you know that the state of West Virginia was created when people in the western end of Virginia chose not to secede with the rest of their state? (They weren't anti-slavery, but were more economically tied to the North.) Allan and I have come to the conclusion that we were taught just about nothing.

Perhaps that's why so many people in the southern US still believe myths and lies about the Civil War. Or perhaps there's another reason.

December 20, 2010 marked 150 years since South Carolina seceded from the United States of America, the first state to do so. Some white South Carolinians celebrated with antebellum-style balls, while others, mostly African Americas, protested outside.

Naturally, Confederacy-lovers claim that their celebration has nothing to do with slavery. Indeed, they claim that the southern states' secession and the bloodiest war in US history were not about slavery. According to them, it was all about states' rights. States' rights, states' rights, states' rights. Limiting the power of the federal government to tell local governments what to do. This is the mantra.

I don't know whether the people who cling to this talking point are actually ignorant of the truth, or if they know they are lying. Given the train wreck that is public education in the US, my guess is that a fair percentage of them believe this lie to be true. But about this there is no question: it's a lie.

Secession was not about states' rights, plural. It was about one state "right": the "right" to own human property and control a supply of forced, free labour.

Edward Ball is the author of the book Slaves in the Family, which chronicles his journey to find and meet the people who are descendants from the slaves owned by his own ancestors. (Great interview with Ball here.) On the anniversary of South Carolina's secession, he wrote an essay, "Gone With The Myths" for the New York Times. Here's an excerpt.

I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”

I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.

But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.

South Carolina: “The non-slaveholding states ... have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and “have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. ... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”

Georgia: “A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia.”

Several states single out a special culprit, Abraham Lincoln, “an obscure and illiterate man” whose “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Lincoln’s election to the White House meant, for South Carolina, that “the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

In other words, the only state right the Confederate founders were interested in was the rich man’s “right” to own slaves.

It’s peculiar, because “states’ rights” has become a popular refrain in Republican circles lately. Last year Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wondered aloud whether secession was his state’s right in the aftermath of laws out of Congress that he disliked.

In part because of this renewed rhetoric, in the coming remembrances we will likely hear more from folks who cling to the whitewash explanation for secession and the Civil War. But you have only to look at the honest words of the secessionists to see why all those men put on uniforms.

This Disunion entry, "Dancing Around History", also puts the lie to the states' rights myth, and counters the usual rationalizations in more detail.

The citizenry, poised to tear a nation apart, was planning a grand party. The following afternoon, Palmer and other delegates who had assembled in the South Carolina city voted 169 to 0 for secession. That evening thousands flocked to Institute Hall in downtown Charleston to witness the formal signing of the “Ordinance of Secession.” Afterward “cannon were fired,” reported the Charleston Mercury, “and bright triumph was depicted on every countenance.”

On Monday, exactly 150 years later, Confederate enthusiasts sought to relive the festivities with an elaborate Secession Gala. Three hundred celebrants—dozens decked out like cavalier planters and Lady South Carolina—packed Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium to celebrate the fateful vote. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the whole town had gone back in time.

Outside the ball, though, more than a hundred people staged a downtown march, capping off an afternoon of protest that included police-guarded demonstrations at local hotels and a candlelight vigil. The protesters, mostly black, carried signs reading “Don’t Celebrate Slavery and Terrorism” and “It’s not About Heritage.” “Slavery is what you defend when you have a party, a celebration, get drunk, holler loud, act like a rebel, and talk about how you’re celebrating your heritage,” said NAACP leader Reverend Nelson B. Rivers III. “No matter how you dress it up, it is still slavery.” As darkness fell around Gaillard Auditorium, they lit candles and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

Inside, the white gala attendees, nearly half of whom were dressed in period costume, belted out a rousing rendition of Dixie. The mood was festive and defiant. Slavery, many insisted, had nothing to do with their decision to buy the $100 ticket to attend the ball. “We’re not celebrating slavery,” maintained Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief Michael Givens. “We’re looking at the bravery and tenacity of the people who rose up.” When pressed, he and others admitted that the institution was an abomination. But they also took pains to emphasize that secession was about high tariffs or states’ rights. Anything but slavery.

Attendees at Monday’s ball would like to believe that the unanimity of slaveowners and non-slaveowners during the crisis proves that slavery wasn’t the driving issue behind secession. But a closer study of the contentious debate over secession in late 1860 shows how “fire-eaters” used fear of emancipation to coerce and persuade whites of all classes into ultimately supporting secession. (Needless to say, the state’s black majority likely didn’t support secession either—though no one bothered to ask them.) [Read more here.]

Also: Creative Loafing: It's the slavery, stupid.

Read More

gopnik: how the internet gets inside us and why this is really ok

This is a tangent to my previous post, but it deserves an entry of its own. I want to point out this excellent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "How the Internet gets inside us".

Gopnik reviews a pile of recent books about the internet and society, dividing them into three themes: technology is our saviour, technology is our demise, and technology has always been met with these same two responses. Gopnik calls them "the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers". It's a perceptive and entertaining assessment of how we conceive of technology in our lives.

Here are a few bits I especially enjoyed.

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

It is an intuition of this kind that moves the final school, the Ever-Wasers, when they consider the new digital age. A sense of vertiginous overload is the central experience of modernity, they say; at every moment, machines make new circuits for connection and circulation, as obvious-seeming as the postage stamps that let eighteenth-century scientists collaborate by mail, or as newfangled as the Wi-Fi connection that lets a sixteen-year-old in New York consult a tutor in Bangalore. Our new confusion is just the same old confusion.

Naturally, I love this historical perspective. One of my minor academic triumphs in grad school has been a paper arguing that the print revolution of the 1600s was a greater communications shift - a more significant information explosion relative to what preceded it, and a more cataclysmic cultural shift by far - than the one we are living through now. (Thank you, Elizabeth Eisenstein!)

This bit on how our perception of television, relative to the internet, has changed made me chuckle. I loved Gopnik's resolution, suggesting we back away from all-or-nothing thinking and, if technology is bothering us, perhaps a few small changes are in order.

It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us. Simply reducing the machine’s presence will go a long way toward alleviating the disorder. Which points, in turn, to a dog-not-barking-in-the-nighttime detail that may be significant. In the Better-Never books, television isn’t scanted or ignored; it’s celebrated. When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)

Yet everything that is said about the Internet’s destruction of “interiority” was said for decades about television, and just as loudly. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” in the nineteen-seventies, turned on television’s addictive nature and its destruction of viewers’ inner lives; a little later, George Trow proposed that television produced the absence of context, the disintegration of the frame — the very things, in short, that the Internet is doing now. And Bill McKibben ended his book on television by comparing watching TV to watching ducks on a pond (advantage: ducks), in the same spirit in which Nicholas Carr leaves his computer screen to read “Walden.”

Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.

You can read the whole thing here. It's the same New Yorker issue with the much-talked about story about Paul Haggis and Scientology. I haven't read this one yet, but several people we know have recommended it and it sounds great. Why not thank a tree and print them both?

Read More

ted rall, tunisia, egypt, wisconsin and revolution

I've been meaning to post this interview with cartoonist and activist Ted Rall ever since Allan said, "You must read this - he sounds exactly like us."

Rall's new book is The Anti-American Manifesto; this interview is in the CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate School Advocate.

Reluctant Revolutionary: An Interview With Ted Rall

Advo­cate: . . . In your new book you explic­itly advo­cate the use of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence. It’s hard to get any more rad­i­cal than that and I can’t imag­ine the deci­sion to write such a book was an easy one to make. Indeed, in con­ver­sa­tions with friends about the book I’ve found that even the men­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence is almost uni­ver­sally greeted with dis­dain, shock, or dis­be­lief. I am really inter­ested in how you came to this deci­sion to write the book, the events or ideas that led you to this argu­ment, and why you felt com­pelled to write this book now?

Ted Rall: Well, it was a very dif­fi­cult deci­sion, from a career stand­point as well as from the stand­point of being a sim­ple Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. As a stu­dent of his­tory I am well aware of the fact that rev­o­lu­tion is dan­ger­ous and vio­lent and bru­tal and can make things worse before they make things bet­ter, so it’s not a deci­sion to be taken lightly. I want to be very clear that even though the book is a call to arms and a call to get rid of the cur­rent gov­ern­ment, and it does def­i­nitely defend the use of vio­lence (I would say that there is no such thing as non-violent rev­o­lu­tion; no rad­i­cal change has ever taken place with­out vio­lence or the cred­i­ble threat of vio­lence), but I think there is a ten­dency to sen­sa­tion­al­ize the vio­lent aspect of the book. Most rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­ity is inher­ently non-violent actu­ally. It’s just that vio­lence is part of the revolutionist’s tool­box; it has to be, oth­er­wise there is no way to cred­i­bly remove the state. The rich and the pow­er­ful don’t give up wealth and power vol­un­tar­ily so you can’t fight it non­vi­o­lently with­out effec­tively tying one hand behind your back.

In terms of the deci­sion to write the book I kind of fol­lowed a sim­ple, log­i­cal process, which is to ask myself and many other peo­ple whether there was any pos­si­bil­ity that this sys­tem, the Democ­rats and the Repub­li­cans and the cor­po­ratist cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem that they sup­port, could or would address any of the really seri­ous press­ing prob­lems that are faced by the Unites States today  —  whether those are income inequal­ity or the envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change, or sky­rock­et­ing deficits, or war and mil­i­tarism, or health­care  —  and I don’t think so.

. . . When Obama refused to be the new FDR I knew that, Obama being about the best most pro­gres­sive, smartest pres­i­dent we were gonna get out of this sys­tem, I knew that the time had arrived to call for rev­o­lu­tion. Now I wish that other peo­ple were doing it, I wish that I could join some­one else’s move­ment. I don’t want to stick my neck out; it’s not fun to attract all of this heat, but no one else is doing it. There’s no Left what­so­ever in the United States. All there is is wimpy lib­er­als. So, I wrote this book in order to start a con­ver­sa­tion. This is not rev­o­lu­tion for dum­mies, this is not a how-to guide, this is not the anar­chists’ cook­book. If you are pick­ing this up look­ing for how to over­throw the US gov­ern­ment buy another book; this is not that book. This is a book that cre­ates the space to have a dis­cus­sion that is just not even part of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Amer­i­can pol­i­tics occurs strictly between the Ds and the Rs. We don’t even talk about the Greens and the Lib­er­tar­i­ans, much less the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting rid of the sys­tem entirely.

Advo­cate: Along those same lines, how has your life changed since the pub­li­ca­tion of the book? What’s the last month been like for Ted Rall? What have you learned about Amer­ica, par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing the sub­ject of this book?

TR: I guess many things did not come as a sur­prise. The fact that the media and the polit­i­cal sys­tem are so deeply entrenched and unwill­ing to con­sider actual change came as no sur­prise. The fact that there are many very reac­tionary, hate­ful peo­ple who defend the sta­tus quo no mat­ter what came as no sur­prise either. But what did come as a sur­prise were the huge crowds that came out to my book sign­ings, which indi­cated to me that there is a thirst for talk­ing about these sorts of options. Many, many peo­ple have been over the sys­tem for a long time, but that con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t take place, so I pro­vided a forum for that kind of dia­logue to hap­pen. What I’ve learned, and it’s kind of what I sus­pected, is that there are a lot of peo­ple out there like me. I wouldn’t have writ­ten the book if I thought I was alone. I don’t think I’m such a unique thinker. A lot of peo­ple can look at the same set of cir­cum­stances and draw sim­i­lar con­clu­sions, and they have. So in terms of how my life has changed, I mean, it hasn’t really, except for being very, very busy doing inter­views, but that’s about it.

I've always said that, despite the persistent, ignorant and usually imaginary fear of socialism and communism that runs through US history, the real danger to US democracy has always been from forces on the right. I've blathered about this ad nauseum on wmtc, no need to flog the "fascist shift" theme here. Now, events in the Middle East, the successful leftist movements transforming South America, and the sudden spark of progressive engagement emanating from Wisconsin and rippling through other states, are combining to give me new hope. These events are reminders that none of us can predict the future.

No people's movement, no matter how successful, has ever known the outcome of their struggle in advance. All we can do is keep on keepin' on.

Read More

reading list redux: taibbi in rolling stone, elliott in mother jones

A few weeks ago, I highlighted three long magazine articles that, taken together, demonstrate so much of what is wrong with the profit-driven system that dominates our world. They document how capitalism is destroying the environment, health care, and in general, people's lives.

Well, I'm back to repeat myself. This story by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism almost guaranteed to amaze you. The depth and breadth of corruption - in both financial and legal systems designed to increase the wealth and power of giant banks while destroying low- and middle-income Americans - are simply mind-boggling. Do yourself a favour and read this: "Invasion of the Home Snatchers: How the courts are helping bankers screw over homeowners and get away with fraud".

If you are interested in health care, and why it needs to be publicly financed, why profit needs to be removed from the system, don't miss "Making A Killing," by Carl Elliott in Mother Jones. An excerpt and links to important sidebars are in my post here.

And the third story I had highlighted is really a series of articles and analysis about the BP disaster, also in Mother Jones. It may be the definitive investigation of how BP is burying the evidence of their crimes against our planet.

I will try to post about these stories again, but I can't guarantee anything.

Read More

orenstein, porter and the disneyfication of (very) little girls

Last year, I highlighted a story about a study proving that "almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience." This inspired one of my better posts, "science proves that men and women are from the same planet", relating the belief that so-called traditional gender roles are innate to to a right-wing worldview, especially anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism.

I thought of those ideas when I read a column about Peggy Orenstein's recent book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. I haven't read the book yet, but I have read Orenstein's superb 1994 book Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. I was working with teens at the time, and this book was so powerful, I wrote to the author - on paper, pre-email! - to thank her. So when I see Orenstein's name, I pay attention.

This column by Catherine Porter in the Toronto Star sums up the ideas from Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

In her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein of the New York Times examines the hypergenderized world of little girls, who by age 3 are taught — through their Cinderella tiaras and Belle ball gowns, and mostly by our “oohs” and “ahhhs” over them — that being pretty in a Disney way is what matters most.

That’s the first glass-slippered step on the shimmery slope of objectification, she argues, that leads to black camies and knee-high boots at Hannah Montana concerts by 10, no undies Britney Spears-style by 13, and carefully posed photographs of themselves sent to all 622 Facebook friends. . .

The lesson our daughters are learning, starting with that Disney gown: their lives are performances; they are consumers and marketers.

“Rather than raising a generation of Cinderellas, we may actually be cultivating a legion of step-sisters — spoiled, self-centred materialists, superficially charming but without the depth or means for authentic transformation,” Orenstein writes.

. . . .

• Nearly half the girls surveyed in Grades 1 to 3 want to be thinner.

• Nearly 43,000 children under 18 had “surgically altered their appearance” in 2008, over twice as many as a decade earlier. In 2009, American teenagers had received 12,000 injections of Botox.

• Two-thirds of college students tested by psychologists scored high on the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory,” meaning they are excessively self-involved.

• Close to half of 6- to 9-year-olds girls regularly use lipstick or gloss. Almost one in five girls, aged 8 to 12, wear mascara.

This was before Walmart released its makeup line for 8-year-olds.

These trends are not natural. Our kids aren’t growing up faster, Darwin-like. They’re being pushed by marketers — who created the toddler and tween categories — and we are letting them. We think they are just expressing themselves, the same way we express ourselves by squeezing into skinny jeans and paying $30 to get our eyebrows “weaved.” They’ve just stepped onto the beauty machine earlier than we did.

. . . .

Disney announced this month a deal to enter 580 maternity hospitals in the U.S. to give new mothers a free Disney onesie if they signed up for DisneyBaby.com email alerts.

This is painful to read, its implications monstrous to consider. Among other things, it sickens me how something as elemental as giving birth becomes just another marketing opportunity. Among other things, I wonder how anyone could read this and still believe gender roles are innate.

Porter uses an excellent analogy - one close to my heart - to describe Orenstein's advice to parents:

Orenstein hopes her book is to processed girldom what The Omnivore’s Dilemma was to processed food — a call to action. Her message isn’t to ban all princesses. It’s for parents to chaperone their daughters through that world consciously.

“It is strategic then, absolutely vital — to think through our own values and limits early, to consider what we approve or disapprove of and why,” she writes. “I refuse to believe that parents are helpless.”

Parents are not helpless, I agree. But they are often overwhelmed. And they must first believe these trends are harmful before deciding to consciously help their daughters navigate these minefields. What happens to the girls whose parents are oblivious - or cheerfully complicit?

Read More

celebrating freedom to read week: liberate a challenged book!

This week is Freedom To Read Week, the Canadian cousin of the ALA's Banned Books Week. FTRW is sponsored by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council. They say:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right of all Canadians, and freedom to read is part of that precious heritage. Our Committee, representing member organizations and associations of the Book and Periodical Council, reaffirms its support of this vital principle and opposes all efforts to suppress writing and silence writers. Words and images in their myriad configurations are the substance of free expression.

The freedom to choose what we read does not, however, include the freedom to choose for others. We accept that courts alone have the authority to restrict reading material, a prerogative that cannot be delegated or appropriated. Prior restraint demeans individual responsibility; it is anathema to freedom and democracy.

As writers, editors, publishers, book manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and librarians, we abhor arbitrary interpretations of the law and other attempts to limit freedom of expression. We recognize court judgments; otherwise, we oppose the detention, seizure, destruction, or banning of books and periodicals – indeed, any effort to deny, repress, or sanitize. Censorship does not protect society; it smothers creativity and precludes open debate of controversial issues.

This year, FTRW has teamed up with BookCrossing to create Free A Challenged Book.

I hope you're familiar with BookCrossing, the amazing website that helps you share books and connect with book lovers all over the world. If you don't, please go here and read about it right now!

Free A Challenged Book is a special kind of BookCrossing.

Most Canadians probably don't even realize that on their own shelves sit challenged books. During Freedom to Read Week, your mission is to release challenged books all across Canada — on park benches, in coffee shops and in schools — as a way to mimic how challenged books are passed around, and to spread the word about challenged and banned books in Canada.

The Freedom of Expression Committee invites you to find a title you care about from our list of challenged literature and release it into your community. Perhaps your book will be picked up by someone in your community or maybe even by a foreign exchange student who will release it in another country — that's the beauty of this project and our hope for your freed book.

Interested? Here's how to get started...

1. Find a title from your own bookshelf that appears on our list of Challenged Books.

Here are just a few examples of books that have been challenged in Canada:
* Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
* J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
* Rosamund Elwin, Asha's Mums
* Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
* Elizabeth Laird, A Little Piece of Ground
* Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
* John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
* Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
* J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter
* Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
* Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
* more books...

2. Tag it with our handy book label.

3. Follow the link to BookCrossing.com and register the book.

4. Release the book into your community.

5. Log on to the BookCrossing website often to see who finds your book and what they think about freedom of expression.

More about my own Freedom To Read Week soon.

Read More

capitalist destruction: our health, our environment, our communities: three great articles

I've been working my way through a trio of long magazine articles, courtesy of our public library, that I must share with you.

From a writer's perspective, these are exactly the kind of journalism I once aspired to (and had a small taste of). Enormous amounts of time and work go into pieces like this - background interviews that don't appear in the story, hours tracking down leads, many more hours spent simply observing, reams of interview transcripts, countless rounds of editing. This is something no blogger or reporter can do on her own. Magazines have to pay for this, or it can't be done - which is why it has become so rare.

From a political perspective, these stories are about widely different subjects, but one common thread runs through them all.

If you read only one of these stories, I strongly recommend "Making A Killing," by Carl Elliott in Mother Jones, an exposé of the corrupt, profit-generating business of clinical drug trials. If there was ever an argument for getting the profit motive out of health care, this is it.

Documents unsealed in related civil suits suggest an alarming pattern of deception. Sales reps were instructed to tell doctors that Seroquel doesn't cause diabetes, even though the company knew about the link to diabetes as early as 1997. Internal correspondence reveals company officials discussing how to hide or spin potentially damaging studies. "Thus far, we have buried trials 15, 31, 56," wrote a publications manager in 1999. "The larger issue is how do we face the outside world when they begin to criticize us for suppressing data."

One of those potentially damaging studies led back to the University of Minnesota. . . . In the late 1990s, a clinical trial known as Study 15 unexpectedly failed to show that Seroquel was any better than Haldol, a generic antipsychotic that's been on the market since the 1960s. In fact, on the main measures, Seroquel performed worse than Haldol. The study also showed that Seroquel increased the risk of weight gain and diabetes. Internal correspondence repeatedly refers to Study 15 as a "failed study," and company officials discuss possible ways to spin or bury it. "I am not 100% comfortable with this data being made publicly available at the present time,". . . .

Even more alarming are internal documents suggesting that AstraZeneca was designing clinical trials as a covert method of marketing Seroquel. In 1997, when Dr. Andrew Goudie, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Liverpool, asked AstraZeneca to fund a research study he was planning, a company official replied that "R&D is no longer responsible for Seroquel research — it is now the responsibility of Sales and Marketing." The official also noted that funding decisions would depend on whether the study was likely to show a "competitive advantage for Seroquel."

Another set of documents from 2003 describes a glucose metabolism study apparently designed to fend off the charge that Seroquel causes patients to gain weight and become diabetic. One slide describes two purposes for the study: a "regulatory" purpose and a "commercial" purpose. The regulatory purpose was to "produce data that will help us defend the Seroquel label." The commercial purpose was to "produce data that will enable us to generate commercially attractive and competitive messages in relation to diabetes and weight." . . .

Many clinical studies place human subjects at risk—at a minimum, the risk of mild discomfort, and at worst, the risk of serious pain and death. Bioethicists and regulators spend a lot of time and energy debating the degree of risk that ought to be permitted in a study, how those risks should be presented to subjects, and the way those risks should be balanced against the potential benefits a subject might receive. What is simply assumed, without much consideration at all, is that the research is being conducted to produce scientific knowledge. This assumption is codified in a number of foundational ethics documents, such as the Nuremberg Code, which was instituted following Nazi experiments on concentration camp victims. The Nuremberg Code stipulates that an "experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society," and "the degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment."

But what if a research study is not really aimed at producing genuine scientific knowledge at all? The documents emerging in litigation suggest that pharmaceutical companies are designing, analyzing, and publishing trials primarily as a way of positioning their drugs in the marketplace. This raises a question unconsidered in any current code of research ethics. How much risk to human subjects is justified in a study whose principal aim is to "generate commercially attractive messages"?

If you read Elliott's story, don't miss these two important sidebars: "What Happens When Profit Margins Drive Clinical Research?" and "Poor Reviews: Profit pressures gut guinea pigs' only safeguard: institutional review boards".

Next, also from Mother Jones, a series of reports and analysis on the BP disaster and cover-up: BP's Deep Secrets. This was a cover-story package of six different articles; the lead story by Julia Whitty is especially important.

And finally, from the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports from Florida: "Invasion of the Home Snatchers: How the courts are helping bankers screw over homeowners and get away with fraud".

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke

The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

. . . When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec­ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure. . . .

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

And that's just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.

Have you spotted the common theme? Clinical drug trials that produce both unsafe drugs and massive profit for university researchers, pharmaceutical companies - and the people who are supposed to be overseeing them. The destruction of the environment by one the world's largest corporations and the bottomless resources they've committed to avoiding responsibility. Millions of Americans losing their homes because of massive financial fraud, in which the perpetrators walk away without losing a penny, the public pays for their privilege, people the world over suffer extreme deprivations, and finally, the corrupt financial and legal systems will profit further from the loss.

What drives each of these human-made disasters? Profit.

Capitalism is collapsing, and we are all paying the price.

Read More

what i'm reading, winter break edition

Enough of school today! I must blog!

Here are the books I read over my break from school, thanks to the amazing Mississauga Public Library System.

I actually read Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, in New Jersey over Thanksgiving. It's well known to Canadians, and was made into a very good movie, but doesn't seem to be as widely known in the US.

As I've mentioned in other contexts, I don't generally read anything Holocaust-related, as I was forcibly overdosed on Holocaust education as a child. But having seen the excellent movie adaptation of this novel, I wanted to read it, and I'm very glad I did. It's a novel about memory, generational bonds, generational conflicts and family secrets. It's also a view into what it might be like to live in an occupied town or village. What is it like for people who are not rounded up, but who are forced to live under the thumb of their oppressors, in their own homes, in their own town, every day? The deprivations, the daily humiliations, the constant fear. Michaels really brought this home for me. Fugitive Pieces was her first novel, quite an amazing debut. Even if you've seen the movie, the book is different enough that I highly recommend it.

A type of book that I love but seldom indulge in - my literary "junk food" - are what I call intelligent thrillers, spy or murder or legal thrillers with something extra, something deeper. Generally that means the author has a keen eye for human motivation, and the characters have depth beyond the stock items of genre fiction. If this appeals to you, one of the best of its kind is Donald Westlake's The Axe.

Over winter break I read two novels of this variety: The Legal Limit by Martin Clark and The Finder by Colin Harrison. Clark's was good - I would have made it about a third shorter - but Harrison's was brilliant. You may know Harrison as the former editor of Harper's magazine; he is married to the writer Kathryn Harrison, best known for the controversial memoir The Kiss. But Colin Harrison writes sharp, insightful New York City thrillers. His plots are intricate and unpredictable, his characters are complex, his dialogue rings true, and his New York City is a the real deal. The Finder was the best of his I've read so far.

I read Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead and wrote about it here. I loved this book and I love Whitehead's writing. I'm quite in awe of his ability to write something so simple, yet so complex.

And I read The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams, which I mentioned (along with Fugitive Pieces) in my recent post about resistance. This is an excellent young-adult novel about a teenage girl's rebellion against the polygamous religion-turned-cult her parents belong to and her impending forced marriage. Reading and the public library figure into her liberation. The Chosen One speaks to the need for young people to have in their lives caring adults who are not their parents - what a vital resource that is - and is a reminder to us all to be that resource whenever we have the opportunity.

Read More

resistance is not futile: resistance is everything

I think a lot about resistance: about what it means when ordinary people refuse to yield to powers much stronger than themselves. I've been thinking of the many forms acts of resistance can take, why people resist, what it means.

Last summer in Toronto, groups of people walked the streets of their city to show that they could, to defy the sudden existence of martial law that claimed they couldn't.

All over the UK, students are in the streets and occupying buildings, resisting massive cuts to education funding. The situation in the UK and throughout Europe is very dire - but the people whose system caused the pain are not suffering. A friend who lives in London and I were emailing recently, and she summed it up this way:

...they are closing libraries, cutting everything, raising university tuition fees by 200% and sales tax is now 20%! Bankers are getting huge bonuses still. We work with quite a few financial services firms and it's like they are living in a different universe. Although of course they are taking the opportunity to lay off as many as they can as well even though they are continuing to make huge profits. Barclays doesn't serve tea anymore at meetings to 'cut back'.

Some of my friend's British compatriots are employing a brilliantly creative strategy of resistance to library closures. (Many thanks to Deang for sending this story.)

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates.

"A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL," she said.

"I went home, put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it's just gone absolutely mad."

They planned to start the campaign on Wednesday, but keen supporters of the library started taking books out the week before.

And in just over a week, the shelves were emptied, with the final books withdrawn yesterday.

"People were going in last night to get books and there weren't any left, "she said.

"I think it's a very simple but clever idea and it's given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.

I love this for so many reasons: how this town values and protects its library, how people united can fight back, how a few organizers with a good idea can spark rebellion. I also love the story because it's about reading as resistance.

Reading has been used as act of political resistance through the ages. Countless books and movies depicting ordinary people struggling against totalitarianism will bring you to hidden books, an echo of children secretly reading books forbidden by their authoritarian schoolmasters, now with potentially fatal consequences.

I recently saw this connection in two differnt novels. (Still in the works: a winter-break "what i'm reading" post.) In The Chosen One, an excellent young-adult novel by Carol Lynch Williams, a young person's resistance to her parents' oppressive religion - and a forced marriage to a man four times her age - begins with reading. Her rebellion begins in the library, until the library becomes - literally - her means of escape.

In Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, after a man risks his life to save a Jewish boy, they read together, working their way through the man's vast library, the education of that boy becoming an ongoing act of resistance.

Reading as resistance isn't about beating the enemy: it's about maintaining some human dignity, stubbornly clinging to a shred of one's own humanity. That has been the case for all the subjugated peoples of the world who have refused to speak the language of their oppressors. At least in private, and often at great cost, people the world over will insist on speaking the language of their own people. It's a way of saying: we still exist.

Also in Fugitive Pieces, a shopkeeper in the Nazi-occupied Greek village hides oranges, saving the scarce fruit - and their desperately-needed nutrition - for the neediest families. The shopkeeper could be killed on the spot: hiding an orange as an act of courageous resistance.

Food can become an instrument of resistance. The movie "Hunger" depicts the refusal of food as the ultimate resistance: the 1981 IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands in 66 days of self-inflicted torture. First we see an earlier form of protest, as the political prisoners in Northern Ireland refuse to wash or change their clothes, covering the walls of their cells in their own excrement, making their captors' jobs as disgusting and difficult as possible.

When the guards haul off the men for forced bathing - heavy accent on forced - the prisoners lash out with feet and fists and teeth, individual naked men fighting back against a small army decked out in face shields and batons. It's a stunning scene. I thought: this is what resistance means. Never going quietly. Never being docile. Fighting every inch of the way. Resistance means: we will not go quietly.

Michael Fassbender's harrowing, incredible performance as Sands causes you to question the very nature of human survival and sacrifice. Watching the effects of starvation on the human body and brain, you wonder, how could a human being choose this? Where do they find the strength? Inevitably, even a believer like me may be led to ask, what good does this do?

Then in the postscript you learn that 10 more men made the same choice - that the prison ultimately met all their demands - that during the hunger strike, Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament, opening the door for political recognition of Sinn Fein.

And suddenly the movie's title isn't about the needs of the body: it's about the human hunger for freedom.

Read More

a kinder, gentler huck finn and the sound of samuel clemens spinning in his grave

I suppose you've heard that there is a new, bowdlerized edition of Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alan Gribben, an editor with the temerity to call himself "a Twain scholar" - although Judas or Jack the Ripper might be more appropriate - has removed every instance of the words "nigger" and "Injun," and replaced them with the word "slave".

I find this anti-intellectual wallpapering sad and discouraging beyond measure. As if purging a classic of an offensive word will somehow reduce the incidence of racism in the world. As if anyone has the moral right to rewrite an author's - any author's - work!

I don't have time to write about this as fully as I'd like right now, but will expand on it at a (much) later date. For now, a few other good pieces can stand in for me.

From a discussion in The Atlantic, Jamelle Bouie:

Taking the History Out of 'Huck Finn'

. . . Maybe I spend too much time in the political blogosphere, but this reminds me of Rich Lowry's most recent column for the National Review, where he channels his preschool self to brag about America's complete and undiminished greatness. The similarity comes in the mutual urge to purge the ugliness from American history. Jim Crow and neo-slavery makes Lowry uncomfortable, so he glosses over it as he spells out America's unadulterated raditude. Likewise, "nigger" makes people feel bad, so it must go, according to NewSouth and Alan Gribben.

But erasing "nigger" from Huckleberry Finn — or ignoring our failures — doesn't change anything. It doesn't provide racial enlightenment, or justice, and it won't shield anyone from the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination. All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection. Which is a shame. If there's anything great about this country, it's in our ability to account for and overcome our mistakes. Peddling whitewashed ignorance diminishes America as much as it does our intellect.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, also in The Atlantic, responds:

I'm obviously not Mark Twain, but having written a book, I can only imagine how hard Twain worked. I would be incensed if someone went through my book and took out all the "niggers" or "bitches" or "motherfuckers." It's really just a hair short of some stranger, in their preening ignorance, putting their hands on your kid.

To me that's the worst part; surely we are, as Jamelle says, peddling whitewashed ignorance, but much worse we're actually peddling it at Twain's expense. I think the worse part of censoring Twain, is that it's a shocking act of disrespect toward the writer, executed by people who claim to hold up his legacy.

I am remembered to the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who aptly noted that when people whitewash Robert E. Lee, and claim he was anti-slavery, what they are implicitly claiming is that the actual Robert E. Lee — one of the greatest generals of the past two centuries — isn't good enough.

This is actually much worse, because the invocation of nigger by Twain is not a moral failing. But because of our needs, Twain isn't good enough. Because we can't handle the story of who we were, and evidently who we are, Twain must be summoned up from the dead and, all against himself, submitted before the edits of amateurs. This is our system of fast-food education laid bare: Children are roaming the halls singing "Sexy Bitch," while their neo-Confederate parents are plotting to chop the penis off Michelangelo's David, and clamoring for Gatsby and Daisy to be reunited.

Let us all live in a world of warm snugglies. Let the air-conditioning anesthesia sprawl free. May the flowers of happiness multiply out. May Mark Twain's ghost haunt us all.

Globe and Mail:

To delete the word “nigger” from its 200-plus appearances in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and replace it with “slave,” is to evade the problem of education. It is to falsify a world as a precondition for teaching about it.

. . . .

The problem of education is to teach impressionable and sensitive young people about a sometimes harsh world. The world as it is, in other words. And very much the world of Huck Finn.

That world is rendered in Huck’s vernacular that has preserved, for all times, the inner truth of the antebellum South. “Nigger,” used so frequently, reveals a reflexive, unthinking degradation of black people. In counterpoint is Huck’s own slow-emerging recognition that Jim is a human being worthy of respect. Huck is a creature of his time and place. His transformation is the subversive moral core of the book. If he spoke like a civil-rights activist, the essence would be lost.

Words wound, words enlighten. Satire often features a kind of bravura cruelty. It doesn’t flinch from exposing how stupid and horrible people can be. (People are exceptionally stupid and horrible in Huck Finn.) Readers do flinch; and so they should, if the satire is sharp enough.

Huck Finn is just that sharp, and touches on the sorest spot in United States life: race. “It is a book that puts on the table the very questions the culture so often tries to bury, a book that opens out into the complex history that shaped it,” an English professor in Texas wrote. Are high school teachers up to the challenge? If not, it makes more sense to strengthen them than to weaken the book.

To tame Huck Finn, to soften its voice, does no favours to young people.

Robert Hirst, the curator of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, via Gothamist:

When Pat Finn, in his drunken tirade about meeting a “nigger” who could vote and was educated, the whole strength of that depends on feeling how bigoted Pat Finn is. If you soften his words, you’re not helping the point. I teach Twain once a year and I tell my students, I’m not going to euphemize this word. I’m not going to say N-word. You’ve totally destroyed the music of it and the point of it. [Twain] is well aware of the uneasiness this would cause. He lets Huck use this word exclusively. The uniformity of it shows you that he doesn’t want the pressure to be let up.

Gothamist himself announces an even newer edition: The Hipster Huck Finn, in which satirist Richard Grayson writes "an edition of Huck Finn that New Yorkers from Bushwick to the Lower East Side can all enjoy". Gothamist predicts a future edition which will "replace the word 'devil' with 'Wal-Mart'."

But the appearance of this book leaves me in little mood for joking.

Read More

what i'm reading: history online

Disunion is a blog about the US civil war, the bloodiest, deadliest (to Americans) war in US history. The New York Times began running Disunion, as far as I can tell, on October 31, 2010, with this preamble.

The story of the Civil War will be told in this series as a weekly roundup and analysis, by Jamie Malanowski, of events making news during the corresponding week 150 years ago. Written as if in real time, this dispatch will, after this week, appear every Monday. Additional essays and observations by other contributors, along with maps, images, diaries and so forth, will be published several times a week.

A US history teacher writes about Disunion:

Imagine modern web coverage of the U.S. in the early 1860s, day-by-day! I often find that our history textbooks, even the really good ones like Brinkley and Foner, fail to provide students with a sense of the immediacy and uncertainty of the historical present, often because that is exactly what makes for quality history...the distance and perspective to see things more clearly (or at least more fully). Nevertheless, imagining the historical present is a valuable skill for teachers to develop in students. . . . It's a really great resource for students to see into the fog of war and the unpredictability of the future.

I'd very much like to read this, but I'm a bit intimidated. I would have to go back to the beginning - I can't do it any other way. I discovered the blog in early December, but still haven't read more than a few words. It feels like I've already missed too much to start now.

I'm still reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys online. Samuel Pepys was a 17th Century protoblogger: he kept a private journal chronicling both his personal life and the political and social goings-on if his era. It's one of a very few firsthand accounts of British or European history of its time, and the only one so richly detailed and wonderfully readable. The Diary contains eyewitness accounts of major events in British history, such as the Great Fire of London, the plague and a war with the Dutch. Equally important, it's a window - a sharply focused, vivid window - into the standards, values and mores of another world.

In 2003, a web designer and all-around creative guy named Phil Gyford started uploading a diary entry each day, beginning on January 1, 343 years to the day after Pepys (pronounced "peeps") began writing his diary. Hundreds of people read the The Diary each day, and a small, loyal group of readers annotate the entries for further edification.

I've been reading The Diary since the beginning. Although I'm no longer part of the commenting group, I know many of the annotators online and know them all through their copious and fascinating entries. Many in the Pepys crew are beginning to spy sadness on the horizon: Pepys stopped writing his Diary in 1669, which translates to 2012 for us.

[For more on Samuel Pepys Diary: I first blogged about it here (and have mentioned it several times since); here is Pepys' Wikipedia entry; and here's the "about" from the Pepys Diary blog.]

So I'd like to read Disunion - to get caught up, then read it daily or weekly, the way I read Pepys - but do I really need one more thing to do?

But can I resist?

Read More

what i'm reading: apex hides the hurt

I'll probably write a combined "what i'm reading" post for everything I read on my winter break. But right now I'm reading a novel I love so much, that I just couldn't wait to tell you about it: Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead.

I don't want to give too much plot away, because I love the way the novel unfolds, but here's enough to go on. A "nomenclature consultant" is hired to help a town re-name itself. This is a man who dreams up the names that brand our world - the popular pharmaceuticals, the cell phones, the toothpaste, household cleaners and video game systems. Now he's going to judge which name best suits an old town with a new look - new money and new computer-related jobs.

But the town already has a name. Gentrification and job growth are important, but what about tradition? Which leads to the question... whose tradition? Turns out, the town's current and historic name was itself a re-naming, not unlike "America" or the "West Indies". History is written by the conquerors - and the definition of "traditional" depends on where we start.

History, race, class, advertising, language, and consumer culture converge. Yet somehow this all happens in a slim, wryly funny, wonderfully readable, little miracle of a book. I am fascinated by - and so envious of - how certain writers can do so much in so little, layers of meaning packed into so few words.

Apex Hides the Hurt skewers marketing, advertising, and contemporary consumer culture. It's a commentary on the pervasiveness of marketing in our lives, and how marketing reduces everything to its demographic parts. It's about language, and how language is exploited to sell - products, ideas, people, history, anything.

The novel also plays with the contemporary penchant (or obsession) for naming every phenomena of the world around us, the kind that Urban Dictionary collects, but perhaps with a biblical reference, as a man continues to name the animals.

What do you call that terrible length of time between when you see that your food is ready and when your waitress drags her ass over to your table with it? He saw Regina emerge from the back of the restaurant. His eyes zipped to the plate sitting on the kitchen ledge. Tantalasia. Rather broad applications, Tantalasia, apart form the food thing. An emotional state, that muted area between desire and consummation. A literal territory, some patch of unnamed broken gravel between places on a map.

Apex Hides the Hurt even contains a wry send-up of libraries and librarians. A town librarian has written the official history of the town.

Winning over the town librarian for sympathetic press wasn't too much of a task, he figured. A set of leatherbound Shakespeare would do it.

Later, the narrator tries to visit the town library, only to find it has been displaced by a big-box clothing chain, a fictional version of Old Navy.

On the rare occasions that he entered libraries, he always felt assured of his virtue. If they figured out how to distill essence of library into a convenient delivery system - a piece of gum or a gelcap, for example - he would consume it eagerly, relieved to be finished with more taxing methods of virtue gratification. Helping little old ladies across the street. Giving tourists directions. Libraries. Alas there would be no warm feelings of satisfaction today. The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers.

Whitehead writes the hipster librarian with a perfect eye for detail. As she chats with the nomenclature consultant, he thinks, "Slimpies: Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don't Have It in You."

* * * *

Before the digital era and the explosion of activist creativity, before YouTube and viral marketing - and before the shelf life of taglines had been reduced to nanoseconds - there were some standard activist slogans you'd always see. The same dozen sayings would emblazon the t-shirts, bumper stickers and postcards sold at demos and folk music festivals. "I long for the day schools have a surplus and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale" and "Why doesn't Crayola's flesh-coloured crayon come in 52 shades?". In those days, there was something called a "flesh-coloured" crayon, a pinkish-beige hue.

Now we live in an era where flesh-coloured crayons come in many shades. Our TV screens are populated by people of all colours. But is that multiculturalism promoting equality, empathy and understanding among all people? Or is the appearance of diversity merely a tool used to induce more people to buy more products? This is a central question of Apex Hides the Hurt. It's about, among other things, what I wrote about here: "you can't find inner peace in a bottle (of iced tea)".

With this brilliant little book, Colson Whitehead becomes one of My Favourite Writers.

* * * *

I've also read Whitehead's wonderful, unusual debut novel The Intuitionist, in which ideas about race and how we perceive the world converge and double-back on themselves in a world of skyscrapers and elevator inspectors. Whitehead is also the author of some of the greatest words ever written about New York City, a collection called The Colossus of New York, the cultural grandchild of E. B. White's classic Here Is New York.

I blogged about Colson Whitehead after a terrific essay of his ran in the New York Times: "I write in Brooklyn. Get over it." And I included him in a trio of Great Writers on the Great City: please go here and especially here. (New York City fans: click on that last link.)

I have not read his novels John Henry Days (2001, shortlisted for Pulitzer Prize) or Sag Harbor (2009), but I will.

Read More

daniel ellsberg calls for boycott of amazon over wikileaks

Daniel Ellsberg:

Open letter to Amazon.com Customer Service:

December 2, 2010

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear – and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses – to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

Yours (no longer),
Daniel Ellsberg

Powell's, by the way, is an excellent bookseller. The company supports progressive causes and their employees are unionized.

Read More

in which i succumb to a facebook meme

I could not resist this memelike thing from a Facebook friend. It's a great insight into your friends' influences and loves.

"Fifteen authors":

Which authors have influenced you and will always stick with you? If you're game, list the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me; I'm interested in seeing which authors you choose.

My list:
George Orwell
John Steinbeck
Charles Dickens
Howard Zinn
William Shakespeare
S. E. Hinton
E. B. White
Emily Bronte
Saul Bellow
Toni Morrison
Graham Greene
William Kennedy
Paul Zindel
Gloria Steinem
Michael Pollan

Yours?

Read More

the taste of metal: war resister memoir by canadian journalist jack todd

Just before classes started, I added to my growing library of war resister literature* by reading The Taste of Metal: A Deserter's Story by Jack Todd. Todd is a sports columnist for The Montreal Gazette and a novelist. Originally from Nebraska, Todd deserted from the US military in 1970 and came to Canada, settling first in Vancouver before moving to Montreal.

A Taste of Metal is an excellent read - gritty and unsparing, compassionate and keenly observed. For me it was interesting to compare this book to the deserter's story I'm most familiar with, Joshua Key's The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq, which I've written about here and here, among other posts.

Josh's book focuses on why he joined the Army and his experiences in Iraq - what he witnessed and was forced to participate in. After Josh realizes he cannot return to Iraq, the book follows his desperate struggle to live underground in the US, before finally finding refuge in Canada - or at least among the Canadian people.

A Taste of Metal, on the other hand, focuses on the writer's wrenching decision to go AWOL and leave the US, and his struggle to find his footing in Canada. In this sense, it's an excellent counterpart to Josh Key's book.

Jack Todd never went to Vietnam. Fortunately for him, a childhood friend had been there and survived, and pleaded with him not to go. Even though Todd opposed the war, he couldn't conceive of deserting and leaving behind everything he knew. During basic training, he met a soldier who had applied for conscientious objector status, a figure of towering physical and moral strength.

Almost every night when I'm on supply guard duty, Powers drops by at some point. He doesn't seem to need more than three or four hours' sleep, so we sit there night after night, talking about Thoreau and Sakharov and Camus and arguing about the war. We agree that it's stupid, callous, destructive, murderous, probably illegal, and certainly immoral. We disagree only about our own responsibility for bringing it to an end.

Powers argues that if I believe it is criminal for the U.S. to go on killing people, then I have a moral obligation to refuse to fight: "Man, you're part of the machine or you're out. You can't have it both ways. You want to be a nice little soldier boy for a couple of years, do your time, then go back to Miami and join a couple of peace marches for your conscience? Work for George McGovern or Gene McCarthy in '72 and hope they straighten out this mess? Is that it? That's chickenshit, man. If we're all like you, then those bastards can go right on dropping napalm on babies for a hundred years, because nothing's going to change."

His friend's influence, along with the photographs his boyhood friend had showed him - including a necklace made of human ears, cut off of North Vietnamese - push his already troubled conscience to the limit. Todd decides to go AWOL.

Powers wants to roll at first light the next morning. I spend a sleepless night in the apartment downstairs. I feel the pain of old ties breaking, the sense of loss overwhelming: my parents, Mariela, all my old friends back in Scottsbluff, my lost career. All because of this war and the things it is doing to people. No matter what happens, I'm an American — as American as Richard Nixon or Spiro Agnew or Dean Rusk or Henry Kissinger or any of those generals in Washington — so why should I have to go into exile for my beliefs? Why should I have to give up my life in Miami and shatter my parents and turn my back on my country and go into exile when I was born in the USA, when I tried to become a Marine Corps officer, when my patriotism runs at least as deep as theirs and possibly deeper? I would fight any war except this one, so why does it have to be this one? Who turned my country over to these maniacs anyway, and when are we going to get it back? What kind of madmen decide to defoliate an agricultural country on the other side of the world in order to "save" it? I have been brought up to despise injustice, and this is injustice — massive, powerful, state-supported injustice.

There is nothing left to be done. I have written editorials and marched, protested and argued and carried placards, worked for Bobby Kennedy, hoped for Eugene McCarthy after Kennedy was shot. And still the war grinds on, madness carried along by its own momentum. The only thing left is to walk away.

It's not quite that easy, but he does it.

The night of January 3, 1970, with Powers waiting to drive me to Vancouver early the next morning, I call home. My mother answers, and in the instant after I hear her voice I think I can't possibly tell her. Then I just blurt it all out

"Mom, I'm not going back to the army, I've made up my mind, the war is wrong, I can't be part of it, I'm going to desert and I'm going to Canada tomorrow morning."

She catches her breath. She's tougher than I am, tougher than Pop, tougher than any of us. She knows I need her to be steady and she is. She speaks slowly. I can tell she's determined not to let her emotions get in the way.

"Well, you know we'll support you whatever you decide to do. I know you've thought about this a lot and you know I hate this war, but this is going to be hard for you, real hard."

"I know, Mom. I know it's going to be hard for you, too. But I have to do it. It's wrong to be a part of it, you know? I feel awful but I don't feel like I have a choice."

"You're sure you don't want to go back and wait to see what school you get in the army? What if you get journalism?"

"That would just make it worse, If I did, I'd feel like I had to ask for infantry. Writing press releases for the army would be the most dishonest thing I could do. It would be like writing speeches for Nixon. It would make me sick."

"You know if you go you might never get to come home again."

"I know, Mom. I've thought about that a lot."

"And you know we might never see you again. We're getting old, your Pop and I. We can't afford to go traveling and we've never even been on a plane, anyway."

"I know. I'll find some way to get you up to Canada. You should see the world anyway. You can't just stay in Scottsbluff all your life."

"Oh yes, I can. You know what Faulkner said, how if a man was meant to travel he'd of been long-ways like a road or a wagon instead of up-and-down-ways like a tree or a fence post? Well, I'm like that. I was meant to stay put."

I laugh. At least she can kid about it a little. And she has to know that if not for her, I would not be going to Canada. She taught me about books, taught me to think for myself, taught me to be skeptical about people in power. If it wasn't for her I would never have become a reader, never have gone to university. . . .

Her voice breaks a little then. She knows how silly that is, talking about sending pots of food all the way to Canada, but somehow it's a comfort to pretend that she can. We talk around it awhile longer, but the truth is out there, dangling along the thousands of miles of telephone wire between us. Given her age, their poverty, the distance, it's possible we will never see each other again.

Being permitted to stay in Canada legally wasn't a sure thing, and came close to not happening. Once in the country, Todd floundered for a while, struggling with poverty and alcohol abuse on Vancouver's downtown Eastside.

There aren't many places on the continent worse than Hastings Street. Every town has its skid row, but Hastings is the skid row for an entire country. It's where you end up when you have nowhere else to go. You've bounced out of Winnipeg or worn out your welcome in Sudbury or taken the bus down from Prince George with the pay from a summer's logging fat in your pocket and forgotten the way back. It's warm enough in Vancouver so you won't freeze to death in the winter, so when the rest of it is gone — family and friends, jobs and money and hope — you stop here in this beautiful place at the tag end of the continent, two blocks short of the water, and you try to get numb enough to die.

I'm luckier than most. They've been taken down by cheap rum, glue, smack, wine, beatings, rape, prison, frozen nights sleeping on Toronto sidewalks — or maybe just the demons that live in the back of their minds. They end up here, dazed and broke and bleeding sitting in a doorway, sprawled on a park bench, shuffling along side walks slick with frozen spittle begging quarters from strangers scraping together enough to get a needle back into a ravaged arm or a flask of cheap brandy or a few filthy balls of scavenged Kleenex soaked with glue, jammed between the gum and upper lip so the fumes explode behind their eyes.

Days when they're almost sober they sit for hours in the White Lunch drinking coffee with extra cream and sugar because the cream and sugar are food, sort of, trying to eat a bit, hands shaking, the terrors of withdrawal nibbling at the corners of their minds. Then they score enough for another bottle or another needle and crawl into a doorway and pull the world shut behind them, nothing left except the warm, dumb place at the end of consciousness when you go down under the water for the third time. Bobbing beneath the surface, hoping not to come up ever again, not to go back to the shakes and the terror and the cops whacking the soles of your feet with their nightsticks when you’ve lost your shoes.

Hastings Street is a derelict's paradise, a symphony of misery. They come here all the way from Toronto and Halifax and Newfoundland, chasing a warmer place to die. The only thing that makes me different is the beast, because the beast has not yet crawled behind my eyes and taken over, although if I stay down here long enough it will get me, too. Beyond that there is no pretense. No point remembering that not so long ago I had another life, a job and a car and a beautiful woman and a future. . . . I haven’t started panhandling, not crazy enough or drunk enough yet, but that will come. That makes me different, maybe, but not different in a way you’d notice when we’re all sitting side by side on a park bench at the end of a winter afternoon, waiting for time to pass.

Todd flirts with dissolution, but surfaces intact. I found this part of the story particularly gripping. Many years ago, I briefly did some volunteer work visiting indigent people with AIDS at a New York City hospital. Most of the patients had been sex workers and drug addicts - but before that, many of them had lived ordinary middle-class lives, complete with families, jobs, homes. It's astonishing how easy it can be to fall through the cracks, and for many people, how impossible it becomes to climb back out.

Todd mentions that in 1970, after the US's secret bombing of Cambodia was revealed, after the murders at Kent State, the volunteer group that helped US war resisters in Vancouver was processing 100 people each week, with similar numbers arriving in Toronto and Montreal. Imagine 300 war resisters coming to Canada each week! I'd give anything to see that kind of resistance now.

Instead, we need passports to cross the border, and the government unleashes all its resources trying to kick out some 50 people.

One person who helped Todd - a total stranger who takes some very real chances for him - says, "It's hard for Canadians to find something we can do to help stop the war. If I have a chance to do something tangible, I want to do it."

A Taste of Metal is a ground-level view of resistance to war: what it takes to make that fateful choice, and what it costs. It's an excellent book.

-----------
*
Pat Barker, Regeneration
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston Trilogy
Matthew Bin, L.M.F.
John Hagan, Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada
Joshua Key, A Deserter's Tale
A. L. Kennedy, Day
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Christopher Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

[With thanks to Allan for always adding to my collection.]

Read More

howard zinn, naomi klein and why we must let war resisters stay in canada

About 500 people packed the Bloor Cinema in Toronto last night, to hear Naomi Klein speak briefly, and to watch "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train," a documentary by Denis Mueller and Deb Ellis. We also saw a new five-minute film about the War Resisters Support Campaign and Bill B-440, an amazing piece that I look forward to posting as soon we're able to release it.

We were thrilled with the turnout, and even more with the event itself. There's no doubt that Naomi Klein's presence helped fill the house. Her warm and eloquent introduction tied everything together so beautifully.

The idea of this evening, she said - using this movie on behalf of Iraq War resisters in Canada - was born at a memorial service for Howard Zinn, one of her greatest teachers, and towards the end of his life, her friend.

Naomi talked about her parents, who came to Canada as Vietnam War resisters, who achieved official Canadian status in 20 minutes at the border. She contrasted this with the threat of deportation that the current war resisters live under, and the deportations that have already occurred. We need to see this difference, she reminded us, in the context of how Canada has changed, and "the rising mean tide, the smallness of spirit at the highest level" that characterizing the government's policies.

Evidence of this is in the hostile reception recently given to Tamil refugees, in the Harper government's plan to build more prisons, in the attack on dissent and freedom of expression at the G8/G20. And of course, in the increasing militarization of Canada. No wonder the government is hostile to these war resisters, she said. They're a visible reminder of how much Canada has changed.

Naomi recognized that people often say the Iraq War resisters are different than the Vietnam resisters, because the Vietnam War resisters were drafted. (Reminder: at least 10,000 volunteered then deserted.) But Naomi said that, for her, the fact that people did volunteer, and then desert, makes their resistance even more powerful - and makes an even stronger case for allowing them to stay. The Iraq War resisters once went willingly to war. Now, having seen the reality of war for themselves, they have experienced a profound life-altering change. They have gone up against the mighty US military to come to Canada.

Howard Zinn, of course, was a war resister of the highest order. He fought in World War II, the supposedly "good" war - then came to question the very concept, and came to decide that no war can ever be good. When we go to war to vanquish a tyrant, he said, we are killing innocent people who were victims of that tyranny.

* * * *

The film itself is a loving and moving portrayal of one of the greatest teachers and activists - one of the greatest Americans - that we have ever known. It follows Zinn through his earliest days, growing up in poverty, then as an airman and bombardier, and a labourer, putting himself through school while working.

At Spelman College, a traditionally African American university, Zinn didn't set out to lead his students into the civil rights movement. But he encouraged them to question, and to speak out, and to organize. "We embarked on a class project," he said. "To end racial segregation." He stood beside his students in struggle - and reserved, conservative Spelman College was never the same.

I won't walk you through Howard Zinn's remarkable life. I highly recommend the book You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn's memoir, which I blogged about here, here and here, back in 2004. And this movie is a must-see. A new version of the movie will soon be released, since both Howard and Rosyln Zinn were alive when it was first released.

But I will point out two notes that gave me chills last night.

In the movie, Zinn talks about growing up in a home with no books. He says this is not an exaggeration: his family did not own one book. He would find books on the street, books other people had thrown away, and read them voraciously. Of course, eventually he discovered the public library.

The newspaper his parents read in their tenement flat in New York City's Lower East Side had an offer: you could send in 10 cents and receive a novel by Charles Dickens. His parents knew Howard loved to read, so they mailed off a dime, and a book by Charles Dickens arrived in the mail. The Zinns continued to do this until Howard had received - and read - all of Charles Dickens novels. Through Dickens, Zinn discovered that the poverty and struggle his family faced was not theirs alone, and it was not a natural and inevitable condition. It was global, and it was the work of men. Of capitalism.

Later, as a student, Zinn heard the song "Ludlow Massacre," by Woody Guthrie, about the brutal killing of 19 striking coal miners and their family members in Colorado in 1913. He looked in his history books for more information on the incident, and found none. There's a terrific scene in the movie where Zinn is addressing a labour gathering, talking about how the giants of the American labour movement were wholly absent from official US history. "I looked for the Lawrence Mill strike, it wasn't there. I looked for Bill Hayward, he wasn't there. . ." As he progressed through his formal education, this never changed. In graduate school, the texts repeated the same point of view as the books he saw in elementary school. This persistent, omnipresent perspective - the point of view of those in power - led him to write A People's History of the United States.

Perhaps some of you have already guessed what I'm getting at. I'm watching a movie about Howard Zinn, one of my greatest heroes of our lifetimes. And I learn that as a young boy, he was deeply affected by Charles Dickens, one of my great writing heroes - and later by Woody Guthrie, also on my short-list of heroes. It's not surprising to learn that Howard Zinn was influenced by people who used their art to crusade against poverty and injustice. But Zinn could have mentioned anyone. He said Dickens, and Woody Guthrie. My heart swelled.

I always wanted to meet Howard Zinn in person. That would have been a lot easier if we had lived in the Boston area. So many of our Red Sox friends heard him speak or saw him at demos! I never had that opportunity. I do have two emails from him that I treasure.

But last night, watching this movie, I felt close to him. I felt the spirit of Howard Zinn alive in the room, in all of us, in every one of us who carries the banner of peace.

Read More

what i'm reading double-header, part two: this book is overdue!

Another fun book I read this summer is This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Will Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson.

Are librarians still necessary in the age of Google? When so much information streams directly into our homes, do we still need public libraries? Marilyn Johnson answers these questions with a resounding yes, and yes, more than ever.

Johnson brushes away dusty stereotypes of shush-ing schoolmarms in sensible shoes, and introduces readers to the new breed of librarian. Apparently they're all much younger than me and have tattoos, but the age differences won't matter. Contemporary public librarians are technologically savvy, networked to databases and online communities around the globe, fiercely dedicated to intellectual freedom, and committed to the public library as a free, public information resource and community centre.

In this book, you'll learn some library history, meet a sampling of the zillions of blogging librarians, peek inside the updated New York Public Library, meet radical librarians enabling public protest, and discover how librarians are protecting your intellectual freedom every day. Pack-rats everywhere will appreciate the chapter on archivists - how they find, protect and preserve the raw materials of history.

What happens when librarians and civilian Googlers face off - who can collect more and better information? You'll have to read to find out. Johnson has a breezy, accessible writing style, and her deep appreciation for her subject material infuses every page.

My only issue with this book was much of the material wasn't new to me - but that's only because I've been thinking, reading and analyzing the role of librarians in our society for at least a year now. If you love libraries and ever find yourself defending our need for them, you'll want to read this book.

Read More