Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Last weekend I took part for the first time in an annual local event, Brookline Artists’ Open Studios. My BAOS blurb said this: “Photography from abstracts to photojournalism, recent Israel/Palestine focus.” In addition to the more-typical art-lovers who wandered by, a number of visitors told me they were drawn by the Israel/Palestine mention. Some of them stayed a long time, talking about the politics behind the photos, asking about my impressions, and watching parts of a slideshow I set up alongside some of the prints. Those who stuck around seemed pretty much on my political wavelength.

Even those who came without Israel/Palestine in mind seemed to take the photojournalism in stride. I wasn’t sure how this would go, here in heavily-Jewish liberal Brookline where, as I’ve noted over the years, Israel’s faults just aren’t on most town residents’ radar. Indeed, a few BAOS visitors left quickly after glancing at my wall. Israeli soldiers tear-gassing nonviolent Bil’in protestors wasn’t what they were looking for.

I showed other photos, too, in somewhat separate spaces - abstracts, portraits, landscapes. Listening to two days of positive feedback about these was very exciting, especially since I’ve never shown my non-I/P work like this before. I even sold a few prints and photobooks, tempting me to try to do more so I can upgrade my camera equipment and software before my next Middle East visit.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestine, photography, photojournalism

In the past week or so I’ve added a dozen galleries of this year’s images to my photo site. Collections range from the Boston Sabeel Conference, Zionist counterprotest, and local anti-war rallies to less political subjects, including people, abstracts and macros, hummingbirds, and travel to Colorado, Vancouver and Denman Islands, and even Niagara Falls.

And these ants:

Technorati Tags: ants, photography

Today’s New York Times reports that this might no longer be legal in New York City, but I’m not sure:

According to the Times:

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups. In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

As I read the article, it sounds like the cops can still videotape whenever they claim something illegal might happen, but they have to follow the rules to get higher approval. Not really much protection, when you think about it.

So I think this will continue, but maybe they’ll hide the cameras better:

These photos are from the 2004 legal protest outside the Republican National Convention in New York City. More photos of the event in my galleries.

I couldn’t get to Washington for today’s big anti-war rally, but I dig make it to the edge of Boston Common with a few hundred others who didn’t get to DC either.

It was pretty cold, but there was a lot of energy.

Most passersby were more or less on the same wavelength.

Or one of several wavelengths, given the multiple messages.

Even Superman came to help, but somehow he was pushed aside.

Guess it’s up to us.

Jessica Masse, the interfaith coordinator of the Islamic Society of Boston, writing in The Boston Globe:

The public has questions for Muslims in America and we have responded. We have opened our mosque to the public, taken part in  outreach efforts, and worked extensively to foster understanding of Islam and Muslims. We have been answering questions for years and we will continue to do so. However, asking questions and providing answers is a two-way street.

Here are a few  questions  of our own: What are the true reasons a political advocacy group decided to organize a media campaign and initiate a lawsuit against us? Why are Muslims in Boston, who are without a single structure designed and built as a mosque, sued and defamed when they purchase a vacant parcel of land from the city as part of an urban renewal program, even though 17 other such transactions were made with churches and synagogues? And why, when we have offered to sit down with those people asking questions over the past two years, have they refused to talk to us, preferring to hurl accusations without listening to our answers?

I don’t ordinarily find a full set of quotations someone else has gathered worth passing along, but these five all appeal to my intermittent efforts to seek political and intellectual clarity and commitment in the face of ambivalence, complexity, and comfort. They appear at the beginning of a blog entry at  Global Politician having to do with law and technology, which I will finish reading later, but so far these are worth repeating:

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make it its home for life.  For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system.  When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.  (its rather like getting tenure).”
Daniel Dennet - Quoted in Paul Thagard’s Mind - An Introduction to Cognitive Science Test

“Everything in nature, in the inanimate as well as the animate world, happens according to rules, although we do not always know these rules.”
Immanuel Kant, Logic

“The fuzzy principle states that everything is a matter of degree.”
Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic

“When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others.”
Bertrand Russell, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?”

“Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.”
William James

Just a few months ago I posted a link to Dave Pollard’s 56-item How to Save the World Reading List. Today, Pollard has an expanded 80-item list. The new list seems to have more anti-corporate books. Good.

Administration’s Nuclear Saber Rattling on Iran Threatens Global Security:

Statement by Dr. Kurt Gottfried, Chairman, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Emeritus Professor of Physics, Cornell University

“Recent reports suggest that the Bush administration is considering using nuclear weapons against Iran. The very fact that nuclear weapon use is being discussed as an option—against a state that does not have nuclear weapons and does not represent a direct or imminent threat to the United States—illustrates the extent to which the Bush administration has changed U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

“The Bush administration has explicitly rejected the basic precept that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons should be to deter the use of nuclear weapons. It has assigned a new, and provocative, mission to U.S. nuclear weapons: to dissuade or prevent other countries from undertaking military programs that could threaten U.S. interests in the future. A ‘preventive’ nuclear attack on Iran would fall into this category. It has also blurred the line between nuclear and conventional weapons by declaring that nuclear weapons can be used as part of military operations.

“This nuclear policy increases the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used, and ultimately decreases U.S. as well as international security. Instead, the United States should commit itself to strengthen the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons that has developed over the past 60 years.

“Plans to use nuclear weapons against Iran also fail to recognize the immediate dangers inherent in the use of nuclear weapons. The administration is reportedly considering using the B61-11 nuclear ‘bunker buster’ against an underground facility near Natanz, Iran. The use of such a weapon would create massive clouds of radioactive fallout that could spread far from the site of the attack, including to other nations. Even if used in remote, lightly populated areas, the number of casualties could range up to more than a hundred thousand, depending on the weapon yield and weather conditions.

“Threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iran provides the strongest of incentives for nuclear proliferation, since it would send the message that the only way for a country to deter nuclear attack is to acquire its own nuclear arsenal. The administration cannot have its cake and eat it, too—it cannot have a viable nuclear non-proliferation policy while continually expanding the roles for its own nuclear weapons.”

A UCS animation showing likely bomb effects.

Commenting on Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article about Bush administration plans to get the US into a war with Iran, Eliot Gelwan wonders what we can do beyond blog:

Throughout my life, I have been much more of an activist (literal meaning: “one who is active”, right?) than during the mounting outrages of the Bush years, despite my growing conviction this administration’s insanity presents the greatest threat to life as we know it that I have seen in my lifetime. Somehow I justified my complacency by saying that my weblogging activities are a sufficiently potent form of activism, spreading the word (yeah, right to my all of 300 or so daily visitors??). But none of the righteous weblogging indignation of a community of writers far more articulate and passionate than I am stopped the tragic debacle of the destruction of Iraq. Part of the problem is how inured we have become to the outrages of the Bush era as they have accumulated unceasingly. But the outrages to which we are ramping up now are transcendent, and now is the time for far more. What can you, we, do to make sure the administration does not pursue this mad course of action?

Like Eliot, I’m not as active as I used to be. Age? Health? Burnout? Tactical and strategic confusion? Competing political, family, job priorities? All of it, no doubt, and more.

This is important — not my own intermittent inertia in itself, but the fact that it is so widely shared. Our hesitancy helps sustain the status quo of power and privilege. But it’s not clear what would make enough of us do more, or what the result would be if we did, and without some hint at what might happen, it’s hard to get us out to do …. what? More massive marches against war, or for impeachment? Civil disobedience? Some media-friendly symbolic campaign? Blocking military bases? Another Michael Moore movie? Moving to Teheran to become human shields? Are we trying to prevent this next war by returning a Democrat to the White House so that he or she can run the next war after that, or do we aim to end the military-industrial complex regardless of who runs it, and how will we do that, exactly? Does preventing the war require a single-issue movement or is time to recognize, again, that we need something more comprehensive?

The proliferation of goals and options makes it hard to figure out what to focus on. For many years I’ve told myself that maybe it doesn’t matter all that much which track I take. Organizing meetings, writing for a blog or the alternative press, melding academic concerns about law and justice with political theory and struggle, attending occasional rallies or forums that others have organized — since it all makes some sense, it no longer seems to matter exactly what I choose, or even which issue I emphasize. I do what I can, at the moment. So I end up scattered, much less productive than local activists I see everywhere. Meanwhile, the multitude of conflicting analyses and goals leaves what used to be called, somewhat hopefully, The Movement scattered and splintered as well.

Eliot and I both live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where the local Peaceworks group has spent years leafleting, picketing, organizing. In liberal Brookline, Peaceworks has many sympathizers. Town Meeting will probably vote next month to support impeaching George Bush. Would Brookline be more opposed to the war if I had continued going to meetings after the first year or so? If so, would the town’s anti-war fervor be even higher, and if it was, would it make a difference? I don’t think so, but of course I can’t know for sure. I do think I’d feel better about my efforts if I had more of them to point at.

There is, of course, a large literature on tactics, running meetings, educating the public, preventing burnout, and much more. It is all useful. It doesn’t feel like it’s enough right now.

I share Eliot’s sense that the time has come for far more. Eliot, what say we have coffee and figure out what to do next?

This is a re-posting of my regular column in today’s Brookline TAB. I write these columns every three or four weeks for Brookline’s mainstream, moderate-to-liberal residents. My columns have to focus on local issues, but sometimes local becomes national…

Impeaching Bush is Just the Start

“Town Meeting urges our Representative in Congress to introduce and/or support a resolution impeaching President George W. Bush.” That’s the warrant article Brookline Town Meeting will probably approve in May. It’s good, but it’s not enough.

The article is likely to pass because a majority of Town Meeting Members probably agree with its “Whereas” paragraph, which says Bush “has repeatedly violated his oath of office by failing to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, in particular by directing and countenancing numerous violations of the Constitution and Laws of the United States, and by purposely misleading the citizens of the nation so as to cause the United States to commence war in Iraq.”

Indeed, this vote is easy. Just about no one here likes the prez. His policies are disastrous, his statements dishonest, his personality annoying. Although “our Representative in Congress” Barney Frank says Michigan Representative John Conyers’ impeachment motion is just a feel-good distraction, a symbolic Town Meeting stand will indeed make residents feel good enough to move it forward

More important, Brookline’s vote will strengthen a national impeachment movement by towns, cities, and state legislatures. That movement, in turn, could spur conversation about just what it is we want people with too much power over our lives to be able to do to us.

At May’s meeting, of course, Republicans and conservatives will claim Bush has done nothing impeachable. They’ll say elitist critics who can’t fathom the president’s homespun charm and who still insist that both his elections were fraudulent are just retaliating the only way they can. They’ll say impeachment talk is just payback for Republicans going after Bill Clinton.

Well, so what. Brookline Democrats don’t really care what Republicans think.

A potentially more powerful argument maintains impeachment is none of Town Meeting’s business. Apparently, the Constitution omits Brookline’s role in presidential impeachment. Then again, insistence that Town Meeting should stick to zoning, parking, budget and other local concerns has failed to persuade recent Town Meeting majorities. So in the end there will be plenty of abstentions, and some nastiness and hurt feelings, and Brookline will congratulate itself for sticking it to Bush.

That’s the easy part.

More useful would be pushing our own Democratic Senators, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, to join Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s effort to censure the president. Right now censure is almost as unlikely as impeachment, but high-profile support could animate the public debate. Why not amend the warrant article to ask Kerry and Kennedy to show some guts? Or is that too touchy a topic for Brookline’s cautious liberal core?

The warrant article has a second defect: Impeaching Bush means we’d end up with President Dick Cheney. If, as we like to assume, Cheney is the real Administration brain, would we be better off or worse off with the Veep sitting on the throne instead of hiding behind it?

We don’t really know the answer, so just to be sure, Town Meeting should resolve to impeach Cheney, too. Indeed, that’s the thrust of some other impeachment drives around the country. Brookline should follow their lead on this one.

While we’re at it, let’s not stop at Cheney. Next in the presidential succession line is Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. He’s nicely low key, but this is what he says about our impeachment-worthy president: “While we work to defend our country, there are some liberal Democrats who have taken the extreme viewpoint to propose censuring or impeaching the President who is committed to fighting a war against terrorism overseas instead of here in our streets.” Better impeach him also.

Then comes Senate President Pro Tempore Ted Stevens. Remember that Alaskan bridge to nowhere? And Stevens’ push to gut the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Him, too.

After Stevens, there’s Secretary of State and Administration insider/apologist Condoleezza Rice. Then Treasury Secretary John Snow (Business Roundtable! NAFTA!). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (enough said). Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (more than enough). And on to another dozen Cabinet secretaries standing in line.

Makes you wonder how many honchos-in-waiting we’ll need to push aside to get rid of the Administration’s policies. That’s more important than just exchanging Bush for a clone.

So let’s impeach Bush. And then let’s move down the line.

Looks like Eliot Gelwan has been checking out Wikipedia’s take on cognitive bias. Here’s his list:

List of cognitive biases
Logical fallacies
Self-deception
Statistical bias
Media bias
True-believer syndrome
Wishful thinking
Doublethink
Want to see things in true perspective instead? Or at least become more realistic? (wikipedia)

The latest issue of JPG Magazine, a quarterly print magazine, is now available. This issue’s theme is Photography is Not a Crime:

There’s another example every day. An overactive security guard harassing a photographer on a public sidewalk. Cops intimidating people with cameras. Photography bans in subways. In a post 9/11 age of paranoia and suspicion, public photography is increasingly seen as threatening, or mistaken as criminal. And we here at JPG are sick of it.

So we devoted issue 5 to this important topic. The theme, “Photography is Not a Crime,” is a rallying cry. It’s meant to remind everyone that amateur photographers are the documentarians of real life. We capture our world to help us understand it. We are not a threat.

The issue contains 31 photographer’s takes and stories on the theme, NYC subway photography by Edmund Leveckis, Shane Lavalette’s Family Portrait Project, an interview with attorney Bert Krages, and a special clip-out Photographer’s Right Bust Card.

I mention this partly because the topic is important to those of us who try to photograph situations that some want undocumented. The first photo on JPG’s sample page, for example, shows an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in Ramallah, where I also took photos last year, including this one of a soldier as he was beginning to single me out for taking photos I wasn’t supposed to take. Of course, I’d like to think photojournalism can indeed be a threat, but this might be wishful thinking.

But really I’m mentioning this JPG issue because it includes a photo of mine, and I want to brag. It’s this one, which I took as I was being thrown out of Boston’s Park Street subway station for taking photos the week of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The flag, of course, makes it perfect.

You can see more of my 2004 DNC and RNC photos, and other political and more mundane topics, in my photo galleries.

This report from Friday’s New York Times won’t surprise those who have participated in protest marches and rallies in New York over the past few years (as I described after protesting at the Republican National Committee in 2004).

Excerpts from the Times:

In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used “proactive arrests,” covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.

Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as “obviously potential rioters.”

The reports provide a rare glimpse of internal police evaluations and strategies on security and free speech issues that have provoked sharp debate between city officials and political demonstrators since the Sept. 11 attack. The reports also made clear what the police have yet to discuss publicly: that the department uses undercover officers to infiltrate political gatherings and monitor behavior.

Indeed, one of the documents — a draft report from the department’s Disorder Control Unit — proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30 years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested, “Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds.”

….

Daniel M. Perez, the lawyer representing the people arrested at the animal rights demonstration, argued that the police tactics “punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities.” The Police Department and the city have said that preserving public order is essential to protecting the civil rights of demonstrators and bystanders.

Mr. Perez maintains that the police documents, taken together, show a policy of pre-emptive arrests. The draft report discussed how early arrests could shape future events. “The arrests made at West 59th Street and Fifth Avenue set a ‘tone’ with the demonstrators and their possible plans at other demonstrations,” the report stated.

….

Mr. Perez said the show of force sent a deliberate warning to people expressing their opinions. “The message is, if you turn out, be prepared to be arrested, be prepared to be sent away for a long time,” he said. “It sounds like something from a battle zone.”

Demonstrators arrested during the economic forum were held by the police for up to 40 hours without seeing a judge — twice as long as people accused of murder, rape and robbery arrested on those same days, Mr. Perez said.
….

The power of the police to secretly monitor political gatherings was tightly controlled by a federal court between 1985 and early 2003, the result of a lawsuit by political activists from the 1960’s who charged that police undercover officers had disrupted their ability to express their opinions. Many of the restrictions from that case, known as Handschu, were eased at the request of the city in 2003.

The proposal to use undercover officers to spread misinformation — which the Police Department says was not adopted — recalled the origins of the Handschu lawsuit, which was based in part on the actions of undercover agents and officers who instigated trouble and spread lies among a group of military veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.

An email notice about a meeting tomorrow night for Boston-area activists re-establishing Students For A Democratic Society got me to check out the new SDS website, which has this:

We are activists from around the country who feel that a student movement is desperately needed to carry on the struggle for participatory democracy.

We are now in the process of forming a national organization by linking the various SDS chapters around the US and by helping to build new chapters. The ERAP forum is where you can join in the process of developing a mission statement and other core documents.

The website has links to chapters across the country, an email  list, and other such things, plus a lot of documents from and about the original SDS, This is from a January press release:

Several chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced today, Monday, January 16, 2006, their intent to form a national organization and hold the first SDS national convention since 1969. “It seemed appropriate to make this announcement today, on the observed Martin Luther King day”, said SDS regional organizer Thomas Good. “We have an anti-war movement that is addressing the issue of stopping the bloodletting in Iraq but the civil rights issue remains unaddressed”, he added. The national convention is scheduled for Summer 2006 and will be preceeded by a series of regional conferences occurring on the Memorial Day weekend….

The new SDS plans to continue the independent radical tradition in America: political education and demonstrating, advocating and organizing for democracy and justice, unions, civil liberties, peace and freedom. According to Korte the meetings this spring and summer will focus on building an infrastructure that facilitates these goals as the new SDS, like the old, is an organization of activists. Friends of peace and justice, those students who want a voice, a say in their own destiny, should visit www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org where regular updates will be posted and contact information is now available. 

SDS is an education and social action organization dedicated to increasing democracy in all phases of our common life. It seeks to promote the active participation of young people in the formation of a movement to build a society free from poverty, ignorance, war, exploitation, racism and sexism. Visit www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org for more information.

The website includes SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, a long document that turns out to be still thoughtful and useful despite some obviously dated specifics. Maybe the new SDS can figure out how to make more effective long-term changes than the old SDS could accomplish before splintering.

This is from the Port Huron Statement introduction:

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.  First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration “all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than “of, by, and for the people.”

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology — these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

Fries with that?

Recent adult immigrants are healthier than their U.S.-born counterparts, though they become less so the longer they stay in the United States, according to a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study, released Wednesday, found that immigrants who have been in the United States less than five years have lower rates of obesity and high blood pressure than Americans, even with limited access to health care and insurance. The rates increase the longer the immigrants stay in the country, the CDC said

Sam Smith, who edits the Progressive Review, on The real Holocaust denial:

The jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell’s 1984. Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the greatest Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes, Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient and widespread prejudice produce such an extreme result in this case?

We avoid this question because it takes us places we don’t want to go. Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in a way the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany’s liberal elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed today in the failure of America’s liberal elite to do likewise.

Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by ‘an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy….

…The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state.But we don’t talk about this do we? We don’t teach our children about it, do we?

The problem with using the outcome rather than the origins of the Holocaust as our metaphor and our message is that we are totally unprepared for those practices, laws, and arguments that can produce similar outcomes. We study the death chambers when we should be learning about the birth places.

From an email sent by John Spritzler about an April meeting of a national group he’s working with, Solidarity Now:

Working people are under attack as never before. The institutions on which workers have depended–the Democratic Party and the unions–have utterly failed to defend us. Democratic as well as Republican politicians support the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, savage cuts in social programs, outsourcing jobs, attacking public education, rewriting bankruptcy laws to benefit credit card companies. Union officials work with corporations to cut wages, rob retirees of their pensions, impose wage tiers, cut health care. They replace worker solidarity with worker-against-worker Company Teams. They support the war-makers in DC.

Meanwhile most working people, blue-collar and white-collar, employed and unemployed, remain unorganized and largely defenseless.

The politicians and the unions are part of the problem. We cannot rely on them and we cannot change them. We have to go around them, to create institutions that we control to fight for the values, the livelihoods, the future of working people.

SOLIDARITY NOW is a new organization formed in Peoria, IL in 2005. Our goals are to rebuild the culture of mutual support that is natural to working people, to fight for the goals of working people, and to build a movement for democratic revolution.
 
If you are an auto worker, a teacher, a nurse, a student, a professor, work in an office or school or hospital or university, are employed or unemployed, working or retired, we invite you to join Solidarity Now and to join us in Kokomo for our National Meeting.

Here is the proposed agenda for the upcoming Solidarity Now National Meeting, April 7, 8, and 9. …

Michael Winerip in New York Times:

In a recent newsletter, FairTest printed an analysis of SAT results, using, and crediting, College Board research showing the direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For every extra $10,000 a family earns, children’s combined math and verbal scores go up 12 to 31 points. So children whose parents earn $50,000 score better on average (a combined 996 SAT) than students from families who earn $40,000 (967) but worse than students from families who earn $60,000 (1014).

For politicians and testing executives bragging about how No Child’s testing emphasis is closing the achievement gap, these are not promising numbers.

In 2004, the College Board demanded that its data breaking down SAT scores by income, race and sex be removed from the FairTest Web site, claiming that the posting was a copyright infringement.  But after FairTest showed  the letter to reporters, the College Board backed down, calling it a mistake by a junior staff member.

My columns on high-stakes testing.

So much for the booming economy…

Fastest-growing Jobs Losing Real Value - The NewStandard:

Recent statistics show that the fastest-growing jobs in the US also happen to be those with the lowest compensation. At the same time, the minimum wage is, in real dollar terms, the lowest it has been since its enactment in 1947.

The BLS last month reported that the official unemployment rate had fallen to 4.7 percent. Buried in the rosy economic scenario portrayed by recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports is the fact that few jobs in the fastest-growing categories pay well. According to the BLS January jobs report, food-service and service-provider jobs grew a combined 69,000 in January. The report was followed this month by the BLS annual Occupational Outlook Handbook, which projects continued rapid growth in demand for home-healthcare workers, medical assistants and personal-care aides, all service-related jobs that generally pay little more than the minimum wage.

Though service-related employment categories do include managerial and non-supervisory positions that are better compensated, the majority of such jobs pay little more — and in some cases, such as restaurant workers, less — than the minimum wage, which is now less than a third of the average hourly wage, according to an analysis released by the Economic Policy Institute Friday.

Of the 30 fastest-growing occupations, six do not require higher education and another eight demand just an associate’s degree.

The late-night TV comics are having a great time joking about Dick Cheney shooting his fellow hunter instead of a quail, and I can’t say I blame them. Anything making the Veep look foolish can only be good news, except of course for the guy he shot in the face.

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show claimed Cheney’s quail was caged until shortly before release and disoriented when Cheney took aim. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it sounds plausible. I do know some so-called “hunts” amount to open slaughter of birds and other animals bred specifically for the purpose. It can get pretty gruesome.

I first found about live pigeon shoots and similar atrocities in the early 1990s. That’s when my wife, a criminal defense lawyer, represented Steve Hindi, head of an Illinois animal rights group that documents and interferes with pigeon shoots and other kinds of animal mistreatment. The charges against him were thrown out of court when my wife pointed out he hadn’t actually broken any laws, though I just read online that a few years later he spent six months in jail.

At any rate, if the quail Cheney didn’t manage to kill was indeed raised for slaughter, this is probably what its short life was like:

Bobwhite Quail Production and Management Guide:

At six weeks of age, chicks are typically moved from the brooding facility into outside flight pens until 17 weeks of age, and then birds are marketed to hunting plantations. The density of birds placed in a flight pen is estimated as 0.70 birds/ft2. Flight pens generally contain approximately 20 percent of the total pen space enclosed for shelter and dry space for feeder and waterers. Flight pens are relatively inexpensive, consisting of wire or netting supported by 4 x 4 wood posts. Several variations of flight pens are used and the actual cost depends on the resources available on the farm. If most of the materials used to construct a flight pen are purchased, then the facility may cost approximately $0.70/ ft2. The disadvantage of flight pens is a high rate of mortality. The high rate of mortality probably occurs due to exposing quail to a cold, wet environment. This condition creates an excellent environment for disease outbreaks such as Bronchitis, Capillaria, Histomonas and Ulcerative Enteritis. 

Conversely, a low percentage of growers (ca. 10%) are raising bobwhite quail in scaled down “Broiler Houses” for the entire 17-week production period (Figures 3 and 4). Bobwhite quail production should be a primary enterprise on a farming operation for a grower to invest in this type of facility, which ranges $7-8/ft2. With a bird density in enclosed barns at 2.0-2.5/ ft2, housing 25,000 quail could be very expensive. The primary advantage of a quail barn is that the birds are removed from a cold, wet environment. Pine shavings are usually placed in the house at a depth of 4 inches. The incidence of mortality is relatively low in this type of facility because of the warm, dry environment it provides. Growers producing quail in an enclosed facility have experienced the percentage of flock mortality as less than 5 percent. This reduction in mortality can help offset the increased building cost associated with a quail barn. 

Additional advantages of quail barns include a lower incidence of cannibalism and reduced feed cost. From 5 to 14 weeks of age, birds are grown in the dark to prevent cannibalism. Light stimulates bird activity, thus less cannibalism occurs with birds grown in darkout housing. However, dim light should be provided to the birds at 14 weeks to stimulate feed consumption so that birds will have adequate energy reserves for flying when marketed at 17 weeks of age….

Pack ‘em in, cut expenses, keep enough of them from being eaten by their peers so the Vice President can kill them when they’re 17 weeks old. Very sporting.

To Western eyes the Muslim response to the offensive Danish Muhammed cartoons (more accurately, the response of some Muslims primarily in Arab countries) seems ridiculously disproportionate. This is the 21st Century. Can’t they take a joke? Don’t they get satire?

Yet Muslims aren’t alone in responding with rage to perceived insult. Many Americans feel a similar rage, for example, when protesters deface a piece of colored cloth. Soldiers willing to kill and willing to die to protect the American flag sometimes become veterans perfectly willing to attack those who burn it. A fragile sense of honor blends far too easily into the kind of excess we more readily associate with Muslims over there than with good ‘ole Americans over here. Patriotism, nationalism, religion — stir the pot and danger pops out.

The public debate over the Danish cartoons stars players with rigid views on both sides. Editors making a fetish of free speech stand against Muslims with a particularly unforgiving view of Islam. It’s easy to get righteous when one value is more important than anything else. That’s how we get to the much-bandied-about “clash of civilizations” — modernism versus traditionalism, democracy versus authority, humanism versus religion, universalism versus tribalism. It’s harder to sort one’s way through all this when you think values are multifaceted and complex, when everything — under one or another set of circumstances — might be balanced, compromised, or ignored.

Despite my belief that Muslim resentment against the West is often justified, I’m enough of a Westernized assimilated atheist to find the violent reaction to the cartoons unjustifiable. Still, I don’t know enough about Islam to really understand the symbolic impact. I gather that Muslims themselves disagree about whether depictions of Muhammed and other prophets are allowed and about what response is proper when those depictions are offensive, especially when the images, like these cartoons, are intentionally offensive. It seems the violence grew slowly, supposedly pushed along by governments and groups seeking to intensify the initial tepid response. But even now, as Arab-American blogger Bedouina notes, the voices of moderate Muslims calling for restraint are easily heard if one pays attention.

I could refer here, too, to Christianity’s long violent determination to carry out God’s word and to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians “in the name of the Jewish people,” but the point should be clear. When God speaks, blood flows.

Except, supposedly, in today’s so-called civilized West, where God’s work is more sanitized. The modern Western God, after all, is a liberal humanist who enjoys a good laugh and appreciates satire, not a brittle, narrow-minded tribal warlord jealously guarding his wards’ honor. So we protect our new Free Speech idol to the point of offensiveness, not because we must but because we choose to.

And thus we generate a Free Speech response. The Iranian-inspired effort to disseminate cartoons mocking the Holocaust, or denying it, or whatever they’re doing, seems to my Western Jewish eyes not equivalent in purpose or scope to the Danish cartoons, but hey, speech is speech. Satirizing Muslims who use religion to foment terror seems to me more legitimate than Holocaust denial, but once Free Speech is absolute, it’s hard to draw lines.

Speech causes pain. It has consequences. To claim otherwise, to claim Muslims should just learn to live with satire and keep their protest within acceptable Western limits, seems to me a denial of speech’s power. It’s inconsistent to say speech is so important we must test its limits at all cost (as when newspapers aggressively re-post the Danish cartoons over and over again) and then say it’s so inconsequential people should simply ignore what they don’t like to hear.

All of which doesn’t mean I have a solution. Absolutism looks reasonable when slopes are slippery — I too like the freedom to say whatever I want and would object to externally imposed limits — but clashing absolutisms yield mutual destruction. Sometimes both sides should step back from the brink, take a couple of deep breaths, and try to figure out what happens next.

————–

First published on eTalkinghead.com.

My column in today’s Brookline TAB:

Social psychology straddles psychology’s focus on individual behavior and sociology’s concern with societies and groups. How do other people influence our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? Why and when are we susceptible to conformity and obedience, persuasion and propaganda, prejudice and aggression? How do our institutions foster competition or cooperation, apathy or participation, selfishness or altruism?

I’ve been pondering how all this plays out in Brookline because last month I started teaching social psychology for the first time in years. It’s always good to have a few current anecdotes to spice up those three-times-a-week classes.

So what might a social psychologist notice in Brookline?

Our schools, for one thing. For example, I’ve written before about Brookline’s implementation of the state MCAS test and federal No Child Left Behind Act. As a parent, I oppose the politically motivated effort to re-shape public education. I wish more parents would simply refuse to let their children take the test, a course of action the Brookline School Committee reluctantly allows but never publicizes (an ambiguity reflecting its own social psychological and political dilemmas).

The social psychologist in me wonders how institutionalizing MCAS affects not just the children who cram for the test but also the teachers who do the cramming. Brookline has good teachers, many of them knowledgeable about MCAS’s inaccurate assumptions and harmful consequences. How do they deal with the cognitive dissonance aroused by following orders to prepare kids for a test they know is educationally damaging? One option is deciding that maybe MCAS isn’t so bad after all. That’s less risky than refusing to take part, and more comforting than continuing to think they’re hurting their students.

Schools offer a multitude of social psychological lessons. My seventh-grade daughter and her friends routinely deal with complex dynamics inside the classroom as well as in the hallways, cafeteria, and schoolyard. They’re already familiar with peer pressure, obedience, sex roles, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotypes, aggression, power, fairness, impression management, and on and on. Unvoiced lessons about interacting with others typically have more impact than the formal subject matter covered in class.

Over at Brookline High School, the latest allegation of sexual assault raises plenty of social psychological questions. According to media reports, four members of the freshman girls basketball team say their male coach touched them inappropriately during a team practice. The coach, now charged with indecent assault and battery, faces a disciplinary hearing this week.

Since the reports don’t say exactly what the coach allegedly did, a social psychology class is free to generate relevant questions. What makes some touches okay and others inappropriate? How has that assessment changed over time, and how effectively does the legal system reflect new norms? Would this incident strike us differently if the coach were a woman, or the team members men? Since inappropriate touching by an authority figure is rarely reported, what made this incident different - the support the girls gave each other, the coach’s part-time status, the recent focus at BHS on inappropriate teacher behavior?

There’s life outside school, of course, and where there’s life there’s social psychology. Police use of power and discretion is always worth paying attention to. So too are everyday interactions easily observable in Brookline District Court, where people acting in a variety of formal and informal roles reflect the workings of hierarchy and legitimacy, stereotyping and symbolism, punishment and reward, and conformity and credibility.

The pending sale of 2 Brookline Place also highlights credibility. It wasn’t easy for Winn Development to persuade Town Meeting Members to let them exceed town zoning restrictions. Important to at least some members was their trust in Winn partner and Brookline resident Roger Cassin. How might Cassin’s decision to sell the site to Children’s Hospital affect the credibility of the next developer who wants to be trusted?

And then there’s the Board of Selectmen. Michael Sher’s attempt to bring down Public Works Commissioner Tom DeMaio and the subsequent effort by the four other selectmen to isolate Sher and defend the status quo provide useful material for lessons on coalition formation, leadership, decision making in the face of ambiguity, and self-justification. I’ll have to tell my students to come to the next Selectmen’s meeting if they want to watch social psychology come fully alive.

By coincidence, George Bush’s State of the Union speech started tonight right after I finished watching a video I’m planning to show to my social psychology class. The Human Zoo is a three-part Discovery Channel series illustrating a variety of social psychology research findings. The videos focus especially on volunteers spending a few days in a country house as part of a psychological experiment structured like one of those reality TV shows where people act more or less naturally while engaging in a variety of silly competitive tasks.

The video has plenty for students to talk about, but so did Bush’s speech. The formal Congressional setting, robed Supreme Court Justices and uniformed generals, cheering Republicans standing for one ovation after another while Democrats stayed sitting, forced smiles by powerful people trying to look polite for the watching public — all this and more seemed simply an extension of the Human Zoo’s account of group identity and conflict, role adaptation, leadership and conformity, and similar dynamics.

As far as I can tell from news reports, the only person straying from expectations was anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who wore an anti-war T-shirt up in the House Gallery. Then again, she was arrested and removed before Bush’s arrival, apparently before the cameras got a glimpse of free speech (at least, I haven’t seen any pictures yet). As the Human Zoo video notes, rebellion isn’t easy.

One of the Human Zoo’s creators was social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment more than 30 years ago during which subjects assigned to act as guards quickly adopted a brutal stance toward subjects assigned to role-play prisoners. After watching the day’s footage of Human Zoo participants turning against each other, Zimbardo explained we were watching “the dark side of human nature seeping out.”

Could be my imagination, but I think I saw some of that darkness behind all those self-satisfied smiles in the Congressional hall.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

Complete article

Stephen Soldz:

I have always felt that personal change, as is facilitated by therapy and analysis, needs to be complemented by social change that will reduce the environmental causes of human suffering. We have to create social institutions that increase the likelihood of people acting constructively and reduce the likelihood of destructive action. Like many in my generation, I grew up in the anti-Vietnam war and other social justice movements of the 1960’s. The current trend toward permanent war and the imminent breakdown of our already inadequate network of social services have led to a revival of my activism.

Soldz, a psychoanalyst, has been doing a lot of good writing recently, much about Iraq and related issues. Interesting blog, too.

New Orleans Activists Fill Aid Gaps Left by FEMA, Red Cross:

At any given time, about 30 volunteers with the grassroots relief organization Common Ground Collective work from early morning until late at night in a small corner of the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. They unload trucks, patch people’s homes, staff an on-site distribution center, and drive supplies out to surrounding regions.

Throughout the day, people from the neighborhood drop by to pick up supplies. Stacks of canned food, bottled water, toiletries, bleach, diapers, baby food and other necessities are stored in what volunteers have dubbed “the tunnel,” a long outdoor corridor roofed by tarps….

Though most Americans might be surprised that such grassroots level relief is still necessary a full two months after Katrina flooded New Orleans, the gaps left by federally funded programs and large charities are evident in the still-devastated Crescent City. People live in houses with holes in the roofs. Families struggle to find enough food, water and ice to get them through the day. And neighborhoods sit largely empty waiting for their residents to find the resources to return.

In the face of the inadequate official response, small groups like Common Ground are struggling to pick up the slack. They work with few monetary resources and volunteer labor in an effort to reach those underserved by powerful relief agencies. They combine their humanitarian efforts with an alternative vision of rebuilding that seeks to empower and restore dignity to the people of this struggling city.

My daughter’s excitement at starting seventh grade is a pleasant reminder that life begins anew every September. The summer heat having melted the previous year’s inevitable imperfections into an unformed mixture of possibility, this change of seasons has always meant to me not the approach of harsh winter but the emergence of energy and even, sometimes, of optimism.

This new school year’s promise, though, was accompanied by Hurricane Katrina. My daughter and a friend in a different Brookline school tell me that both schools have emphasized the importance of helping survivors, but their teachers haven’t led substantive classroom discussions about the hurricane or about the continuing mess in and around New Orleans. If their reports are accurate, I’m disappointed. I had expected Brookline schools to focus heavily on Katrina, making use of its drama to raise a wide range of educational topics in classes ranging from science to social studies to math to English.

My generation grew up amid constant talk of expected war with the Soviets, of the need for backyard fallout shelters, of milk contaminated by radiation from atom bomb testing. When I was the age my daughter is now, I watched President Kennedy announce on television the Cuban missile blockade. For days afterward, I walked to school wondering which jet flying overhead would drop The Bomb. In later years, scholars examined how these experiences affected our later lives.

Today, images of destruction bombard a new generation. When my daughter was in fourth grade, she too looked up nervously at jets overhead, asking which one might crash into Brookline. This year she watches Katrina’s devastation, asking, as she did four years ago, “How could this happen?” The tragedies of Manhattan and New Orleans — more visually and emotionally powerful than the mere threat of disaster that assaulted my generation — and the endless War on Terrorism’s escalation of fear of The Other will form the backdrop of her generation’s memories of childhood and adolescence. The inevitable anxieties are certain to play themselves out in decades to come.

In response to this changed world confronting our children, our schools should be expanding coverage of intense events. This is no time to stick to a pre-packaged curriculum.

I’ve written before about the importance of putting aside scheduled lesson plans and seizing instead the teachable moment. That’s not easy, since there’s always pressure to focus on the nitty gritty. Even teachers who want to address issues they know are on their students’ minds can’t always do so when they know how much of the curriculum remains to be covered. Too often, thus, spontaneity loses out.

That’s perhaps especially true in our era of state-mandated tests designed to narrow the range of topics our students are supposed to learn. Here in Massachusetts, what’s most important in school is whatever the state MCAS exam tests. That’s the case even in Brookline, despite protestations to the contrary by school principals and School Committee members who criticize MCAS mandates while insisting that teach-to-the-test pressures don’t contaminate our high-quality schools. MCAS, of course, is fully in keeping with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which penalizes public schools that don’t keep their attention on the federally approved bottom line.

The inability of schools across the country to meet politically motivated demands now has a striking parallel: the plight of Hurricane Katrina survivors unable to live up to the apparent federal assumption that survival is a personal, rather than a communal, responsibility. Our schools should address that philosophy of rugged individualism, along with the many other political and economic forces that escalated the predicable Katrina disaster and are likely to escalate disasters yet to come.

The interplay between profit and power, of race and poverty, of science and politics — these are what our kids should come home talking about. These topics may not be on the MCAS test, but our schools should address them nonetheless. The time to do that is right now, when the news is filled with the raw material of discussion and debate. By the time Katrina makes its way into some future watered-down government-approved textbook, the immediacy and relevance will be long gone.

——–

Published today as my regular column in the Brookline TAB

From t r u t h o u t - By Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo

New Orleans - Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private
security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets
of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been “deputized”
by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law
enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards
on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland
Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries
we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details
of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador
to Iraq, John Negroponte.

“This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental
United States),” a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood
on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. “We’re much better equipped to
deal with the situation in Iraq.”

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in
the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences.
Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern
for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about
why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like
Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets
of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.

What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke
with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state
governments……

The Anti-Defamation League reports on white supremacist responses to Katrina (I saw this on the Daou Report):

White supremacists continue to use the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and to promote their racist agenda and hateful worldview.  Within days of the destruction, white supremacists communicating to each other on the Internet had incorporated Hurricane Katrina into their standard racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are controlling and manipulating the government to use African-Americans to destroy the white race.

In addition, many white supremacists expressed outrage at the “contamination” of their white communities.  Some white supremacists argued that communities should impose limits on the numbers of evacuees accepted.  Many took satisfaction at the number of African-American deaths, or wished that there had been more minority deaths.  At least one racist took matters into his own hands.  His solution was to go to evacuee shelters wearing a white supremacist shirt to get the attention of white evacuees so he could help them.

After the hurricane hit, a number of white supremacist groups rushed to offer help to whites, or, in many cases, to solicit donations that would allegedly be used to help white victims.  One prominent racist proposed a “Cartridges for Katrina” program that would provide ammunition to whites who chose not to evacuate the affected region.  His group claims to have established a “Whites only” tent city for survivors.

The following is a summary and compilation of quotations that appeared on white supremacist Web sites and bulletin boards on September 3 - 8, 2005….

Eliot Gelwan of Follow Me Here reprints a September 6th email (originally on an anthropology list) which “contains an eyewitness account of two paramedic friends of [ ] who were trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” Although I won’t repeat the whole thing here (but read it all at FMH!), this part especially struck me:

Hurricane Katrina — Our Experiences (Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky)

…. We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the “victims” of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.

Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

And this:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
….

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims” they saw “mob” or “riot”. We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

…..

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

Food Not Bombs — a fixture around Boston and other cities — needs volunteers and money. Report from September 11:

The first Baton Rouge kitchen will be set up today. We need as many volunteers in  Baton Rouge as possible.  Tucson and Prescott Food Not Bombs report that there is widespread need in Baton Rouge. Volunteers, food and personal items such as tampons are needed. A 24 foot truck will be leaving Tucson on Thursday. Visit our news site for more information on the ground.

Food Not Bombs groups all across the southern United States are feeding families displaced by Katrina. Help us get food and supplies past FEMA. We need clothes, cooking equipment, food, cooks and money to provide for thousands of hungry homeless people. We have no overhead, rent or salaries so every donation goes directly to helping people.  Many affected by Katrina are familiar with Food Not Bombs because we have been sharing free food in communities through the area for many years.  Because we are independent we can take food and supplies to areas where no other agency can reach…..

Because this disaster may last 6 months to a year or more we intend to set up Food Not Bombs field kitchens throughout the region. Food Not Bombs is encouraging the refugees to participate in cooking, serving and collecting the food. Their participation may be one of the most therapeutic things we can provide. It is possible that as many as a million people will be homeless for the next 6 months as a result of this disaster…….

In a few weeks many of these people will be considered regular members of America’s homeless population. In 1989, Food Not Bombs fed the people made homeless by the earthquake and after a few weeks the working class victims were forgotten and faced the same problems as those who were homeless before the earthquake. Because this could be such a long crisis it may be better for us to teach people how to organize their own local Food Not Bombs group so they can provide long-term support.

Village Voice News

Although the effort was trumpeted in the media as an example of grassroots ingenuity in the face of disaster, local officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency have nixed an attempt by Houston activists to set up a low-power radio station at the Astrodome that would have broadcast Hurricane Katrina relief information for evacuees….

Supporters of KAMP, which was set to launch at 95.3 FM, blame red tape and bureaucrats seeking to “manage the news.”

“I’m very disappointed,” said Councilmember Ada Edwards, who represents a mostly black district in central Houston and had issued a letter of support for the station. “One of the real challenges of this big tragedy has been access to communication–open and honest communication. I really hoped this would be an open outlet for people to get information that was unscripted and that would really address their needs.

“But it seems par for the course in terms of how this whole thing has been rolling out with FEMA and the Red Cross trying to keep tight control and manage the news,” Edwards complained. “It’s really sad when these people feel they have to sanitize all the time.”

This is my regular local column for today’s Brookline TAB. It was supposed to appear last week, but the editor never received my email. It turns out the newspaper’s spam filter blocked my column’s reference to “sluts” and “oral sex.” Makes me wonder what else doesn’t get to newspapers, and to other recipients, because of mechanistic approaches to dealing with spam.

Another aside: I’ve finally blocked all spam comments from appearing on this blog without burdening me with dozens, even hundreds, of emails a day for me to approve or deny. I don’t think I disabled commenting entirely, though. but if you leave a comment that doesn’t appear within a day or so, please let me know….

———————– 
MIDSUMMER MUSINGS

The heat’s got me too lethargic to focus on any one topic, but I return to three familiar ones — my community, my daughter, and my congressman.

My wife and I flew to Los Angeles earlier this month for a family wedding. We spent much too much time sweltering indoors instead of immersing ourselves in cool ocean water, but I did like the Fairfax neighborhood’s ethnic and economic diversity, which is much broader than we’re used to here in Brookline.

The TAB reported a few weeks ago that the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth ranks Brookline fourth in the state in the percentage of immigrants, with more than one in four residents born elsewhere. That’s a good thing. Our immigrants’ top ten countries of birth are China, Russia, Japan, Israel, Korea, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Germany. This list is no surprise to anyone eavesdropping on conversations in Coolidge Corner or entering our many Asian restaurants.

What Brookline’s missing in significant numbers, though, are the Latinos and African Americans most people have in mind when talking about politically relevant diversity. In Brookline, the most obvious people of color are those who come into town every day to serve white families as nannies, house cleaners, lawn workers, and taxi drivers. Fairfax was a refreshing change.

Limiting Brookline’s ethnic diversity, of course, is our lack of economic diversity. That’s not too surprising in a town where, another TAB article informs us, 45% of residents hold graduate degrees (the third highest percentage in the country). Inundated with doctors and lawyers and post-docs and professors, Brookline has failed miserably to provide meaningful numbers of affordable apartments. The result is a community technically diverse but, despite exceptions unnoticed by most residents, homogeneously comfortable in income, profession, and values.

Another quick trip this month directs my musing elsewhere. Last weekend my wife and I drove up past Lake Winnepesaukee to visit our 12-year-old daughter in sleepaway camp. At a different camp last year she picked up far too many fashion tips and came home more knowledgeable than we expected about makeup and dating. This year’s camp is more rustic. We’re glad to see her more focused on hikes, group games, and horseback riding than on which boys might be available.

But I wonder what will happen in September once she hits seventh grade. She and her friends all became premature teenagers this past year, determined to act like 15-year-olds who are themselves trying to pass for 18. Listening to my daughter and her friends chatter about potential and imagined boyfriends and casually refer to sluts and players and oral sex, I wonder if it isn’t time for town schools to institute lessons in Feminism 101.

My impression so far is that the schools treat encroaching teenagerdom far too gingerly, delaying serious talk about adolescent angst until most kids are already through it, often damaged by it. Sex and relationship education should come much sooner, much more honestly and comprehensively. So should facilitating coordination, or at least communication, among parents.

A third thing on my mind is Brookline’s representative in Congress, Barney Frank. When the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to send Americans back to the Moon and then to Mars, Frank was one of only 15 reps dissenting from the 383-vote majority. Most Democrats went along with the president’s NASA plan. Frank said no.

I have pleasant memories of childhood summers reading science fiction. I spent a few adolescent years imagining myself blasting off into space. I’d still go to Mars if I could. But Frank is right. According to the Associated Press, Frank “questioned spending billions to go to Mars when ‘day after day … we’re told we can’t do enough for housing and we can’t do enough for health care…. This is a fundamental debate the country ought to have … about whether or not to commit these untold billions … at the expense of other important programs.”

Frank should continue to push his Democratic peers away from the deadening center toward more progressive politics. The space program’s place among national priorities is only one of many fundamental debates this country ought to have.

I’m headed to the West Coast again. The flight left late, and now, a couple of hours into it, there’s still almost four hours to go.

For the past hour or so I entertained myself by leafing through every page of the Sky Mall catalog that United has thoughtfully placed in every seat pocket. The cover promises “over 500 new products!” I turned the page from electronic gadgets to security doo-dads, from office furniture to pet houses, from swimming pool toys to massage tables. Most of the time I stared in amused disbelief at the golf accessories and pampered pet products and hidden video cameras . Who would buy that innovative new tie rack that conveniently holds 76 neckties? Or that pop-up hot dog cooker, just $49.95?

In between my sneering, of course, I found a few things I myself could force myself to buy if I had the extra cash. I’m not completely immune to the consumerist lure; this is, after all, a G4 iBook I’m writing on at the moment. But the catalog’s obvious pitch to people with scads of extra money clarifies how class-based our economy really is, and how easily people with money become accustomed to finding a product to rid eliminate every inconvenience. Flying offers an experience where disposable income is assumed, from the in-flight shopping to the airport stores to the ads for ever-more-expensive vacation paradises.

Bus, the other end of interstate travel, offers a different experience. My May bus-and-ferry  trip from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver Island took a whole day, long enough to remind me of my long-past coast-to-coast bus trips. Bus travel reveals different assumptions — people with limited funds, bus stations with junkier food, dirtier bathrooms, inconvenient connections. Still, I’ve always liked it — the slower pace lets you see where you’re going, the tired passengers are more varied and often pretty friendly, you get to see the drivers pay attention to the road. And now that passengers can’t smoke, the actual journey is no more uncomfortable than flying (though still not as pleasant as taking a stroll through a train).

I expect to do more bus travel later in the summer and fall; it remains a great way to make a lot of stops without expensive one-way plane flights. I’m looking forward to it.

But maybe first I’ll get one of those travel cushions Sky Mall is selling. Could come in pretty handy, after all.

Today’s column in the Brookline TAB:

After visiting Kagoshima, Japan, last year, I wrote about Brookline’s less ambitious recycling efforts, bicycle accommodations, and other practices. A week last month on Denman Island, a Manhattan-sized island with 1200 residents a short ferry ride from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, again has me comparing apples and oranges. Much can’t be moved here — views of snow-topped Canadian mountains, great weather, uncrowded roads — but some Denman ways would benefit Brookline, if only we could figure out how to adapt them to our larger urban space.

Confirmed urbanites would feel out of sorts on the island, but plenty of Brookliners would enjoy visiting despite the lack of full-service tour